You’ve been a successful attorney for years; what inspired you take on the new challenge of writing a thriller deeply rooted in Southern history?
As a Louisiana native and history buff, I’ve always been fascinated by Louisiana’s unique multicultural society, from the early French and Spanish settlers who displaced and later oppressed the native population to the 18th and 19th centuries’ freemen of color, the reprehensible slave trade, the numerous immigrant groups, and those who came south during America’s expansion. I sought to create a compelling story that ties the past to the present and deals with an evolving sense of what constitutes “justice.”
How did you develop the main character of Jake Gold, the chameleon-like peddler who becomes the subject of a massive manhunt?
My great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant who began his career as an itinerant peddler in the Deep South and who had encounters with marauding bands of white supremacists, was the inspiration for Jake. Although the setting is historically accurate, Jake and his adventures are purely fictional.
What is it about a southern plantation, usually romanticized in fiction, that drew you for the setting of the book?
Both before the Civil War and during and after Reconstruction, plantations were the crucibles for interactions between blacks and whites, between the educated and the unschooled, between southern “aristocracy” and the merchant class, between those whose livelihood was tied to the land and those whose only interest was commerce, and between those who enforced laws (both just and unjust) and those whose power emanated from guns and violence. All of these came together on Louisiana plantations and form the basis for the novel.
Why were you interested in making cultural diversity, racial tension, and the search for the truth the novel’s underlying themes?
Truth and identity are intertwined. The Cottoncrest Curse is concerned with three universal questions. Can we really know every significant aspect of our family’s history? How are our relationships affected by our preconceived stereotypes and by our own sense of identity? And, do we have an obligation to tell the unvarnished truth if it helps some but injures others?
What kind of research went into writing The Cottoncrest Cruse?
A great deal of historical research underpins the entire book, ranging from events in the Civil War, the plantation system in the 1890s, the intricacies of sugar-cane agriculture, the background of the famous case of Plessy v. Ferguson (the “separate-but-equal” litigation that arose in Louisiana), which was overturned by the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, and the Freedom Riders of the 1960s.