What is a Southern Writer, Anyway? A Response to Margaret Renkl opinion writer for the New York Times

I realize this article does come from the New York Times, but I do take umbrage at this author's taking an opportunity to bash all of us Southerners who support our President as "enablers who stoke the lie of white supremacy, in their words and deeds, nearly every day."

Apparently Ms. Renkl is a self-hating Southerner, who sees her fellow Southerners as beneath her contempt.  Now I will admit that I do not belong to the pantheon of great writers she mentions: "Think about William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, the great pillars of what we think of as Southern literature." She omitted Pat Conroy whom I think also belongs in this list. 

"Great writers everywhere do the same thing," she writes, "but the South’s legacy of slavery and its overt and enduring racism make the truth a Southern writer speaks especially urgent — never more so than now, when our president and his enablers stoke the lie of white supremacy, in their words and deeds, nearly every day."

I am one of those Southerners for whom she expresses contempt. A Trump supporter. A die hard Deplorable who does not write opinions for the New York Times dismissing her fellow Southerners with prejudicial disdain. 

I am also a Southern writer not on the New York Times Best Seller List, but one who writes history as she sees it from the perspective of one who began writing with the discovery of my Native American Heritage. I have an ingrained love and affection for Black people because of those I have been blessed to know, particularly  the woman who helped my parents raise me. 

The artist, Willie Cole, saw a picture I posted of Mattie Lee Martin (Mammy) on my website (http://www.southern-style.com) and included her in his "Mammy Project"  in the Amstadt collection at the Wadsworth Athenium collection in Hartford, Connecticut.  I dedicated  my book, Mint Julep Trilogy, to her and Wilcox County, Alabama, relatives because of the influence she made in my life. Now, many will take calling her "Mammy" as condescending and will mock the relationship we in the South have had with those who loved, guided, and taught us within our homes. 

There is no condescension there, only love and appreciation for someone too important to call by any other name. And while my first novels, published by Mercer University Press, Swimming with Serpents and In Pursuit, focus on Native American history, my most recent novel, On to Angola, very definitely is inspired by the pluck and courage of the Black members of our Southern family. 

On to Angola follows twin brothers ripped from their mother's arms at one of Jean Lafitte's slave sales who are then separated at the Fort Mims Massacre and raised in very different circumstances. They must race against time and against all odds, evading slave catchers, Jackson's Coweta raiders, English profiteers, and the elements of Florida of 1821, the year Andrew Jackson became the first Territorial Governor of Florida, to find their mother at Angola. It is dedicated to those Blacks captured at Angola and returned to slavery by those Coweta raiders.

On to Angola is a self-published "the rest of the story" not often told because it is the story of the Red Sticks who survived the Creek Indian War and the Blacks of Angola. Angola was a community established as a "safe place" after the destruction of the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River. The Negro Fort was built by the Corps of Colonial Marines (Major Nicholls and Captain Woodbine) as a place of refuge for those Native Americans and Blacks who joined them in fighting in the War of 1812. Archaeologist Uzi Baram (New College in Sarasota) now leads an archaeological search to uncover more of the story of Angola. 

Southerners who support Trump are no more white supremacist than those who consider themselves intellectually superior by claiming enlightenment. Our history is our history, Black and White. Knowing it, acknowledging the past, helps us become better people.  There are good people and bad people throughout time who live in the culture and conditions of their time. 

Current genealogical study tells me that my ancestors were among the Powhatan tribe that welcomed the English at Jamestown as well as those who sailed upon the Mayflower. Others have fought and died in every American war since. 

To be accused of being a white supremacist simply because I am a God fearing, patriotic American who distrusts the trade deals negotiated by past presidents, who believes that the United States deserves its sovereignty, who supports borders and legal immigration and respect for our laws and those who enforce them, who voted for Trump because I believe America is the greatest country on the face of this earth and needs defending not deriding, does not make me a white supremacist. I am proud to be among independent thinking Black people who agree -- and they are not white supremacists.

It makes me a Southerner who recognizes the great tapestry of our Southern heritage. I thank God for planting me here. And by the way, Roll Tide!