Blog Blitz with Author L William Gibbons
Christmas in July,
unwrap a summer ebook blog blitz, welcomes L William Gibbons
With a supernatural undercurrent, The Fourth Marker is the story of an
elderly man, Gabriel Townsend, whose spirit is being crushed between the
metaphoric anvil of his pragmatic views and the falling hammer of his wife's
pending death.
While a child on the family farm during the Great
Depression, Gabe rejected legends of his Native American ancestors and ignored miraculous
cures of three family members. Gabe's half-breed paternal grandfather, Noopah, tried
to teach him tribal legends and the old ways, explaining that, after most
Indians had been killed or driven from their lands by the Army and settlers,
tribal elders returned to their lands in
spirit form after their deaths. They
dwelled at a sacred hill on the family's land and protected their descendants
from early death and white man's diseases.
During those years, three family members were cured
of life-threatening diseases, but Gabe's pragmatic mother, not of Native
American blood, blindly credited their recoveries to the nascent field of
modern medicine. After each recovery, a person of evil character and not of
tribal blood disappeared, followed by the mysterious appearance of a wood
marker on the sacred tribal hill. Yet, despite those events and Noopah's words,
Gabe adhered to his mother's intractable views.
Now facing the loss of his wife, he relives his childhood
memories, guided by the spirit of his grandfather from beyond – well beyond –
the grave. Finally understanding the truth of long ago, he decides to beg the tribal
spirits to take his life in exchange for his wife's, aware that a fourth marker
would signify his own life – and death.
As Gabe's father noted, "some understand only
what they see; others see only what they understand." The Fourth Marker highlights this most human of vices against the
backdrop of Native American legends with ample helpings of farm life during the
Great Depression.
Some thoughts from Bill:
BEFORE
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
A highly successful genre for generations of novels,
television, and film has been the Western. For many of those generations,
"cowboys and Indians" has been a common theme, popular not only in
the United States but, based on this writer's personal experience, in Japan,
England, and France and surely in many other countries.
Except for a few examples, chiefly James Fenimore Cooper's, The Last of the Mohicans, most settings for the theme, and
variations thereof, have been west of the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountain
ranges and the majority of those west of the Mississippi River. However, the
relationships between the relatively new arrivals to North America's eastern
shores and the indigenous people in those areas were established long before
the time periods represented in most novels and film. Further, those beginnings
impacted all later relationships between the two groups down through the
centuries, even to the present day.
In 1608, English soldier
and intrepid adventurer, Captain John Smith, explored the Chesapeake Bay, the
United States' largest estuary, and its far reaching tributaries under the
auspices of the Virginia Company of London. His maps and intelligence regarding
the Native American populations, philosophies, and practices served the English
well for the next century in their quests to establish a Virginia colony and to
further their commercial interests.
Through the centuries,
Native American populations in eastern North America were wooed, threatened,
and manipulated, at various times, into serving the interests of the English,
Dutch, Swedes, Spanish, and French in various wars and skirmishes, including The
French and Indian War (Seven Years' War), United States' Revolutionary War, the
War of 1812, and the United States' Civil War.
The land mass defined by
the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean is the Delmarva Peninsula which
includes the whole of Delaware (Del), the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Mar), and
two counties of Virginia (Va). Contemporary place names such as Chesapeake, Nanticoke,
Pocomoke, Quantico (Maryland), Chicamocomico, Wicomico, Manokin, Accohannock,
Assateague, and many others on the peninsula reflect the names of tribes, subtribes, and native place names used long
before first contact with Europeans.
The United States' Indian Removal Act of 1830, which
resulted in the Trail of Tears episode in American history, required all
indigenous people, with few exceptions, to leave their tribal lands in the
southeast and east, along the eastern seaboard. Some tribal members on the
Delmarva Peninsula as well as other areas in the east, defied the government
and remained on their ancestral lands, hiding from authorities in the Great
Pocomoke Forest, outlying islands, and swamps on the southern peninsula.
A conscious decision to "hide in plain
sight" or not, they eventually intermarried and bred with local whites,
African-Americans, and mulattoes. Many families whose ties to Delmarva date
back a generation or more share a heritage with those aboriginal people;
however, the prejudice and racial bias of
a bygone era caused many to ignore – even deny to this day, witnessed by this
writer – their lineage.
Determination of one's "Indian-ness,"
usually based on persistent family lore and legend and aided by convenient and
wide-ranging research resources available on the internet, has resulted in an
upsurge of interest in Native American DNA that still exists on the Delmarva
Peninsula. Although less concentrated among the peninsula's population than
during America's Great Depression, Native American blood still courses through
the veins of many of Delmarva's residents.
Author Bio:
Born the first of three
children to Charles and Lydia Gibbons in 1946 in Wilmington, Delaware, Bill's
young family moved back to their homeland of Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore,
part of the Delmarva Peninsula, shortly after his birth. There, he attended school
and worked on the family farm in a community of farmers from whom he gained
much of the knowledge of farm life that would show up in his writing decades
later.
Following graduation from
Wicomico Senior High School, Bill enlisted for four years in the U.S. Air
Force, serving in Texas, Mississippi, Japan and Washington, D.C. Upon
completion of military service, he attended University of Delaware while working
full-time as a laboratory technician and later as a computer programmer for a
large, international chemical company in Wilmington, DE. While attending
college, he augmented his G.I. Bill tuition benefits with sales of his art, e.g. oils,
pastels, and ink.
He was transferred to
Atlanta, GA and Tampa, FL, working in industrial chemical sales, and eventually
back to Wilmington, DE. Taking early retirement from that company, Bill
moved back to his childhood home of Salisbury, MD and entered the real estate
sales, home improvement contracting and real estate investment fields.
While involved in real estate sales, he was a contributing columnist in the
local Salisbury newspaper, writing about real estate sales, purchases, and
investment. Later, he was a political cartoonist for the same newspaper.
Bill entered college again
at Salisbury University, a campus of the University of Maryland System, at the
age of sixty-three with a double major in physics and philosophy. As a
result of academic successes in his writing at SU, paired with his experience
with a newspaper column and political cartoon publications, Bill pursued his
life-long ambition to write in the fiction genres.
Always a devotee to
travel, all languages, and experiencing other cultures, Bill has lived and
traveled in Asia, traveled throughout Europe and in most U.S. states and
Canada. He speaks, reads and writes Japanese, although not as fluently
as he would wish, is a light airplane pilot, is currently studying Spanish, and
is a member of Eastern
Shore Writers Associationand American
Mensa®. He has also been published in Mensa® Bulletin,
the organization's national monthly magazine.
On October 6, 2011, Bill's
wife, Sharon, gave birth to their first child.
Find Bill here:
Buy his Books here:
Please visit these
other sites and leave a comment to win a $10 GFC to Wild
Child Publishing.
Great post, Bill. This is sad history, but I suppose history is like that sometimes. Great things happen, as well as terrible things. What surprises me is our inability (for some of us) to forget this aspect of our history. Some would say we're making the same mistakes today. It's important to remember, so thank you for the reminder.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Matt. I wanted to give some of the history behind the premise of my novel, i.e., the return of Native Americans to their ancestral lands, albeit in spirit form following their deaths, to protect their descendants.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Bill
ReplyDeleteThanks, S.R. And thank you for organizing the blog blitz. I'm sure it's been like herding raccoons!
ReplyDelete