Louella Bryant
I grew up fascinated with TV shows about cowboys—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.
From the time I was young, my mother told me stories about her early life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and 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.
After she married, my mother gave birth to two boys. They were still very young when their father was killed in an explosion at the paper mill. In her early twenties, my mother was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the paper 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 in Appalachia.
After her husband’s death, my mother married a sailor who struggled with alcoholism. After he moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Navy Department, I was born. 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 racism, and the soot and poverty of my family’s southwestern 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.
From the time I was young, my mother told me stories about her early life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and 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.
After she married, my mother gave birth to two boys. They were still very young when their father was killed in an explosion at the paper mill. In her early twenties, my mother was a beautiful widow with no means of support, so she took a job at the paper 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 in Appalachia.
After her husband’s death, my mother married a sailor who struggled with alcoholism. After he moved the family to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Navy Department, I was born. 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 racism, and the soot and poverty of my family’s southwestern 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.
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