Where Will We Stand?

In September, I had the good fortune to see the brilliant Shaw Theatre Festival production of The House That Will Not Stand by Marcus Gardley in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It was marvelously staged in the round and acted with intensity by a superb cast of women playing New Orleans Créoles de couleur, Creoles of color, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a destiny changing moment in American history.

The April 30, 1803 acquisition of 828,000 square miles by the United States from France for $15 million doubled the country’s size by adding territory that, in addition to Louisiana, would eventually become the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and parts of Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

But, even as the transaction expanded the young nation’s prospects for the future, it also shook the foundation of everything the mixed-race characters in Gardley’s play had ever known, and it shriveled their dreams for the future. Under French rule they had enjoyed a privileged position in society—more restricted than their white counterparts, to be sure, but vastly more advantaged than that of enslaved Black people, including the ones they themselves owned. Under the French, they knew where they stood. With the Americans, they could not be sure. The uncertainty tore them apart.

I have been thinking a lot about the dynamic explored by the play in these final days before the November 5 Presidential election. Everything we have known as Americans, could be changed. With our votes, we will select the path we wish the country to take—a nation governed by laws, as it has been for two and a half centuries, or one led by autocratic caprice.

Will the journey on that path begin with a peaceful transition from one administration to the next? Or, will it, as many fear, begin as a January 6, 2021 redux?

In The House That Will Not Stand, a family is destroyed by tensions that arrive with new laws and cultural traditions. Let us hope that when the election is over, the United States does not become a country that will not stand. The last time Americans reached that point was at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and the reverberations—for good and for ill—are still being felt.

Welcome

Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many blog posts as I embark on my latest career, that of a published author. My first novel, Red Clay, will be released on February 4th by Blackstone Publishing in hardcover, audio and e-book editions. It is available for pre-purchase now at https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/products/book-gt5d or wherever you buy your books.

My previous vocations—journalist, corporate communications executive, professor, consultant—have all involved research and writing in a variety of formats. All have required clarity and precision, depth of knowledge about the subject at hand (more in some situations than others), and the capacity to think critically and employ ideas across conceptual lines.

However, none of those previous roles have been as fulfilling as working on Red Clay, a multi-generational saga that follows the intertwined fates of two families—one white, one Black—bound together by history, culture, custom, and even a shared family name, as they seek to make their way through the chaos of the Civil War’s final days, the tumult of Reconstruction, and, eventually, the fear and uncertainty posed by the arrival of Jim Crow.

My fulfillment resulted from three things: First, the opportunity to portray the complexity of the African American community at a crucial moment in history, alongside the complicated relationships between Blacks and whites at that time. Second, the chance to reflect on how events of more than a century-and-a-half ago continue to reverberate in twenty-first century America. Third, the possibility of imagining the life and times of my great-grandfather, the man whose life was the inspiration for Felix, the central figure in Red Clay.

If he could see us now, more than eighty years after his death, the actual Felix would surely be astonished by the lives his descendants are living, and I believe he would be proud of what African Americans in general have achieved in the United States of 2024. Sadly, however, I suspect that he would not be surprised that Confederate flags still fly, though he would be shocked to see how many of them flutter in Northern breezes, and he would surely be dismayed that the vitriol in today’s political discourse mirrors that of his own time.

We are living in period when we would all be well-advised to recall William Faulkner’s much-quoted line from Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Working on Red Clay was a constant reminder of that notion. Reading it may engender similar thoughts.