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 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 deals with the question, “Is there such a thing as ‘systemic racism,’ or are there only individual racists?” This is a heavy issue—very controversial at this time in American society. The Confederate soldier in my novel—is he only responsible for his actions as an individual who was fighting to preserve his family’s cotton plantation, or is he answerable as a soldier in an army whose ‘Cause’ was to preserve the Southern Way of Life that was based on slavery? A heavy issue indeed. … Bear with me.
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Colleen and the Statue is Volume 5 in my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle. At first I considered making the title, Colleen and the “Confederate” Statue. However, that would have limited what I wanted to ask to the controversy de jour: “Should statues of Confederate generals and personages be removed?” I wanted to address a larger question: “Should the deceased ‘Great Men’ of history who committed obvious atrocities be given one last chance to repent?”
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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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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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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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