Author: Suzanne Moyers

Making sorghum syrup In researching this novel, it didn’t come as such a surprise that most women in the early 20th century were saddled with an inordinate amount of often dirty, strenuous, and downright dangerous labor.  Women worked with chemicals like lye and boric acid, handled open laundry fires and sizzling stoves (while wearing dresses… Continue reading Going Whole Hog…And Goose

I believe that one carries the shadows,  the dreams,  the fears, and the dragons  of home  under one’s skin… –Maya Angelou Two weeks ago, after 20 years away, I returned to Texas.  Last time I was there, in fact, was to bid good-bye to my father’s mother, Ruby Jewell Johnson Moyers, aka my grandma, Mimi. … Continue reading The Dreams, The Fears, The Dragons…

When she was about 12, my grandmother’s father, aka Papa, lost his arm to a sawmill blade.  I think it was Nana herself who described to me the one detail she remembered from that day: How Papa’s coworkers burst into their house and heaved his bloody body onto their kitchen table. How the blood dripped… Continue reading Giving Papa a (Whittling) Hand

11-yr-old cotton picker, 1911 Growing up, I spent many summers and holidays on my grandparents’ farm in northeast Texas.  Nana and PawPaw Joe’s house, built by his grandfather, was surrounded by cotton fields.  Cotton was King in the south at one time, and still was an important crop when I was a child. I remember… Continue reading Cotton-Picking Children, Part I

If you were Caucasian and lived in the South c. 1919, you were probably a white supremacist.  How could you not be? From your birth, you would’ve absorbed the messages, played out in the very routine of daily life, that you were better for the accident of being born a particular race, one assigned a… Continue reading In 1919: You Had to Be Taught

     I was a teenager when my grandmother, aka “Nana,” began to develop dementia.  She’d been a sweet, proud, incredibly resourceful woman, and it was hard–especially as an adolescent– to deal with her frequent forgetfulness and odd behaviors.  But what really made an impression on me was they way she would suddenly stare into an… Continue reading Writing My Southern Roots