Hello, everyone from the Danny and Juniors Club. Like rock and roll, we’re here to stay. Or as that great American philosopher Waylon Jennings said, “We might be crazy, but it’s kept us from going insane.”
Flags on the Bayou is out now. I know that with each novel or collection of stories I have written an introduction to what I believe is best in that particular publication. However, this one is different. My feeling about it reminds me of something Ernest Hemingway said about The Old Man and the Sea not long before his death. He said that he had re-read the book and felt that someone else had written it.
I have always had non-chemical blackouts. After a fairly short amount of time, I don’t remember my own books. I do not understand the phenomenon, but it’s always been that way. But this one is different, and I think it’s because of the first-person narrators who tell us their story. Hannah and Darla are Black enslaved women who speak French and Spanish and English, and are the embodiment of courage and spirituality and overcome the worst in the cruel world in which they were born. I’m convinced their voices are theirs, not mine. And it’s the same with the other characters. The owners of Lady of the Lake Plantation in St. Martin Parish were based on my ancestors; my great-great grandmother was named Booth and was born in Wilkes County, Georgia. My great-grandfather was with Jackson’s entire Shenandoah Campaign and at Gettysburg, when in forty-minutes 8,000 men lay dead or dying on Cemetery Ridge. My ancestor William Burke fought at Shiloh and saw forty percent of his regiment destroyed in fifteen minutes.
But oddly this book is not about historical events; it’s about now. For good or bad, our antecedents are still with us. In fact, I think they watch us daily and wonder why we do not grasp that simple connection. As soon as the Civil War appeared to be over, the same players, particularly men like William Sherman, encouraged or spent the rest of the nineteenth century killing the buffalo and starving the Indian nations into submission, all in the name of Manifest Destiny.
But this is not meant to be a bitter book. Instead, it’s full of humor, and certainly irony. How could it not be? If irony and humor were not there, we would have already undone ourselves.
F. Scott Fitzgerald had a great influence on my work. In a letter or a conversation, he said something I have never forgotten: “No one can understand America unless he understands the graves of Shiloh.”
No one could say it better.
This one is my best. I hope you like it.
Always,
Jim