Family Matters

My last post of 2014 is a couple of days late. That’s what a long holiday, too much TV football, and grown children returning to the hive will do for you. The computer keyboard gets shoved aside for a game of some sort, the kitchen countertops stay covered with artery-clogging snacks, and chaos reigns for days on end. Or so it seems.

But we love it all, and view these few wacky days as another example that sometimes, maybe all the time - family matters. Read those two words as an adjective-noun, or as a noun-verb, either way, family matters seem to dominate the end of the year around our house.

In the real world of right now, our older son’s beautiful young wife is expecting the birth of their first child in five weeks or so. The little guy will be our first grandchild, so we’re really happy. Meanwhile, two days ago, our younger son proposed marriage to a beautiful young lady with whom he has been smitten.

The big question came just after they climbed the narrow iron spiral staircase to the balcony in the historic 115 year old Lockhart Public Library Building. The clever lad carved a hole in the pages of a hardback copy of Wuthering Heights and hid the ring inside. Then he recruited an accomplice to stash the book on a shelf full of dusty old leather-bound novels. Happily, the sparkly ring survived an unguarded hour or two hidden in the pages of the gloomy Victorian epic of romance and revenge. The beautiful young lady said “Yes,” so there’s an April wedding ahead in 2015, paving the way for more grandkids.

By the way, “Wuthering Heights” is more than the name of Emily Bronte’s lengthy novel. It is also the name of the English country home in which much of the action in that novel takes place. Wuthering means blowing strongly, so here in Texas we’d call a wuthering height a real windy hill. A house up there in the 1860’s would probably look like the spooky house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho movie, only dustier. And maybe without an old dead lady in a rocking chair.

In my American Victorian era Civil War tale, Tangled Honor, a good bit of the action occurs in the McBee family home in Lexington, Virginia, which can’t help but bring family matters into the story. The McBee house in my book doesn’t have a name since it’s in town, and is a widow’s home. I could have called it Widow’s Heights, I suppose, but I didn’t put it on a hill. There is an old lady in the McBee house, the Widow McBee, of course. And she has a rocking chair, but her heart was still beating last time I checked in on her.

Anyway, the Captain McBee Civil War novels have become as much a family story as a war story, which might be off-putting to some readers who enjoyed the purely military plot of my first book, Whittled Away.  Granted that family stories can get convoluted really fast, and those story threads in a novel can grow and take over more of the plot than the writer, at least this writer, first intended. On the other hand, family relationships have a way of blowing up or changing rather quickly and unexpectedly, and that’s not so very different from war.

Since we are at the end of 2014, I’m remembering that this past year has been the 150^th anniversary of the last full year of the Civil War. The year 1864 was an ugly year for America, a really ugly year for the South. The military campaigns of 1864 were exceptionally brutal as Grant and Sherman relentlessly attacked, and the Confederacy reached the point of desperation, yet dug their heels in, refusing to yield.

The states of Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee in particular endured terrible months of the war impacting the civilian populations as large armies foraged for food, stealing whatever they could find to feed the soldiers, then destroying the farms. Small towns and large cities were targeted by artillery. I bet almost all of us remember the stunning panoramic film shots of Atlanta burning created for the film Gone With the Wind.

I’ve not written about 1864 in the McBee saga yet, but in June of ‘64 the little town of Lexington, Virginia was shelled and many of the buildings were burned down by Union soldiers with orders to destroy the Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.  Any lingering attitude of chivalry, of keeping the war between soldiers-only, was long gone.

So, as my closing wish for the year, I’m promoting “Remember and Learn.” Remember because the 600,000 military deaths and untold thousands of American civilian deaths were important. They were too important to let drift away, forgotten in the fog of passing decades. Shame on us if we let the significance of those deaths leave our national memory.

 Learn because we certainly don’t want to again go down the nightmare road of internal war again. Us waging war against us, never again.  You bet we have huge issues dividing our country today, some of the issues not so different from the divisive issues of 150 years ago.

But now we know what happened right here in our heartland when politicians let stubbornness overcome compromise and reasonable debate. Now we know that even endless, repetitive, seemingly futile debate is infinitely preferable to picking sides and shooting at each other. Let’s don’t ever go there again.

Family matters. Noun-verb. Family matters, and we are a national family. (Pretty corny, I know. But I believe it.)

We need for 2015 to be a long happy year, not just a happy new year.

 

 

 

 

 

Lucy Pickens

Today I should be writing a post about how soldiers celebrated Christmas during the Civil War. Truth is, I sidestepped that topic in both my Civil War novels, so I haven’t researched it. But there’s two more Christmas’s to be considered in the last two books in the McBee set, so perhaps by this time next year I’ll know if Christmas trees and jolly ole Saint Nick were part of the 1863 or 1864 Christmas scene in Virginia during the war.

Instead of Christmas 150 years ago, I’m back-stepping to the topic of beautiful women in the 1860’s. I receive a daily e-mail from the Texas Historical Commission about something interesting or significant that occurred in Texas history on that date, sometime in our state’s history.  A few weeks ago, the topic was a Texas beauty named Lucy Holcombe Pickens. Here’s the text:


On this day in 1862, the Confederate government issued $100 notes bearing a portrait of the renowned Southern beauty Lucy Pickens. Lucy Holcombe was born in 1832 in Tennessee. Between 1848 and 1850 the Holcombes moved to Wyalucing plantation in Marshall, Texas. Lucy became highly acclaimed throughout the South for her "classic features, titian hair, pansy eyes, and graceful figure."



In the summer of 1856 she met Francis Wilkinson Pickens, twice a widower and twenty-seven years her senior. Her acceptance of his marriage proposal, it is said, hinged on his acceptance of a diplomatic post abroad. President James Buchanan appointed him ambassador to Russia, and Pickens and Lucy were wed in 1858 at Wyalucing. Lucy was a favorite at the Russian court, but Pickens resigned his diplomatic post in the fall of 1860 in anticipation of the outbreak of the Civil War. Upon his return home he was elected governor of South Carolina.


By selling the jewels that had been given her in Russia, Lucy helped outfit the Confederate Army unit that bore her name, the Lucy Holcombe Legion. Her portrait was also used on the one-dollar Confederate notes issued on June 2, 1862. She died in 1899.


I was easily able to find several period photographs of Lucy with a quick internet search. The images confirm her beauty, although her portrait in profile selected for the paper currency is much less flattering, in my opinion. The photo on the left certainly displays her severely contained “titian hair.”


If I had found the image on the right before the front cover was completed for Tangled Honor, I would have been sorely tempted to find out if the portrait is in the public domain. That portrait is of a young woman whose features and hair style would mark her as very attractive in 2014, over 150 years after the image was made.  I would have loved to have used it on my book cover instead of the sassy model wearing modern eye make-up.


It is fun to consider that a young woman from a plantation in Marshall, Texas would end up being given jewels by the Russian Czar of enough value to help arm and supply a regiment of Confederate soldiers in South Carolina, as the young, beautiful First Lady of that state. Not to mention being the only woman whose image graced any Confederate currency. She also wrote poetry and a novel under a penname. There is a biography of Lucy Pickens, Queen of the Confederacy, published in 2002 by the University of North Texas Press.


The biographer included a short quote in the Epilogue. “Submission is not my role,” wrote Lucy at some point. No doubt, my fictitious Faith Samuelson would have agreed with that quite un-Victorian outlook by a woman in the 1860’s, although I suspect it helped that the historical Lucy’s non-submissive role was aided by virtue of her being  a beautiful woman of substantial means. The book excerpts on Amazon lead me to believe Lucy Pickens was exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally rich, exceptionally spoiled, exceptionally influential, and exceptionally Southern.  I’m glad to have learned about her.


Meanwhile, back in Lockhart, Texas three days before Christmas, may I wish “all ya’all” a Merry Christmas! 


Peace Be With You.                  

 

 

 

Cheese Grits and Raw Bacon

Grits. Baked cheese grits to be exact. With bacon bits added for the first time. Cheese grits are a McBride family holiday tradition going back forty years. Some December back in the early 1970’s when Nita and I were childless newly-weds, my mother served cheese grits at Christmas. They stuck, so to speak. 

In the ‘80’s our pre-teen sons loved the dish, probably because grits are not green. In the ‘90’s our teenage sons loved the cheese grits because…well, what’s not to love? The dish is butter, milk, and cheese held together by a tasteless white grain, and it has no nasty little bits of green pepper or onions that deterred our sons from eating meat loaf when they were kids. Or now.

In 2014, the venerable baked cheese grits dish reached a new high with the add-on of six strips of crisp crumbled bacon.  After all, since bacon is the new chocolate, why not add it to everyone’s favorite dish of sin. We’ve already twice made and served bacon enhanced cheese grits this season, and have been directed by our 30-something year old sons that grits are expected on Christmas Eve.  And we’re not arguing.

If you want the recipe for Mama McBride’s cheese grits with value-added bacon, just shoot me an e-mail. I promise your dog won’t have much licking to do to clean the bowl after your human holiday feast.

Speaking of bacon and my book in progress, I am this week writing about a march made by my soldier characters in mid-February in a snowstorm.  This bit is real history, and I’m using a couple of primary source memoirs to keep my account accurate, while putting my characters into the middle of it. That’s the fun of writing historical fiction. I get to plug fictitious characters into well-documented historical events. 

In this chapter as in the real event, the men are not given time to cook their issued rations. Instead, after a freezing cold night trying to sleep wrapped in wet wool blankets in the open, they resume their trek, munching on “sea crackers” and raw bacon pulled out of their haversacks. We don’t munch on raw bacon these days. Rather, the whole scenario of marching and sleeping in the open in mid-winter in crappy weather and eating raw bacon makes a good reminder of just why two Civil War soldiers died of accident, exposure, or disease for every one soldier killed in combat. Bad water and spoiled meat killed far more soldiers than did lead bullets or exploding cannon shells.

For those with a military bent, in real life a captain, who normally  only commanded a single infantry  company of some fifty men, was ordered by Major General Hood to lead a column of some one thousand broken-down and exhausted stragglers the last ten miles, while most of the division went ahead.  Because of the extremely poor condition of the stragglers, the captain was given three days to make the short march. Ten miles was about half what a large column of Civil War soldiers were accustomed to marching in one day, so being given three days to go ten miles is indicative of the sad condition of the straggling troops.

As a novelist who wants to include the march in my story, I’m left to sort out why General Hood dipped so far down into his command structure to select this officer, the real-life man who inspired my main character, John McBee, to lead a thousand-man column. Why did Hood pick a lowly captain to lead a thousand stragglers? Why not a major or a colonel with experience commanding such a large body of men? On the other side of that coin, did the captain accept the assignment as a compliment, or as an insult that his first command beyond his own company would be a bunch of limping, hurting men who couldn’t keep up? 

I’m finding that getting into the heads of historical characters is a honey-trap for writers of historical fiction. It’s fun to guess at a famous man’s motivation for a decision, but it’s also risky because not every reader will agree with my interpretation and may not find the resulting actions as credible to the famous person. But adventure novels are all about getting our guys and gals into honey traps and back out again. There’s a bit of James Bond or Emma Peel in most of our main characters.

Talk to you next week. Happy shopping.

Pearl Harbor and Dickens on the Square

Sometimes one day changes everything for a country. A single day becomes a pivot point that sets inexorable forces in motion. I’m writing this post on December 7th, which 73 years ago was also a Sunday and was one such day: The morning the Japanese navy launched a surprise bombing raid to destroy the biggest battleships in our fleet while they were moored at Pearl Harbor. It was a morning that changed everything for the USA and the world.

So today I’m adding a scratchy photo of my dad, Tech Sergeant Frank McBride, US Army Air Corps, sitting in a jeep somewhere in France during his 2 ½ years overseas during WWII.  Pop is still with us, 94 years old and doing fine, one of the ever-shrinking cohort of WWII veterans. With Pop in mind, today, Pearl Harbor Day, seems a good time to pause, remember, and thank those guys, even if it’s not Veterans’ Day or Memorial Day.

Now back to the war that also changed everything for the USA, that is to say, the war that insured that the USA would remain a sea –to-shining-sea nation. The war that, to borrow a phrase my author friend Jeff Brooks chose for the title of a fine Civil War novel, prevented the USA from becoming a permanently “shattered nation,” a nation irrevocably split asunder into two countries. Thank goodness the four years of death and sacrifice finally ended with the USA still a single nation.

It’s easy to understand why the USA mobilized everybody and every industry to fight back at the Japanese and Hitler’s demonized Germany 73 years ago. On the other hand, it has never been easy for me to understand why 153 years ago, America’s southern states did much the same thing, mobilizing everybody and every industry, to sever the national bonds and strike out on their own. It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve read an ample number of history books in which learned historians attempt to explain the “why” of it all as they describe the progression of events leading to Fort Sumter.

Nonetheless, I still have never quite “got” it. I’ve never understood the thinking that brought about the all-out effort to abandon the American national identity that had been growing for eighty years since the ragtag collection of colonies broke away from England, and through death and sacrifice, became a single American nation. But the Civil War surely did happen, and maybe we are stronger now for the terrible pain we brought upon ourselves back then.  I hope so.

Yesterday I spent five hours in the 112 year-old Clark Library here in Lockhart, as one of several local authors who were part of the annual Dickens on the Square celebration. Twenty-five years ago a feisty city librarian started the early December festivities to raise money for the library, blatantly imitating the Dickens on the Strand celebration in Galveston. I don’t know how things are going in Galveston, but here in Lockhart after 25 iterations, Dickens has become part of our town’s culture.

It helps that our library building is a Texas landmark that has a stage in front of a huge stained glass window, a U-shaped balcony, fine woodwork, and has been well-maintained and renovated. Just the place for we local authors to hawk our books inside the building, while outside a day-long series of choirs, dancers, ice sculptors, glass-blowers, animal shows and such take place on the street, sidewalk and library lawn. There’s a parade on Friday night to kick off the weekend and huge Yule log is ceremoniously set ablaze. It’s a fine time, and not too shabby for a little town usually only remembered for our surplus of BBQ joints.

I am pleased to have sold all the copies of my two novels that I brought along. Of course, Lockhart is a town of only 12,000 folks, and having lived here for over thirty years, almost every sale was to someone I knew by name.

I confess that it was most fun to sell my novels to a few middle-aged men and women who had been teenagers at Lockhart High School in the ‘80’s while I served as the school’s principal. It was a personal joy to watch the dawning recognition that, yeah, he’s still around, and has become something besides an old principal who has lost his faculty. 

Turkeys and Bears, Muskets and Books

Thanksgiving came and went at our house with all the expected goings-on: We all over-ate, the dog-ass Cowboys lost in Dallas, as did the Longhorns in Austin, as even did the Aggies in their newly adopted state for Thanksgiving football rivalry- Louisiana.

On Friday, our younger son Ben and his girlfriend Meredith went to a local outdoor gun range to live fire black-powder muskets. The range was a beehive of activity, and really loud. It was fun to occupy a shooting station sandwiched between guys and gals blasting away with their ultra-modern military-looking rifles. They had boxes of ammo to feed into long clips that enabled those black (or camouflaged) beauties to spew lead out at an amazing rate. Pity any home invader at their houses.

Meanwhile, we lined up our paper cartridges of powder, a tin of brass priming caps, and a few dozen cone-shaped and well-lubed lead Minie balls. They are “Minie balls” because a French officer named Minie invented the bullet’s cone design with 2 or 3 ribs circling the hollow base of the lead cone. The hollow base was so the tail of the cone would expand when the powder exploded right behind it, and the ribs were to grip the grooves cut inside the barrel to spin the bullet for accuracy. They are lubed with tallow to make them easier to push down the barrel. How’s that for high tech? But it was definitely 2G technology in 1861 because repeaters and breech loaders were already in limited use, but were too expensive for the army to produce in huge numbers.

Back to the range, we pulled the ramrods and laid them on the table, ready for use, because without them, muzzle-loading muskets are just long steel and wood clubs. Not even good for golf.

Loading the muskets is labor intensive, for sure. The army manuals during the Civil War called for “Loading by the Nines.” Nine steps: Put the musket butt on the ground; Remove a paper cartridge from the leather cartridge box; Tear the cartridge open with teeth; Pour loose powder down the barrel; Remove ramrod from under the barrel; Cram the lead bullet and paper down the barrel and return the ramrod; Move musket to the ready position; Remove priming cap from leather box on belt; Put the priming cap on the cone. Now you’re loaded and can aim, fire, and repeat.

Another side story, maybe even true: The US army took almost any willing recruit-if they had four front teeth. If any of those teeth were missing, the recruit was labeled 4-F, as in without four front teeth, and deemed ineligible for service. The Rebs were less discriminating, it’s said. They only required one top and one bottom tooth, one over the other, to pass their physical.

Back to the range again, the upshot of our slow loading was probably a 50 to 1 ratio of the number of rounds fired by our shooting neighbors’ modern rifles to us. Rapid musket fire is 3 bangs per minute, starting loaded.

As to the success rate of the 1860’s technology as evidenced in Ben and Meredith’s marksmanship, it was a bit shy of perfection: At 50 yards, they got a third of their shots somewhere on the rectangular targets. It’s said that for each Civil War soldier actually hit by a fired Minie ball, a man’s weight in lead was exchanged. From our experiences on the gun range, I don’t doubt that one bit.

Ben did pop the Big Bad Bear target a couple of good ones right on his snout. After a few shots fired, both quickly learned that black powder residue gums up a barrel, making it progressively harder to ram the next Minie bullet to the base of the barrel, making slow loading even slower and harder the longer you do it. The stories of Civil War soldiers emptying their canteens down the barrels to clean them during long battles are true enough, as I suspect are the tales of a quick pee down the barrel when a man’s canteen ran dry.

Going back in time a week, the weekend before Thanksgiving I opened my outdoor book shop at a Civil War reenactment just outside of Hempstead, near Houston. My inventory was limited: Just my two Civil War novels. To encourage folks to stop and shop, I set out a musket and some gear on the table next to the stacks of books. Not unlike at the gun range, dads and kids are drawn to the long muskets and like to handle them. Then it’s my job to turn their attention from guns to books. Good luck with that, huh?  I confess it’s a bit of bait and switch, a time honored marketing tradition.

Of course, the weather included a couple of rain showers passing through on Saturday, impacting the number of people who came out to watch the reenactment. Nonetheless, enough people looked past the muskets to buy books that I can say I popped the bear a couple of good ones right on his snout, sales-wise.

Promoting my own writing to others across a table doesn’t come naturally, but it is fun to gab about the Civil War, and it’s not even too bad to be told over and over about other people’s ancestors who were Civil War soldiers. Heck, I do that too. I even went so far as to craft a novel around one of them, so I can’t complain as I listen, waiting for my chance to work in a word about Tangled Honor or Whittled Away. I’m shameless, but a sale is a sale.