by Donna VanLiere
Just in time for the holidays, Donna VanLiere brings us another heartwarming story of love and family.
Jane Gable has lived all of her nine years in the town of Morgan Hill. It’s always been pretty much the same . . . until this year. When this small Tennessee town gets its first black residents, people, attitudes, and familiar alliances change. Then tragedy strikes – and Jane has to
find a new way to define “family”.
Take a trip to Morgan Hill. Stop in at the store and visit with Henry over an ice cream sandwich. Walk along the railroad tracks with Jane and her little brother (carefully avoiding that snake Alvin Dodson, who likes to lurk among the cockleburs). Join the crowd at the church’s annual Christmas pageant. You might even meet an angel.
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
It was raining real hard the day we buried my daddy. Mama said it was because the angels were crying; but after hours of drenching downpour I doubted the angels were crying tears of joy about seeing Daddy in heaven but instead were just downright upset about having him there.
My father was a diabetic and a drunk—two conditions that don’t get along well with each other. Doc Langley kept telling him the drinking was going to kill him but Daddy never listened. He was playing cards with Beef, Dewey, and the rest of the boys one night when he had what they described as “some sort of fit” and passed out. They thought he’d just drunk too much so they let him be, head down on the table for the next twelve hours while they finished their game. By the time one of the boys got the good sense to think Daddy wasn’t taking a catnap (trust me when I say that taking just twelve hours to figure something out was a record-breaking feat for them), they fetched the doctor, but Daddy was all but gone. Doc said it wouldn’t have done any good if he’d gotten to him earlier—the alcohol poisoned his bloodstream and threw him into a diabetic coma. He was twenty-eight years old. I was nine.
The day we buried him was the same day I first saw a black face up close. East Tennessee didn’t have slaves during the Civil War, so there was never a large population of black people to settle there. Many lived in Greeneville but in my nine years of life I’d never set foot anywhere but Morgan Hill. My brother, John, and I were riding in the car with Aunt Dora when we got behind an old pickup. Aunt Dora was looking for a way to pass when a tiny head popped up from inside the truck bed. He was a little boy, no older than John, and the color of pure milk chocolate. His head was round and bald and his eyes were as big and black as shiny marbles. He hung on to the tailgate and stared at us. I remembered hearing Mama talk about some coloreds who had moved to town but I’d never seen them, and in that brief moment I found myself gawking at him. He almost lost his footing when the truck lunged over a rut in the road and, as suddenly as he appeared, the little boy smiled real big—the biggest, whitest smile I’d ever seen—and ducked down into the truck before it pulled onto the drive that led to the Cannon farm.
“Well, look at that,” Aunt Dora said. “There’s them coloreds your mama said moved to town. They should shake things up.” I didn’t really know what she meant at the time but all that would change soon enough.
That was the spring of 1947 in Morgan Hill, Tennessee. Morgan Hill is fifty-five miles northeast of Knoxville where it lays claim to the most beautiful rolling, green hills you’ll ever see. Thomas Morgan was the first to settle there in 1810. He lived at the base of a small hill he deemed Morgan’s Hill in honor of himself. The s was eventually dropped. Who knows why. In 1947 Morgan Hill boasted Walker’s (a tiny general market with a single gas pump in front), the Morgan Hill Baptist Church, and the Langley School Building (named after Doc Langley’s great granddaddy), which housed grades one through twelve in one hot, cramped brick building on top of the hill right in the middle of town. We were a poor community; some of the homes, ours included, that were hooked to electricity just three years earlier couldn’t afford the electric bill so we continued to use coal oil lamps. We milked our own cows, butchered our own pigs, grew our own vegetables, and scraped out a living the best we knew how.
Now you might think that what you’re about to read has a great deal to do with my father and growing up poor in east Tennessee, but there is so much more—what captured my heart was the hope of belonging and the dream of family. Fifty-four years have passed and many of the details have blurred, but the memories of the heart are as alive for me today as they were then. The woman I am has a great deal to do with that ninth year of my life. It started out as any other year, nothing extraordinary, but as each day unfolded it became remarkable in every way. There are times when I’m still amazed that we made it through. It has been said that every life has a story. This is my story, although it belongs to so many others, for I was never alone. They were always with me . . . and still are today.
Interview with Donna VanLiere
WOF: Many of our readers ‘met’ you for the first time this year at Women of Faith’sContagious Joy conferences, where you performed dramatic sketches. If you had to choose just one, would you rather act or write? (And aren’t you glad you don’t have to choose?)
DONNA: I’m thrilled I don’t have to choose one or the other and thankful that God allows me to do both!
WOF: What inspires you to write a new novel? Is it a character or plot idea or theme or . . . ?
DONNA: I wish I knew what inspired me! I think I’m always listening for stories. I’ve discovered that inspiration comes in many different forms. Sometimes it can be something as simple as something said in passing by a friend or a statement by my pastor. It also comes from watching the evening news or reading through the paper or just watching people at the grocery store. Whatever that “something” is triggers more ideas in my head and I’ll start to put together characters and a plot to hold them together. My problem is not a lack of ideas but a lack of time to put them all together!
WOF: The events in the book are seen from the perspective of nine-year-old Jane Gable. Was it difficult to write a book through the eyes of a child?
DONNA: No. Jane tells the story as a grown woman looking back on 1947 and how that year changed everything in her life. I wanted the reader to “see” the things that Jane did at that time and go through the questions and fears she was experiencing. It was confusing to Jane how the people she loved in her community would treat the first black family to move into the area. To Jane they were just people who needed a place to live. She couldn’t understand why so many people were prejudiced toward people they’d never met before. I’ve already heard from readers who have said, “I grew up in a town like that,” or “Boy, did that book ever bring back memories.” I’m honored to know that readers have really captured everything that Jane experienced at that time.
WOF: Some of your characters are on the hostile side. Is it difficult to write about characters with attitudes and beliefs different from your own?
DONNA: No, because I think that without Christ that I could easily be someone like them. It’s only by the grace of God that I am a new person. I spoke with a lot of different people about growing up in that era. It was a simple time with simple pleasures but also a scary time because so many households were rebuilding their lives after the war. Lynchings were already occurring in the South, which is so hard to believe. We won the war overseas against a man who was annihilating people different from him yet evil was rearing its ugly head here because black people weren’t white! I had to get inside the heads of some of those people for the book and show the prejudice, racism and ignorance that they’d let creep into their lives. And it wasn’t just rednecks, either. Some of the characters were upright, decent people but they didn’t want a black family living in their community. That’s what was so confusing for Jane. She admired and respected many of those people but was baffled by their actions. She was
learning that prejudice comes in all shapes and sizes.
WOF: The town of Morgan Hill is practically a character in its own right. That seems like it’d be a little complicated; how did you keep track of all those people and places?
DONNA: I’m so honored that you got that! I wanted the community of Morgan Hill to be its own character—from the railroad tracks that ran right through the middle of town to Henry’s store that crackled with life every day and to the church and school where so many functions took place during that time. St. Martin’s Press has already asked me to write more books set in that little community and I couldn’t be happier to take readers back to Morgan Hill. Each book will have a different main character but all the action will take place right there in Morgan Hill so keep your eyes open for more books in this series! It wasn’t difficult to keep track of the people because I would just ask myself, “Okay, where is Joe during this scene? Where is Henry?” Each member of the community was vital to the story so I had to keep track of their comings and goings.
WOF: Fran and Milo’s relationship is interesting – in a good way. Was it based on your own experience as an adoptive mom?
DONNA: No, Milo is older than my girls when we adopted them.They were both 10.5 months and came out of orphanages. Milo was six and was growing up in a home filled with love with both parents and a sister. Milo’s situation was difficult all the way around. He lost everyone he loved and was then thrust into an all white home with a single mother who had never been around black people. At one point Fran even says, “I don’t know anything about his people’s ways.” She felt insufficient for the task she’d been given and it didn’t help that so many people around her wanted her to get rid of Milo. But then there were those people who were going to stand next to her and Milo despite what people thought. They were angels within reach for Fran. Fran and her children (Jane and John) and Milo all had to figure out how to make things work.
WOF: If you had to boil down the message of Angels of Morgan Hill to one sentence, what would it be?
DONNA: The hope of belonging and the dream of family. Jane desperately wanted to have a complete family. She’d grown up with a drunken father and when he died she hoped and prayed that somehow, some way she could be part of a real family. In the same sense Milo wants a family where he belongs. It’s a dream they both share.
WOF: What’s your favorite part of writing a book? Your least favorite?
DONNA: My favorite part is actually getting into the story and making it come to life. My least favorite part is starting it!
WOF: What author(s) do you read and re-read? What are you reading now?
DONNA: I read lots of different authors but I re-read Philip Yancey. I just re-read What’s So Amazing About Grace and now I’m reading his new book on prayer. Unfortunately, I always have about three books going at once in addition to magazine articles and devotionals and of course the Bible. You should see my night stand. Add several children’s books on top of my books and I’m always looking at a mess. I clean it off at least twice a week but then books start piling up again. If I didn’t clean it I’d never make it to my bed!
WOF: What’s next for you?
DONNA: My editor at St. Martin’s Press has asked me to write another Christmas novel for fall of ‘07 and then another Morgan Hill book for ‘08. I’m working on the Christmas book now but think this will be the first deadline I miss because we’re expecting our little boy from Guatemala to arrive sometime in January or February and that’s when the manuscript is due. Check back with me at that time to see if I’ve finished it and if I don’t answer the phone you’ll know why!
