Louella Bryant's Blog - Posts Tagged "alcoholism"
Cowboys and Alcoholics
How I came to write COWBOY CODE
One holiday while visiting my mother, I went up to the attic and rummaged through boxes for anything I had left up there when I left for college. In an old trunk I found hundreds of letters my parents had written to each other while my father was in the Navy. Letters to him were imprinted with lipstick kisses. His were typed on onionskin paper using manual typewriter. A censor had sliced out any hints he had given to his location somewhere in the South Pacific. When I asked, Mom let me have the letters. Through their words of passion, I felt a book coming to life.
I grew up in the era of Gene Autry, a squeaky-clean singing cowboy who respected women and never touched alcohol. Unlike my father, good cowboys never got drunk and always defeated the bad guys. My father wasn’t a bad guy, but his drinking nearly destroyed our family.
From the time I was young, my mother told me stories about her early life in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and many of those tales bore fruit in Cowboy Code. Panthers came down from the forests at night and stole chickens from her father’s yard and the woods were full of ticks and poisonous snakes. She recalled the train stopping at the town’s station and unloading wealthy visitors and dignitaries headed for the elegant Homestead resort a short drive away to play tennis or golf and soak in the hot springs. She spoke about the African settlement where the Negroes lived. Her father, a mill foreman and secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, hired one of the young men from the settlement to help him with his small farm. My mother had been the oldest of three children, and her father inflicted harsher discipline on her than he did on her younger brother and sister. At eighteen she married to escape the sting of the razor strap for even a minor infraction of his rules.
My mother’s two sons were still young when their father was killed in an explosion at the paper mill. In her early twenties, Mom was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the mill and hired a nanny for her boys. In Cowboy Code, I replaced the older boy with Bobbie, a 14-year-old girl, because I wanted the story to reflect a girl’s coming of age in Appalachia.
After her husband’s death, Mom married a sailor who struggled with alcoholism. Shortly after he moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Navy Department, I was born, followed five years later by my younger brother. The six of us lived in a development of small houses built for families of WWII veterans just outside the nation’s capital.
Cowboy Code took twenty years to find its way into print. I was reluctant to release the story and expose the shame I’ve felt for most of my life around my father’s drinking, my grandfather’s racism, and the soot and poverty of my family’s Virginia roots. But in writing about the people of the fictional town of Pine Cliff, I have come to realize that they are the embodiment of dignity, honesty, a strong work ethic, and a deep spiritual faith, and I’m proud to say that they are my people.
One holiday while visiting my mother, I went up to the attic and rummaged through boxes for anything I had left up there when I left for college. In an old trunk I found hundreds of letters my parents had written to each other while my father was in the Navy. Letters to him were imprinted with lipstick kisses. His were typed on onionskin paper using manual typewriter. A censor had sliced out any hints he had given to his location somewhere in the South Pacific. When I asked, Mom let me have the letters. Through their words of passion, I felt a book coming to life.
I grew up in the era of Gene Autry, a squeaky-clean singing cowboy who respected women and never touched alcohol. Unlike my father, good cowboys never got drunk and always defeated the bad guys. My father wasn’t a bad guy, but his drinking nearly destroyed our family.
From the time I was young, my mother told me stories about her early life in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and many of those tales bore fruit in Cowboy Code. Panthers came down from the forests at night and stole chickens from her father’s yard and the woods were full of ticks and poisonous snakes. She recalled the train stopping at the town’s station and unloading wealthy visitors and dignitaries headed for the elegant Homestead resort a short drive away to play tennis or golf and soak in the hot springs. She spoke about the African settlement where the Negroes lived. Her father, a mill foreman and secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, hired one of the young men from the settlement to help him with his small farm. My mother had been the oldest of three children, and her father inflicted harsher discipline on her than he did on her younger brother and sister. At eighteen she married to escape the sting of the razor strap for even a minor infraction of his rules.
My mother’s two sons were still young when their father was killed in an explosion at the paper mill. In her early twenties, Mom was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the mill and hired a nanny for her boys. In Cowboy Code, I replaced the older boy with Bobbie, a 14-year-old girl, because I wanted the story to reflect a girl’s coming of age in Appalachia.
After her husband’s death, Mom married a sailor who struggled with alcoholism. Shortly after he moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Navy Department, I was born, followed five years later by my younger brother. The six of us lived in a development of small houses built for families of WWII veterans just outside the nation’s capital.
Cowboy Code took twenty years to find its way into print. I was reluctant to release the story and expose the shame I’ve felt for most of my life around my father’s drinking, my grandfather’s racism, and the soot and poverty of my family’s Virginia roots. But in writing about the people of the fictional town of Pine Cliff, I have come to realize that they are the embodiment of dignity, honesty, a strong work ethic, and a deep spiritual faith, and I’m proud to say that they are my people.
