Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

family

The Inspirations That Led to “Brookhaven”

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Brookhaven has made its historical novel debut. Publication happened faster than I anticipated; I thought maybe by sometime in late January. It was a surprise to receive a message from the publisher last Thursday with the link to Amazon Kindle, followed by the paperback on Friday.

Like all stories, Brookhaven has its seeds, some going back more than 60 years. Some of those seeds are movies.

The children in our family are spread widely apart; my older brother is eight years older, and my younger brother is 10 years younger. For a decade, I was the little kid in the family. And because my father wasn’t a fan of movies, and my mother was a Hollywood director’s dream of a fan, I became my mother’s movie partner. We saw the Disney movies, of course, but we also saw a lot of others, including some that weren’t exactly the best viewing for a child.

The late 1950s and 1960 were a banner time for the movie forays by my mother and me. On one day, she took me to the Saenger Theatre in downtown New Orleans to see Last Voyage, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. It was an early version of The Poseidon Adventure, with a doomed luxury liner. My mother had a crush on Robert Stack, which I didn’t know at the time.

I cried from the tension in the movie so much that my embarrassed mother had a novel way to make it all better – we walked across Canal Street to the Joy Theatre to see Some Like It Hot. It was funny and certainly without the tension of Last Voyage. But whether it was appropriate for an 8-year-old is another matter. (She did buy me popcorn and a soda at both movies.)

A third movie we saw that year was The Horse Soldiers, a Civil War film with John Wayne and William Holden (my mother has a crush on Holden, too). That movie was a great one for a kid – a troop of Union soldiers riding through Confederate territory and creating havoc (although having Yankees as the heroes was almost over the top in 1959 New Orleans). 

Decades later, I was reading a story about Greirson’s Raid in 1863, when I realized I had seen the movie. I didn’t know in 1959 that the movie was based upon a historical event. What was more was that a bunch of Young family ancestors lived in Brookhaven, Mississippi, at the time of the raid. 

That was one inspiration for Brookhaven. A second had been my paternal grandmother, whom I dearly loved and with whom I spent a week every summer in Shreveport from the time I was 8 to when I turned 14. The visits stopped for reasons of her health, but she would live for another 16 years.

She was a storyteller. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so she filled my information gaps about him. She kept his workshop intact and let me explore it each time I camp; what I remember most is lots of dust, old carpentry equipment, and a considerable number of empty bottles that my teetotaling grandmother refused to answer questions about.

One thing one grandmother would talk about was the Civil War, except she referred to it by its proper name, she would say, “the War of Northern Aggression.” She bought into the Lost Cause completely. She was proud of her father-in-law, Samuel Young, who was a Civil War veteran. She said very little about her own family, so I suspect they didn’t fight in the war. 

Samuel had died in 1920 when he was 74. His wife Octavia had died at 44 in 1888 (when Samuel was 43), and Samuel had never remarried, unusual for the time.

For decades, those stories and the memories of those stories lay dormant, until an article about Grierson’s Raid began to bring them to the surface, fusing them with other stories. Little did I know that hearing my grandmother talk about “those Yankees” would help inspire a novel so many years later. 

Related:

Grierson’s Read and “The Horse Soldiers.”

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding.

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith.

A note from T.S. Poetry Press on the release of Brookhaven (including the author’s note).

Sometimes Fiction Imitates Life

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You read a book like A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.

My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law. 

My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.

Each summer, from the time I was 8 to about 13, I would fly to Shreveport to spend a week with my grandmother. My grandfather had died when I was nine months old, so I never knew him. My grandmother lived across the street from my father’s oldest sister (and the family’s firstborn) and her husband. Aunt Rubye and Uncle Revis were responsible for some of my most vivid memories of Shreveport.

Both were “characters,” Aunt Rubye only slightly more staid than Uncle Revis. She was famous for her looks of disapproval and her biscuits. He wore a cowboy hat and drove a gigantic Dodge that was a faded pink and only slightly smaller than an ocean liner. My grandmother usually ate her lunch and dinner with them, which meant I did, too, when I visited. My visits usually coincided with harvesting the acre of vegetable gardens they had behind their small frame house. I learned to dig up potatoes, pick corn (and when to know it was ready), pick green peans (and help shell them; no body ate for free). 

The Lennon Sisters

Saturday evenings were devoted to watching the Lawrence Welk Show on television. I wasn’t a particular fan, but the best part was the running commentary on the individual acts from Uncle Revis. My favorite part was when the Lennon Sisters performed. You would hear my uncle begin to mutter until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He’s shout “Ignorant!” at the television set. “They’re ignorant1” My grandmother would smile, my Aunt Rubye would roll her eyes, and I’d go off into gales of laughter. I suspect that his commentary was for my benefit and amusement.

He’d let me tag along with him when he ran errands. He always seemed to have a pipe in his mouth, even when he wasn’t smoking it. We’d go tooling all over Shreveport in that big Dodge. I’d go with my grandmother when she had errands to run as well. She drove a black 1940 Ford that always, always was breaking down, usually in a part of town you didn’t want to break down in. I met the most interesting people because of that car’s problems.

Uncle Revis hated one thing even more than the Lennon Sisters. 

Cats. 

When I was about 10, I was sitting with him on the back steps after dinner. For whatever reason, we had no garden duties that might. It was one of those beautiful Southern summer evenings, still light. He was smoking his pipe, and he was talking about his favorite writers, of which James Michener was No. 1 on the list. Suddenly, he grabbed a rifle from behind us (which I didn’t know he had at hand) and fired off a shot at the fence between his yard and the neighbor’s house next door. A cat went flying in the air. 

The next-door neighbor loved cats, with at least a dozen and often more roaming around. If they stayed at the neighbor’s house, Uncle Revis would have been fine. But, as all of them were outdoor cats, they roamed the outdoors. And they seemed to know that Uncle Revis didn’t like them. All the more reason to visit.

Aunt Rubye came flying on to the back porch, shouting at my uncle. This might have been Shreveport in the 1960s, but firing a firearm inside the city limits was something only the police could do. But that wasn’t Aunt Rubye’s issue. 

What she was upset about was the reaction from the neighbors. As it turned out, they were their son’s in-laws. And they might, she said, breathing fire, think it was an insult aimed at them.

“Well,” Uncle Revis said, “they’d have to be pretty smart to figure that out. That won’t be a problem.”

Uncle Jack and Burley Coulter up in Port William, Kentucky would be proud. Yes, sometimes fiction does indeed imitate life.

Top photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth in Jena, Louisiana, about 1923.

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

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The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit.

Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages.  The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

Family History as a Source for Stories

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A single comment by my father nearly six decades ago led to a story idea. 

“Your great-grandfather was too young to enlist in the Civil War,” he said. “So, he signed up as a messenger boy when he looked old enough to get away with it. And then he had to walk home when the war was over.” My father must have heard that from his father; he was four when his grandfather died, with no memories of him at all.

A year ago, when I decided I wanted to know more, any family member who might have known something was long buried. 

The records in the family Bible provided few clues. One of millions published by the American Bible Society in the 1870s, it included family records inserted between the Old and New Testaments. The earliest recorded date was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase; it noted the birth of my great-great-grandfather. But almost all the entries, stretching from 1803 to the 1890s, were in the same hand, if different inks – my great-grandfather’s handwriting (my great-grandmother had died in the 1880s).

To continue reading, please see my post today at American Christian Fiction Writers.