Path of 1831 annular solar eclipse seen by Nat Turner. NASA, collection of Michael Zeiler. Since ancient times we’ve viewed solar eclipses with foreboding. But they don’t affect our lives, do they? The most significant solar eclipse in American history happened in 1831. What made it important was a man who saw it. Nat Turner, […]
The work of Dr. Walter Plecker’s Bureau of Vital Statistics would culminate in Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which remained on the books until it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. Plecker is depicted in the novel, Forsaken. Born into a slave-owning family in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia just days before […]
(Large photo) Elizabeth City County Courthouse, Hampton, Virginia, where Virginia Christian was tried for murder in 1912. (Small photo) Inez C. Fields, the daughter of George Washington Fields, lead defense attorney in the Virginia Christian trial. (Massachusetts Historical Society) Was it a good idea for the father [Henry Christian] to testify that he did not know the […]
In May 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education II, stating that “all deliberate speed” was to guide the desegregation of schools. That fall I started first grade in Floyd, Virginia, riding bus #27 the seven miles from home to my elementary school. In Floyd there was […]
Stumps and logs were what remained of the American chestnut tree on our farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains when I was a boy. At woods edge near the house stood a lone tree, stunted, no more than ten feet tall. For years it leafed out in the spring, but the leaves withered. Then, only […]
Yesterday I listened to an NPR interview with author Peter Ross Range, who’s just published the book, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler. “This was the year of Hitler’s final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallible leader who would interpret and distort Germany’s historical traditions to support his vision for the Third Reich,” reads […]
“Is there a Santa Claus?” asked little Virginia O’Hanlon in a letter to the editor of the New York Sun newspaper in 1897. Francis Pharcellus Church wrote the paper’s legendary reply. “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus,” Church said. “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that […]
On this day in 1912 at 10 o’clock in the morning, the murder trial of sixteen-year-old Virginia Christian opened in the Elizabeth City County Courthouse, Hampton, Virginia.
An African-American girl, “Virgie,” as she was called, was convicted of killing her white employer, Ida Belote, a fifty-one-year-old widow.
Virgie died in the electric chair at the state penitentiary in Richmond the day after her seventeenth birthday. She is the only female juvenile executed in Virginia history.
In February 2016 NewSouth Books of Montgomery, Alabama, will publish Forsaken, my first novel, which opens with the trial and execution of this girl and dives deep into the poisonous waters of Jim Crow Virginia.
For me, the publication of the book will be the fulfillment of a dream born when I was Virgie’s age. But like the novel, the achievement is bittersweet.
I’ll be sixty-five years old when Forsaken is released. I’ll be a debut novelist who just enrolled with Medicare. Many of the family members, school teachers, and college professors I most would have wanted to see its publication are long since gone.
What’s more, any sensible reader might reasonably inquire, “What could a sixty-five-year old white man have to say about a sixteen-year-old black girl who lived during the rise of racial segregation in Progressive-era Virginia?”
In the weeks ahead, please return to this site. I’ll do my best to answer that question and others. I’ll tell you about the creative process I followed to research and write the book and provide background on the history and politics of the times, times fraught with wrenching change, blighted hope, and sometimes brutal cruelty.
I’ll fill in the lives of the historical figures I came across in my research, figures who absolutely would not let me turn away, figures I wanted to bring to life in hopes they might help us today live lives of understanding, tolerance, and empathy. The events in Forsaken are tragic, but the story is one of redemption and hope.