Kamila Kinyon: I enjoyed hearing you read from your new book at the open mic night. Could you give an overview of this project?
Linda Tate: Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative will be published by Ohio University Press next fall. The book traces the story of the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of my family from 1830 to the present day. I deeply believe that exploring any Americans family story can enhance our understanding of American history, life, and culture.

The book is based on extensive primary and secondary research, but it reads like a novel, with three first-person narrators telling the tale. I tell my story in three shorter sections that provide the opening, middle, and closing of the book; my great-great-grandmother Louisiana tells her story in 1902; and my grandmother Fannie tells her story in 1963. The family history also comes alive through photographs, maps, and abbreviated genealogies.

Its been a hard book to write. There are many painful episodes along the way, as the family deals over several generations with poverty, racial and class discrimination, and family violence. Ultimately, however, the book ends on a hopeful note of healing, showing the ways that some family members in the current generation have broken the destructive cycles and claimed a more constructive approach to living.

Could you describe your research and writing process in collecting information for this book and in preparing it for publication?
When I began the research for this book, I decided to relocate to the area of western Kentucky where my grandmother, Fannie Tate, had been born. In fact, I had only three definitive pieces of informationher maiden name, her place of birth, and her date of birth. The story that I have reconstructed in Power in the Blood evolved from those tiny pieces of information. Id been estranged from my father for many years and had had almost no contact with any of his relatives, so I knew very, very little about my grandmother, other than the fantastic legends she left in her wake.

My grandmother was born near Golden Pond, Kentucky, in an area that was then known as the Land Between the Rivers. For two summers, I rented a farmhouse just outside that area, now known as the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. While there, I explored the towns my grandparents had known, met the relatives who had known and loved them, visited their unmarked graves, and began to connect with my grandparents on an imaginative plane. Living where my grandmother had lived, I came to understand deeply the social, economic, and regional forces at work in her life.

Living just outside the Land Between the Lakes during those two summers also gave me the opportunity to conduct extensive genealogical and archival research in the area. Through this research, I identified and located numerous distant relativesfourth, fifth, sixth, even seventh cousins, many of whom not only had known my grandparents but could also tell me stories of my great-grandmother Deelie, my great-great-grandparents George and Louisiana, and even my great-great-great-grandmother Nancy Bybee. Library research culminated in an ongoing family reunion, profound face-to-face meetings with scattered family. Names previously unknown suddenly had voice and substance. Photographs were exchanged, stories told.

The majority of the resulting book is true in the sense that it recounts people, names, dates, experiences, and even very small details that were passed to me through written documentation, through oral history, and through artifacts such as photographs and family heirlooms. As I worked, I was surrounded by history books and journal articles, photocopies of census records and court documents, old family photographs, audiotapes of oral history interviews and family visits, maps of every size and shape imaginable, pottery shards and the rusted hub of an old wagon wheel, a jar of muscadine jam made by one of George and Louisianas descendants, even the family recipe for cornbread that Fannie had written down so that my mother could learn how to make it for my father.

To re-create this story, to fill in the gaps and speak across the silences, I spent countless hours in libraries, archives, and courthouses. I consulted census records for Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois from 1830 through 1920, marriage documents, birth and death documents, tax records, court cases, land deeds, school records, Confederate Army documents, church records, cemetery records, guardian records, local histories, old maps, old photographs, and other relevant documents, including the idiot inquest book and feeble-minded persons inquest book for Trigg County, Kentucky. The Kentucky Archives extensive collection of Trigg County court records was immensely helpful in creating a personality profile for George Washington Armstrong; particularly valuable were documents relating to his arrest and conviction record, his ongoing legal complaint with Charles Blossus, and the settlement of his estate.

Finding my way back to our American Indian past was much more difficult, much more complex, yet again I carefully followed multiple routes back to that past. Spurred on by my grandmothers repeated claim that her mother was a little Indian, I have spent more than twenty years studying American Indian history and examining American Indian records. Given her ancestors places of origin (Jackson County, Tennessee, and Marshall County, Alabama), I have focused much of my study on Cherokee and Creek historyand as I did when I studied our particular family history in the Land Between the Rivers, so too when I turned to these forgotten pages of history, I encountered one incredible piece of information after another. The book brings to life these amazing twists and turns.

Most of all, whether I was trying to get a feel for turn-of-the-century life in the Land Between the Rivers or trying to understand our American Indian ancestry, I listened. As I found distant relatives, we met, shared stories, held get-togethers, even put on the first reunion of George and Louisianas descendantsnearly 100 of their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and even a few great-great-great-grandchildren attended this gathering. All of these get-togethers involved very, very lively storytellingand I listened to every word. It was at one of our many family gatheringsas we were out tramping through the woods that had once been the site of our familys cabinsthat I heard the rumor of George robbing and killing a peddler who had been passing through the area. I augmented the tale with details Id gathered from Georges tax records (which show his sudden increase in worldly goods), and of course, I was able to use court records to document his violent behavior and other brushes with the law.

Taking all of that information and turning it into a book was perhaps an even more challenging taskone that I cant easily sum up in just a few words. Ultimately, I was able to use only a fraction of the information Id found through my research. As I sifted through everything I had gathered, I had to think also about what would make all of these details come alive for my readerespecially for someone not in my family, someone not interested in every little bit of minutiae I came across in my research. I had to give narrative shape to the information; I had to imagine the actual lives of my ancestors. Its one thing to have a chronological list of what happened (when a couple married, when children were born, when people had to appear before court, and so forth), but its another thing entirely to imagine their daily lives, the reasons why they made the decisions they did, the kinds of things they might have said and done. The closer I got to my own time period, the more I knew about those thingsbut even in writing about my own life, I found that there is a great deal of mystery even when looking back at ones owns decisions and actions.

As I got to know each of the three narrators more fully (and as I said, I even had to get to know myself in a different way), I was then able to think about plot, about the arc of the story. Ultimately, I had to make some hard choices: I decided to eliminate a few relatives whose tales were not essential to the telling of the overall story, in a couple of cases, to merge a couple of relatives to create one character, and finally to change some of the characters names. All of this took an enormous amount of timebecause it took me years to see clearly the heart of the story, to decide what was essential to the story and what could be set aside. But with a big family, there are so, so many people to keep track ofand I feared that my readers would get bogged down in what one of my friends called the begats that theyd never get to the actual story.

Once I had all of that figured out, well, then, I still had to craft a good book! My grandmother and my great-great-grandmother both speak in rural southern dialects of earlier erasand I had to do a lot of painstaking work to ensure that I was capturing the rhythm of their speech, the flavor of their dialects. At the same time, I wanted them to stand as distinct charactersso I also had to make sure that they didnt sound alike as they told their tales.

Theres much more I could say about how I actually wrote the bookbut this should give you a taste of the many different levels on which I worked as I wove this tale.

Did you have a clear idea for the arc of the book early in the writing process? Did you know in advance how you wanted to end it, or did the structure of the book change radically during the process of invention and revision?
The book changed radically as it evolved. Ive been working on this book for the last 12 years, and the final version I submitted to the publisher in October is the fourth full draft Ive created. Each draft has been quite different. I knew fairly early in the process that I wanted to have three distinct narrators (my great-great-grandmother Louisiana, my grandmother Fannie, and me), but how I structured those narratives, how I put them in relationship to each other, how I teased out recurring themes changed dramatically as the book evolved. Also, since the sections told from my point of view are essentially memoir, they changed as I lived the events!

Could you describe how you use narrative voice in your book? What are the different points of view from which the story is told? Were some of the narrative voices more difficult to write in than others?
I wrote in essentially six different narrative voices. The book opens with a poem in which I describe a recurring dream I had for years (thats the first narrative voice). Then the first full prose section is Lindas Story, 1988-1993; thats written in my adult, storytelling voice. The next section is Louisianas Story, 1902; thats told from the perspective of my great-great-grandmother Louisiana. The next section is Lindas Story, 1964-1981; this is told in my childhood/growing-up voice. The next section is Fannies Story, 1963; this is told from the perspective of my grandmother, Fannie. The next section is Lindas Story, 1996-1998; here I return to my adult, storytelling voice. Epilogue, References, and Acknowledgments are written in my scholarly voice.

It was most difficult to write in my great-great-grandmothers voice. I never knew her personally, and it was a real challenge to get inside her brain, as it were. I not only had to figure out what things had likely occurred in her life, but I also had to determine how she felt about those events and how she would speak about them. I also had to find ways to capture her dialect and speech rhythmeven though we are separated by more than a century. I think I finally got therebut she was a real challenge!

I probably had the most fun capturing my grandmothers voice. Fannie was a larger-than-life person, and it was a blast creating a rather outrageous, tell-it-like-it-is voice for her.

What are some of your current writing projects?
I am currently working on a new book, Reading and Writing the Self to Wellness, written in collaboration with Social Work Professor Emeritus Jennifer Soule. This book will draw on my ongoing interest in memoirboth as a literary form that readers can enjoy and benefit from and as a genre that writers can find empowering.

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