This series is appropriate for both young adults (ages 18+) and older readers alike. The history of the Panhandle serves as the backdrop of each book and is weaved into the character development and the story itself, so you are learning pieces of Texas Panhandle history while reading a fun and engaging book.
These books are family sagas and multigenerational – each story spanning across several generations from grandparents to parents to children and grandchildren. They tackle tough subjects like class differences, interracial relationships, PTSD, alcoholism, and family loss. Even with these tough topics, each book is still rich with humor, love, and personal growth. And one thing is known from the beginning – these stories all have a happy ending.
All tagged writing about racism
As an OWG (Old White Guy) who grew up in the Texas Panhandle in the 1940s and 1950s—before the Civil Rights era, I find it hard to understand antiracism. I’ve always insisted that I’m not racist. But Black folks tell me, “That’s not enough. You have to be antiracist.” In part, I wrote my novel, Colleen and the Statue, to try to understand what Confederate statues mean to African Americans, and thereby understand racism and antiracism.
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My novel, Colleen and the Statue, is a love story. However, it also answers the question, “What do we do about this Confederate statue?” That is, for this particular statue standing in Central Park of Mackenzie, Texas, my story gives a unique solution. Read the novel to know what it is. Personally, I think that each statue has its own story and we should judge it accordingly, asking: “Who put it up? Where was it put? What did it symbolize when it was erected? What does it symbolize now? Should we distinguish between the historical person and what that person’s statue stands for today?” I think this last question is the most important one.
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Imagine this: It is July 2020. A protest march is taking place in front of the arrival terminal of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. Dozens of protesters are marching up and down, loudly demanding the removal of the 9-foot bronze statue of “the Duke” from main lobby of the airport. They are university students—mostly African American. A staff writer with the Los Angeles Times is covering the demonstration. He notices that one of the protesters is a petite young Vietnamese woman, who is out of place among the boisterous Black demonstrators. She is silent and not moving from her spot directly in front of the entrance doors, and she is holding a modest sign printed in calligraphy: REMOVE A MONSTER.
Colleen and the Statue is Volume 5 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle. It’s apropos for the times we’re in. May-June 2020 will be remembered as times of protests, marches, and questioning of the fundamental values of American culture and society—brought on by the senseless murder of yet another black man at the hands of heartless white police officers. Usually, opinions on the matter are divided into two distinct camps: white and black, with each side giving an opposing, contradictory version of what happened and its meaning. But what if there were a third opinion? What if what took place in Baltimore to George Floyd had taken place under a statue of Robert E. Lee, and the statue could talk?
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Once upon a time, the Comanche people ruled the Texas Panhandle. Then they were disappeared and erased—saw both genocide and “cultural genocide.” Tammie’s Destiny, Volume 6 of my historical romance series, tells the coming-of-age story and forbidden love between an adolescent Comanche girl from a reservation in New Mexico and a young man from a Texas millionaire ranching family. The tale’s background is the generational hatred between Texans and Native Americans, seemingly making such a relationship impossible.
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As I said, Jim Crow was not real for me. I grew up in Amarillo’s white ghetto, totally unaware of how “coloreds” lived their lives in N-town on the other side of the tracks. I had no idea of the unofficial brutal system that completely controlled their lives, and of the horrific consequences for even the slightest violation of Jim Crow’s unwritten laws: disappearance, lynching, indefinite imprisonment, beatings, castration, gang-rape, black-listing from employment, burning down of houses, and more—much more. Even today, I find it hard to believe that this was happening in the city and the region where I grew up. … But I’m not a black, so “they didn’t come for me.”
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In recent times, starting in the mid-1920s and the 1930s, white supremacist groups, such as the modern KKK, have claimed the statues as their own—as heroic defenders of the white race. The original meaning has been co-opted, so that now—today—in the first decades of the Twenty-First Century, long after the last Confederate veteran has died, and after almost all the children of Confederate soldiers have passed away, the racists, the white supremacists, Aryan Nation members, neo-Nazis, neo-KKK members, and the like, have made the statues of the Confederate soldier into symbols of the so-called “movement” to defend and preserve the white race.
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“[Good-bye] to officers who put ‘duty’ above ‘ethics,’ and to the troops who regularly complained that the Army’s Rules of Engagement were too strict—as if more brutality, bombing and firepower (with less concern for civilians) would have brought victory instead of stalemate.”
Words of Major Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, who retired in 2018, after 18 years in the Army and 11 deployments, often to war zones. Words very unusual for a multi-medalist soldier who was teaching history at West Point. He had become a disillusioned pacifist after what he saw in his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan—and he gave up his once-promising career, in order to speak out.
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I have determined that one of my coming novels in the series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, will deal with the issue of whether to remove the Confederate statue from the central park of my fictitious city of Mackenzie, which is modeled after Amarillo. At present, there is an absolutely incredible number of such monuments, which are scattered throughout the former Confederate states. The central theme of my novel will be: Is it right to honor a soldier who served in the wrong army? That is, even if the soldiers of the Confederate States of America were heroes and valiant soldiers, were they mistaken in fighting for what became known as the “Lost Cause”?
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My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.
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