On the 20 years of writing Cowboy Code

 I was born in the new era of television and on Saturdays glued myself to our black and white screen when cowboy shows came on—The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and especially Gene Autry. Every time Autry picked up his guitar as his buddies sat around the campfire under a crescent moon, I felt a thrill. Unlike my father, good cowboys never got drunk and always defeated the bad guys. My father wasn’t a bad guy, but his drinking nearly destroyed our family.

Although I was born in the Maryland hospital where years later John F. Kennedy would be taken after the Dallas shooting, from the time I was young my mother told me stories about her early life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Many of those tales bore fruit in Cowboy Code. Panthers came down from the forests at night and stole chickens from her father’s yard, and the woods were full of ticks and poisonous snakes. She recalled the train stopping at the town’s station and unloading wealthy visitors and dignitaries headed for the elegant Homestead resort a short drive away to play tennis or golf and soak in the hot springs. She spoke about what was known as the African settlement where the Negroes lived. Her father, a mill foreman and secretly a member of the Ku Klux Klan, hired one of the young men from the settlement to help him with his small farm. My mother had been the oldest of three children, and her father inflicted harsher discipline on her than he did on her younger brother and sister. At eighteen she married to escape the sting of the razor strap for the most minor infraction of his rules. 

In the late 1930s, my mother gave birth to two boys. They were still very young when their father was killed in an explosion at the town's paper mill. In her early twenties, my mother was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the mill and hired a nanny for her sons. In Cowboy Code, I replaced the older boy with Bobbie, a 14-year-old girl, because I wanted the story to reflect a girl’s coming of age and her feelings of isolation in the mountain town, distress because of the racism of its citizens, and powerlessness to do anything about her stepfather's alcoholism.

After her husband’s death, my mother married a sailor who struggled with alcohol addiction. My father moved his wife and two stepsons to Washington, D.C. where he worked for the Navy Department. As I grew up, our summer vacations were spent visiting relatives in southwest Virginia. We never entered an aunt’s or cousin’s house without sitting down for a meal of meat, vegetables fresh from the garden, and hot baked biscuits. Once in a while we engaged in table raising, a combination of spiritualism and levitation that occurs in the novel. To this day I am unable to explain the phenomenon. 

Cowboy Code took twenty years to find its way into print. I was reluctant to release the story to the public and expose the shame I’ve felt for most of my life around my father’s drinking, my grandfather’s participation in the KKK, and the soot and poverty of my family’s Southwest Virginia roots. But in writing about the people of the fictional town of Pine Cliff, I have come to realize that they are the embodiment of dignity, honesty, a strong work ethic, and a deep spiritual faith, and I’m proud to say that they are my people.