Tennessee WordSmith

Of Dental Drills and Starship Hobos

2012-02-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

Two of my short stories have just been released as ebook shorts: "And Naked We Leave" and "Now Spit." Both were written in the mid-90s. My mother has informed me that "And Naked We Leave," about the last hobo, is her favorite of my stories she has read (and that's gotta count for somethin'.) "Now Spit"... probably wouldn't be one of my mother's favorites, she is on the squeamish side....

And Naked We Leave

Lew Roycko is a successful lunar real estate developer. On a business trip to earth, he realizes that something has been missing from his life. His interest is piqued by a mysterious old man -whose stories just may change his future.

Now Spit

Jerry Carp's day takes a turn for the worse when he awakens to find himself bound and gagged. But that is not as disturbing as the sobs and screams... and the whine of the drill....

Western Short Story Collections

2012-01-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

The short story is my favorite prose medium to read and to write. There's something about getting right to the point, and making a hard punch quickly, that is satisfying... and from a writer's point of view, the short story is a special art. It's like a prose haiku, or like a visual artist getting the maximum effect with the fewest strokes of the pen or brush. Less really is more.

For a long time it looked like the form was withering away. For the first several decades of the twentieth century, serious writers made their money in the short story to finance the work of writing their novels, rather than vice versa. By the 1990s, though, short story markets were drying up. Where were we as readers going to turn to find the new Louis L'Amour or Dorothy Johnson? Fortunately, the internet age -and the rapidly growing market for e-book shorts -has started filling the void.

My short story collection The Stealing Moon is out of print. In the coming year, the stories from it and several new tales will be repackaged as two separate collections from Western Trail Blazer: Cherokee Winter and Red Trail. I currently have several shorts available for 99 cents.

It has come to my attention just today that two of my friends have Western short story collections available for the kindle... for FREE, at least on Jan. 27 and 28. I imagine they'll go back up to their regular price after that. I highly recommend you seek them out. I am also going to mention a couple of collections that can be bought for under a dollar, and a couple of my own individual e-book shorts. Go out and grab you some short fiction!

FREE through Jan. 28:

SHADOWS OF YESTERYEAR by Jory Sherman

WALTZING WITH TUMBLEWEEDS by Dusty Richards

99 CENT SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS:

THE WANTED MAN by Matthew Pizzolato

THE ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES, VOL. I by Edward Grainger

THE ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES, VOL. II by Edward Grainger

INDIVIDUAL SHORT STORIES BY TROY D. SMITH:

THE DIVIDED PREY

BLACKWELL'S RUN

THE WINDIGO

HERE ARE SOME ANTHOLOGIES (a collection has stories that are all by the same author; an anthology has works by several authors)

THE TRADITIONAL WEST

THE CHRISTMAS CAMPFIRE COMPANION

LONE STAR LAW

PAPERBACK CLASSICS:

MOVING ON by Jane Candia Coleman

INDIAN COUNTRY by Dorothy Johnson

THE HANGING TREE by Dorothy Johnson

Ladies Love Outlaws

2012-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

To quote that great troubadour Waylon Jennings:

"Ladies love outlaws
Like babies love stray dogs.
Ladies touch babies like a banker touches gold;
Outlaws touch ladies somewhere deep down in their souls."

It was somewhat of a surprise to me when I started to realize just how many readers of traditional westerns were women. I got a lot of comments from female fans when I started publishing westerns, and when I took an informal survey of my students when I taught high school in Illinois, I discovered that more girls liked westerns that boys (they often cited the western as something they can do with their dads, and they associated the genre with their fathers.) There are a lot of good western writers who are women, too, I bet a lot more than you'd think.

I think at least part of it is the romance of the Old West -romance in the 19th century sense, as well as the more modern "love" sense. Ladies really do like a cowboy; I've rarely met a woman over 30 who didn't swoon at the sound of Sam Elliot's voice.

I've been making a conscious effort to make inroads into that audience, even though my books are rarely what we guys would call "mushy" (except in the gory sense.) I've been invited to be the guest blogger on January 28 at the website "Petticoats & Pistols: Romancing the West." I'll be on hand throughout the day to answer readers' questions, and there will be a drawing for an autographed copy of my western novel Caleb's Price (which does have a romantic element to it.)

Feel free to drop by, all day Saturday Jan. 28. It's at http://petticoatsandpistols.com/

Review for Bound for the Promise-Land

2012-01-18T22:48:00.000-08:00

I just became aware of this great review for my novel Bound for the Promise-Land, at the blog of author Kae Cheatham.... check it out. click here

Manhattan Public Library's article about Classic Westerns

2012-01-08T23:20:00.000-08:00

The reference staff at the Manhattan Public library, at their website "Little Apple Bookworm", just did an article about the Western genre. I was quite honored to have my novel Bound for the Promise-Land included in their list of recommended western novels, right there with several of my friends and with people -Elmore Leonard, Charles Portis, and Jack Shaefer -who are icons in the field. Never thought I'd see my name in such august company (and here it is only January.)

It's a nice article, check it out! http://bit.ly/z2ulAC

And if you want to check out the book in question, in paper or ebook: http://amzn.to/xaIIfw http://amzn.to/wdSACK

Vote for RIDING TO SUNDOWN in the P & E Poll

2012-01-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

My Western novel Riding to Sundown is one of the books being considered for the Preditors and Editors online poll. If you liked said book, I'd sure appreciate you zipping over and voting for it: vote here

Voting is only open till Jan. 10. Several of my friends are up for other categories, listed below. Much obliged!

Best Ebook Publisher for 2011 - Western Trail Blazer

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/ebookpublisher.shtml

Anthologies - 2011 Christmas Collection from Victory Tales Press

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/antho.shtml

Short Stories Romance - Homecoming by Cheryl Pierson
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/shortstoryr.shtml

Short Stories Sci-Fi - Storm Riders by Karen Michelle Nutt
http://critters.org/predpoll/shortstorysf.shtml

Short Stories All Other - Sharpshooter by Kit Prate from WTB

http://www.critters.org/predpoll/shortstory.shtml

Novels Sci-Fi - Lucca: Warriors for the Light by Karen Michelle Nutt
http://critters.org/predpoll/novelsf.shtml

Novels All Other - Riding to Sundown by Troy D. Smith
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novel.shtml

Novels Mystery - A Familiar Evil by Anne Patrick
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novelmys.shtml

Novels Thriller - To Kill My Love by Lee Baldwin
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novelthrill.shtml

Author of 2011 - Amanda Ashley
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/author.shtml

Novels Romance - Jessie's Girl by Amanda Ashley
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/novelr.shtml

Cover Art of 2011 - Conceived in Darkness by Laura Shinn
http://www.critters.org/predpoll/bookart.shtml

Civil War Vampires -and not the sparkly kind!

2011-12-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS

My horror short story "The Blood of Patriots" is now available as an ebook: Link to Amazon listing
Description and brief excerpt below:

A SHORT TALE OF TERROR by award-winning author Troy D. Smith

Colonel Jeffords has more to worry about than the Confederate Army. He has chosen to employ an infamous Union guerrilla band led by the mysterious Captain Vincent Caine -a band so bloodthirsty that the enemy may not be enough to satiate them. Vincent Caine has a secret, you see -a terrible, terrible secret. And a terrible hunger...

EXCERPT:

There was something about Vincent Caine. Something which –from the first moment I saw him outside Fredricksburg –told me that the Englishman was no ordinary fighting man. I could not place it at the time, the odd feeling which crept into my gut on each occasion I saw him. There was a coldness in Caine’s features, you see, which slithered at you in the pale moonlight like a serpent.

Of course, Caine was not an ordinary fighting man –he was an irregular, or scout. A guerilla. That breed of man is often cruel and independent –even arrogant, not used to submitting to military discipline.

And Caine was one of the more infamous Union guerillas. He and his band struck fear into Rebels, and anyone else who crossed them.

Looking at him for the second time, just before Chancellorsville, I could understand why. A buzz of irrational fear pricked at the base of my skull when the man reported in to me, and the sensation heightened when Caine smiled.

“Good morning, Colonel Jeffords,” he said. I had never quite been able to trace his accent –having traveled

Britain

in my youth, I prided myself on placing regional inflections.

I rubbed my bleary eyes and brought my tin coffee cup to my mouth with both hands.

“Morning!” I said contemptuously as I sat the cup back down. “It hardly qualifies. Two hours till sunrise, I call that night. I definitely didn’t sleep long enough for it to qualify as a new day.”

Caine’s grin grew colder, somehow. “Just one more sacrifice we make to the god of war,” he said. “Many of our actions in his service look better outside the rude gaze of the sun, I think.”

Read the whole thing!

Excerpt from Cross Road Blues

2011-12-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

I've decided to post the first chapter of my crime novel Cross Road Blues to give folks a taste. The book has received praise from several folks in the crime fiction biz whose opinions I value highly:

"CROSS ROAD BLUES isn't just one of the best crime novels I've read recently, it's one of the best crime novels I've read in a long time... You need to read this one, and I recommend it very highly." -James Reasoner

"Drugs, murder, a little Voodoo, and the blues -a lot of blues. Troy Smith's got his mojo workin' in this fast moving, atmospheric crime novel set in the blues joints and back alleys of the 1950s. Check it out!" -Bill Crider

"If Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil at the crossroads, then Troy Smith must have made a deal with the ghost of Robert Johnson. He delivers a story told with the power and passion of the great Blues Man himself." -Robert J. Randisi

Book video:

Without further ado: Cross Road Blues by Troy D. Smith, Chapter 1.

Nashville, 1957

“He sort of puts me in mind of that one fella from up in Detroit. What the hell is his name?”

I was leaning forward on my stool, my elbows on the bar. The whiskey sour rested between my arms, still half-full, and I stared at it. There were other whiskey sours yet unpoured, waiting to take its place, and this one had not made way for them. That didn’t seem right. I breathed out a tired little sigh and nodded at the glass.

“What the hell is his name?” Willie said again.

“Who?”

“That one fella up in Detroit.”

“There’s a lot of fellas up in Detroit, as I understand it. I may be wrong.”

The third member of our trio chuckled. This was Malcolm, and it was his joint we were sitting in. Malcolm’s. It made more sense than a lot of things do. Willie would still pester Malcolm every once in awhile about the name -not a bright thing, since Malcolm was the only cat in Nashville who would pay money to a piss-poor piano man like Willie, but Willie wasn’t too awful bright. He wanted Malcolm to change the name to something more fitting for a blues bar. “Blues Sky” was one of his suggestions, or “Blues’n’Shoes.” Willie is a dumbass.

“No, man,” Willie said to me. “You know what I’m talkin about. That fella from Detroit, the one that stomps his feet all the damn time.”

“John Lee Hooker,” I said. I raised my glass and tossed it back. Progress, is what they call it. Put down the old and make room for some new.

“Yeah, him,” Willie said.

“Boogie Chillun,” I said absently. I was looking toward the end of the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention.

“That’s who this Newsome boy puts me in mind of,” Willie said. “The way he stomps his feet while he plays that guitar.”

“He puts me in mind of Robert Johnson,” Malcolm said.

The bartender set another glass in front of me. “He puts me in mind of a asshole,” he said. “Punk.” Then he walked back to the far end of the bar.

“Don’t pay no mind to Rhodesia,” Malcolm said. “He hates everybody.”

“Then why’d you hire him as a bartender?” Willie said.

“Why do I pay you to play the piano? My heart is softer than my head. Besides, he’s big as a damn house.”

I was already halfway through my second whiskey sour. It occurred to me that I ought to keep the whiskey next time, but lose the sour. It had been that kind of day.

“Why he put you in mind of Robert Johnson?” Willie asked. “Robert Johnson didn’t never stomp on the floor like he had ants in his damn britches.”

“No, but Robert Johnson was a crazy-ass motherfucker. Same as this boy is. I’m hopin that, when word gets out how crazy he is, folks will come in just to see what kind of crazy shit he’s gonna do.”

“Hell,” I said, and I drained my glass again. “Is that what it’s all about. Maybe I ought to just wear women’s drawers on my head and the money would pour in. Then I wouldn’t have to pump gas all day.” I waved at Rhodesia.

“Slow down,” Malcolm said. “You gonna be too drunk to play.”

“I can blow harp, drunk or not. All’s I gotta do is remember how to breathe. Just give me a plain whiskey this time, Rho. A double.”

“Roy must be havin trouble with his old lady again,” Willie said with a grin.

“It’s what keeps me in business,” Malcolm said. The liquor was helping. I could only dimly hear Sonny Boy Williams on the jukebox. That was a sure sign everything else would fade away before long, or at least subside to a dull drone.

“Don’t get so high you can’t hear this boy play,” Malcolm said. “This is his third time here -you missed the first two.”

“I’ve been beatin myself over the head with a tire iron day and night because of it.”

“Come on, man. I want you to back Newsome up after tonight, and I want you to know how to play around what he lays down.”

“How about me?” Willie said,

“He don’t need no piano music. But he could use some harmonica stuff.”

Del Fenton walked over to the bar. My stomach turned a little when I seen him, and it wasn’t from the whiskey. Del was just like me and Willie -not a has-been, but a never-was. But unlike us, Del didn’t realize it. He went around like he thought he was some kind of star. It never fazed him that no one else bought into his fantasy, and that made him look more than a little ridiculous. He was like some of the chickenshit officers I had known back in Korea. They wouldn’t be promoted no higher than they already were, not if every officer in the United States Army got wasted, and everyone seemed to recognize that fact except them.

Del was fried and dyed. His hair was wavy-straight and a funky shade of red. He couldn’t dye away the wrinkles around his eyes, though, or make anyone forget that the zoot suit he insisted on wearing was years out of style. He had never looked like a blues singer -he wanted to cake city onto his face the way actors put on makeup.

“We about ready to go on, boys?”

“I am,” said Willie.

I looked around at the other customers. There were a couple of guys at the far end of the bar, looking about as active as me -Rhodesia Bain stood behind the counter near them, most likely because they were less talkative than Willie and Malcolm. About a dozen other people were in the smoky room. They huddled close at tables, except for the ones who were alone, and the lone ones huddled close to their drinks. Kind of like me.

I looked at Del and shrugged. “Our public is clamoring for us, man,” I said. “We can’t disappoint them.”

“Ain’t no need to get smart,” Del said. He ran a hand over his hairdo, probably without even being aware of the action. “And you better keep up -I seen how you been drinkin. You fuck me while I’m onstage and I’ll make them chinks that shot you look like your best friends.”

“You keep comparing yourself to the Chinese, Del, I’m liable to start suspecting you of communism.”

“I ain’t no communist.” The hand went over the hair again. “But I am a intellectual.”

“Bullshit,” said Willie. “You just a nigger, like the rest of us.”

“Speak for yourself, chump,” I said. I don’t like being called nigger, not even by a brother.

Someone new had walked into the joint while we were exchanging pleasantries with out fellow professional. He was a scrawny man in a bright suit only a shade removed from Del’s. A black leather hat was pulled low over his face -he had even more swagger and attitude than Del, which did not endear him to me.

“Hey man,” the newcomer said to Malcolm. “You set for my boy?”

Malcolm nodded. “Almost. These guys are gonna do a set first.”

“That’s cool,” he said, nodding. When he nodded the hat’s brim flopped over his face. “Kind of like a warm-up act. I like that.”

Malcolm saw my irritation at the remark. “This is Roy Carpenter,” he told the dude, before I had a chance to speak. Which was good, I guess. “He’s a harpist, a mean one. I want him to play with Jimmy tomorrow.”

“If he can keep up,” Leather Hat said, and he managed to sneer without moving his mouth. Neat trick.

“Roy, this is Bennie Lee. He’s Jimmy Newsome’s manager.”

I almost sprayed whiskey through my nose, I wanted to laugh so bad. “You shittin me,” I said. “Manager? Where the hell you think you are, man, Hollywood?”

“We may be someday,” Bennie Lee said. “My boy Jimmy, he gonna hit it big one day. You gonna be hearin him on the jukebox, ‘stead of a bunch of dead guys. We just got in town and I done got him lined up here and some joint called Ronnie’s.”

“Ronnie’s,” Malcolm said under his breath, and grunted in disgust. “Them dudes act like jazz is better than blues, like it don’t all come from the same place.”

“You wanna make records,” I told Bennie Lee, “you need to get on that highway headed west, for Memphis.”

Willie chuckled. “Yeah man, Only way you gonna make a record in this town is if you a ofay.”

“An ofay with a cowboy hat, who sings through his nose,” I added. “They don’t feature Negroes on the Grand Old Opry.”

“We just in town to, you know, get down the act.”

“Whatever. Del, we gonna get up there or not?”

“Yeah, man,” Del said. “Come on.” Del’s voice was lower than usual, and more serious. He seemed pleased by my exchange with Lee. I suppose he was pissed off a little by the cocky manager -maybe because Del didn’t have no cocky manager, maybe because this manager was cockier than Del was, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I could tell that Del didn’t like the dude anymore than I did. “Ronnie’s ain’t that bad,” he said to Malcolm as he passed him.

Me and Willie got up and followed Del onto the little stage. We left Bennie Lee in the care of Malcolm. Maybe the two of them could dream up a way to take us all to Hollywood and make us all rich. Maybe we could all wear one of them black leather hats.

Del commenced to plucking on his beat-up old guitar. There was an amp on the stage to plug into, but Del wouldn’t have none of that electric stuff. Del figured Les Paul to be the lowest white man since Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Willie settled himself onto his piano stool and popped his knuckles. I stood behind Del and off to one side, and opened up the little case I carried my harmonicas in -one in each key. Del whispered back to me what we were gonna play. It was more of the same old shit. Del wasn’t much of one for branching out in his routine. I could play the songs he liked in my sleep, and often as not that’s exactly what I did.

We started off with C C Rider, an old favorite, and surprisingly lively for Del. I scanned the faces in the audience while he sang in his peculiar high-pitched voice. There was only two women in the club. There was Peggy, who was always there -she would duck out the door once an hour or so with one man or another, and be back in fifteen or twenty minutes, and we would know that she got no further than the alley but that the man got a lot farther. Looks like she would take longer, since her meter was always running. I suppose the sort of clientele we got couldn’t afford to take no long trips. Peggy was a biffer -that is to say, she was not really all that pretty but she had that special sex appeal which comes with a woman who is willing to do things most pretty women would figure they didn’t have to.

Sallymae was always there, too, and we was all thankful to God for it. She was the waitress. It was rare that anybody ever ordered food, and rarer still that they liked what they got, but Sallymae was an essential part of Malcolm’s operation. She wasn’t no biffer, you see -she was fine as hell. Eyes and nose and mouth that was perfect, skin colored like coffee with just a touch of cream. Men would sit and stare in her direction like they was hypnotized -never straight at her, just like you never stare straight at the sun, only stare at the edges of her. After drinking in Sallymae’s beauty for awhile, sipping whiskey all the time to take the edge off their longings, it must have seemed easier to stumble into the alley with Peggy, face her to the wall and lift her skirt and paint her grunts with the brushstrokes of Sallymae’s soft voice. Then they would come back in and look in her direction once more, but with their cheeks warmed by an easy shame. Still they could not look completely away.

And the odd part about it all was that Sallymae rarely looked at them, or spoke to them anymore than was necessary. She smiled all the time, but she never smiled at anyone. All the men could sense that a touch of Sallymae’s flesh would cost them a far sight more than Peggy’s -it would cost them more than money, more than shame.

Lately I had caught her staring at me. Straight at me, and I would smile back. I smiled back at her from the little stage that night, caressing the harp with my mouth while Del sang about The Jailhouse Blues.

We played on -Conversation with the Blues, and then Cemetery Blues. The latter was about how old Grandpa died and old Grandma was tore up as hell about it. Del finished with Getting Older Every Day, and I’m sure he never even reflected on the irony of that song choice. Del’s repertoire was every bit as depressing as his appearance. He gave the blues a bad name.

When we finished and walked down off the stage, Sallymae brushed against me in such a way that her breast touched my bared arm. I held my breath, savoring the feel of it. In the pit of my gut I felt once more the warmth of the anger at my wife Betty, stoked up by the fight we’d had that evening. Desire for the waitress mixed with the anger and swirled it around, making it into something heady and strong and ugly, and I felt my insides crackling with the heat from it.

Willie sidled to the bar beside me, his face turned to Sallymae.

“Why don’t you come with me, darlin,” he whispered to her. I don’t know why he bothered to whisper, loud and raspy as his voice was. “I’ll show you why they call me Willie Fingers. It ain’t ‘cause of the way I play piano.”

I had a sudden urge to hit him. I know it’s crazy. Behind him I seen Del Fenton, and I read the same thought in his eyes. This surprised me, because I had never figured Del as the sort of man to even entertain the notion of violence.

“I reckon it’s because you have to tickle your own ivory,” she said. She did not look at him, or at me, but I felt the smile on her face.

Willie reached his hand out toward her. “Aw, come on now, honey,” he said.

Sallymae suddenly stiffened. At first I thought it was because of Willie’s ignorant freshness, but then I noticed that she was staring at the door. Now I felt that the smile was gone.

Lester Blackmon had walked into Malcolm’s. Lester was a mean-hearted son of a bitch, and every man in the bar hated him. He was a loafer and a bully. That’s not why we hated him, though. We hated him for the same reason Sallymae did. We hated him because he was her husband.

She hung her head and walked over to stand next to him while she took his order. Rhodesia’s hands went none-too-subtly behind the bar. No one knew what sort of weapon he kept there, but we all figured that if it was worse than his bare hands we wanted no part of it. And we all hoped this was the night Lester Blackmon did something to provoke Rhodesia into using whatever it was.

Malcolm was at my elbow. “Get your mind off that woman, pretty as she may be,” he said. “You got more important things to occupy you.”

I forced myself to look away from her and at Malcolm. “Oh yeah?” I said. “Like what?”

“Like this kid Jimmy Newsome. He’s fixin to start.”

I looked toward the stage. No one was there. Then I saw him -he was walking out of the shadows where the men’s room was. He stalked toward the stage like a hunter. Bennie Lee had already plugged in the boy’s electric guitar, one of those new Stratocasters -an outer-space looking thing with no hole in it.

I didn’t get a clear look at Newsome’s face, and he didn’t make it no easier for me to. He picked up that axe with his back to the audience. He never turned around, not even when he sat down on the stool that Bennie Lee pushed toward him. Newsome’s fingers peeled off an opening lick, and I started to wonder if he was planning to turn around and face us at all. His left hand slid up and down the neck of that guitar, making it moan with a voice truer than anything Del could ever muster up. He made it holler and whine. He hit a boogie lick on it that was as fast and hard as hail. All the while his right foot kept time, pounding the wooden stage loud as any drum.

Then he started to sing, in a deep resonant voice. It was an old Robert Johnson tune -The Me and the Devil Blues.

If I’d had any idea on that first night -any idea at all of what was going to happen, the blood that would flow and the misery that would come into my life because of that boy -I would have jumped up and killed his scrawny ass right then and there.

Instead, like everyone else, I listened to him play. And marveled.

Read the whole book- Get it here! Available in trade paperback, coming soon in ebook form

Larry D. Sweazy wins Indiana Book Award

2011-12-05T18:17:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased at the news that my pal Larry D. Sweazy's novel The Scorpion Trail has become the first Western ever to win the fiction prize in the Indiana Book Awards. If you haven't read his Josiah Wolfe stories, you're missing out on some good stuff. (Larry has a Spur Award hidden somewhere as well, no doubt quite inconspicuously.)

http://amzn.to/sjEXzk

Way to go, Larry! Congrats!

Christmas Campfire Companion

2011-11-25T09:46:00.000-08:00

Available now, from Port Yonder Press: Christmas Campfire Companion, a collection of 14 Western-themed Christmas short stories by some of today's top writers in the genre.

My contribution to this tome is called "Christmas Comes to Freedom Hill." It's about a group of "exodusters" -African-American settlers who moved West after the Civil War to start a new life. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Here is a list of the contributors:

Terry Burns

Tim Champlin

Douglas Hirt

Matthew Mayo

Rod Miller

Kerry Newcomb

Robert J. Randisi

James Reasoner

Dusty Richards

Frank Roderus

Troy D. Smith

Larry Sweazy

Robert Vaughan

L.J. Washburn

The book is available now, and will also be available in hardcover. If you have any questions you can contact the publisher at contact@PortYonderPress.com .

Here is the address for the paperback edition ($12.95) at amazon: http://amzn.to/ukGBqS

KMN Books: Author Day

2011-11-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

Nov. 21- Get an update on my recent releases in all the genres I write in, and post questions if you like, at Karen Michelle Nutt's Author Day: KMN BOOKS

Murder and Intrigue in 5th Century Ireland

2011-11-18T15:27:00.000-08:00

Available now in ebook form from Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery: The first of the Conor MacCormac Mysteries, The King's Avenger and The Infidels.

The hero, Conor MacCormac, is both a man of action and a man of thought. His exploits on the battlefield in defense of the kingdom of Connacht have brought him respect from friend and foe throughout Ireland. It is his keen eye for detail and contemplative nature, however, that are his sharpest weapons; death is not always what it seems in the changing political and religious world of the late Roman Empire, and Conor is often called upon to solve mysteries whose answers have broad-ranging repercussions.

This ongoing series of short stories is rich with historical detail, mystery, and old-fashioned suspense. Future installments will find Conor interacting with the fading glory that is Rome as well as the kingdoms of the Emerald Isle.

THE KING'S AVENGER

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106213

Conor MacCormac is not only the most honored warrior of Connacht, he is the king’s closest friend. When his leader is murdered at the High-King’s Fair, it is up to Conor to find the killer. The king had no shortage of enemies –but which one is guilty? And what price must Conor pay to find the answer?

THE INFIDELS

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106219
Conor MacCormac, the new King of Connacht, had not wanted a Christian church in his territory, but the High-King – a new convert – had insisted. Now the priests have been slaughtered by raiders from the northlands – or so it seems. Conor must unravel the mystery, and he fears the truth may rock the Emerald Isle…

Available for most digital platforms at smashwords.com, and coming soon at amazon.com

Writers of the West

2011-11-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

I was thrilled to be interviewed by the very talented Jean Henry Mead on her blogsite "Writers of the West". I feel like I've hit the bigtime... if you go over to take a look, stay and check out the many interviews she's conducted over the years with Western luminaries, including some of my all-time favorites: Will Henry, Jory Sherman, Elmer Kelton, Peggy Simpson Curry, Dorothy Parker (kinda), and many more.

http://writersofthewest.blogspot.com/

The Lonesome Brokeback Picture Show

2011-11-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

See if this story, written by Larry McMurtry, sounds familiar.

Setting: The American West. Two young men begin a lifelong friendship. One of them is passionate and sensitive, the other is both more practical, more physical (although both are very physically competent), and has difficulties expressing, and sometimes even admitting to himself, his inner feelings.

There are women in this story. They love these men, but sense that the men have a deeper bond which their female lovers can never be a part of; the women feel excluded, and resentful of their male rivals.

The passionate friend dies, decades into their friendship, and the more stoic friend is left to face life alone. This forces him to face his inner self, and find the humanity he has held in but which his friend was always in touch with.

What is the story?

If you said The Last Picture Show, written in 1966 and adapted as a film in 1971, you are correct. The lives of Sonny Crawford and Duane Jackson, and Duane’s life (and emotional odyssey) after Sonny’s death, are examined in five novels, which I like to call the Thalia Cycle:

The Last Picture Show 1966
Texasville 1987
Duane’s Depressed 1999
When the Light Goes 2007
Rhino Ranch 2009

AND… if you said the story in question is the Lonesome Dove cycle, begun with the Pulitzer-winning novel in 1985, you are also correct. The friendship between Augustus MacRae and Woodrow Call spans four novels, listed here in chronological order:

Dead Man’s Walk 1995
Comanche Moon 1997
Lonesome Dove 1985
Streets of Laredo 1993

AND if you said the Oscar-winning 2005 screenplay (with writing partner Diana Ossana) for Brokeback Mountain, based on a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, you are also correct.

The film version faithfully presented Proulx’s story about the relationship between Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar; McMurtry’s significant addition was the expansion of the women’s roles. The mens’ marriages had not been described in detail in the Proulx story.

Considering the parallels between Proulx’s story and the themes in the aforementioned McMurtry novels, it is not surprising that he wanted to tackle the screenplay. In fact, the three stories not only echo similar plots and characters, they have a certain progression to them. The Thalia books are about two friends who grow steadily apart; Sonny becomes a supporting character in the second novel, Texasville, and dies by the end of it. The Lonesome Dove cycle’s protagonists remain “together” until Gus dies in the third novel (Lonesome Dove, actually the first of the novels to be written and published.) Brokeback Mountain’s protagonists are “together” in a much more intimate way, and are in love.

I haven’t read any of McMurtry’s memoirs and don’t know a lot of details about his biography. I do know that the fictional city of Thalia (and the Dairy Queen that becomes a sort of town epicenter) are based on McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, and that The Last Picture Show is semi-autobiographic in the sense it is about coming of age in small-town Texas in the early 1950s. I’m not sure how specific the books’ themes are in relation to McMurtry’s actual lived experience, in other words, and it really doesn’t matter. What does matter, I think, is the depths to which he plumbs those themes throughout his work. There’s another theme that is missing from Brokeback Mountain (by necessity, both for loyalty to Proulx’s work and for the integrity of the plot): I speak, of course, of the part where “Passionate Friend” is seduced by an older woman. For Sonny Crawford it was Ruth Popper, the coach’s wife, and for Gus it was Inez Scull, the captain’s wife (I seem to remember something similar in 1995’s Pretty Boy Floyd, as well.)

This repetition of themes is not a bad thing, by any means. Nor is it unique; similar threads run through the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, and many others. I did think it was worth pointing out, though –I bet most of you have read all these books or seen their film versions and never picked up on the fact that they were basically iterations of the same story. Read/watch them again, and see if you find any other recurrent motifs.

SHAMELESS PLUG: I have motifs too! I explore many of the same racial themes in these two novels… and they share a character in common. They’ve also both garnered praise from writers I deeply respect. Check ‘em out!
http://www.amazon.com/Bound-Promise-Land-Troy-D-Smith/dp/1461042690

http://www.amazon.com/Cross-Road-Blues-Troy-Smith/dp/1935797093/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320431970&sr=8-1

Why We Never Watch THE MATRIX at My House

2011-10-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

One night in 1999 I got a phone call from my old friend and co-author David Allen.

“Hey,” he said. “Have you seen that new movie, The Matrix?”

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t seen it. Is it good?”

“Don’t see it,” David warned me. “It’s going to break your heart.”

I did see it.

It broke my heart.

It’s been twelve years since that night. My college-aged kid tells friends that The Matrix was forbidden in our home (It was.) Close friends can tell you horror stories of the occasions when, usually after having more than my share of drinks, I broke down and told them the Matrix story. They never want to hear it again, and when I reach for that third drink people scatter just in case.

If you’re a writer, maybe you have a similar tale.

In 1993, my friend David Allen and I collaborated on a science fiction novel. Well, it was 48,000 words, and to some people (in the 90s, anyhow) that was in the murky land between novel and novella.

Remember those days?

1993.

The voice of Tom Selleck (Magnum, PI himself) came through our television sets, telling us that one magical day we could watch the movie we want the minute we want; we would be able to borrow books from a thousand miles away, carry our medical history on a plastic card, and buy concert tickets from a cash machine—and AT&T was the company that would bring it to us.

Our new Vice-President Al Gore told us that there would soon be a worldwide information superhighway, in part because of legislation he proposed and helped pass as a Senator (or, from a different perspective, Al Gore invented the internet tubes.)

At the University of Illinois, researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications introduced MOSAIC—the first worldwide web browser (I could never have guessed at the time that fifteen years later I would be working part-time at NCSA doing something called “digital history.”)

And in 1993, my friend David Allen and I were inspired by all those things to write a book, which we finished in early 1994. We tried to imagine where a worldwide web and virtual reality might take us. We incorporated elements from many of our favorite authors, from the writers of Doctor Who and Chris Claremont’s run on the X-men comics, to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. There were definitely elements of William Gibson and cyberpunk. By far our biggest influence, and the one to whom our novel was an homage, was Phillip K. Dick. Dick’s stories often centered on an everyman protagonist who discovers that nothing is what it seemed; that reality is purely subjective (many of Dick’s works have been translated to the movie screen: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, Impostor… perhaps you detect a theme.)

Here’s a teaser for that book, All That We See or Seem:

Will Shaw wanted a better life. A parenting license, maybe a physical upgrade for his wife. But he has a nasty habit of asking too many questions, an infamous radical brother, and a directive from the Committee of Programmers to report to The Marches—where reality and sanity blur, and which few return from. Shaw discovers the government’s shocking secrets, but it is Robert Jenkins, the agent assigned to watch over him, who must face the consequences. Both men learn that nothing in their world is what they thought it was.

We never got anywhere with the book. We submitted it everywhere –really, everywhere, at least every place listed in Writer’s Digest’s Novel and Short Story Writer’s Guide. I have a stack of (mostly) polite rejections; the most common complaint, when one was specified, was length. We set the manuscript aside, planning to re-visit and expand it later. And of course, life got in the way. I sold a western short story, to Louis L’Amour Western Magazine, and got sort of wrapped up in westerns and historical fiction. I wrote a 140,000 word Civil War epic. I didn’t think much about that old manuscript, or the several other science fiction projects I had started (and sometimes finished.) Which is a shame, because when I finally did revisit it years later I found it had aged well.

And then came The Matrix. It was kind of a similar plot. Well, no, that’s not exactly true. It was an extremely similar plot, down to some fairly minute details (although radically different in many ways, as well.) Now, I’m not saying the Wachowsky Brothers ripped off our idea—heck, unless one of them was an assistant editor or slush-puppy at a publishing house or sci-fi magazine in ’94 and ’95, there’s no earthly way they could ever have seen it. And in reality (no pun intended), our work (like theirs) was not exactly the most original idea in the world; I think it is very likely they drew on the same antecedents, and the same 90s zeitgeist, that we did.

What it did mean was… any hope we had of getting a publisher to take on our long-languishing project died an agonizing death. Any casual reader picking it up would say “Huh. This is oh-so-familiar… what a cheap rip-off of The Matrix.”

In science fiction, the idea is the thing. To tell the truth, I stuck with westerns for a long time after that. It doesn’t matter how many other people have written about Custer or Wyatt Earp, you can still find new ways to approach the material. Dave stopped writing for awhile, and only picked it back up in recent years.

But you know what? I think our story was better; at the very least, it can stand on its own.

The publishing world has gone through some rapid, crazy changes in the last couple of years. I have been re-releasing all my old stuff as ebooks, or in paper through createspace. So have most of my writer friends –it is possible, not only to read new stuff, but to find books you haven’t seen since the 70s or 80s for today’s ereaders. So David and I have decided that the time has come to unleash our bastard child on the world. It’s available now on smashwords, where 40% of it is previewable, and amazon. Check it out here:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/97040

http://amzn.to/oWP5yC

Give it a try, if you like sci fi. Tell me what you think.

My Personal West

2011-10-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

My thanks to Richard Prosch, who gave me a forum to talk about my views of the Mythic West at his website. He has posted several other essays about "My Personal West" by Western authors, and they're all worth a read.

http://www.meridianbridge.com/?p=621

Clint Eastwood, Heroes, and Antiheroes

2011-10-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

I was recently reading up on the classic screenwriting (and general storytelling) template “The Hero’s Journey” and was reminded of something I noticed a long time ago about a couple of Clint Eastwood western classics. What struck me was the assertion that the hero’s journey and the anti-hero’s journey are identical –up to a point. The article I was reading implied that, whereas the classic hero is an archetype of self-sacrifice and self-control, or “goodness,” the antihero is linked more closely to his base, animalistic side. As a result, the hero’s journey will, at the turning point, see the hero resist temptation and be redeemed, ascending to a moral summit, whereas an antihero will at the same point succumb to temptation and descend into damnation. (Think Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader.)

I’m not so sure this is always the case, but I can’t deny that it often is. And thinking about that made me remember a thought I’ve had for years: that The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven are the same story, told in reverse and with opposite endings.

Let’s take a brief look at the plots of those two films.

The Outlaw Josey Wales:

Josey Wales starts out as a good, honest, family man (in Missouri, on the eve of the Civil War.) His family is murdered by Union guerrillas, and in response he joins a band of Confederate guerrillas. At the end of this very nasty war, he refuses to surrender- and becomes an outlaw, hunted by the federal army.

Wales is clearly a loner –but is not allowed to remain so for long. In his travels he manages to pick up several hangers-on, all of whom are dependent on him in one way or another. There is the old Confederate Cherokee, a young Navajo woman, and a group of settlers that includes a Yankee woman and her granddaughter. By the end of the movie, Wales has brokered peace between the settlers and the Comanches, and his primary nemesis has strongly hinted that he has no intention of “finding” him. Wales has become the nucleus of a community, and an agent of peace rather than chaos. No longer a loner bent on revenge, he has been redeemed and returned in many ways to the condition he had lived in before his family’s murder.

Unforgiven:

William Munny also starts out as a farmer and a family man, albeit a widower, raising his children on a pig farm. But this was not how his life had always been. Munny was a reformed gunman; in his youth he had been a cold, vicious killer. He had changed because of his beloved wife. An opportunity is presented to him, however, to improve his family’s lot by hunting down some cowboys for a bounty (one of them had cut up a young prostitute, whose friends advertised a reward in order to get justice.)

Subsequent events –including the death of his partner –force Munny to confront the ghosts of his past, ghosts he had been trying to avoid for years. In a tearful drinking binge, he relives the horrific acts of his youth. When he finally arrives to take revenge for his friend’s murder, he has reverted to the cold killer he had been before. He has not been forgiven –not by the ghosts of his victims, and ultimately not by himself.

Josey Wales’ story is one of a hero’s redemption. He goes from being a loner to being the foundation of a community –he is loved, and forgiven. He pulls away from the precipice of damnation that the war has drawn him to.

Will Munny’s attempts to be a simple man and a good citizen are doomed. He is pulled back to that precipice, which he had managed to withdraw from once before, and this time he tumbles into it. He descends into the darkness, and clearly feels much more natural and at home there than he ever did while trying to deny that side of himself. Note how confident and controlled he is at the end of the film, once he has finally given his demons free rein.

Eastwood’s famous Man With No Name from the Leone trilogy is an antihero in the sense that he seems amoral at times, and does not display the classic, noble attributes of the western hero. Will Munny is an antihero in a more literary sense. Even though he survives, the audience knows that he has lost the really important battle, the battle with his own dark side. Josey Wales has won that battle, and found contentment.
The two films are like bookends. I recommend you watch them again from this perspective, and that fact will become even clearer.

I also realized that I have done something similar in two Civil War –era novels I have written. The first, Bound for the Promise-Land, is about an ex-slave turned Union soldier and his quest for the meaning of freedom. Filled with self-doubt, he eventually discovers the truth within himself and finds peace and redemption. The second, Good Rebel Soil, is about the infamous Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson –who, along with Bloody Bill Anderson, served as a template for Asa Carter’s fictional Josey Wales. Ferguson is pulled, by his uncontrolled passions, into a self-destructive path that he knows will end in Hell. The first novel has been re-released, and the other will be soon; I think they are two of my best, and taken together give an overview of the Civil War from both sides, as well as food for thought regarding what makes a hero (or an anti-hero.)

CHAMP FERGUSON

http://amzn.to/p0hUS5

http://amzn.to/rk2HXU

New Thriller ebook short

2011-09-21T10:49:00.000-07:00

My new crime story "All Great Neptune's Ocean," an ebook short, is now available- you can read a sample at smashwords.com.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/90071

An investigative reporter gets on the wrong side of a mobster and pays the ultimate price. Believed dead, he seeks revenge in the only way left to him... by going after the one person his enemy loves. Will revenge restore his lost peace -or destroy him forever?

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.” -MacBeth, Act Two Scene Two

New Interview at Western Fictioneers

2011-09-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to the hardworking LJ Washburn for posting this interview at the Western Fictioneers blogsite. The photo, btw, is me in Old West gambler-garb at the White County Fair in my hometown of Sparta, TN, a few years back.

http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2011/09/western-writer-troy-d-smith.html

Great new book from pulp reprint masters Black Dog Books

2011-08-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

Tom Roberts' great imprint Black Dog Books has released an excellent new collection, Dead Man's Brand. It contains the western short stories of pulp master Norbert Davis (1909-1949), who is usually known for his detective stories. I was proud to add a blurb to this book -Davis was a heck of a writer. You should check it out. In fact, if you love Depression-era pulp fiction like I do, you'll find this publisher to be a treasure trove. I'm currently in the middle of Unmasked, which contains the earliest adventures of the Lone Ranger, Zorro, the Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy. Great stuff.

http://www.blackdogbooks.net/index.php?Itemid=13&option=com_zoo&view=item&category_id=7&item_id=93

New interview is up

2011-08-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

I have an interview up, mostly about my crime fiction, on the website of author Nigel Bird: http://bit.ly/q9fjcn

Bird's site, Sea Minor, includes a series called "Dancing with Myself" in which invited authors interview themselves -Lawrence Block, among others, has participated. I was delighted to get this fresh exposure from a writer who is fast making a name for himself.

The Traditional West

2011-07-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

In the early spring of 2010 several western writers came up with the idea of establishing a new writers' organization devoted exclusively to western fiction. I seem to remember the name, Western Fictioneers, being Jory Sherman's idea -someone correct me if I'm wrong. We had our first official meeting in Knoxville that June (during a lunch break from the Western Writers of America conference we were attending.) We decided to also establish an annual award for best novel and best short story, called The Peacemaker. The first winners were announced a few weeks ago.

And now we have published our first anthology... 24 stories by some of the best writers working in the genre today. It's available now on the kindle, and should be available in paperback by mid-July at the latest. I'm about halfway through the book, and it is great reading. One of my stories is in there, "The Sin of Eli." If you like western tales this book is or you -and it just might be the book that introduces you to your new favorite writers (anthologies such as this were how I discovered several writers whose work I wound up following for decades.)

So check it out.

(And if you decided to check out one of my books at the same time it wouldn't hurt my feelings!) :-)

Here's the link: http://amzn.to/rnszpB

When Men Ride Together: Two Very Different Views of The Wild Bunch

2011-07-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

1969: It was the year mankind took a giant step forward with the lunar landing, and it marked the inauguration of Nixon (which, some may argue, constituted a giant step backwards.) It was the last year in a decade of significant change.
1969 was also a significant year in the history of the Western film genre. Two movies were released that year which stretched the boundaries of the Western as they had rarely been stretched before—and in two completely different directions.
The films in question are The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They were ranked #6 and #7, respectively, in the American Film Institute’s top-ten list of the greatest Western movies ever made. On the surface, they hardly seem to go together; one is a grim bloodbath, after all, while the other is a light-hearted buddy movie. Both, however, set the genre’s conventions on their collective ear.

In fact, the two films are more similar than you might think. The plots are basically the same. A group of turn-of-the-century bank and train robbers are pursued by a determined posse; they go south of the border, where they end up in a Latin American village and a showdown with a small army. In real life Butch’s Hole-in-the-Wall gang was also called the Wild Bunch (a sobriquet used earlier by Oklahoma’s Doolin-Dalton Gang.)

The protagonists of both movies are robbers—and, unlike the outlaw-heroes of previous Westerns, were not the least bit apologetic about it. At the same time, they were not amoral “anti-heroes” like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. These gangs had their own set of morals, which they adhered to faithfully. Both sets of characters had depth—especially those in The Wild Bunch—without being complicated. They had simple moral dilemmas. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” “Stick with your partners no matter what.” They also had the same theme: something special is passing away forever. The outlaws are trapped in their profession, and in their time, and are destined to disappear with it.

While plot and theme may have been similar, the film’s executions were as different as night and day. In The Wild Bunch we watch the unique era of the outlaw pass away with stark realism and a sense of impending, pre-ordained doom. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid we sit back and enjoy it while it lasts. The former is dark and violent, whereas the latter is playful, charming and funny. In one scene, Butch tricks payroll guard by imitating an old lady’s voice; in another the gang uses too much dynamite and blows up the money. The Wild Bunch gang is fatalistic but meets a noble end—Butch and the Kid are noble throughout, and meet a grim end. That statement may seem incongruous; both gangs get shot to pieces by a small army, which should meet anyone’s definition of “grim.” The difference lies in how each group got there. Both gangs rob a government supply train (in the case of Butch and Sundance, a mule train.) The Wild Bunch is hired by a Mexican general to steal U.S. arms with which he plans to resupply his army. The gang is drawn into their fatal conflict because one of their members supplied some of the arms to a group of idealistic rebels who oppose the brutal general. Butch and Sundance, on the other hand, are identified as the robbers who stole a Bolivian payroll—there was no altruism involved. It is interesting to note that, while The Wild Bunch’s demise is graphically portrayed, the deaths of Butch and Sundance are not shown—the camera freezes as they rush out of their concealment with guns blazing, leaving the two rogues suspended forever in that instant of time.

A woman plays an important part in the story of Butch and Sundance—the Kid’s lover, Etta Place, portrayed by Katherine Ross (in 1984 Ross would marry Sam Elliott, who had appeared in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as “Card Player #2.) Etta is the outlaw pair’s sentimental focus, the world of warmth and security they would like to enjoy but cannot go straight for.

The Wild Bunch, on the other hand, is a man’s world. The only significant female role in the film is the young outlaw Angel’s two-timing girlfriend, who helps set the bloody events in motion. There is no sentimental focus here. Angel murders the girl, and his partners (played by William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates) are obliged to rescue him from the vengeful general that the girl had taken up with.

The common people love Butch and Sundance, sometimes hiding them from the law. Common people distrust and even hate the Wild Bunch, with good reason.
Both gangs are pursued by posses, but the posses are very different. The one pursuing Butch and Sundance is nameless, faceless, implacable, and apparently unstoppable. Butch and Sundance are forced to flee, on the edge of panic—“Who are these guys?” they keep asking. The Wild Bunch’s posse is led by an ex-member of the gang (played by Robert Ryan), who had been released from Yuma prison and promised a pardon for his cooperation. He does so against his better judgment, and is disgusted by the immoral, incompetent scum he must work with. Keeping in mind the films’ 1969 release, one can speculate that the posses represent different aspects of “the establishment.” Butch and Sundance mock and defy their faceless, unyielding establishment figures, while the Wild Bunch simply ignores theirs (who are ineffective, and far more immoral than the outlaws.)

Butch and Sundance are a little disdainful of their own gang, although they are loyal to one another, whereas Pike (Holden) is loyal to all in his band. Both groups have trouble with insubordination. Pike glares at his men and holds them together with the sheer force of his will. Butch sucker-punches the ringleader of his mutineers, and then charms the rest.
The Wild Bunch—a movie about violent, cruel men—actually has a solid moral, as articulated by Pike: “When you ride with a man, you stay with him. Otherwise you’re an animal.” Butch and Sundance make no attempt to moralize, unless you count Butch singing—while bicycling to the musical accompaniment of B. J. Thomas—“Never hit your mother in the face with a shovel, for you’ll leave a dull impression on her mind.”

Both these films took an approach that few, if any, Westerns had taken before, and spawned many imitators. They gave the audience new glimpses of the outlaw—one of them more realistic than any of its predecessors, and the other more idealized than most which came previously. They made it impossible to look at the Western in the same way we had before.

**

http://amzn.to/o0ImX2
www.troyduanesmith.com

Blackwell's Run

2011-06-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

The latest installment in my series of Blackwell Western short stories from Western Trail Blazer is available now.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/65789

http://www.amazon.com/Blackwells-Run-ebook/dp/B0055DZIYU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307760835&sr=8-1

Karen Michelle Nutt designed a great cover for us, don't you think?

"Max Blackwell is a sergeant in the US Calvary. Then Company C is assigned a new lieutenant - one interested only in glory and following his personal vision. After watching many of his men die due to the commanding officer's disregard of rules and common sense, will Blackwell agree to a mutiny? And if so, what will the consequences be?"

get more info on the Blackwell series here: http://www.troyduanesmith.com/Blackwell.html

New review of CROSS ROAD BLUES

2011-06-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

Writer and blues enthusiast Ricky Bush has a nice review of my crime novel Cross Road Blues up at his blogsite: http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com/

Western Fictioneers' First Annual (2010) Peacemaker Awards -winners and finalists

2011-06-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

This press release was sent out today by Larry Sweazy, awards chair. I had the privilege of being one of the judges in this inaugural contest, and of being one of the founding members of this organization, an honor I am quite proud of.

More details can be found here: http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2011/06/2010-peacemaker-awards-announcement.html

Western Fictioneers (WF) is pleased to announce the WINNERs for the first annual (2010) Peacemaker Awards.

BEST SHORT STORY

WINNER:

Wayne Dundee, “This Old Star” from the anthology Bad Cop…No Donut (Padwolf Publishing)

FINALISTS:

Carol Crigger, “Left Behind” from the anthology Roundup! Great Stories of the West (La Frontera Publishing

C. Courtney Joyner , “Two-Bit Kill” from the anthology Law of the Gun (Kensington)

Matthew P. Mayo, “Scourge of Spoils” from the anthology Steampunk’d (DAW Books, Inc.)

Pete Peterson, “Catch a Killer by the Toe” published by Untreed Reads

BEST NOVEL:

WINNER:

Lyle Brandt (winner), Manhunt (Berkley)

FINALISTS:

Lyle Brandt, Avenging Angels (Berkley)

D.H. Eraldi, Settler’s Chase (Berkley)

Dusty Richards, Wulf’s Tracks (Berkley)

Kit Prate, Long Ride to Limbo -- Western Trail Blazer

(an imprint of Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery)

S. Craig Zahler, Congregation of Jackals (Dorchester Publishing)

Western Fictioneers (WF) was formed in 2010 by Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional Western writers, to preserve, honor, and promote traditional Western writing in the 21^st century. Entries were accepted in both print and electronic forms. The Peacemaker Awards will be given out annually. Submissions for the 2011 awards will be open in July, 2011. Submission guidelines will be posted on the WF web site. For more information about Western Fictioneers (WF) please visit:

http://www.westernfictioneers.com/ or http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/

Sci Fi Short Story: That Distant Eden

2011-05-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

The passengers and crew of the generational ship Thoreau are finally nearing the end of their centuries-long journey to colonize the uninhabited Gordon's Planet. It will be a new beginning, an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of their ancestors who ravaged Earth.

There's only one problem. Gordon's Planet isn't uninhabited after all. And its indigenous people do not wish to be colonized...

Available now as an ebook... only 99 cents.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/61912

http://www.amazon.com/That-Distant-Eden-ebook/dp/B00528ILAQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1306202706&sr=8-1

Champ Ferguson, Confederate Guerrilla

2011-05-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to an article I wrote a few years ago, in Civil War Times Illustrated, about the famous (and infamous) guerrilla who operated out of my hometown of Sparta, Tennessee. Note that there is a typo in the very first sentence (that has always driven me crazy): it should say 40-year-old, not 20-year-old. I later wrote a novel about Ferguson, Good Rebel Soil, which is due to be re-released soon by Western Trailblazer.

http://www.historynet.com/champ-ferguson-an-american-civil-war-rebel-guerrilla.htm

Idylls in Darkness: Selected Poems by Troy D. Smith

2011-05-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00522IVI4

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/62144

Available now at Smashwords.com and for the Kindle at amazon.com

A selection of poems by the award-winning novelist Troy D. Smith. Although primarily known for his historical fiction and mysteries, Smith has been publishing poetry since 1986. The words which acclaimed author Frank Roderus used to describe Smith's fiction apply equally to his verse:

"Troy Smith has a rare and wonderful gift. His words do more than take you to another time, more than allow you to live another person's life... they also open that person's heart and allow you to feel its beat."

History, Memory, and the American Civil War

2011-05-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

The sesquicentennial of the American Civil War is upon us. No doubt you have seen news reports of commemorations and/or celebrations; if so you are probably aware that there is some controversy attached to such events, and to the war itself, even after a century-and-a-half. The Civil War means different things to different people, and those differing meanings are very fluid; the public perception of “what the war was really about” changes not only from region to region, but from generation to generation, and often has as much or more to do with contemporary politics as with the events of the past.

For example, growing up in Tennessee in the 1970s affixed a very specific image of the Civil War in my mind. My home town movie theater had annual showings of Gone with the Wind every spring until Ted Turner bought the rights to it. One of my earliest memories is of wearing a little gray Confederate kepi. I heard stories about the heroism of Champ Ferguson, my hometown’s famous (and infamous) Confederate guerrilla, and the town was overshadowed by the huge memorial stone on the hillside grave of local brigadier general (and later politician) George Dibrell. Male relatives sat and discussed the War of Northern Aggression, and the words damnyankee and carpetbagger were bandied about frequently.

If I had been born a decade earlier, and spent my formative years during the height of the Civil War centennial, no doubt it would have made an even stronger impact on me. If I had been born black, or born white in Illinois instead of Tennessee, I would also have absorbed a very different perspective. That all makes sense—and at the same time, it seems to make no sense at all. We are talking about the same events, after all. What happened, happened. History is, well, history, right? How can people still be arguing about it 150 years later?

That brings me to the crux of what I wanted to discuss in this space: the difference between history and memory, and how it impacts the U.S. Civil War. That means I am going to spend some time defining terms, and explaining just what “history” and “memory” really are. You may be tempted to skip over this section and go straight to the fun Civil War part, but I urge you to bear with me. History and memory are words we all know, you see, but which few of us ever really understand as well as we think we do.

What is history? Easy enough, you say. History means stuff that happened in the past. But if that were the case, there would be no such thing as “prehistory,” would there? Lots of stuff happened in prehistoric times—but we know relatively little about it. There were events, but there was no history—because history is not “the past”, it is a written record of the past. Someone asked me once why, if I wanted to study the history of a certain indigenous tribe, did I not live among them and extensively study their material culture and oral tradition? Because that would make me an anthropologist. Historians look at documents and archives. Like the winter records painted in pictographs on a tribe’s tipis, for example. (Actually, an ethnohistorian takes an approach that blends history and anthropology in many ways, and that is the method I personally think works best in such circumstances—but for the sake of our discussion I wanted to demonstrate clearly the difference between history and anthropology.)

When Mesopotamians and Egyptians starting scratching images into clay—initially as a way for merchants to keep records—and Chinese inscribed divination records on bones and shells, that was the beginning of those cultures’ history. Historians look at those things, and at court records, diaries, news accounts, receipts, ships’ logs, and anything else that is written down to inform them about the era in question. And, of course, they look at narrative histories that were written after the fact—whether that be the records of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, or of Plutarch and Flavius Josephus, Edward Gibbon, or the Shiji of Sima Qian. No matter the source, historians are trained to weigh the context of the times when examining it, and to look at circumstantial written evidence (court records, receipts, etc.) as well.

It is said that history is written by the victors, and that is certainly true. Having the ability to write the “official” history of anything is a form of power, and those after-the-fact histories (as stated in my opening) reflect political realities beyond the event described. For example: generally speaking, whenever a new dynasty took power in China they re-wrote the history of their predecessors to make it seem that the former dynasty’s final years were marked by moral decline and heaven decreed that a change was needed. If you happened to be an average Chinese person of the time, and one of these new histories were released, you might well remember that things were not quite that way during the previous administration (although you might not want to vocalize that opinion too loudly.) Your children and grandchildren, however, would have no such memories and as far as they knew the official line was true—and over time, reality as you lived it would be forgotten. Unless, of course, you made a point of telling your children “Listen, we know the official story, but here is how things really were.” In that case, it is possible that a picture of your time might live on as part of an oral tradition, unanchored to any documentary evidence. A century after your death, the “reality” of your time would either be forgotten completely or endure as a dim legend whose origins have been forgotten (I often wonder whether the tales of Greek demigods or biblical stories of the demonic, giant Nephilim might be cultural memories of prehistoric conflicts between humans and Neanderthals.)

This is not something confined to ancient China. I can think of a very good example in U.S. history—the conflict known for almost a century as the Philippine Insurrection (it is now sometimes called the Philippine-American War, which I think is more accurate.) How familiar are you with this conflict? Odds are, if you are American, not very. I am a lifelong history lover, and I had never even heard of it until college. It was never mentioned in my public school history books. If you aren’t familiar with it, find out some details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_insurrection

This was a pretty significant series of events. U.S. citizens were well aware of what was going on: Mark Twain led protests against the action, and congressional hearings were held. However- it was not in the “history books,” at least not the ones you read in school, until the 1990s. And unless you are what they call a “history buff,” and a pretty serious one, you may not even have known that this very controversial, and once widely-known, thing happened. For several generations –for all intents and purposes –it never did. It disappeared from American cultural memory. (This particular case’s disappearance had a lot to do with the Cold War –the U.S. was competing with the Soviet Union for the “hearts and minds” of other countries, and it was very convenient for such embarrassing truths as the Philippine episode to disappear. I think it is no accident that it was covered in high school history books again –although never in much detail –after the fall of the Soviet Union.)

Another example: before the 1989 movie Glory, how many of us knew that there was a huge number of black Union troops in the Civil War? My school history books mentioned it barely if at all. In fact, there were over 200,000 such troops, and they may have helped turn the tide of the war. Everyone knows that now. Did everyone know that in 1975?

While some things disappear, others are significantly altered- retconned, as comics fans put it. Retroactive continuity: when something new is inserted into a character’s “past” and everyone agrees to pretend it had always been there- and new readers usually never know it hadn’t. In that example, the only way new readers would know about the original continuity would be if they went back and read those earlier issues from years before –becoming, in essence, historians combing an archive.

This works with memory on an individual level as well. For example: do you think you would get the same stories if you read a newspaper interview with a particular sailor that was conducted late in the afternoon of the Pearl Harbor attack as you would get from interviewing that same sailor yourself 70 years later? Possibly, but probably not. The intervening years would have a bearing on the sailor’s recall. In fact, interviewers often find that their subjects will interject information into their own memories which they learned later but could not possibly have known at the time. Memories are not stored whole in your mind; every time you access the memory of an event, different parts of your brain chime in with aspects of that memory that are stored in them. Images, sounds, smells –all these must be instantly recalled and woven together in order to reconstruct a complete memory. I picture this process in my own mind by thinking about Francis Ford Coppola’s approach to editing Apocalypse Now: Redux. The first version of the classic war film, presented at Cannes, ran much longer than the version later released in theaters. The “Redux” version replaces many deleted scenes, which greatly affect the overall narrative. However, Coppola didn’t just add the deleted scenes in, nor use the original Cannes version- he re-edited the whole movie, scene by scene, so that the final version was not exactly the same as any of the previous ones. In a way, that is what happens when we access a memory; it is reconstructed from scratch each time, and therefore often changes from one recall to the next. Cultural memory can be even trickier, because the changes which are inserted frequently are done so intentionally by agents who wish to control the general public’s memory of a certain event.

What does this have to do with the Civil War, you ask? A lot, I answer. The next section will go into great detail about how the tensions between history and memory affect the present-day public perception of that war and its meanings.
The Civil War and the Lost Cause
A recent poll indicates that more than half of Americans, and more than two-thirds in the eleven former Confederate States, responded to the question “What was the Civil War about?” with the answer “states’ rights.” As several commemorations of the war take place around the South, groups (including the NAACP) lodge protests over the fact that many of those events make no mention whatsoever of slavery, which they say was the primary cause of the war. Other groups, like Sons of Confederate Veterans, say that the war was about Southern independence, or high tariffs, or states’ rights, and that slavery—while a factor—was not the main factor. Who is right? And why do we still not agree on it?

Let me start by saying that the vast majority of professional historians—virtually all of them, in fact—say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. I am a professional historian, in addition to being a novelist. I used to believe in the “Lost Cause” ideology of the war, until several years ago, and in fact there are echoes of that belief in some of my earliest fiction—but now I will tell you, with no trace of doubt, that slavery was the prime reason for the Civil War. I will explain why I say that, and how I came to change my mind. Many of you reading this will have already decided that you do not agree with me—but read on. First, because historians like to quote each other, let me give you a few examples of historians’ conclusions before I explain my own.

James McPherson of Princeton, Pulitzer winning author of the classic Battle Cry of Freedom: “Everything stems from the slavery issue.”

David Blight of Yale, author of Race and Reunion: “No matter what we do or the overwhelming consensus among historians, out in the public mind, there is still this need to deny that slavery was the cause of the war.”

Vernon Burton of Clemson, author of The Age of Lincoln: “Everyone knew at the time that the war was ultimately about slavery. After the war, some began saying that it was really about states’ rights, or a clash of two different cultures, or about the tariff, or about the industrializing North versus the agrarian South. All these interpretations came together to portray the Civil War as a collision of two noble civilizations from which black slaves had been airbrushed out.”

Bruce Levine of the University of Illinois, author of Confederate Emancipation: “Because they were fighting to preserve African American slavery and the racial creed that justified it.”

Sociologist James Loewen of The Catholic University of America, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The Great Truth About the Lost Cause: “Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery… Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.”

I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

The fact is, there was a lot of dissent within the Confederate States of America. Of the eleven states which comprised the Confederacy, all except South Carolina produced volunteer military units for the Union, some of them contributing a large number of troops to the North. (There was some pro-Confederacy feeling in various Northern states, but there were no all-Northern Confederate regiments.) The areas of the South which were the most pro-Union are very telling: East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, West Virginia, and Northern Georgia. Look at those regions on the map below—what do you notice about them? They comprise the Southern Appalachian mountains. You see, the Southern region which had the fewest slaves, because its rocky soil would not support plantations, was also the one region that overwhelmingly opposed the Confederacy. West Virginia seceded from the Confederacy and became a separate state in the Union; East Tennessee came very close to doing the same thing. Yet when you drive through East Tennessee today—including the Knoxville-area town named for its most famous citizen, Union Admiral David Farragut—you will notice a sea of Rebel flags. Memory is stronger than history in the Southern mind, it would seem.

I would argue that this lack of cohesion in the South (which manifested itself in other ways as well) was a large factor in the Confederacy’s defeat. I would also argue that there was a lot more Confederate nationalism after there was no longer a Confederate nation, as evidenced by the aforementioned Rebel sentiment in places that were actually pro-Union. After the war, the “Lost Cause ideology” took hold in the South (and the rest of the country.) In this worldview, the antebellum South was a romanticized place which its people fought nobly to defend, but which was doomed solely because of the North’s overwhelming military superiority (let me point out that in the American Revolution, the Texas War of Independence, and the Vietnam conflict, the losing side had overwhelming military superiority, yet this fact alone did not determine the outcomes of those conflicts.) Sure, there was such a thing as slavery, but it was not a major consideration. In some ways this worldview made the healing easier for the losers. We lost, but we lost nobly; and our cause was just, after all. It’s kind of embarrassing to say one’s great-great-grandfather died in a conflict that was mostly about keeping an oppressed people in chains.

This view has actually gained a lot more ground in the last decade or so. It is amazing that it took so long for anyone to catch the errors in that Virginia public school textbook a few months ago, the one which claimed that upwards of 100,000 blacks fought in the Confederate Army (half as many as in the Union!) That’s not true, of course. If there were any African Americans at all taking arms on behalf of the Confederacy they were a rare anomaly (See the various links at the end of this essay.) It turns out that the textbook author, a freelance writer rather than a trained historian, had gotten her information off the internet (specifically, from the Sons of Confederate Veterans website.) As I said earlier, when I was younger I held the same beliefs—growing up in the South, one sort of absorbs them by osmosis. In college I learned that historians almost all present an opposite view, but that was not completely enough to make me re-examine what I thought I knew. It was actually when I reached graduate school that the last traces of Lost-Cause-Disorder were cleansed from my mind, and it was not due to historians or textbooks; it was due to my own research, and what I found in the archives. Embarrassed descendants of the original Confederates may say the Civil War was not about slavery—and Confederate veterans, after the fact, might have said the same thing—but when the war was starting, Confederates and Federals alike knew what was causing it. Examples:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.” - Mississippi secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861.

"One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute." –Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address.

And then there is this, from Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in a speech delivered in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861:

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

"In the conflict thus far, success has been on our side, complete throughout the length and breadth of the Confederate States. It is upon this, as I have stated, our social fabric is firmly planted; and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.

"As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become the chief of the corner" the real "corner-stone" in our new edifice. I have been asked, what of the future? It has been apprehended by some that we would have arrayed against us the civilized world. I care not who or how many they may be against us, when we stand upon the eternal principles of truth, if we are true to ourselves and the principles for which we contend, we are obliged to, and must triumph.”

It is difficult to read that speech and still argue that the Civil War was not about slavery. What really got to me, personally, though, was reading contemporary newspaper accounts from my own home region and discovering prominent citizens (like Judge Sam Gardenhire, one of the biggest slaveholders in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee) making the very same arguments as Stephens. The Confederate VP was not some firebrand saying things that no one in his audience agreed with—quite the opposite.

The documents verify what professional historians will tell you. Slavery caused the Civil War.

But what does it really matter, you might ask. If more and more people become convinced that the Civil War was not about slavery, the public perception will eventually be that slavery was really not so bad. The principles which propelled the abolition of slavery, and the lived experience of all those who suffered it, will be disregarded. What is to stop people from then saying that the folks who opposed Desegregation were not really racists, they were just trying to protect states’ rights? What is to prevent some from saying, and convincing the public, that most African Americans were really on the side of the segregationists, and many of them fought alongside the local Jim Crow authorities against all those Northern interlopers and communists who were saying “Freedom Now”? It’s the same thing—and it would imply that segregation was not that bad, and that the social changes which were made in the Civil Rights Era were not really necessary or important. Why, it was all about the federal government trying to enforce its agenda on state governments and local businesses (thanks to Rand Paul, this example is not completely hypothetical.)

This is serious business. It really matters. So think about this: if it really bothers you that someone says a war fought 150 years ago was about slavery—why? What is your investment? Because if you are a historian, your investment is in the truth.

READ MORE:

“150 Years after Fort Sumter: Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War” by David Von Drehle
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2063679,00.html#ixzz1MY3fdLeR

“Fort Sumter: The Civil War Begins” by Fergus M. Bordewich
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Fort-Sumter-The-Civil-War-Begins.html

“The Myth of the Black Confederate” by Bruce Levine
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-opinions/2010/10/the_myth_of_the_black_confeder.html

“A Union Divided: South Split on U.S. Civil War Legacy” by Claire Suddath
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2055981,00.html

“Five Myths About Why the South Seceded” by James Loewen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths-about-why-the-south-seceded/2011/01/03/ABHr6jD_story.html

Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone” speech, in full:
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76

Having a Smoke with Julian Bond

2011-05-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

The recent classroom lectures I gave about the Civil Rights era reminded me of one of my favorite moments since I started grad school: the day in 2006 when I met Julian Bond -Civil Rights leader, co-founder of both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and long-time chairman of the NAACP. He was at the University of Illinois to get an honorary doctorate (not that he needed one, he is a professor in the history department of the University of Virginia.) I accompanied my professor Vernon Burton in driving Bond to the airport (after a large get-together at the Custard Cup)... and had a cigarette break with him outside the airport before his flight left. That's when this picture was taken- a very cool moment for yours truly.

And here is a 1960s photo of Bond:

WARLOCK: A Neglected Western Classic

2011-04-28T23:24:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been posting several articles I wrote in the late 1990s. This week I am sharing a piece about the 1959 Edward Dmytryk Western Warlock. If you haven’t seen the movie, be warned: I include many plot details.

WARLOCK: A Neglected Western Classic
Imagine a movie with an intricate plot, driven not so much by events as by the tangled relationships between several well-drawn characters. It is a movie with obvious homoerotic undertones and some surprisingly intense violence. To further stretch your imagination, envision it as a film made in 1959 –and a Western, at that.

The film in question is Warlock. Based on a novel by Oakley Hall, it is one of the best examples of that post-war golden time –between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s –when Westerns became an arena of serious adult story-telling. The gunfights and brawls were still there, but a new element was added –the characters were real people, with weaknesses and emotions. The seeds planted by John Ford in Stagecoach grew and flourished.

The rough-and-ready cowboys of the San Pablo spread are terrorizing the frontier town of Warlock, Utah –chasing out the amateurish lawmen, boozing it up in the streets, even shooting a barber for having an unsteady hand. Only a few of the cowboys seem to have any redeeming qualities: the shy Johnny Bannon (Richard Widmark); his younger brother Billy, who idolizes the group’s vicious leader Abe McQuown (Tom Drake); and Curly –portrayed by scene-stealer DeForest Kelly (better known as Star Trek’s “Bones McCoy”) as a good-natured clown.

The city fathers decide they have had enough. Unwilling to face down the rowdies themselves, they decide to hire a famous gunman to serve as town marshal. Warlock’s moralizing, unofficial judge objects but is overruled (one is reminded of Judge Roy Bean’s words in Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo: “Out here, if you want to be a judge bad enough you are one.)

Enter Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda.) The character is a blend of historical lawmen Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickock –a former Union officer who tames one town after another, setting up gambling establishments on the side. His partner is Tom Morgan (Anthony Quinn), a gambler and gunfighter in his own right (read: Doc Holliday.) Instead of tuberculosis, Morgan has a crippled leg.

Blaisedell warns the council what to expect from him. Once he has cleaned out the threat the townspeople will begin to resent his authority and even to fear him –at which time he will move on, both parties having been satisfied. At this point we are introduced to the obligatory “good woman,” Miss Jessie (Dolores Michaels), who disapproves of the big, bad gunfighter yet is obviously destined to tumble for him. While her character is probably the weakest part of the movie, her presence is necessary to define Blaisedell, especially near the end.

The bond between old friends Blaisedell and Morgan is the central relationship of Warlock. Morgan, the crippled gambler, lives his life vicariously through Blaisedell, pushing him toward ever greater glory –like a dapper male version of Lady MacBeth. Indeed, the two act like an old married couple. Morgan decorates their new quarters with drapes from San Francisco, and desperately looks for a word of approval from his partner. He ignores the advances of his own saloon-girls –his only interest is protecting Blaisedell, guarding the marshal’s back at all times.

Blaisedell runs the cowboys out of Warlock, warning them that if they cross him once more they will be banned from the town permanently. Bannon leaves the gang –he had kept one hothead from back-shooting the marshal –and remains in Warlock.

Morgan later receives word that “she” is coming into town on the next stage. “She” turns out to be Lilly (Dorothy Malone), Morgan’s old flame. Lilly is traveling with her late fiancé’s brother; Blaisedell had killed the fiancé in self-defense, never guessing that Morgan had secretly arranged the fight with such an outcome in mind. The man’s brother was now seeking revenge against Blaisedell, which would also bring Lilly her vengeance –she wants to hurt Morgan by destroying the one person he loves.

Morgan hides on a ridge to meet the stage, only to find that it is being robbed by two of the San Pablo boys. Young Billy is one of them. Morgan kills Lilly’s companion, shooting from the ridge, letting the cowboys get the blame.

The cowboys are arrested and sent to the county seat for trial –Blaisedell saves them from a lynch mob –and are acquitted due to lack of evidence. Blaisedell still “posts” them from the town of Warlock, on pain of death. Bannon has meanwhile accepted the job of deputy county sheriff. This thrills the old judge, who wants only “official” law.

The three posted outlaws return to town to protest the unfairness of their banishment –and to have it out with Blaisedell and Morgan. Blaisedell allows Bannon to talk to his old friends. The deputy implores both sides to back away, but to no avail –a gunfight erupts. Bannon’s role if reminiscent of county sheriff Johnny Behan’s role in the O.K. Corral shoot-out; caught between gunmen-turned-lawmen and a group of violent but popular cowboys, he can only watch the inevitable outcome. This further blending of fact and fiction helps establish Warlock as the mythic Western everytown.

The three cowboys –including Bannon’s nineteen-year-old brother –are killed. A fourth dies as well; he had attacked the lawmen from concealment, sent by McQuown. The gun battle does not end the conflict; just like in Warlock’s historical counterpart Tombstone, the surviving cowboys declare war on the city lawmen. Bannon warns Blaisedell not to get involved any further. As a duly-sworn deputy, it is Bannon’s responsibility to keep the peace, not the gunfighters’.

Bannon visits the San Pablo ranch to warn the McQuown that he must not come to Warlock the next day as he had publicly announced he would. McQuown stabs Bannon’s hand, pinning it to the table and threatening to rip it off unless the deputy swears that the cowboys’ version of the conflict is the true one. Only Curly’s intervention allows Bannon to escape alive.

Blaisedell proclaims his intention to retire from the peace-keeping business –he is going to marry Jessie and settle down. He offers his help to Bannon –the outlaws are still on their way –but the injured deputy refuses politely.

Tom Morgan is outraged by the recent events. His greatest anger is directed toward his rival for Blaisedell’s attention –he makes several callous remarks to Jessie, pointing out that Blaisedell could be killed at any time. Morgan is also very upset at Lilly –she has told Blaisedell about Morgan’s role in the death of her fiancé and his brother.

Morgan entreats his old friend not to intervene in the coming battle. He wants Blaisedell safe, and also wants to ensure that Bannon is killed. Then the townspeople would turn once more to Blaisedell to save them. “You can’t let him be the hero,” Morgan says. “If you ain’t the marshal, you’re nothin’!” He holds Blaisedell in their shared hotel rooms by gunpoint until the fight is over. Morgan informs Blaisedell that he is responsible for the gunfighter’s success –always watching his back, arranging his jobs, letting him have all the glory even though Morgan is the better gun. Everything he did was for Blaisedell; as Morgan had told Lilly earlier, “He’s the only person, man or woman, who ever looked at me and didn’t see a cripple.”

The two gamblers/gunfighters watch the fight through the hotel room window, and are surprised. Bannon wins. The deputy kills McQuown and his most vicious sidekick; the others are subdued with the help of Curly and several local citizens who have been inspired by the quiet young deputy to finally take their own stand.

By nightfall Morgan is drunk. The gambler shoots up the town, daring the “big, brave deputy” to come out. Blaisedell locks Bannon up in his own jail –he knows the deputy would stand no chance against Morgan.
Blaisedell faces his friend and warns him to settle down or Blaisedell will be forced to hurt him.

“Then I win,” Morgan says happily. “You’ll be the hero again!” Morgan smiles at the prospect of everything returning to its former status. He draws on his partner, firing first but intentionally missing –lending credence to his claim of being better than Blaisedell –and Blaisedell shoots him.

Anguished, Blaisedell picks up his friend’s body and carries it back to their saloon. A storm has begun –he lays Morgan on the faro table and stands vigil over it to the crackling sound of the lightning. The self-righteous judge is there; Blaisedell kicks the old man’s crutch from under him. “Crawl past him,” he says, pointing to Morgan. “He was a man.” Blaisedell burns the saloon down around Morgan’s corpse.

Bannon informs Blaisedell that he will have to arrest him on the next morning, thus giving him a chance to leave town before then. Blaisedell tells Jessie that he could not remain in Warlock, anyhow –he would have to become a storekeeper or a farmer if he did. Jessie does not understand; those were his plans only the day before, after all.

But something very important had happened since then. Morgan had indeed won. By his death, the gambler had ended Blaisedell’s idyllic plans and returned him to the life of the celebrated gunman –a life which Morgan’s lame leg and crippled self-esteem had caused him to deny himself. Clay Blaisedell rides away from Warlock, looking for a new town to tame. The viewer is left to wonder whether he can survive without his alter ego.

Tom Morgan was one of Anthony Quinn’s best roles, and one of the most complex characters to ever stride down a dusty Western street. He is sophisticated yet tough, and insanely jealous where his friend is concerned. The film’s title, Warlock, obviously comes from the town’s name; it could also apply to Clay Blaisedell, who performs dark magic with his guns, or to the story’s catalyst, Morgan, a male “witch.”

It is a mystery to me that Warlock is not more widely-known, or more fondly remembered. At certain points –especially the scene where Henry Fonda, his face lit by lightning, regards the body of the beloved partner he slew –the film achieves the quality of a classic tragedy. Perhaps the casual Western viewer likes his heroes to wear white hats, or his anti-heroes to wear black ones, and is left uncomfortable by these ambiguous figures whose very relationship is unclear –especially when that relationship is very homoerotic, as this one unquestionably is. Maybe the marshal should just stick to his job of killing the bad guys, and not let things get cluttered up by feelings and desires and the like.

I for one do not believe that to be the case. If it is, it should not be –the Western, as restrictive as the genre might seem at first glance, has the potential to be one of the most interesting story-telling avenues a writer can use. Think of Lonesome Dove or Unforgiven. The viewer who likes the Western for its action and intensity –and also the viewer who believes that the Western goes no deeper than those qualities –would both be pleasantly surprised by a visit back to the “psychological Westerns” of the 1950s. In the town of Warlock, all the hats are gray.

Now Available from Award Winning Author Troy D. Smith

“Troy Smith has a rare and wonderful gift… his work is a treat.” –Frank Roderus, two-time Spur winner

http://www.amazon.com/Riding-Sundown-Troy-D-Smith/dp/1456520520/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1309000917&sr=1-1

The Top Ten Greatest Western Comics

2011-04-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

I recently polled a group of published Western authors and/or comics professionals for their choices of best Western comics characters and titles. It is posted at the Western Fictioneers website:
http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2011/04/top-ten-western-comics-and-whole-slew.html

Dark West: The Western Films of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart

2011-04-19T22:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I found a stash of old articles I wrote in the late 90s. Last time I posted an interview with Stan Lee: today I am posting the first of several film commentary pieces, this one about the 1950s Western movies directed by Anthony Mann and starring Jimmy Stewart. This particular piece has a sort of convoluted history. I sold this article to American Cowboy magazine in 1997- not long before it went to press, though, Jimmy Stewart died. They did a cover article which was a retrospective of his entire career, and decided they didn't need two Stewart articles. So I got a kill fee, but no publication. It eventually appeared in the online magazine American Western -where I got a publication but no fee, so I guess it balanced out.

DARK WEST: The Western Films of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart

By Troy D. Smith

Glyn McLyntock—Jimmy Stewart’s character in Bend of the River—had been beaten and left behind by his partner, played by Arthur Kennedy. “I’ll be seeing you, Glyn,” the greedy partner said.

“You’ll be seeing me,” Stewart answered, his eyes bulging and his jowls quivering with rage. “Every time you bed down for the night you’ll look back into the darkness and wonder if I’m there—and some night I will be. You’ll be seeing me.” He is profiled against the harsh mountain peaks as he watches his attackers leave, and begins to plan his revenge.

This was not the Jimmy Stewart that audiences had become accustomed to in films like Destry Rides Again and It's a Wonderful Life. This was Jimmy Stewart as directed by Anthony Mann, who had cut his teeth on 1940s films noirs. Stewart had needed an image change; post-war audiences were no longer content with whitebread heroes. They wanted the depth, the ambiguity—and yes, the violence—to which their own wartime experience had inured them.

Stewart had previously shown his ability to portray a dark, cynical character pushed to the edge, in It’s a Wonderful Life. Mann may well have seen the actor’s potential in that movie, and wondered: “What if instead of sending George Bailey an angel, someone had handed him a gun?”

Mann did just that, in five classic Westerns: Winchester ‘73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1955), and The Man from Laramie (1955). Stewart’s characters were dark and flawed, and Mann’s direction made their unspoken passions bubble just beneath the surface, threatening to boil over at any time.

The familiar, genial face of Stewart, framed by a shabby cowboy hat, takes on an edge in these films. He is a man haunted by his secretive past, prodded by his barely-suppressed rage into a violent confrontation which may perhaps redeem him. In a jarring scene from The Naked Spur, Stewart—as the self-loathing bounty hunter Howard Kemp—beats an Indian to death with a pistol. Kemp keeps pounding the Indian long after he is dead, desperate fury pouring from his eyes. Then Kemp finally stands and surveys the silent carnage around him; he limps away, bleeding quietly, his rage reined in but still not expended.

The effect is achieved not only by Stewart’s subtle actions and tones, but by the movement of the camera. Mann moves jerkily from one character to another, sometimes pulling away yet again to focus on a recurring image, such as Kemp’s spur or the cowbell on Stewart’s saddle in The Far Country.

Mountains appear often in these Westerns. It seems incongruous at first that Mann’s dark stories should be filmed in the Rockies, instead of the barren locations of Monument Valley. But Mann’s characters are not really lifeless; they are attempting to choke their lives and emotions back. Perhaps the verdant backdrops to their stories make for appropriate imagery, after all.

The mountains themselves provide a physical obstacle which Stewart must overcome, mirroring the emotional one. Howard Kemp must scale a cliff to reach the outlaw he is hunting, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan.) It is tough going, and Kemp cannot make it. His opportunistic companion, played by Ralph Meeker, has no trouble scaling the wall and capturing the killer. Unhampered by a conscience, it is easy for him to find the killer within himself—something which Kemp, for all his cynicism, is unable to do until it is in self-defense. At the end of the film Kemp uses his spur as a climbing tool, once more forced to climb a rock to reach Vandergroat. The same rocky setting had been used in the climax of Winchester ‘73.

Water is another recurring image. Many confrontations take place in or near a river; Stewart, his anger purged, is washed clean and becomes a new man. His conscience has won out. He is free to begin his new life.

When Kemp finally retrieves the killer’s body from the river, he shouts defiantly at Janet Leigh. “I’m takin’ him back!” he says. “He’s gonna pay for my land!” The ex-Confederate bounty hunter had once been a rancher, but was bilked out of his property by an unfaithful lover. Vandergroat had been his one chance to take back his old life. When Lena, Janet Leigh’s character, tells Kemp she will marry him anyway, he does not understand why. “I’m gonna sell him—for money!” he sobs. Kemp ultimately buries the body and leaves it behind. The two decide to go to California instead of returning to his failed life in Texas.

The cowbell in The Far Country is an obvious symbol of Stewart’s longing for home and hearth. His partner Ben (Walter Brennan) had bought the bell to put over the door of the little ranch-house they would have one day; it would jingle when their friends came over. Ben is killed, and Stewart ends up using the bell as a decoy when he goes after the villain. The bell rings when he embraces the heroine, like a divine blessing—not unlike the ringing bells in It’s a Wonderful Life.

At the conclusion of Bend of the River, after Glyn McLyntock has killed his evil alter ego Arthur Kennedy—in the river—and the settlers under Glyn’s protection have seen the rope burns on his neck and learned of his secret outlaw past, they accept him anyway. He is thanked by the motherly figure of Frances Bavier (best known as Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show.) Her acceptance seems especially important to him—she is the family (whereas the families of the hero in most of the other films, when they appear at all, are fractured and twisted.) Only in the end has he found release and redemption, and family peace.

Jean-Luc Goddard, speaking of Mann’s work on the Western film Man of the West (which starred, not Stewart, but Gary Cooper), called it “an admirable lesson in cinema—in modern cinema.” Anthony Mann took full advantage of the unique opportunities of the Western genre, perhaps more than any other director. People in a harsh frontier setting have a head start on unleashing passions. No one captured those passions better than Anthony Mann, and the normally amiable Stewart proved to be excellent clay for him to use in shaping his vision.

Now Available from Award Winning Author Troy D. Smith

“Troy Smith has a rare and wonderful gift… his work is a treat.” –Frank Roderus, two-time Spur winner

http://www.amazon.com/Calebs-Price-Troy-D-Smith/dp/1460937732/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309001052&sr=1-1

The Blackwells

2011-04-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

My stories about the Blackwell family seem to be the most popular of my short-story ebooks. To make it easier for anyone who has enjoyed one of those tales and would like to find the others, I have put up a Blackwell page at my website: http://www.troyduanesmith.com/Blackwell.html

Freedom is a place in your soul

2011-04-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

I've written several books -I just had a new one come out last month, a mystery called Cross Road Blues. One of my proudest achievements, though, was a book that was released 10 years ago -Bound for the Promise-Land. It won a Spur Award for best original paperback novel from Western Writers of America, and was also a finalist in the "first novel" category (losing out to Stephen Harrigan's great novel Gates of the Alamo.) Doris Meredith, a reviewer for the Amarillo Globe-News and Roundup (official magazine of the WWA) called it a classic, a fact I have been known to point out from time to time (as any author would.)

This particular book meant a lot more to me, though, than awards or compliments. While there is no shortage of action in it, the novel is an examination of many of the things that are most important to me in life: freedom, and justice, and redemption. In many ways it is the polar opposite of another novel I'm proud of, Good Rebel Soil: The Champ Ferguson Story. Bound is about a black Union soldier and his story of redemption, and search for meaning, while the other book is about a white Confederate guerrilla and his story of damnation, and descent into fury. I have always regretted that Bound for the Promise-Land was in print for only a short time, and never really reached an audience.

That has changed now, and I had to take the opportunity to publicize that fact. Bound for the Promise-Land has been re-released, in both paper and ebook format, by Western Trail Blazer (Good Rebel Soil will follow in a few months.) I'd like to invite you to read it if you haven't; it's one of the accomplishments in this life I'm proudest of, and I'd like as many people as possible to check it out.

http://www.amazon.com/Bound-Promise-Land-Troy-D-Smith/dp/1461042690/ref=tmm_pap_title_0

Chance to help out a little

2011-04-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

My friend Charles Whipple, aka Chuck Tyrell, who has lived in Japan for years, is donating his royalties from sales of his collection of Japan-set short stories, A MATTER OF TEA, available as a 99 cent ebook, to disaster relief charities in that country. Here's a chance to send a few pennies for a good cause while introducing yourself to the work of a darn good writer. http://chucktyrell-outlawjournal.blogspot.com/

Ebook Short Stories from Western Trail Blazer

2011-04-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Western Trail Blazer has released six of my short stories (two of them also horror stories) in their "dime novel" ebook format. There's more to come. Check 'em out!

The Faces of Change

2011-04-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

I look like me, and I used to look like me, but the me's don't look alike. Has that happened to you? I remember each of these photos being taken -except the one from my first birthday in 1969 -and I felt exactly the same inside for each one. Well, almost exactly. I felt like me, whoever me was at the time.

New interview in the Cookeville, TN newspaper

2011-04-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

Sunday April 3, 2011 -the following piece about me appeared in the Living section of the Herald-Citizen of Cookeville, Tennessee...

http://herald-citizen.com/view/full_story/12593410/article-TTU-grad-releases-8th-book---Cross-Road-Blues-?instance=main_article&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d9865feffe3807b%2C0

Western Fictioneers (WF) is pleased to announce the nominations for the first annual Peacemaker Awards.

2011-04-03T07:07:00.000-07:00

Nominees for the 2010 Best Western Short Story Award are listed in alphabetical order:

“Left Behind” by Carol Crigger from the anthology Roundup! Great Stories of the West (La Frontera Publishing

“This Old Star” by Wayne Dundee from the anthology Bad Cop…No Donut (Padwolf Publishing)

“Two-Bit Kill” by C. Courtney Joyner from the anthology Law of the Gun (Kensington) .

“Scourge of the Spoils” by Matthew P. Mayo from the anthology Steampunk’d (Daw Books, Inc)

"Catch a Killer by the Toe" by Pete Peterson published by Untreed Reads

Nominees for the 2010 Best Western Novel Award are listed in alphabetical order:

Avenging Angels by Lyle Brandt (Berkley)
Manhunt (Berkley) by Lyle Brandt (Berkley)
Settler’s Chase by D. H. Eraldi (Berkley)
Long Ride to Limbo by Kit Prate (Western Trail Blazers)
Wulf's Tracks by Dusty Richards (Berkley)
Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler (Dorchester)

There will be no Best First Western Novel Award awarded this year as there were not enough entries to complete the field of judging.

The Peacemaker Awards will be announced June 23rd, 2011 in Bismarck, North Dakota. A place and time will be announced at a later date.

Western Fictioneers (WF) was formed in 2010 by Robert J. Randisi, James Reasoner, Frank Roderus, and other professional Western writers, to preserve, honor, and promote traditional Western writing in the 21st century. Entries were accepted in both print and electronic forms. The Peacemaker Awards will be given out annually. Submissions for the 2011 awards will be open in July, 2011. Submission guidelines will be posted on the WF web site. For more information about Western Fictioneers (WF) please visit:
http://www.westernfictioneers.com/
or
http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/

NOTE FROM TROY: I am honored to be one of those "other professional Western writers" who formed this distinguished group, and to have been in on the first organizational meeting in Knoxville in June 2010. I am also honored to be one of the judges in our first annual awards contest.

1996 Interview with Stan Lee about Western Comics

2011-03-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

I just found several articles I wrote back in the 90s –several for magazines that never saw print for one reason or another, several others for the late, lamented online magazine American Western. I thought I would post a few of them on here, starting with this interview with Stan Lee from 1996.

(The Punisher is apparently very suspicious of us.)

Stan Lee was one of my biggest –maybe the biggest –childhood heroes. I loved his bombastic style, and his well-defined characters –the way he made them seem like real people with real problems, just like the readers. I caught on early that –while plot was important –it was how much you cared about the characters that really made a story exciting.

Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee) was born in New York City in 1922, and went to work at Timely Comics (later called Marvel Comics) soon after high school. He started off as a gofer and ink pot-filler; in 1941 he had his first writing assignment, a text-only short story in Captain America #3. He was later top writer, managing editor and eventually editor-in-chief. In the early 1960s, working with various talented artists, he co-created a virtual army of superhero characters who have been lighting up the big screen in recent years. Unlike previous superhero comics, Lee’s co-creations had distinct personalities, angst-ridden private lives, and very human weaknesses.

I got to meet my hero at a convention in Nashville in 1996 –at The Great Escape comic store. My 4 ½ year old daughter was already a fan of his characters, especially Spider-man and the Fantastic Four. When I found out Stan was going to be in Nashville I called a magazine editor who had accepted several of my history articles and pitched the idea of trying to get an interview with Stan Lee –about his western comics. I got the green light.

I stood in line to get Stan’s autograph –he was charging five or ten bucks, and donating it to the Boy Scouts –and pitched the interview to him. He was one of the nicest people you could hope to meet, and spent several minutes posing for pictures with my family. I had him sign my 1962 copy of Two-Gun Kid #60, the first appearance of the re-vamped, Silver Age Two-Gun, by Lee and Jack Kirby. He was delighted to see the book. “I remember when Jack drew this!” he said. “Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in years!”

Stan put me in touch with his publicist to schedule a telephone interview. When we spoke again, I was at my house in Tennessee and Stan was in his Hollywood office. He remembered me, and called me “Two-Gun” several times during the conversation.

Me: I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but your western titles lasted longer than any others –even licensed characters like The Lone Ranger.

Stan: Wow. I had never thought about it, but you’re right.

Me: Did you have a favorite western character to write for?

Stan: Let’s see. We had Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Outlaw Kid, Kid Colt, the Western Kid, Black Rider… I liked them all. I kind of liked the Black Rider, because he was more of a superhero. Also, we did one photograph cover of him, and that was me under the mask. I got a kick out of that.

Me: Tell me about some of the artists you worked with.

Stan: Jack Keller did Kid Colt, Larry Lieber did Rawhide Kid, Syd Shores did Black Rider. And there was Dick Ayers. Jack Kirby would step in whenever I needed an extra one done. He filled in a lot. So far as telling you about these artists, all I can say is that every one of them was a pleasure to work with. They were good artists, had a lot of talent. They always kept to their deadlines. I was very lucky –I always worked with good artists.

Me: How would you compare writing westerns with writing superheroes?

Stan: One was as much fun as the other. The only reason that superheroes became so enormously successful was that there seemed to be more glamor involved with them. But I loved writing the westerns. In fact, in those days we wrote everything –whatever there was a demand for. Comics came and went in those days. One year the westerns would be popular, another year the war stories, or the romance stories, or the monster comics. We just went from one to the other, to the other, whatever was selling at the moment. But no matter what else was popular at the time, there was always room for the westerns, and I enjoyed doing them.

Me: Do you foresee doing any more?

Stan: I would love to –whenever we feel there is a market for it. I remember once a writer came up to me to see if he could work for us. I said, “Hey, I need someone to write a western. How about it?” He said, “I don’t write westerns, I write mysteries.” I said, “A story is a story. In a mystery you say ‘follow that car,’ in a western you say ‘follow that stagecoach.’ It’s the same type of writing.” He laughed, and finally did the story, and it turned out okay.

Me: Was there a consistent element in your stories, in every genre, that identified your work?

Stan: I would like to think that I stressed characterization along the way. No matter what kind of story it was, superhero or whatever, I tried to make the characters as realistic as possible so that you cared about them. You can spin the greatest story in the world, but if the reader doesn’t care about the hero none of it matters. That’s the whole thing about writing –make the reader interested in the main characters, make them care what happens to them.

Me: Who was a big influence on you?

Stan: Oh, everybody. I was a voracious reader as a kid. H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare –I probably didn’t understand Shakespeare that much, but I loved the sound of the words. Yeah, I read everything –my mother used to say that if there was nothing else at the dinner table I would read the label on the ketchup bottle.

Me: How would you describe the duties you have now?

Stan: Mainly I work on the movies and television shows we do. I’m really not that involved with the comics anymore.

Me: Why do you think your westerns lasted so long?

Stan: I think it’s because westerns have such a basic storyline. It features the good guys versus the bad guys. Yet there are a lot of options. I think it’s the same reason Westerns have lasted in Hollywood for so long. You can always think of something new and put it in a western setting. You can have romance stories, revenge stories, jealousy, hatred, parental love –you can take any theme in the world and put it in a western formula.

Me: Have you read any of the more recent western titles, like Jonah Hex or Blueberry?

Stan: No, I don’t have time to read comics anymore.

Me: I read somewhere that you once wrote “Stan Lee is God” on a tower.

Stan: Oh, don’t tell that again. I was young. I don’t know why I did that. We had a big building called the tower where we published our high school magazine –I was one of the editors. One day some painters were doing some work on that big steeple-like tower. He left his ladder there and I climbed up and painted “Stan Lee is God.” Then the painter came and took the ladder away –as far as I know it’s still written there. Nobody else could ever go up and erase it. It was just a joke.

Bound for the Promise-Land

2011-03-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

Now available in e-book form....

"Freedom is not a place you run to…Freedom is a place in your soul." These words sum up the life long quest of ex-slave Alfred Mann as he pursues the dream of equality in a world not of his making. From fugitive to Medal of Honor winner, Mann carries on to rise above the ignorance and intolerance of those who seek to bring him down; somehow gaining strength from the unimaginable losses he suffers and his own self doubt.

Troy Smith does a great job of telling this man's story; providing a real insight not only to the emotional struggle that made Alfred Mann the individual he was, but the era that forged his heroic character. – Kit Prate

2001 WWA Spur Award Winner for Best Original Paperback

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/48640

2011-03-19T12:37:00.000-07:00

The second edition of Caleb's Price is now available in paper as well as ebook from Western Trail Blazer.

https://www.createspace.com/3568375

Western Trail Blazer ebooks 25% off this week

2011-03-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Several Western Trail Blazer western novel ebooks are available this week, March 6 to March 12, for 25% off at Smashwords.com . Free samples are available. You don't have to own an e-reader- all books are also available in pdf and html for reading on your computer. Just go to the link of the book(s) of your choice, and use the following coupon code when ordering: RAE25

Westerns
Bad Wind Blowing by Peter Brandvold https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/33855
Bound for Texas by Kit Prate https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26642
Brothers in Arms by Troy D. Smith   https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/28920
Caleb's Price by Troy D. Smith    https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/40281
Capture the Lightning by Madeline Baker   https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/41266
Jason Kilkenny's Gun by Kit Prate https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/39811
Long Ride to Limbo by Kit Prate https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/28828
Passion's Promise by Madeline Baker https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/30100
Riding to Sundown by Troy D. Smith https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35887
Vulture Gold by Chuck Tyrell https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/39423

Lou Cameron

2011-03-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Lou Cameron update

A Western Fictioneers friend passed this along:

"I've heard from Lou Cameron's daughter that the rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He's apparently in poor health but is still kicking, which is good news."

In 1972, David Morrell's first novel was published -First Blood, as most everybody knows, was about a traumatized Vietnam vet named Rambo who didn't take well to being pushed around.

However, another book had come out in 1971 with a similar name, one which not many people remember. Lou Cameron's The First Blood was a WWII action story, and it was like no WWII story I had ever come across. It was 1978 when I did come across it, by the way, at a used book store. I was ten at the time -but I'd been reading "grownup" novels since I was eight, and at ten I also tackled Shakespeare, Robert E. Howard, and Hammett for the first time.

But not grownup novels like this. The cover said it all: "Twice as gutsy as The Dirty Dozen! They had just one order -kill now, die later!" The plot centered around a platoon of GI's parachuted into North Africa, assigned to escort a Free French operative named Andre to a French Foreign Legion fortress named Wadi Gamal, which was about to be overrun by Nazis. I am fuzzy on why Andre had to be there, I think it may have been to get some important intelligence from the commander. Along the way they pick up an Italian deserter named Roggeri -who turned out to be an Italian American from New Jersey who'd had the bad luck to be back in the old country when the war broke out, and wanted to get home. The most colorful character was the platoon commander- Lt. Fitzgerald, AKA The Gentle Geraldine... an Irish-American who was fond of singing that classic ballad "Dirty Gertie", and who also happened to be a totally insane cocaine addict. He was so coked up that he had developed paranoid delusions of grandeur, and it soon became clear to his men that he was more dangerous to them than the Nazis were.

This was not high literature- but man, was it fun. I must have read it half a dozen times over a two year period. I haven't read it in over 30 years now, but I can still remember all those details vividly. And that's a good sign that, high literature or not, it was damn well-written. I remember how excited I was in 1981, when I heard that Kirk Douglas had signed on for a movie version of First Blood, because I thought it was the Cameron book and that the Gentle Geraldine was coming to the screen. (Kirk Douglas dropped out, upset over the changes that were made to David Morrell's story -Rambo was supposed to die at the end -and was replaced in the role of Rambo's old commander by Richard Crenna.) Side note: if you liked Morrell's First Blood, I predict you'd love his second, Testament.

Lou Cameron was better known for his mysteries and westerns. To me he'll always be the guy who brought us The Gentle Geraldine and a bunch of bad-ass Foreign Legionnaires, fighting Nazis together with style. Cameron apparently passed away in October, but the mystery and western writers world didn't find out about it until today. Here's to you, Lou Cameron -1924-2010 -you were a hell of a storyteller. (NOTE: as I pointed out at the beginning of the post, turns out Lou Cameron is alive and well- apparently another Lou Cameron's death caused the initial confusion.)

James Reasoner's review of Cross Road Blues

2011-03-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

Words of praise from an author I've been a huge fan of for 20 years...

http://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2011/03/cross-road-blues-troy-d-smith.html

The Marvel Time Line

2011-03-01T20:58:00.001-08:00

Here is a link to a short piece I wrote in 2006 trying to make sense out of the Marvel Comics time line... http://www.zak-site.com/lockjaw/html/marvel_time.html

2011-03-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

Available March 4...

TENSE MOMENTS- INTERVIEW WITH TROY SMITH

2011-02-28T06:21:00.000-08:00

My friend Larry Sweazy interviewed me on his blogsite Tense Moments recently:

http://larrydsweazy.blogspot.com/2011/02/interview-troy-d-smith.html

THOUGHTS ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION AND HISTORY

2011-02-27T15:23:00.000-08:00

I wrote an essay over on the Western Fictioneers website a little while back, called "O Fictioneers!", that dealt with the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction.

http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2010/10/o-fictioneers.html

My review of Dynamite Entertainment's LONE RANGER comic

2011-02-27T15:20:00.000-08:00

Read my review at the Western Fictioneers website:

http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-your-fathers-lone-ranger.html

My review of James Reasoner's new western REDEMPTION, KANSAS

2011-02-27T15:17:00.000-08:00

Read my review of James Reasoner's upcoming western novel Redemption, Kansas over at the Western Fictioneers website:

http://westernfictioneers.blogspot.com/2011/02/no-cowboys-or-texans-of-any-sort.html

NEW BOOK RELEASES

2011-02-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

Western Trail Blazers has released three novels I wrote in the 90s in both print and ebook form. I wrote Riding to Sundown and Brothers in Arms in 1990, and Caleb's Price in 1993 (it was originally released by Writer's Club Press in 2001.) You can buy them and other fine westerns at: http://westerntrailblazer.yolasite.com/dime-novel-store.php

DIME NOVELS

2011-02-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

The fine folks at Western Trail Blazer (an imprint of Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery) are presenting a modern take on the dime novel... they are publishing western short stories in e-book for for the great price of 99 cents apiece. They have released several of my previously published stories, with some brand new ones upcoming. The best-selling ones so far are in the Blackwell series... my humble effort to track one Tennessee family through the history of the West, a la the Sacketts: "The Blackwell Claim," "Blackwell's Stand," and "The Divided Prey." Jake Blackwell also appears in The Stealing Moon and Bound for the Promise-Land, and "The Windigo" also features a member of the Blackwell clan.

You can buy these, and fine stories by other western writers, at: http://westerntrailblazer.yolasite.com/dime-novel-store.php

A CLASSROOM DISCUSSION SAMPLE: RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND NEW YORK CITY Feb. 18, 2011

2011-02-27T14:42:00.000-08:00

February 18, 2011

I have not been adding to my blog recently, as my time is consumed with revising my dissertation right now. There are a lot of history-related topics I have wanted to address, but I have held off. However, while summarizing a discussion in class this week -partly for the use of a disabled student who has difficulty taking her own notes, and partly for my own benefit and future use -I realized that the material could be adapted and shared with a broader audience (if they were interested.) I present below a generalized transcript of the class as I taught it- in "real time" there was a lot of socratic Q-and-A. The class is the second half of the U.S. history survey -The United States since 1877. Prof. David Roediger teaches the class, and I am one of several TAs; I lead three discussion sections with 25 students in each. Bear in mind that this is a basic overview of some very complex issues, many of which had to be dramatically simplified; any one of those could be expanded significantly, and in more depth.

Discussion of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

Racial Hierarchy, Immigration, and New York

OVERVIEW: We have been discussing How the Other Half Lives, the 1890 book by Danish-American photojournalist and social reformer Jacob Riis. This work caught the attention of middle-and-upper-class white America, exposing them to images from the most impoverished neighborhoods of New York City. We have examined the paradox that Riis, himself an immigrant seeking to bring attention to the plight of the poor with his photographs, expresses in the accompanying text many shocking (to modern readers) ethnic and racial stereotypes about the very people he is trying to help.

In going over the paper drafts I noticed that several people caught on to the fact that the old vs. new immigrant situation was important, but did not understand the details about that situation, thinking it was only a matter of “old” immigrants like Riis being more established and out of poverty. It was more complex.
America, from the time the first English colonies were established, has had a very rigid racial and social hierarchy (or “pecking order”.) That began to change somewhat in the 1960s and 70s, with the Civil Rights and women’s liberation movements and the election of JFK (an Irish Catholic), but is by no means gone completely. It was especially true during Riis’s time.

A hierarchy is a structure. If you wanted to rise to the top of that structure you had to be a WASP –a word that was pretty common when I was growing up in the 70s but isn’t heard that much anymore. WASP stands for “White Anglo Saxon Protestant.” (You could add the word “male” in there, too.) In other words, for most of American history, to be accepted at the highest levels of society you need to be descended from white English people.

As the “W” shows, that structure is racial as well as social. I demonstrate below a model of the racial hierarchy created in colonial America, which was the structure Southern culture was based on until the Civil War. Wealthy white planters were at the top of the structure, followed by artisans and craftsmen who would later be referred to as the middle class, then by a large number of poor whites. Below that is a thin layer –free blacks. There wasn’t a huge number of them. At the base of the structure were slaves- the foundation on which the whole culture was laid.

It was not in the best interests of the wealthy planters for poor whites and blacks to figure out they had anything in common –although in a lot of ways they had more in common with one another than with the other groups. These are the same tactics used in the 19th century to prevent blacks and whites from uniting in labor unions, as mentioned in lecture. Therefore, a line of demarcation was introduced into the structure:

It was, of course, a color line. Since this is a power structure, and white is on top, you could also call it a whiteness line. The people at the very top could tell poor whites: “Hey, maybe you don’t have as much money as us, or education, or opportunity… but at least you’re on the right side of The Line- you’re white, just like us, and that means we’re on the same side… and, if nothing else, you’ll always know you’re better than the people on the bottom side of the line.” Hence, poor whites in the South –who could not afford slaves, and probably never would –went out and fought for the right of wealthy whites to own slaves. Even though slavery meant poor whites had very few job opportunities. (NOTE: in the mountainous Southern Appalachians, where cotton could not be grown and there were few slaves, most poor whites supported the Union.)

We talked in an earlier class about the 1970s sit-com All in the Family. The character of Archie Bunker is a middle-aged, working class white man who is a) extremely bigoted and b)extremely upset about the ways the world he knows is rapidly changing. Archie grew up in an America where -even if he didn't have much going for him -at least he was better than those people. That position of security -being on the WASP team -gave him an innate sense of privilege which the socially progressive movements of the 60s and 70s threatened.

Now we will travel WAY back in time. “Anglo-Saxon” in WASP means “English.” Why is that? It comes from the names of two Germanic tribes, the Angles and the Saxons. These groups migrated to the British Isles in the late Roman period (5th century C.E.) and came into conflict with the people who already lived there: Celtic groups including Britons, Gaels, and Picts. Eventually the Celtic people were pushed to the edges, in a sense: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. The Anglo-Saxons became what were later called English.

NOTE: These maps are much nicer than the ones I drew on the blackboard, which were abysmal.

The English viewed the other inhabitants of the British Isles as inferior, savage, and barbaric. It is safe to say that they didn’t always treat them very nicely. 18th century writer Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver’s Travels) wrote a famous satire of the heartless British policies towards Ireland in “A Modest Proposal,” in which he recommended that the English eat Irish children. There is a theory, which I find convincing, that the British policies toward the Irish would later influence how they treated Native Americans in North America.
What does all this have to do with Jacob Riis and 19th century America? It ties in with the difference between the “old” and “new” immigrants.

The earlier wave of immigrants that appeared on the scene in the mid-19th century were from Western and Northern Europe, mostly Germans, Scandinavians (from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway), and Irish. Germans and Scandinavians were accepted into U.S. society fairly easily- Irish were not. Irish were neither Anglo-Saxon nor were most of them Protestant, whereas Germans and Scandinavians usually were Protestant and, like Anglo-Saxons, were Germanic. From the same “race”, as people viewed it then. In other words: If the “best” race was the Englishman, the next-best must be his Germanic cousins. Irish, on the other hand, had long been viewed as brutish and savage by the English. Thus in the United States Irish immigrants were mistreated and suffered prejudice; businesses sported signs saying “No dogs or Irish allowed,” and people posting job ads specified “No Irish Need Apply.” In 19th-century newspaper cartoons in both the U.S. and Britain, Irish were depicted as dark and apish, as in the examples below:

Do Irish people look significantly different from English people in real life? Of course not. But in these and similar cartoons the difference is striking. In essence, there was a new “color line” in the U.S. and the Irish were below it. They were not accepted as part of the “white race.”

The late 19th century saw a wave of “new” immigrants. Most of them were NOT from Western and Northern Europe. They were from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom were Jews; they were from Southern Europe, including Italy and Portugal; they were from farther afield, including Asia- particularly China. Like the Irish, the “new” immigrants were not accepted into the upper levels of the social hierarchy; like the Irish, none of them were considered exactly “white.” It is worth noting that Italian-Americans were sometimes the victims of lynch mobs in late 19th century Louisiana. The Chinese, meanwhile, were singled out for exclusion, with laws prohibiting further Chinese immigration in the 1880s.

In essence, a new socio-racial hierarchy was in place in the U.S. by the late 1800s. Like in the earlier racial hierarchy model from the antebellum South, there is a line of demarcation that could be called a “line of whiteness”:

In this model, the farther away an immigrant group is from Northern/Western Europe –thus the farther away they are from Anglo-Saxon –the less acceptable they are.

Just as in the colonial model, African Americans are on the bottom. Writers and historians –from W.E.B. Dubois and James Baldwin to Winthrop Jordan –have long proposed that white identity in America was formed in opposition to black, using blackness as a defining “other.” I may write more about that idea on another occasion. Suffice it to say that for Irish and other immigrant groups to rise to the level of “white,” they had to also define themselves against the other end of the racial spectrum and make it clear they were not “black.”

Case in point: The New York Draft Riots of 1863.

The Civil War was raging, and a draft had been instituted on both sides. In New York, a large number of Irish immigrants were drafted, sometimes shortly after they got off the boat. At that time, anyone able to pay a substantial fee didn’t have to serve –which meant that wealthier men didn’t have to be drafted if they didn’t want to be, whereas poor men had little choice. It was a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” This contributed to the anti-draft feeling in the city. What started as anger directed at draft officers in July, 1863, quickly escalated into a race riot that lasted for days, with largely Irish mobs invading the black neighborhoods and killing an untold number of African Americans (possibly hundreds, although the exact number is not known.) Among other things, they burned down a colored orphanage. African Americans had little or nothing to do with Irish immigrants’ situation; the fact they were targeted shows that the Irish knew where they were on the hierarchy.

As James Baldwin put it in the introduction of his 1985 work The Price of the Ticket (p. xx):
“…the Irish became white when they got here and began rising in the world, whereas I became black and began sinking. The Irish, therefore and thereafter… had absolutely no choice but to make certain I could not menace their safety or status or identity: and, if I came too close, they could, with the consent of the governed, kill me.”

W.E.B. Dubois wrote, in his essay “The Soul of White Folk,” that
“[America] aspires to sit among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of ‘lesser breeds without the law’ and she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of ‘new’ white people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and ‘dago’ her social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take her unflinching and immovable stand... She trains her immigrants to this despising of ‘niggers’ from the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the submerged classes in the fatherlands.”

This is how racial hierarchies work. To work your way into the upper levels, one must show solidarity with the upper levels against those on the bottom. Another important element is paternalism ; in fact, I would say that paternalism is the oil that greases the socio-racial hierarchy machine.

Paternalism, as the name implies, means assuming a superior position and treating your subordinates like children. In this scenario, since they (whichever groups are below yours) are “inferior,” then it follows that they cannot take care of themselves, make their own decisions, or solve their own problems. You have to do it for them, and of course you do, and isn’t that nice of you. British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem in 1899 inviting the U.S. to engage in imperial pursuits in the Philippines, saying famously “Take up the white man’s burden!” It was the civilized, “superior” white man’s duty to take care of all those non-whites: to “seek another’s profit and work another’s gain” even though they would not be grateful for it, and would complain that you were pulling them out of the darkness for their own good.

This brings us back to our earlier discussion about All in the Family. The son-in-law Michael (or, as Archie called him, Meathead) was a liberal grad student engaged in many progressive causes, which was a source of endless arguments with his father-in-law. It was always evident to the viewer, however -especially when he was interacting with his (apparently only) black friend -that he had a strong and condescending feeling of paternalism.

THEREFORE: Bearing in mind that Jacob Riis was from Denmark, and thus a Germanic “old” immigrant, and that the ethnic groups he was examining in New York (with the exception of the Germans, and they came off looking pretty good compared to everyone else) were all from groups that were either “new” immigrants or, like the Irish and African Americans, fell below that “line of whiteness”… and that “superior” groups are often paternalistic against “inferior” ones… perhaps Riis was not so much a paradox as at first he seems, after all. From that perspective, it actually makes sense that he could say in one breath “I really feel sorry for these poor people, I want to help them,” and in another breath say that they suck, and throw in a bunch of racial and ethnic stereotypes. And bear in mind, he was writing the book to encourage middle-and-upper class whites to come to the aid of their social inferiors, to take up their “white man’s burden.” Also bear in mind that, in order to be accepted into the “upper strata” as an immigrant, it was important that he demonstrate that he had those powered people’s attitudes toward the “lower strata.” This is a key to understanding Riis and his work, and the time in which he lived.

FURTHER READING:
How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis
The Price of the Ticket by James Baldwin
Making Ireland British by Nicholas Canny
“The Soul of White Folk" by W.E.B. DuBois
How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev
White Over Black by Winthrop Jordan
"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling
How Race Survived U.S. History by David Roediger
Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White by David Roediger
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by George Takaki

BOOKS BY TROY D. SMITH

"Smith creates a classic from the first chapter ... a magnificent novel."- Roundup Magazine
Winner of the Spur Award

http://amzn.to/ooaaUS

"CROSS ROAD BLUES isn't just one of the best crime novels I've read recently, it's one of the best crime novels I've read in a long time... You need to read this one, and I recommend it very highly." -James Reasoner

http://amzn.to/nYLBww

WHY IT MATTERS TO ME: GENDER AND SEXUALITY Dec.16, 2010

2011-02-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

December 16, 2010

A month or so ago I posted a couple of blogs that were to be the first two parts of a three-part series, “Why it Matters to Me.” I looked at the ways my own experiences with race and class had informed my views on the subject and compelled me to champion various causes. This last portion, gender/sexuality, has been delayed somewhat by the end-of-semester madness that runs amok in academia, but now at last here it is.

Because my encounters in this particular area have mostly been on the periphery (being a heterosexual male and therefore not an object of imposed power, other than the adolescent societal pressure of maintaining what scholars on the subject call “heteronormativity”), many of my experiences have actually been watching the experiences of others. Since it’s not my place to broadcast other people’s private, or inner, lives –or to “out” anybody that has not chosen to announce their sexual identity –I plan to be as circumspect as possible in this essay, being vague in places and changing details in others.

That being said, I’ll address the same question I asked myself about race and class- when did I first become truly aware that there was such a thing as gender/sexuality classifications? Obviously, that kind of thing is presented to us all, culturally, from birth, and kind of sinks in by osmosis. Girls are “supposed” to act one way, and boys another. There are “tomgirls” (like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird ) and “sissies”- kids who don’t exactly conform to the “rules” of gendered behavior.

I was in a bit of an unusual situation –although it only seemed unusual compared to the ideal families of television, I guess. My parents separated when I was quite young, and I have no memories of them together. My formative years were spent in a household with two very strong women, my mom and her sister Essie. I had no real positive male influences. There was my older cousin, Essie’s son Stanton, who was as close to me as a brother, but he –though several years older –was still just a kid like me. Two of my mom’s brothers also lived with us, and I adored them, but never pictured them as someone I wanted to be like (they were fun-loving, hard drinking, quasi-employed bachelors.) I loved to read- and devoured comic books even before I could decipher the words, either having my cousin read them to me or figuring out the plots by the pictures alone. I loved movies, too- basically, I suppose I just loved stories.

So I took my models for masculinity from the stories I read and watched. Cowboys, superheroes, war movies. My dad and his brothers were all in the military; when I was three my Uncle Arthur came to visit us, in his Army uniform, and brought me a huge play-set of plastic Army men (in four different colors, to better facilitate imaginary warfare.) He and my Dad looked a lot alike, and I actually thought he was my Dad… in fact, I think I was thirty before I mentioned the incident to my mom and she told me who it actually was. Because I associated my father so much with the military –mostly because of that three-year-old’s confusion –it’s probably not surprising who I wound up choosing as my main masculinity models at ages 3 to 5: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood… and Nick Fury. Fury was a Marvel Comics character who had two ongoing series at once –one set in the (1970s) present-day, in which he was a middle-aged leader of a government spy organization, and one set in his younger days as a commando leader in WWII. The character has been played on screen by Samuel L. Jackson and David Hasselhoff, neither of whom capture the essence of the 1960s and 70s Nick Fury:

NICK FURY (drawing by Joe Sinnott.)
http://www.comicvine.com/nick-fury/29-3202/black-white/108-12599/90818-nick-fury/105-208236/
In my young mind, real men sported whisker stubble, chomped on cigars, often wore hats, and frequently dressed in leather, flannel, and boots (if you know me, you know I often do all those things, though the cigars are a very infrequent treat .) I think those images were substitutes for my missing father, and that dressing myself accordingly –in pretend clothes and paraphernalia as a kid, and real ones when I grew up –was a way of clothing myself with my father, which is really clothing one’s self with the essence of comforting (or yearned for) masculinity.

When I got a little older, I was still turning to fictional characters for masculinity guides, but on a more sophisticated level. Later in life I realized how profoundly influenced I had been by certain characters from my pre-adolescent years: Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird; Gary Cooper as Will Kane in High Noon; Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca; Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life; and perhaps most of all Spider-man, who co-creator Stan Lee portrayed as learning that “with great power comes great responsibility.” From all those characters, I concluded that real men are good men, and honorable ones. Their defining characteristic is the willingness to do what they know is right, no matter how hard it is or how much it costs them. I later realized that I had come up with the definition of, not just a man, but of a good person of any gender. Anyone who knows me knows that the “me” I have cultivated and constructed –and all our selves, inner and outer, are a combination of our own constructions and the fears we fortify ourselves against, with a healthy dash of genetics –has elements of all those fictional characters. With a little Andy Griffith thrown in.

But of course, it is never that simple. I had other qualities as well, which did not fit into the American cultural paradigm of masculinity, and I had no stereotypical male figure around to teach me that I am supposed to suppress those things. I was extremely sensitive, and extremely emotional. I was “bookish,” and lived in a world of my own imagination. Those are all qualities I would encourage and nurture in any child of mine, no matter their gender… but in the late 70s/early 80s, and no doubt still today, they are qualities that mark a young boy as a target by his peers.

Which leads me to the first hints I received that gender and sexuality are categories people can be put into. My first exposure to the concept of homosexuality came when I was around nine… Fred Sanford was describing a “sissified” (I knew that term) man as “kind of…you know…” and then made that famous Fred Sanford “comme ci, comme ca” hand motion. His friend Bubba, as I recall, said “Oh, you mean he’s gay.” Fred was confused by the term, and so was I, both of us thinking gay meant happy. I asked my mom what the heck he was talking about, and she explained that some boys liked to kiss other boys instead of girls. In that same time period I saw Archie Bunker interacting with a transvestite, and Billy Crystal’s character on Soap wore women’s clothing and wanted to get an operation to turn him into a woman. Well, all this seemed rather strange to me, but I didn’t give it much thought. I sort of chalked it up to just another weird thing grown-ups talked about which I didn’t understand.

I was pretty sheltered in some ways during elementary school, in part because of my school, Baker Elementary. It was small- only about a hundred students total –and only went to the fourth grade. Basically, then, you had a group of about twenty kids that you went to school with every day from kindergarten through 4th, after which you all went to the much bigger “city school.” I never rode the bus in my Baker years, and my older cousins –like older cousins and older siblings from time immemorial –avoided me like the plague when their friends were around. What all this means, and the reason I am bringing it up, is that I was never around any “older kids.” In my experience as a father and step-father, kids’ first exposures to the seamier concepts in life often come from older kids on the bus. In my case, at the age of 10 I had never heard the f-word (though I’d seen it carved into a chair arm at the movie theater, and wondered what it meant), or the term a-hole, or any of the sexuality centered insults. I had seen the word “queer” on a bathroom stall –again at the movie house (or as we called it, the Show) –and just assumed it was an expression of postmodern bemusement (although of course I didn’t have those terms for it.) “Queer” was a word my grandmother used often to describe anything strange, pronouncing it “qwar.”

Then it was on to fifth and sixth grade at the “big school”- as well as riding the school bus (and being around
high schoolers) for the first time. It was a whole new world. Almost every single fifth grade male swore in practically every sentence, often using words I had never heard before. One kid, a well-known bully, approached me on the playground my first week there.

“Hey,” he said. “You look queer. Are you queer, boy?”

Well, this was an easy enough question. I delighted from a young age in the idea of being a non-comformist –of course this would make me seem strange.

“Why yes,” I said. “In fact, I’m probably the queerest kid in this school.”

This was not the response he was expecting. He was dumbfounded. He gathered his friends around.

“This kid is crazy!” he said. “Go ahead –ask him if he’s queer!”

“Um, hey kid, are you queer?”

“I sure am,” I replied. “It’s no big deal, I’m kinda proud of it.”

Needless to say, I was not getting off to a good start in my new social circles. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the word meant when they said it, and to absorb it –and a lot of other cool dirty words- into my vocabulary. By the end of that school year I, too, was “burning” my friends by questioning their heterosexuality. A favorite tactic –and one that, with my verbal skills, I excelled at –was to turn someone’s words around to make it sound like they were admitting that they were gay (for example, someone once called me “queerbait” and I said “it works, too, ‘cause here you are.”) This was often accompanied by gestures whose significance none of us really understood at the time. Somehow it seemed to be ratcheted up several degrees when we entered middle school.

So, then, was I introduced to that world of burgeoning male adolescence, so lovingly portrayed in Lord of the Flies. It was a good thing, in some ways, that I had a sharp wit and a sharp tongue, because I needed them. I was a scrawny, cerebral, artistic kid, and looked like easy pickings for bullies. When confronted, my usual tactic (if there was a crowd around) was to verbally humiliate the oppressor, then refuse to “meet him outside” to fight. He would eventually figure out that picking on me was more trouble than it was worth, as it would get him ridiculed; if they caught me outside alone, of course, it helped that I could run really fast. The bully would then move on to easier prey.

This is the part of the story I am ashamed of. I wasn’t really joking in my Lord of the Flies reference; kids aged 12 to 14 can be very, very nasty to one another, and it is not uncommon at all to see them engage in masculine (or feminine) bonding that involves singling out some outsider and attacking them. The weaker the outsider is perceived to be, the better. Here is a basic truth about middle school: there are four types of kids, bullies, victims, defenders , and bully enablers. There are very, very few defenders, and for good reason. The whole process is about developing community by choosing an “other” to define yourself against- and at this age, peer community is just about the most important thing in one’s life. If you see another kid being bullied, and you come to his aid, you risk ostracism as well- and that goes against the grain of self-preservation.
There were certain boys that were always singled out to be victims. They were usually the more sensitive ones, who did not fit into the prevalent view of “proper” masculine behavior. Some of those kids later came out as gay; others were perceived to be gay, and that was enough. They were considered fair game.

Sometimes, as I said, I was singled out as the prospective victim. I can remember several specific instances where I was the defender, and I felt really good about myself afterwards. But most often- I either ignored it, or joined in (both forms of bully-enabling.) I joined in to take the heat off myself. And I was extremely cruel. Sometimes, I was the bully.

Now I’m going to be vague. I know a lot of people who were victimized for their perceived sexual orientation or relative degrees of masculinity. I knew such people in middle and high school, at church, through the extended church network I was hooked into, and when I was college age. I know six people who were either gay or perceived to be who committed suicide. Most were casual acquaintances, one was a very good friend several years younger than me. Some of them I defended, some I ignored, some I helped persecute here and there. I’m haunted by all their memories. And despite that, I found myself doing the same thing as an adult in the workplace years ago. I’m quite embarrassed about that; it goes against all the ideals I have tried to define myself by. I wouldn’t do it again, and it hurts to even think about it.

I have also known people who belonged to conservative churches who felt that their desires were sins they needed to struggle against. They tried to make themselves straight, getting married even though they had no sexual desire whatsoever for women. That’s their right and their choice. Most of the ones I know have had sad lives, though (as have their wives.) I often imagine what their lives could’ve been like if they’d had the freedom to just be themselves.

I tried to raise my daughter to be open and accepting, and to have a concern for social justice. When she was eleven or twelve I was proud of her for getting into arguments with older relatives in defense of gay marriage. I was touched when, around that time, she asked me: “Dad, if I were to grow up and tell you I was gay, would you disown me?” We had been discussing the tragedy of a teenage girl who committed suicide in the 1950s because of her sexual orientation. “Of course not,” I said. “I am your father, and I’ll always love you and stand beside you no matter what. Unless you become a Republican (which was only a joke, by the way.)”

When she was sixteen, my daughter told me she had realized she was gay. It was one of those situations where you are very surprised, but not surprised at all; a lot of things sort of clicked into place and made sense. She has been wrestling with concepts of identity, sexuality, and gender since then, refining her understanding of who she is and how she wants to be known. It is a very important journey, and like any parent I have been worried about her on the road while also finding joy in her journey. It is an odyssey that has been very instructive to me, as well, as I’ve seen this person I love so much face obstacles and challenges that I have never really known.

Recently she told me that there was something very important she wanted to discuss as a family. I knew that since starting college she had become very impassioned about gender and sexuality studies, and seemed to be learning about herself at an accelerated pace in her new academic setting. I had a pretty good idea what she wanted to talk about. She was very nervous, but she did not need to be. She told us she did not feel that traditional gender classifications fit her as a person, that she felt neither male nor female but somewhere in-between, and always has. It is a form of identity known as genderqueer, or GQ. Again, it made sense when I thought about it. She was frustrated at the unfairness of being put into a box that was not of her own making, of having an identity thrust upon her. She asked us to think about calling her by a different, ungendered name, and to refer to her with gender-neutral pronouns. Henceforth in this essay, therefore, I will refer to them as my child. My very beloved child.

I am going to share with you what I said to my child that night, as best I remember it. Maybe I’ll add a little that I should’ve said and left out. I have permission to discuss it in this forum, and I’m glad –because it is the thing parents should say to their children, whatever paths they take, and maybe you know someone you should say it to.

“I love you with all my heart. I don’t love you just because you’re my child; I don’t love you for who I want you to be, or who anyone thinks you ought to be. I don’t love you because you’re a reflection of who I wanted to be. I love you because you are you. I am proud of your courage, in approaching me (and ultimately the world) with this. I am proud of your passions, and compassions, and desire to help others and make a difference in the world. What you ask of me is not easy –I feel a sense of bereavement for the little girl I knew, who is gone forever. But she would be gone anyway; you’ve grown up. Whether you are still that little girl or not, or whether in fact you ever really were, you are still YOU, and it is you I have loved, not an image. I told you once not to feel bad about leaving me some day –it is your job to leave me; it is my job never to leave you. Wherever you go, whatever you do, whoever and whatever you are- I will always be your father, and I will always love you. And I am very, very proud to have had a hand in bringing the world such a beautiful person. Despite my part in that, I have no proprietorship in you- your life, and your identity, are yours, and that is as it should be.”

In the process of writing this essay, I’ve realized a couple of things. For starters, unlike the essays about race and class, this effort to sift through my early experiences with gender resulted in me talking at length about who I am, and why. Wouldn’t it be simpler, and better, if we could move beyond societally imposed barriers and boundaries, drop the terms gender and sexuality and sexual orientation, and just call it who-I-am-ness? Or maybe just call it “me” and “you.”

The other thing I realized: I started out to pinpoint when in my life I first became aware of race, class, and gender-and-or-sexuality, and it turns out all three were at around the same time. Middle school, around age twelve. All three of those identity markers are socially constructed, and it seems they get constructed at around the time of adolescence (this would be a good point to clarify something; sex refers to the genitals you have, gender refers to how you view yourself and are viewed by others.) We get to middle school, and segregate ourselves by race and class in ways we never did before, not of our own volition. And within those constructs, we pick out a handful of people who don’t fit in and put them on the outside, to further define ourselves as insiders, like chickens in a barnyard. It makes sense that things would play out this way; adolescence is the transition between childhood and adulthood, when we are struggling mightily to come out from under our parents’ shadows, to become our own people and find our own identity. Pack mentality has a tighter hold on us during those years than at any time in our life. If we want to minimize friction centered on race, class, and gender/sexuality among teens, they need to be better educated –and their teachers should be, too. I thought we had made a lot of strides in that direction in the last couple of decades, but the evening news seems to indicate otherwise.

BOOKS BY TROY D. SMITH

"Smith creates a classic from the first chapter ... a magnificent novel."- Roundup Magazine
Winner of the Spur Award

http://amzn.to/ooaaUS

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WHY IT MATTERS TO ME: CLASS Oct. 29, 2010

2011-02-27T14:31:00.000-08:00

October 29, 2010

Last time I talked about how a grad school assignment had inspired me to think seriously about when, and how, I had first become aware there was such a thing as race or class. That thought process was extremely valuable to me; the act of isolating the ways I became aware of those things helped me to understand how those awarenesses had affected my life from that point forward, and why I felt as I did about those topics. In that blog, I expounded on my experiences with race; now I’ll do the same with class. I do run the risk of repeating myself, because I have discussed some of these things in earlier posts –if so I hope you’ll bear with me.

I’ll begin, as before, with a little background. I was born in the small town of Sparta, pop. 5,000, in the Upper Cumberland region of Tennessee. The Upper Cumberland stretches across northern middle Tennessee and southern middle Kentucky; the Tennessee portion is comprised of ten counties. (At this point you are probably wondering why I have wandered into a geography lesson, and may be nodding off –I’ll try to control myself, I promise.)

I have a reason for bringing all that up. Tennessee became a state in 1796, and by that time the ancestors of all four of my grandparents were already living in the Upper Cumberland; there are cemeteries in White and Overton counties where I can visit the graves of multiple generations of them. The region has also been home to Civil War guerrillas (and archenemies) Champ Ferguson and Tinker Dave Beaty, World War I hero Alvin York, Louis L’Amour’s fictional Sackett clan, bluegrass legends Lester Flatt and Benny Martin, and a couple of politicians named Albert Gore. There are a lot of families like mine, who have been there for a couple of centuries… and in that time, especially in the smaller towns (and the largest town, Cookeville, has a whopping population of about 20,000), there has not been a lot of social mobility among those families in all that time. If you are from there and your family has some wealth, odds are they had it before the Civil War; if your family is poor, they’ve probably been poor the whole time as well.

My paternal grandfather was a farmer –a sharecropper, really –and he did prison time in the 1940s for making moonshine. He later worked the fields many years for one of Sparta’s most prominent citizens. My maternal grandparents were townfolk, living in Sparta –my grandfather worked as a freelance gardener and handyman for several of the town’s wealthy families. My mom and her seven brothers and sisters grew up with hunger as a frequent companion. She was born in 1951 –a baby boomer. Everyone knows that baby boomers grew up in suburban houses with pipe-smoking Ward Cleaver dads in gray flannel suits, right? Not where I’m from. My mom did not have electricity or running water until the late 60s, when she was married to my soldier father (I was born in ‘68.) In the early 70s my grandma still heated with a cast-iron wood stove in the living room- I never saw that sort of thing on TV.

My mom and her siblings are all extremely intelligent, and love to read- go to my Aunt Essie’s house and you’ll see Faulkner and McCarthy lying about (their books, not them personally), my mother has an impressive library of her own (she particularly likes African American history and fiction, and historical fiction in general), and when my Uncle Gordon (the eldest) died, my mother found among his effects 1950s rejection letters for a novel manuscript. Those facts are especially significant when you consider that none of them graduated from high school. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, most of them never even attended high school. In fact, I am the first male in my family –on either side, ever, so far as I know –to graduate high school, let alone college and grad school (a couple of my older female cousins did so ahead of me, and to be fair my Aunt Essie’s son Stanton would have had he survived his senior year.)

Suffice it to say, even a town as small as Sparta had a set of tracks, and I was from the wrong side of them.
My earliest memories are of being three years old, and living in a small house (near one of the black communities I talked about last time, Black Bottom) with my (recently separated) mom, her sister Essie and her son, and two of their brothers. My mom got remarried when I was five- she and her husband, and many of their siblings, worked for minimum wage at one of the garment factories in town. There were several such factories- they’d moved into the area in the mid-20th century because labor was ridiculously cheap, since Appalachian Southerners tended not to unionize; some miners had made a go at a strong union during the Depression, which led to a good bit of murder and mayhem in Wilder. At any rate, none of us had very much in the economic department.

My Aunt Essie worked in the factory office –and ended up marrying the owner, a Czech Jew who was 20+ years her senior. Edgar Lebenhart was a kind, gentle man- the son of a Prague bureaucrat, he had escaped Europe during the Holocaust (many of his family did not.) He was educated and cultured –he spoke five languages and collected Palestinian artifacts –he was a huge influence on me. He provided me with a treasure trove of history books; no one had ever even mentioned college to me, and here was someone saying that I should be a professor someday. They bought a very nice house, and then a smaller one next door which my family rented from them. It was a nice set-up all around, especially for me: I had two families, really, and those years were a break from the poverty we had mostly known. It didn’t last long, though; Edgar died of a heart attack when I was 9, and a few months later Essie’s son Stanton –who had always been a big brother to me –died in a car wreck on his 18th birthday. Over time, Essie’s health problems ate away at the money Edgar had left her until it was all gone. The nice houses at the edge of the woods were gone (that place is still the home I go to in my dreams), and my family was back to moving from one rented trailer to another. Sometimes they had big holes in the floor that we covered with ply-board; one was so small that I slept on the ironing board built into the hallway wall. My step-father developed tuberculosis and was usually out of work, leaving us to get by on my mom’s minimum wage job. There were many days when I would not have eaten at all had I not had free lunch at school. Food stamps were a fact of life –but once Reagan’s trickle-down economics came into play, they were cut way back. To this day when I think of Ronald Reagan I think of the harsh growling in my stomach as I looked into the cupboard after a hard day of being a 7th grader and saw nothing but a small can of Crisco, and knew there’d be nothing there tomorrow either. And to this day when I hear people deride those less fortunate than themselves as lazy and undeserving welfare bums, I am enraged. My family did nothing to deserve the poverty they suffered, except be heirs to generations of it with no tools to get out.

The Upper Cumberland was one of the country’s most active moonshine-producing regions in the first half of the 20th century. In the 70s and 80s it was one of the country’s top marijuana producers; nowadays it is a center of meth dealing. Several of my relatives and friends have been in and out of prison. People need to stop crowing about how hard they are on crime and start asking themselves why people in this one region, for a century, have been turning to drugs and alcohol as both an escape and a career; is it because Appalachian people are naturally lazy and/or criminal? That is the image the rest of the country sometimes seems determined to focus on, but it is not true. There just aren’t very many opportunities there- and, with most of the factories I mentioned earlier having moved to Mexico in pursuit of even cheaper labor, it is getting worse.

So –sometimes my family had stuff (like adequate shelter and food) and sometimes they didn’t. That wasn’t hard to figure out, even for a kid. When, though, did I realize that there was more to it than that, and that there was such a thing as social class? I was forced to cast my memory back, for that grad school exercise, and I realized it was around the same age that I had started to recognize racialization.

I really wasn’t aware of class in elementary school. I went to one of the smallest schools in the county, and its location made it an interesting mix. It was near the black communities known as Black Bottom and Bluff City, and by extension was therefore near the poor white neighborhoods which bordered them. At the same time, though, it was also close to a neighborhood which included a place called Sugar Hill –a scenic area where many of the town’s well-to-do lived.

At this point, I have to clarify something. When you grow up in generational poverty in a small town, the people you view as “rich big shots” are really nothing of the kind. In any other setting, they would be considered as average middle class folks- small business owners, professionals and the like. But to poor people, middle class seems rich, and that’s how Sugar Hill denizens appeared to the rest of us. Or, more accurately, to our parents.

You see, the kids at Baker Elementary played together –black and white, poor and not-so-poor, and never thought anything about it. I had very close friends from all three neighborhoods, and there seemed to be no difference. But when I wanted to have some of my Sugar Hill friends over to the house, or go to theirs, my mom was always horrified at the prospect. She was still deeply hurt by the way kids of that class had tormented her as a child, and feared my experiencing something similar. Nevertheless, we played at one another’s houses, and I never thought anything about it.

Then, elementary school was over and middle school began. Without even realizing what was happening or how, we started self-segregating… the “popular” kids (and somehow you just never saw many poor “popular” kids) banded together, the black kids did the same, and the group known in some circles as white trash hung together. Many of my best friends had been a part of that “popular” group- and all of a sudden, none of them ever talked to me. They didn’t even seem to notice when I was close by, like I was a pigeon. It was like I ceased to exist altogether. It even seemed that many of the teachers knew who the “proper” kids were. I gradually realized that I was no longer considered an important person –because of who I was, and what I did or didn’t have. It also sunk in for the first time that those upper middle class types had things I did not, and never would, because of who my family was –not just physical things, but privileges. And the unfairness of it burned in me like a flame fed by a bellows.

To this day, one of the worst things anyone can do, and the quickest way to arouse my fury, is to imply that I am intrinsically not good enough. The second worst thing you can do is to imply that poor people in general are not good enough- that they are automatically lazy and worthless, and imply that they deserve whatever they get (or don’t get.) I take it very personally. When you say that, even in a general sense, you are talking about my family. I also despise being ignored because of who I am or what I do. I was a janitor for many years, and most people never looked into my face or even seemed to realize I was there.

Both race and class issues cut straight to my sense of justice, which –because of the things I have discussed here and elsewhere –is one of the core parts of my psyche. The difference is, I approach racial issues from the perspective of someone on the privileged end of the social construct, recognizing its iniquity and trying my best to disown that privilege. With class, I approach things as the unprivileged one (even though, from what they tell me, I am now on the verge of being a middle class professional.) And unprivileged people react to the concept of privilege by –taking it personally, and getting pissed off. It is human nature.

There are people out there who will say that someone from my background isn’t really unprivileged at all –that I escaped poverty, and that proves anyone can if they really want to. To which I say, bullshit. I am extremely lucky. For every person who tried as hard as I did and succeeded, there were three more who tried just as hard and failed because the deck was stacked against them. And seven others who never tried at all –not because they were lazy, but because poverty creates fatalism. I am in no way better than my friends and kin who wound up in prison. I am fortunate. They are not. And a big part of my good fortune was having an influence early on –my Uncle Edgar –who could envision something better for me and make me believe in my potential.

Some people start in the basement and scale the walls of the tower, until they reach its peak. Very, very, very few. And some, once they are there, become smug; I am here because I am exceptional. Let those still in the basement do the same, if they can. But that’s not how I look at it. I want to do all I can to throw wide the doors that bar their way, and welcome them all. Because I know most of them deserve to be here just as much as I do. I do realize that opening those doors is a tall order, and not one I can realistically do- but maybe, if I really throw my weight into it, I can budge it a fraction of an inch, and other people can pitch in. At the very least, in the meantime, I can try to treat people like human beings –no matter who they are and what they do for a living.

Because that’s what I expect, and demand. Whether I should be a professor or a janitor- I am still me.

BOOKS BY TROY D. SMITH

"Smith creates a classic from the first chapter ... a magnificent novel."- Roundup Magazine
Winner of the Spur Award

http://amzn.to/ooaaUS

http://amzn.to/nYLBww

WHY IT MATTERS TO ME: RACE Oct. 19, 2010

2011-02-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

October 19, 2010

I often find myself, in loosely constructed essays that begin as tirades on Facebook and turn into posts on my (erratically amended) blog, addressing social issues which are very important to me: they are more often than not race, class, and sexuality issues. I suppose one could frame them generally as social justice concerns. In debating people with opposite views it becomes increasingly clear to me that one’s stand on these issues is informed largely by one’s own experiences. Duh, you say. Well, yeah… that statement does reflect perception of the obvious. But knowing that your experiences inform your politics, spirituality, and et cetera, is one thing- truly understanding it is another thing entirely.

My focus on social justice has informed my whole adult life. The volunteer work I did with Haitian immigrants in the late ‘80s, the ministries I undertook when I was a young man, the poetry and fiction I continue to write, the themes I explore as a professional historian, the approaches I take in the classroom, all have been driven in whole or in part by the fuel of my social passions. So have my efforts to understand my own place in the universe; who I am, and who I aspire to be.

In my first year of grad school, I took a course on the Black Freedom Movement taught by Professor Sundiata Cha-Jua, whom I greatly respect and admire. One of the first assignments seemed, on the surface, ridiculously simple, and yet turned out to be so complex that it still echoes in my thoughts several years later. The professor instructed us to write a short paper addressing the earliest moments in our lives when we fully realized that there were race and class differences in our society. The very act of sifting through my memories for those epiphanies made me think about my life, and myself, in ways I never had before. I have cared about these things for most of my life –but why? I think a similar exercise would help anyone develop better understandings of themselves and of these particular issues. Perhaps you are a person who does not particularly care; well, why not? Maybe isolating the answer to that question can lead you to future experiences which will make you care more.

I intend to structure this endeavor in three parts, and explain the moments in my life that have made me care about race, class, and sexuality. It may seem like a self-absorbed endeavor, and the first time I did it, privately, it was. In this case, though, I hope that seeing how someone else’s thought processes led them to a position might give you a starting point to find where you are on the spectrum of opinion/engagement, and why. I am going to start with race.

I come from a small town in Appalachian Tennessee (Sparta- population when I was a kid, it has not changed much, was 5,000, or about one-quarter of the people in the county. The rest lived in one of a handful of hamlets, or in the rurals.) There were two or three hundred black people (the 2000 census recorded close to 250), making the town 5% black and 95% white back when I was growing up. It may sound weird, but that gave Sparta the highest percentage of black citizens of any town in the whole Upper Cumberland Region- Cookeville has more numerically, but they make up a smaller percentage of the overall population (in 2000, about 700 individuals making up 3% of the population.) No other nearby town was even close; in fact, two –Crossville and Gainesboro –were “sundown towns” and when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s had virtually no black inhabitants at all. My point is, Sparta TN has a black community, and small as that community is it is one of the biggest in the area. Very few of those African Americans lived in the rurals (virtually none, in fact.) Most of them lived in two distinct neighborhoods in town: one was referred to as Bluff City (not on maps- none of these black neighborhoods were ever marked on maps.) The other, larger neighborhood was in the center of town. It was known, to every white person in the county, as Nigger Hill. Forgive my use of that word- I hate it, but I fear that euphemisms or asterisks will weaken the impact of knowing that such a term could be tossed around so lightly so recently. Over the years most folks –except some, in private conversation- have shortened that offensive title to just “The Hill.” There was a third, much smaller, neighborhood not far from Bluff City called Black Bottom. All three neighborhoods were clustered around the Calfkiller River.

I noticed when I was a teenager that white folks from the rurals were much more likely to be vocally prejudiced than white folks from town, and I have always suspected that it was because they rarely interacted with black people. My mom was raised in town- her family had been extremely poor, and they lived on the outskirts of the Bluff City / Black Bottom area. Her childhood friends, neighbors, and babysitters had been black, and she knew them as people instead of scary “others.” There were still social differences, of course; my mom didn’t have to sit in the balcony at the movies or drink from a different fountain. But she did not raise me to think of black people as inferior, scary, or even different- and I suspect many of my white rural classmates had a different perspective offered to them at home. A few years ago I attended a Black History Month expo in Sparta, organized by my friend Louvenia Gardenhire, and couldn’t help noticing that half the audience was black and half was white, and I noticed that the majority of whites I recognized were “townfolk.” This is not to say the townfolk weren’t prejudiced, I just think it was a smaller percentage and more subtly presented. When I was a teenager in the mid-80s one my biggest influences was an elderly black man in the Bluff City area who had been childhood friends with my maternal grandfather. I used to sit and talk with him for hours, and I learned a lot.

None of that, however, answers the question asked of me by Professor Cha-Jua. When was the first time I really, really saw and understood the significance of race? The answer lay, not in personal experience, but on television.

It was 1980, and I was not quite twelve years old. The family was gathered around the set –I believe we were watching 60 Minutes, but it may have been a similar news anthology program. The program did a piece on Emmett Till, who had been murdered twenty-five years before.

If you are not familiar with the case of Emmett Till, he was an African American teenager from Chicago. In 1955 he visited relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Accounts vary, but the 14-year-old Emmett –unversed in “proper” behavior for blacks in the 1950s South –managed to offend a 21-year-old married white woman. Some reports were that he whistled, others that he called her baby, others that he put an arm around her waist and asked her for a date using “lewd” language. Whatever it was he did, it offended the woman and her relatives; Till was later abducted from his great-uncle’s house, taken to a barn in the next county, beaten and tortured, and murdered. His body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River. His mother insisted on an open casket; photos of his terribly disfigured body, and details of his death, were in newspapers all around the country, leading many Americans to reflect on the racial problems of Mississippi and the country in general. Despite an abundance of evidence, an all-white jury acquitted the two accused murderers.

I watched the 1980 news segment in horror. The infamous open casket photo was shown; relatives of Till were interviewed, and I remember one woman –I assume it was his mother but am not certain now –broke down in sobs. I was overwhelmed. I quickly ran and locked myself in the bathroom because I didn’t want anyone to see me cry, and held in the deep, painful sobs that welled up from my soul. I prayed, silently, fervently and desperately: Why, God? How could the world be such a place –how could people do something like that, because of the color of someone’s skin? I prayed that the Lord would help me understand. And I prayed, with all the sincerity of an 11-year-old, that He would somehow let me do something someday –even if it were only a little something –to help improve that world, to help set those balances straight. It was not until I thought back, while working on Cha-Jua’s essay, that I realized how profoundly those moments affected me.

Concern for racial justice became an ingrained part of who I was. A few years later, when I was in high school and looking for a church to attend (my family was not religious at the time), one of the things that attracted me most to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a religion I would join as a teen and leave when I was in my late 20s) was the racial harmony I saw at their meetings –this when I was from a town where churches self-segregated. Once, when I was 18 or so, I heard a sermon about “Freedom as the Children of God” in which the speaker pointed out that many people thought they were free, but were not. That set me to thinking about freedom- what it is, where it’s found –and (history nerd that I was) I was reminded of how the slaves were freed after the Civil War, yet both the Reconstruction South and the industrial North were not really havens of freedom for them. I decided I wanted to write a book someday –not about slavery, but about freedom. First, though, I spent several years in the full-time ministry. Two of those years I worked exclusively with Haitian immigrants (this was the late 80s, and unrest in Haiti brought a large number of Haitians to America –looking for freedom.) The first year was spent in South Florida, and the second was in New York City. I was living and working at Bethel, the Witnesses’ world headquarters, while serving and preaching in a French-speaking congregation comprised almost wholly of Haitians (La Congregation Francaise Centrale de Brooklyn.) It was while I was there, going door to door in Bedford-Stuy and Crown Heights, that I had another epiphany about race.

There was a lot of racial unrest in Brooklyn in the late 80s and early 90s –ever hear of the Crown Heights riot, or see the film Do the Right Thing? When I was working in those neighborhoods, I was often the minority. On many occasions, angry black people called me names, swore at me, threw glass bottles at me, and on two occasions threatened to kill me… because I was white. It hurt, terribly. I was trying to be a good person. I was trying to help people. I hated racism with every fiber of my being. And yet, there were people who despised me and threatened me –because just from looking at my skin, they thought they knew who I was. It was so unfair. It burned like nothing I had ever experienced. And then, one day, something dawned on me. If I wanted to avoid such treatment, all I had to do was leave that neighborhood and go –almost anywhere in the country. The unfairness would melt away, and I would once more be treated like a person. But if I had been born black instead of white, there would be nowhere I could go in the entire United States where I could completely escape that horrible feeling. And all of a sudden –even though I could never fully understand –I understood better. A few years later, I did write that book about the meaning of freedom: Bound for the Promise-Land. It won Western Writers of America’s Spur Award, and was complimented by many who read it for its verisimilitude. The truth is this: when I wrote that book, the story of a former slave who spends his whole life looking for peace and trying to understand freedom, and tried to put myself in that character’s place, all I had to do was call up the memory of the feelings I had on that day in Brooklyn when people were throwing glass bottles at me from their cars as they drove by. And I had an inkling of how my character felt, and of how the bottle throwers felt.

Flash forward now to the past few years. While at grad school I worked for awhile, as part of a teaching fellowship, at the University High School. Every year a group of those Uni High kids take a weeklong trip to Clarksdale, Mississippi to work for Habitat for Humanity there. That is a noble goal in itself, but the experience involves much more than just that. The teachers –particularly Dr. William Sutton –make the whole thing an educational experience, spending the evenings after a hard day’s work discussing race and class issues with the kids, most of whom are from privileged middle class homes in Illinois, and to whom the poverty and even the history of the rural Mississippi Delta are so foreign as to be virtually incomprehensible. I have accompanied my friend Bill Sutton on many of those trips now, both with student and church groups, and Clarksdale almost seems like a second home to me –it feels more like home, to a Southerner such as myself, than Champaign, Illinois ever could. I have discovered that my own background of poverty has helped me be able to present fresh perspectives to those students, and some have told me they were encouraged by my words to aspire to lives of greater public service. Those are some of the most wonderful words I have ever heard in my life.

On the last such trip, this past spring, I realized something. I was at the Habitat dorm, at a singalong with the young college students from my church group and several of my Clarksdale friends, and a couple of the songs we sang were old Civil Rights standby’s: “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” It dawned on me while singing those songs that I was only a few miles away from the spot where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. In a way, I had come full-circle… and along the way, maybe, just maybe I have done a little something to make a difference. I keep trying.

And that’s why race matters to me.

In a my next post I will talk about class. Right now I better get back to work on that almost-finished dissertation before I get grounded. It’s about race, by the way.

BOOKS BY TROY D. SMITH

"Smith creates a classic from the first chapter ... a magnificent novel."- Roundup Magazine
Winner of the Spur Award

http://amzn.to/ooaaUS

http://amzn.to/nYLBww

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RACISM AND PREJUDICE? Aug. 1, 2009

2011-02-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

August 1, 2009

There are commonly some misperceptions about the words "prejudice" and "racism."

If you are prejudiced, you "pre-judge" others without data, based on your suppositions about all people of a certain group. All black people are lazy, all Jews are greedy, all Arabs are terrorists, all white people are racists.

Racism, technically (at least according to us wacky academics), is not the same thing as prejudice. Racism means supporting or being actively invested in the continuation of a racial hierarchy in which one's own group dominates. By this definition, anyone and any member of any group can be prejudiced. George Jefferson and Fred Sanford were extremely prejudiced, to use fictional examples. It could be argued that Malcolm X was actively prejudiced for many years, MLK was not. But those individuals technically could not be described as racists; only someone who traditionally benefited from being at the top of the social structure could do that. Archie Bunker was working class, barely qualifying as lower middle class, and didn't have a lot of leverage in society; still, he was racist. This is because, as a white man of his generation, he was taught to believe that simply being white made him superior to anyone who was not, and that was the natural order of things- he was invested in this belief, and felt threatened when liberals chopped away at how things had always been, because if that lifelong belief were challenged he would be losing the only thing in his life that made him feel naturally special, and which he had come to expect society in general to back up.

Because of the nature of the world around us here in the U.S., I believe that none of us can ever completely rise above our prejudices. No matter how liberal you are, or how open-minded a conservative, you might still feel more threatened walking down a dark street with young black kids around than young white kids, for example. I also believe that, no matter how non-racist you want to be, it is virtually impossible for a white person in America to divorce him or herself from the intrinsic advantages of being white in what has always been, and was designed to be, and thus to a degree still is, a racist society. Sure, folks can say that affirmative action gives all the advantages to the minority instead of the white male. This does not negate either the effects of generations of disadvantage placed on a minority group, or the fact that in daily life they can still expect to be treated differently in subtle ways than a white person would. For example, one early study on racial profiling indicated that in one U.S. city black drivers made up 70% of random traffic stops, even though they were only 17% of that city’s population. Henry Louis Gates is not a unique case; I have a black friend right here in Champaign County, Illinois who was confronted in his own home and almost arrested on suspicion of burglary after neighbors saw him go in through the window when he lost his key. Now, I’ve been locked out of my own home and broken in on several occasions, as have many of my white friends, and none of us have ever had the cops called on us. I say this again: I believe that being white confers certain automatic advantages on a person which most of us never think about and don’t recognize because we take it for granted. I say this despite the fact that I come from a very poor background and in a lot of ways have had to struggle mightily to overcome that and get where I am now.

Despite the fact that we can’t divorce ourselves from the advantages of whiteness, we do not have to be racist. It is possible to renounce the structure and no longer invest in it. Some call such individuals “race traitors.” A lot of Americans, though, are still very invested in the racial hierarchy, often without being aware of it. A lot of them are working class. The loss of that hierarchy, or even adjustments to it, means a subtle shift in their world and in their view of themselves; they feel threatened, because they sense that they would be losing that certain something which makes them feel special. I have a close relative who is probably the most prejudiced person I have ever known. Once, visiting him, he started yet another race dialogue and his embarrassed wife intervened. “Leave Troy alone,” she said, “you’ll only start an argument; you know how he feels, and he knows how you feel, and you’re being rude.” Then, however, she turned to me with a concerned look on her face. “But Troy,” she said, “I’m not prejudiced, and I have black friends –but what would happen if we all started intermarrying, and there’s more of this mixed race stuff? What would become of white people?”

“Why,” I answered, “if that happened, eventually everyone would be brown, and there’d be no race at all.” She did not like this idea, in fact she seemed very disturbed by it. Because if there was no race, there would be no chance she could be better than her black friends. An even scarier idea, though, and one that has plagued white people ever since we started enslaving Africans, is that someday they might somehow get the upper hand and be in a position to treat us like we have treated them. This was a big fear leading up to and during the Civil War; if the slaves were freed they would surely embark on a bloody rampage of revenge and maybe even become politicians! The former, almost amazingly, did not happen except in a handful of isolated instances. Former slave masters, who tended to focus on the Old Testament, failed to take into account the forgiveness inherent in their New Testament-oriented ex-slaves.

That age-long fear, though, is still alive and well. The election of a black president, instead of “solving” race, has brought it to a boil as more and more Obama detractors have resorted to racially tinged communication. “Obama is not actually American”; he “hates white people” and is a “racist.” To say nothing of the racial epithets and offensive racialized cartoons and jokes floating around. People who engage in this sort of behavior are afraid: afraid that their world is changing, and afraid that they are losing valuable advantages. They are afraid of things being unfairly stacked against them, and –like many whites in the 19th century –afraid that those formerly on the bottom will wind up in charge and take all those advantages for their own group. Obvious facts don’t matter. Of course Obama is a U.S. citizen. He was raised by his white grandparents- of course he doesn’t hate white people.

This country was built on racism. Africans were enslaved and treated as non-human so that the wealthy planter class could remain in power and continue maximizing their profits. As long as workers, white and black alike, could be continually played off against each other by race, that power would remain consolidated. Poor whites from the 17th century on have been told –sometimes subliminally, sometimes directly –“yes, you are poor… yes you endure much hardship. But at least you are not black…. At least you are not one of THEM….so long as that is true, you will always be one of US.” This line of reasoning was effective enough that a minority of white Southerners who were slave-owners could convince poor whites who would never even be able to afford to rent a slave that they should fight and die to protect slavery. Slavery may be gone, but the social structure erected to prop it up is still around, and still being used in the same way. This time it is certain elements of the Republican Party, stoking the racial fears of the middle class in order to gain political leverage over the current administration. And it is WORKING.

If you have found that it is working on YOU- don’t let it. The enemy is not a mysterious black bogeyman, it is the people who use that image to scare you into aggression and into doing what they want. If we all just realized how this system works, we could resist its influence. Disavow power for the few, even if it benefits you in the short run; wake up.

"Smith creates a classic from the first chapter ... a magnificent novel."- Roundup Magazine
Winner of the Spur Award

http://www.amazon.com/Bound-Promise-Land-Troy-D-Smith/dp/1461042690/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1309000041&sr=1-1