Larry Nicholl's Blog
January 15, 2023
Cowboys and Indians Today
Their love story is at the same time a social commentary—more relevant today than ever.
Americans have always been fascinated by cowboys and Indians. Every major white Hollywood actor has made at least one movie where he appears as a cowboy hero, either attacking or aiding Native Americans. Today’s importance of re-examining the relationship between European Americans and America’s Indigenous peoples is such that President-elect Biden has nominated Debra Anne Haaland to become the first Native American to run the Department of the Interior, and the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. History.
Today, Native Americans are joining with Black Americans and other people of color in demanding recognition of the centuries of abuse that has been sponsored by the U.S. and state governments. Public symbols of this abuse—inappropriate statues and memorials—must go!
Most recently, on the day after Christmas, members of the Dakota Sioux defaced the over-sized bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln that sits on the law in front of San Francisco City Hall. Lincoln’s face was covered in red paint. At the base of the monument, Lincoln’s etched name was highlighted in the same bloody color. This vandalism intentionally coincided with the 158th anniversary of Dec. 26, 1862 mass hanging of Native American leaders, which was personally okayed by President Lincoln. This followed the 1862 Dakota Sioux Uprising in southwest Minnesota. Throughout the 1850s treaty violations by the United States and late annuity payments by corrupt Indian Agents caused increasing hunger and hardship among the Dakota. During the uprising, the Dakota killed as many as 800 white settlers. US soldiers put down the uprising. A military court then sentenced 38 Native leaders to death in the largest one-day mass execution in American history. The Dakota Sioux have not forgotten that President Lincoln himself approved this.
My love story begins with a similar uprising: The Red River War of 1874-1875. US Cavalry under Col. Ranald Mackenzie ended the war by surprising and capturing several thousand Comanche and allied tribal members in Palo Duro Canyon, near Amarillo, Texas. The soldiers then marched their captives on foot more than 200 hundred miles to reservations in Oklahoma—a “trail of tears” that resulted in the deaths of an unknown number of women, children, and elderly. The cause of the war was the decision by the Texas and U.S. governments to remove Indigenous people from the Texas Panhandle, so that white cattlemen and settlers could move in. To this day, this injustice perpetrated against Native Americans of the Texas Panhandle has been ignored. That their land was stolen is not taught in schools. Titles to land in the area make no mention of any recognized ownership by the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for centuries. … My story is intended to make known what happened.
Never Heard of the 442nd
I never heard of the 442nd until I came to California in 1970. I was born in Texas in 1941, several months before Pearl Harbor. My only memory of the war years is going with my mother to the Amarillo, Texas, Santa Fe train station to see off my godmother, a nurse who was dressed in her U.S. Army olive green uniform. My first memories of the post-war years are of two young neighborhood veterans who served in the Pacific Theater wildly waving their prized war trophies: Japanese rising-sun battle flags. As a small child I heard war-stories from returning veterans. One of the Garvey brothers, who had been a Marine, told of hitting the beach of a small Pacific island and then running across to the other side while shooting at entrenched Japanese infantry. When he got to the other side and turned around, he was the only member of his unit still alive. My sixth-grade teacher was a mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Force stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was struck. He gave us his first-hand account of the Japanese attack. I saw many movies and read dozens of comic books that depicted battles of Americans slaughtering the barbarian “Japs.” But I never heard of the 442nd Japanese American unit until I came to California.
Why is that? Amarillo is in the center of the United States, a thousand miles from either coast. When I was growing up there, I never remember seeing a single Japanese face. Many young men from the Panhandle like my three maternal uncles went to California, joined the navy and marines, and fought against the Japanese. They returned home with their prejudices reinforced. I heard of one veteran from my town who tried to bring his Japanese war-bride home. They were quickly run out of town. Veterans who returned home from the war in Europe never talked about seeing Japanese Americans in American uniform—members of the 442nd. I never heard mention of “relocation camps” for Japanese immigrants and their American-born children, or that the 442nd was composed of young men who were drafted from these camps while their families remained imprisoned behind barbed wire in isolated places with U.S. Army soldiers on guard towers manning machine guns aimed at persons who were legal immigrants and fellow American citizens.
Why is that? The Japanese Americans who served in World War II were members of what Tom Brokaw named, “The Greatest Generation.” In total, 14,000 men served in the 442nd. They earned 9,486 Purple Hearts. Twenty-one of their members were awarded Medals of Honor. Yet when they returned home to America after the war, they were met with “No Japs Wanted” signs. Their service was ignored and soon forgotten. Their families’ confiscated properties were not restored nor compensated for. My novel tries to understand why that was and shows the long-term consequences for Japanese American families from wartime hysteria and post-war hatred.
Susanna the Foundling
In 1932, during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, Susanna was abandoned by her mother on the back porch of the owners of a dairy farm along Route 66 in the Texas Panhandle. But her tale begins in 1910, with a detailed flashback, telling the story of the diverse extended family that found her. Her adoptive paternal grandparents were farmers and ranchers who were not who they said they were. When they came down from Iowa to the Texas Panhandle, they were “passing,” that is, both were white-looking, but the grandmother was actually Sioux Native American from South Dakota, and the grandfather was African American from Canada. And the adoptive maternal grandparents were of Mexican mestizo heritage. Susanna herself was “Okie,” white mixed with Cherokee from Oklahoma, and she looked nothing like any of the members of her adoptive family. Thus, as Susanna was growing up and learned who her adoptive grandparents and parents were, while knowing almost nothing of her own biological parents, she began to ask herself, “Who am I?”
By accident, Susanna’s biological family in California discovered her existence. They assumed she had died like her ailing mother had, on their Grapes-of-Wrath trek to California. But a university professor doing research on the Dust Bowl had interviewed her adoptive family and included in his book the note that the mother had sorrowfully pinned to the blanket of her abandoned child. When Susanna’s biological aunt who was a student at UCLA discovered the interview and note while doing research for a class, she came to Texas looking for her long-lost niece, who was now almost six. So began a series of contacts between Susanna and her biological family, including an uncle who came to Texas to work for Susanna’s adoptive family.
As she grew up, Susanna’s adoptive grandfather applied to her a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” because already as an adolescent, she mediated the frequent disputes that emerged between the dozen diverse families of the farming cooperative that her grandfather had founded. This multigenerational family saga follows Susanna from the time she was found on the porch step, through her infancy, childhood, teenage years, courtship, marriage, and birth of her first child. The story ends in 1954, when Susanna is in her early twenties. Her adoptive grandfather has died and to everyone’s surprise has bequeathed to her his leadership of the co-op, knowing that she alone would be able to keep the ever-quarrelsome families together.
Susanna’s story is similar to that of Sunja in Min Jin Lee’s multigenerational family saga, Pachinko about a Korean family making its way in Japan. Coincidentally, that saga also begins in 1910. Asked about the themes she gravitated toward as a writer, Lee replied: “My subjects are history, war, economics, class, sex, gender, and religion. My themes are forgiveness, loss, desire, aspiration, failure, duty, and faith.” Precisely my own subjects and themes in Susanna’s Ballad.
June 23, 2020
What If the Statue Could Talk?
The premise of my latest novel is that the Confederate statue in Mackenzie Central Park is alive—with the spirit of a Rebel soldier who was killed at Gettysburg in 1863 and who wakes up in his statue in 1913 at its dedication on the battle’s fiftieth anniversary. During the decades that follow, he witnesses events taking place around him in the park, unable to speak, unable to fathom why his spirit is here, and clueless as to how long he will have to stand here. Among the events, he witnesses is a Ku Klux Klan rally, in which two young black men are tortured and castrated for the offense of passing through this park and speaking to several young white women.
Finally, after four decades, a young Irish immigrant girl shows up at the park and can talk to him. They talk and talk. She realizes that she was sent to help him. She causes the soldier, who died a hero serving in the Confederate States Army, to reexamine why he had been fighting. She helps him see that until he accepts that he was in the wrong army—an army dedicated to preserving the enslavement of black Americans—he will continue to stand here. She makes him question the thirty-five years of his life as a slave owner and heir to a large Texas slave plantation.
Returning to the murder of George Floyd and the statue of Robert E. Lee, suppose Lee’s spirit was there in his statue, trapped until he reexamined his entire life as slave owner and commander of the main Rebel army. Suppose a young black woman, who lived in Baltimore and was a friend of the Floyd family, was able to talk to General Lee about what he had just witnessed. Could she help him see that his spirit was trapped there until he saw that he should have accepted President Lincoln’s offer to command the Union Army—to put an end to the rebellion and bring about the end of slavery? … Right now, it’s a time of questioning: “Is there systemic racism/slavery in America today?” ... If so, it’s time to put an end to it.
April 19, 2019
Tragedy & Romance: Do They Go Together?
TRAGEDY AND ROMANCE
Using Both to Write Stories
“1847 … that’s when it began,” my elderly Irish-born pastor replied, when I told him that my ancestors immigrated to America from Eire because of the potato famine. After Palm Sunday mass, Monsignor had come into the parish hall and sat down where I was having coffee and doughnuts. Somehow, the conversation led to the greatest tragedy in the history of his homeland.
“Genocide,” he then quietly commented. “That year—1847—saw the most abundant wheat harvest ever. But the English exported it—to feed the British army, and they deliberately left the Irish field workers to either starve or emigrate. The only crop the workers had been allowed to grow in their little gardens was potatoes. But that year, the potatoes turned black and the vines died. Our island’s population went from eight million to one million. … Genocide. … Tragedy.”
“But Father, good came from it,” I told him. “… at least for my family. … Romance: My famine-exiled great-grandparents met on the boat to New York, fell in love and married as soon as they landed. … So for me, tragedy and romance go together. … I’m writing a novel about it.”
“I’m glad for you,” Monsignor smiled. But his face turned sad and a far-away look came into his eyes. “On our farm in Ireland where I grew up, there’s an abandoned village. Everybody had died or left. In one of the fields near it, we discovered a mass grave—a sand pit where they had dumped dozens of bodies. … I have refugee-relatives around the world—Argentina, Australia, this country. … My grandparents used to tell stories about struggling to survive and stay.”
“Father,” I then told him. “The first Irishman of my family who got here was my great-grandfather McDade. He’s the one who married my great-grandmother off the boat in New York in 1860. My novel, Colleen and the Statue, begins with a fictionalized version of what happened to him not long after he arrived.
“Father, I’ve seen a tin-type photo of my great-grandfather McDade in his Union Army uniform. My mother’s old aunt, who showed me the photo, said that he was at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. He must have felt like the thousands of Irish immigrants who joined the Yankee Army. For them, the Rebel Army represented the hated English, who had forced them to emigrate or starve. They knew the South was supported by England, where Southerners sold the cotton that made white slave-owners rich. So for Irish immigrants in the Union Army, killing a Rebel soldier was the same as killing an Englishman, and revenge for what happened in Ireland.”
Monsignor was captivated by the American Civil War history I then recounted—about the two Irish regiments that were at Gettysburg: the New York 69th and the Pennsylvania 69th.
“Father, I don’t know for sure, but I think my great-grandfather ended up in the PA 69th—the regiment of 250 Irishmen who are credited with stopping Pickett’s Charge up Missionary Ridge. As the Confederates came up the hill, whooping their Rebel Yell and carrying their Stars-and-Bars flag, they were confronted by the sight of the Green Flag of Ireland and they heard battle-cries in Gaelic. The 69th held its ground, fought hand-to-hand at the stone wall from where they were shooting on Pickett’s men, and sent what was left of the Rebs staggering back down the hill.
“Father, that Gettysburg battle story is true. And in my novel, that’s where I put one of the characters—in the PA 69th. After the war, both my McDade great-grandfather and the grandfather of my novel’s invented young-man protagonist went to Texas—to Fort Worth.
“I don’t know a lot about my real great-grandfather, apart from the fact that the tragedy of the potato famine put him onto the boat where he fell in love with my great-grandmother. … As a child, my mother actually knew her and said she “talked funny”—with an Irish brogue. … In my novel, I invented a series of tragedies and romances, with Gettysburg as the starting point.
“As I wrote, I was thinking of Scarlett and Rhett in Gone with the Wind, where in the midst of the tragedy of the American Civil War, we follow one of the most famous romances in all of American movies. In my book, which is set in Texas in the mid-1950s, Colleen and Patrick are the main characters. They’re young folks who are coming of age and falling in love. They haven’t yet experienced tragedy themselves, but they’re surrounded by people who have.
“Colleen has just come from Ireland, where her relatives had fought in the Irish War for Independence as guerilla soldiers in the IRA—the Irish Republican Army. But in the midst of the tragedy of that long war, her grandmother had a romance with an English Army officer and married him. In my invented city of Mackenzie, Texas, Colleen and her boyfriend Patrick learn the tragic story of Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, whose Confederate statue stands in the city’s Central Park. The sergeant died at Gettysburg in the Rebel Army. As a young man on his father’s slave-plantation in East Texas, he had fallen in love with a slave girl and wanted to marry her when she became pregnant. An impossible romance, which resulted in tragedy, both for him and for his beloved—part of the reason why he joined the Rebel Army in 1861 and went off to war … to die in battle.”
Monsignor and I then had a long conversation about the relationship between tragedy and romance—he, giving examples from Irish literature; me, examples from American literature.
April 14, 2019
Loneliness & Romance - A Book Review
LONELINESS AND ROMANCE
I just finished reading Less, the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer. He was asked in an interview for The Guardian, “You’re an identical twin. How has that shaped your perception of identity?” He answered in part, “I am used to being with another person in the world, so it makes it lonelier when I’m not with him.” This is the theme that struck me most when following the life of Arthur Less, the novel’s protagonist: the theme of loneliness. The novel has been described as a tragic comic story, a same-sex love story, a satire of the American abroad, a bittersweet meditation on love and aging, a romantic comedy, a satirical comedy, and more. I see it as a serious study of the fear of being alone—which here means growing old without someone to love … which is an underlying theme in each of my own novels.
In my novel, Tayla of the Golden Spread, the main supporting character, Aunt Maureen, is an elderly and lonely widow, living by herself, unable to find living-with-meaning after the loss of both her husband and her son. She is growing older and lonelier, with no hope of finding love in her life again. Unexpectedly—perhaps by divine intervention—she is called upon to take on the guardianship of her adolescent niece. This new relationship and responsibility changes her, by bringing love back into her life. Not the love of a man, but love for her niece, Tayla, whom she must guide through the girl’s struggling coming-of-age romance with her beau, Jacques.
In my novel, Little Alice Landergin, the female protagonist, Julia Landergin, is forty-eight- years-old, childless and lonely. She lost her fiancé to World War I and soon afterwards buried her new husband after a tragic accident. She now lives alone in a big, empty farmhouse, loveless and without thought or hope of finding love a third time. Unexpectedly—perhaps by divine intervention—she discovers she has two little nieces, whose parents and grandparents have died in a horrible automobile accident. As their only known relative, she feels obligated to take them in and raise them. Through them, she finds love again. She had always wanted children to love, and now she has two. And through them, she meets Major Curry, a widowed World War II veteran, who likewise is growing old alone, with no hope of finding love again. When Julia and Major Curry meet through the girls, they find the mutual possibility of not having to grow old lonely and without someone to love.
In my novel, Beth’s Story: A Runaway Bride, the protagonists are each lonely in their own way. Beth is eighteen and is running away from a feared life of loneliness in an arranged marriage to a middle-aged widowed millionaire. The man wants her only to breed—he needs a son to inherit his millions. She doesn’t feel loved by her father, who is in effect selling her, to settle his debts and avoid losing his ranch. Twenty-six-year-old Silas has recently been mustered out of the Army, after almost a decade of service. He is suffering PTSD from his participation in the Korean War. He is lonely—fearing that he will be alone the rest of his life … alone because of his endless and terrifying nightmares from what he saw and did in Korea. When Beth meets Silas, she finds hope—hope that she can marry a handsome young man and live a true married life, with love instead of loneliness. When Silas meets Beth, he starts to laugh again, and slowly begins to lose his nightmares and overcome PTSD. With this silly and immature young girl, he finds an unusual romance, which starts taking away his fear of being alone the rest of his life.
In my novel, Nadya: The Restoration of a Flying Tiger, the protagonists likewise are each lonely in their own way. Nadya lost her extended family, except for her brother, to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. She and her brother immigrated after the war. She is too busy trying to build a new life as a nurse to have time to think about love and marriage and children. She lives with her brother and his family, but feels completely alone. She is in her mid-twenties, with no hope of finding love and an end to loneliness. Howie is an ex-Flying Tiger pilot, a veteran of the wars in China—World War II and then the Chinese Civil War. He lost his Chinese wife and his two children to Mao’s Communist army. He was flying for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, who were defeated in the war. He has come home an alcoholic, who is suffering from PTSD and from despair. He has lost the love of his life as well as his children, and is suicidal—he decides to escape his loneliness by killing himself. When Nadya and Howie meet in the emergency room of the hospital where she is a nurse—after he has unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide—they fall in love. He finds a reason to live. She finds a reason to hope. Both find the possibility of escaping loneliness.
For me in my novels, loneliness and romance go together. That’s why I liked Greer’s Less.
Throughout Arthur Less’s odyssey around the world—through Mexico, France, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan—he is looking for a way to escape his loneliness and his fear of turning fifty with nothing and no one. But like in a Hallmark movie, it was evident from the start that in the end, Arthur would somehow find happiness—a way out of loneliness … through romance.
April 7, 2019
"Who Am I?"
“Who am I?”
It seems that most people don’t ask themselves, “Who am I?” Most people know who their parents are—and their grandparents and even their eight great-grandparents. So it seems that they’re sure of their ethnicity, religion and nationality. So it seems if you ask most people whether they know who they are, they’ll suppose it’s a trick question, and they’ll answer you unabashedly, “Sure, yes—of course I know who I am!” But some people are not so sure.
One of my coming novels—Susanna’s Tale: The Dirt Farmer’s Daughter—deals with this issue: “Who am I?” The main character, Susanna, is a “foundling”—she was literally found by a couple on their back porch, having been abandoned during the night by an unmarried mother. They adopt her and love her; but as Susanna is growing up, she wants to know who she is—who her mother was and why she never came back for her.
But not only adopted children want to find out who they are. Two supporting characters in my novel are “passing.” That is, they’re passing for white, having appropriated the identities of two deceased friends. After years of pretending to be someone else, they’re no longer sure who they themselves really are. And when their four children discover that their parents are not who they are pretending to be, each child has an identity crisis: “Who am I? … I’m not who my parents say I am, because they’re not who they say they are. … So who am I?”
Two other supporting characters in my novel have their own unique identity problems. One of these characters is a Mexican-born, Aztec-looking young lady, who has to use her “one drop” of black blood from a long-forgotten slave ancestor in order to get a teaching job in a “colored” school. When her boyfriend wants to marry her, he has to give up his Protestant “Anglo” white identity and become a member of her extended Hispanic Catholic family.
“Who am I?” she asks herself each day, as she stands before her African American class in an all-black school in “Colored Town.” “Who am I?” he asks himself each Sunday, as he is attending mass in Spanish in “Mexican Town.”
There is also the problem of what new word to use in order to tell the world who I am. An article in the L.A. Times (April 4, 2019)—“Brush up on your vocab list”—highlights this problem:
“Many [neologisms] come from discussions of culture, identity and social justice. Among these are ‘Latinx,’ a gender-neutral term defined as ‘of or relating to people of Latin American descent,’ and ‘colorism,’ which refers to ‘differential treatment based on skin color, especially favoritism toward those with a lighter skin tone and mistreatment or exclusion of those with a darker skin tone, typically among those of the same racial group or ethnicity.’”
A large segment of American society is comprised of immigrants, who have identity problems of their own. Many immigrants make every possible effort to assimilate—throw off their identities from the “Old Country” and become 100% Americanized—which includes unlearning their native languages, completely changing their cuisine and manner of dressing, and so on. But if immigrants come to this country past a certain age, the accent remains, mannerisms remain, cultural interpretations remain—and deep down, they ask themselves … consciously or unconsciously … “Who am I?”
Another segment of American society is comprised of people who question their gender identity. Or rather, there are people who won’t answer who they are by the traditional binary terms of “male” or “female.” A recent article in the L.A. Times (April 4, 2019)—“Giving students power over their own names”—highlights this gender identity issue:
“[T]he University of California system … now allows students who are applying for undergraduate admission to identify themselves from at least seven choices under gender, including gender non-conforming, genderqueer, transgender, trans man, or trans male, trans woman or trans female. Students also can mark heterosexual/straight, bisexual, gay or lesbian on their applications.”
Finally, more and more people are asking for DNA tests to discover more about their ethnicity and genealogy—typically “Only $99!” But be careful what you ask for. One very white philanthropist socialite matron, who had always been assured by her socially prominent New Mexican family that she was “pure Spanish,” discovered that her DNA showed she is more than fifty percent Native American, specifically Navajo and Apache. A politically active matriarch of a large African American clan, who sends out daily #BlackLivesMatter tweets, was informed by her DNA test results that she is sixty-five percent English. And of course there is Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Based on family stories she heard growing up, she was so sure of her Native American ancestry that she infamously had her DNA tested. The report showed that there was “strong evidence” of one Native American ancestor “approximately six to 10 generations ago.”
So it turns out that “Who am I?” is not a simple question with an easy answer. While it may be true that most people have no problem with their self-identity, there are quite a few people who are searching. … I hope my novel, Susanna’s Tale, will resonate with these people.
April 4, 2019
"Duty" Above "Ethics"
“Duty” above “Ethics”
A Look Inside the Thinking Behind the Latest Book Larry Nicholl is Writing
“[Good-bye] to officers who put ‘duty’ above ‘ethics,’ and to the troops who regularly complained that the Army’s Rules of Engagement were too strict—as if more brutality, bombing and firepower (with less concern for civilians) would have brought victory instead of stalemate.”
Words of Major Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, who retired in 2018, after 18 years in the Army and 11 deployments, often to war zones. Words very unusual for a multi-medalist soldier who was teaching history at West Point. He had become a disillusioned pacifist after what he saw in his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan—and he gave up his once-promising career, in order to speak out.
But what if instead of Major Sjursen, Danny had been Major General Sjursen; and he had been serving in the Confederate Army during the Civil War? In all wars, there is a handful of soldiers—including high officers—who come to question what they are doing and what they are fighting for.
What if Major General Sjursen—a classmate of Robert E. Lee at West Point—had accompanied Lee to Washington before the war started and had listened to Lee’s explanation to Lincoln for not accepting command of the Union Army: “Duty, Sir. … It is my duty to Virginia.” … The question of ethics—the ethics of slavery—was never an issue for Lee.
What if Major General Sjursen had been at Gettysburg in 1863 under General Robert E. Lee, and as a result of what he saw there, came to recognize the senselessness of the slaughter for both sides? … With no end in sight.
What if Sjursen had been serving in the Army of Northern Virginia from the time Lee took command in 1862, and through the Siege of Petersburg in 1864-1865? Then in March 1865, after that Army’s final offensive action—and failure—in the Battle of Fort Stedman near Petersburg, Major General Sjursen—after sending a sealed letter of resignation to Lee—had surrendered.
Sjursen had become totally disillusioned. His life-long friend Lee was determined to break out of the Petersburg Siege, link up with the Confederate army in North Carolina under General Johnston, jointly defeat Sherman, and then go after Grant. And fight on and on … endlessly.
“Insanity!” Sjursen thought to himself, not daring to confront Lee. “I’m not sorry to leave behind the absurdity I witnessed.”
When taken to President Lincoln, who happened to be near Fort Stedman observing the Siege of Petersburg, my fictitious Major General Sjursen explained to Lincoln why he had surrendered:
“Maybe it’s hopeless for a former [Major General] to fight [both Southern and Union] militarism. Still, I plan to keep attacking in that lost cause. … I plan to keep explaining that we are engaged in Orwellian forever wars that professional foot soldiers make possible. …”
The real Major Danny Sjursen entitled his essay in the L.A. Times (March 31, 2019): “I was an obsequious Army grunt. But no longer.” This essay would serve as a perfect foreword to my coming novel: Colleen and the Statue—A Soldier’s Redemption.
The real Major Sjursen offers no solutions in his essay. He is proud to have become a pacifist and is proud to be speaking up against unbridled militarism. But he is hurting—undergoing treatment for PTSD, and he wonders: “I wonder whether something resembling an apology, rather than a statement of pride in who I’ve become, is the more appropriate valediction.”
The soldier in my coming novel is not unlike Major Sjursen. But my fictitious soldier faces directly the issue of “duty” versus “ethics.” He did his duty and valiantly served in the Confederate Army, but he came to see that he was in the wrong army and was fighting for the wrong cause. What can he do to redeem himself for this ethical failure? That is the underlying issue for the novel. … I plan to send a copy to Major Sjursen (retired).
March 28, 2019
Silent Sam vs. Tommy Trojan
How My Writing Deals with the Issue of Removing Confederacy Statues Across the United States
In 1930, the statue of Tommy Trojan was unveiled during the 50th Jubilee celebration of the University of Southern California, of which I am a proud alumnus. The sculptor used USC football players as “visual references” for the statue, which is a life-size bronze sculpture of a Trojan warrior and sits in the center of the campus. It is the unofficial mascot of the university. On the base is inscribed the five attributes of the ideal Trojan: “Faithful, Scholarly, Skillful, Courageous and Ambitious.” On the reverse of the base is a plaque bearing a quote from Virgil: “Here are provided seats of meditative joy, where shall rise again the destined reign of Troy.”
There has never been any controversy over this statue, other than during the Vietnam War era, when briefly Tommy Trojan’s sword was removed and a gas mask placed over his face. For most people, the statue is the symbol of the university’s athletic prowess, especially in football. No one—as far as I know—has ever advocated removing Tommy Trojan.
In 1913, the statue nicknamed Silent Sam was unveiled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the center of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This bronze statue of a Confederate soldier was originally planned to be in place in 1911, for the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The plaque on the left side of the base says: “Erected under the auspices of the North Carolina division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy aided by the alumni of the university.” The plaque on the right side reads: “To the sons of the university who entered the War of 1861-65 in answer to the call of their country [the Confederate States of America] whose lives taught the lesson of their great commander [Robert E. Lee] that duty is the sublimest word in the English language.”
In August 2018, Silent Sam was pulled down by protesters, and it was removed to a “secure location” by university authorities. In justification of their actions, the protestors who toppled the statue cited the dedication speech given by Julian Carr, a UNC alumnus and trustee, and a former Confederate soldier, who “urged his audience to devote themselves to the maintenance of white supremacy with the same vigor that their Confederate ancestors had defended slavery.”
I grew up playing under the gaze and protection of a similar statue of a Confederate soldier in Ellwood Park in Amarillo, Texas. The statue was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1931, and still stands where it was originally placed. Until I came to California in 1971 and studied history at the University of Southern California, I had never given much thought to that statue, which stood guard over me in my neighborhood park that was the equivalent of Amarillo’s “Central Park.” I grew up unaware of the statue’s significance, as a symbol of white supremacy and slavery. In recent years, African Americans have been unsuccessfully petitioning the Amarillo City Council to have the statue removed from the park and placed in a museum.
The issue of Confederate statues came to my attention again in mid-March 2019, when Carol L. Folt was introduced as USC’s next president. She is coming to my alma mater from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where as chancellor she had to handle the controversy involving the removal of Silent Sam.
I have determined that one of my coming novels in the series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, will deal with the issue of whether to remove the Confederate statue from the central park of my fictitious city of Mackenzie, which is modeled after Amarillo. At present, there is an absolutely incredible number of such monuments, which are scattered throughout the former Confederate states. The central theme of my novel will be: Is it right to honor a soldier who served in the wrong army? That is, even if the soldiers of the Confederate States of America were heroes and valiant soldiers, were they mistaken in fighting for what became known as the “Lost Cause”?
General Lee surrendered at Appomattox in 1865. But the controversy over what his army was fighting to defend—slavery or states’ rights—goes on.
March 14, 2019
Memories
Different authors write for different reasons—for all sorts of different reasons. I write to preserve my memories and to pass them on—to whomever might want to remember them with me. Which means that everything I write is autobiographical—not in the form of memoirs, but autobiographical, nonetheless.
Some people don’t want to tell their memories to anyone—their memories are “sacred.” I remember one such person—an elderly lady from East Prussia, which no longer exists.
What used to be East Prussia now is divided between Poland, Lithuania and Russia. In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland opened World War II in Europe, the population of East Prussia was 2,500,000—with 85% being ethnic Germans. The territory was part of Hitler’s Third Reich. When Germany lost the war in 1945, the entire ethnic German population was expelled by the victorious Red Army. Among those expelled was this elderly lady, who ended up in California in the early 1950s.
After we became friends, I asked her to tell me her story—what happened to her during the War and then in its aftermath. All she would say—with tears in her eyes—was that her husband had been a soldier in the German Wehrmacht (Regular Army) and he died in the War, and that she had not remarried. She wouldn’t say anything more about her family—whether or not she had children or relatives who had survived.
“My memories are sacred,” she told me. “I will not tell them to anyone. They will die with me.”
I’m different. I don’t want my memories to die with me. When someone I have known dies, part of my sorrow is that most of their memories have died with them. Most people don’t leave behind, when they leave this world, long diaries or extended memoirs or annotated albums of photographs or audio-videos or carefully-crafted CDs of their lives. And after a few years, even what memories they have left behind are stored in a box and stuck in a closet somewhere, and forgotten. Their memories died with them, in effect. I don’t want that to happen in my case.
So I write novels—historical novels, which are really my own history; romantic fantasies, which are the romances I lived or wish I had lived; tragedies, which entail the sad things that have happened to me or to my loved ones during my life.
More than anyone else, my mother, who lived to be 103, liked to read my novels, because she knew where everything was coming from: who, what and where I found inspiration for the tales I was telling. Also, my two brothers, my sister, and some of my cousins who grew up with me in the Texas Panhandle—they know, they too recognize my inspirations.
I put a disclaimer at the beginning of each novel: “Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” Which is true. But the starting point for each character’s story and the incidents in that character’s life are someone I have met or something I have witnessed.
Why do I say, “I don’t want my memories to die with me”? Because maybe—just maybe—I have learned something during my seven-and-a-half decades of living. Maybe—who knows— maybe I have some little bit of wisdom to pass on. Maybe—it’s possible—I have an insight worth giving to others. Presumptuous of me, I realize that. But I like to listen to people who have lived a long time tell me their life story. I learn from it. I think every person’s life story is unique and worth preserving.
“Dad, you can’t make this shit up!” as my daughter used to say, after telling me her latest adventure or some crazy thing she had just witnessed.
