I’m not sure, exactly, when I started writing, but I know when I first felt it. That was on my grandparents’ front porch in rural Virginia when, at the age of eleven, I got shipped “north” from my home in Alabama to work on their tobacco farm. On Sunday afternoons, aunts, uncles, and cousins in varying degrees gathered to rock, smoke, shell peas, and talk. Soon the stories began to rise from their collective past – of hard times, ancestors who fought in the Civil War, family feuds and triumphs, neighborhood scandals involving the preacher and a choir director – stories of good people, bad people, and some who were most certainly crazy. The scenes and the people in them came alive on that porch and lingered long after the voices were silent, the peas all shelled, and the rocking chairs rocked still. The magic in them captured me – not only the magic in the stories themselves but the urge they kindled in me to tell them in my own voice, infuse them with my unspoken hopes and dreams, feel them lift me away into the starry night of my own imagination.
That, for me, is how writing began.
That urge followed me through my life as a student, a soldier in Viet Nam, and thirty years as a civil rights lawyer, judge, and law teacher. When I finally sat down to write serious fiction, stories bubbled up like virgin springs from every facet of my life, but the ones that really stuck, that made me stay with them and go deep, were those that dealt with what the writer Russell Banks once told me was the defining moral issue of our time (his and mine; we were about the same age): race.
As a kid growing up in the white supremacist South of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the crucible of racial oppression was right there before me every minute of every day. A pestilence of terror hung in the air. I felt it, even as a privileged white boy. The Klan was riding, Black people were marching and dying, and hope glimmered dimly through an endless thicket of violence and fear. That’s where the “deep” stories came from. My first novel, Leaving Tuscaloosa, follows the trail of two boys – one Black and one white – through two days and nights of racial strife in a southern town. My new novel, Sayla is My Name, continues on that trail of racial injustice and follows it into the darkness of American slavery by tracing the story of a mixed-race woman who endures the horrors of slavery and, amidst the chaos of the Civil War, fights her way to freedom and a new life.
In addition to those two novels, I’ve published a third, The Last First Kiss, 2020, and short fiction and essays in various journals, including Blackberry, Story, Eclipse, and The Courtland Review. A well-received book on the legal profession entitled The Lawyers’ Myth, was published by The University of Chicago Press in 2001. My first novel, Leaving Tuscaloosa, won the 2013 Alabama Author’s Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and The Crook’s Corner Book Prize for debut novels set in the South. “Black Quill,” an essay on trout fishing, appears in Astream, American Writers on Fly Fishing; Robert Demott, ed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Sayla Is My Name in the fall of 2026.
