News about this Series, the Author, and a few Others too !
News about Robert F. Jackson, Jr's. work in descending order from newest posts backward
New !
From the author of the historical series SUNNY OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST, telling of a courageous and adventurous marriage between a Navajo woman and a white American adventurer from Virginia . . .
. . . SAILING TO WINDWARD, a small enjoyable novella takes us to the beautiful and sometimes dangerous Philippine Islands just one year before the invasive American political involvement there in 1898. This is the story of the troubled and dangerous lives of two Filipino sisters, typically petite Cebuano Visayans from the central islands, who might be forever lost to their family and the world . . . and two men who may care enough to help, one Filipino and one Irish American. Sheltered, entitled, provincial, twenty-three year old Rosario Lopez flees home and family on the island of Cebu to avoid her selfish stepfather's demands: marry his friend, an older man who is a sexual pervert, or be sent to a convent. Now, as she tries to secure passage on a trading schooner that roams from mainland Southeast Asia to scattered Polynesia, her sister, Teresa, a year older and equally charming, has disappeared months earlier, perhaps for fear of being forced to take Rosario's place in the marriage. No one really knows why she's gone or where she is. The author is married to a charming and accomplished Visayan woman, and they have lived and traveled where much of this story takes place. 1. Moral, 2. Christian main characters, 3. Some Catholicism, 4. Some adult themes and content, 5. Realistic violence and risks, 6. No gratuitous sex and violence. This novella stands alone but introduces people and places that will be important in the new series: Magandang Pilipinas (Beautiful Philippines). On AMAZON click here |
press release for Sunny of the Old Southwest
Alumni Notes
University of Virginia Curry School
[click text above]
Alumni Notes
University of Virginia Curry School
[click text above]
A UNIQUE CHARACTER'S HISTORICAL VALIDATION
Only a reader or two were surprised at the 'intelligence' of my three native women in this five volume series. It may be natural to view people from and formed by a simpler culture and lifestyle as surely being not as smart as those from a more advanced society. But it is not level of intelligence that is different; it is simply the level of education and experience that differs. Thus, should a native girl be raised with many challenges in her own cultural experiences, as was my character Jóhonaá (Sunny), she would grow up just as smart as any other American girl of that era, such as a 'white' girl, or black or Mexican. But she would be smart in some different ways and areas of knowledge. Innate, biological level of intelligence is an important factor as well; and Sunny and her two cousins share a high level of that trait in their family.
If some academic educational experiences were added to any capable, historical, native girl's formation, a similarity with girls in America's frontier 'white' world is formed, and even a similarity to those in the more civilized Eastern culture of that day. Thus Sunny, a Navajo, fits somewhat comfortably, in volume 4, among the academics at the University of Virginia.
There is logic to a smart and farsighted father, such as Sunny's, teaching and encouraging his daughter to read and write, when those cultural elements had been available in their Spanish and Mexican dominated region for centuries. All he had to do was cultivate positive relationships with the good members of the clergy, military, and civil government around him. He does this with the Americans as well when they come into the region after the Mexican War. That conflict was fought in 1846-47, just before and during the period when his daughter and her cousins were born. With her closeness to the two sisters, Naadáá (Natty) and Dahiná (Dani), her cousins, apparently some of her European influence rubbed off on them, making it slightly easier for them to marry white men, when no others were available after they found themselves in Texas. This also helped Natty to eventually become a regionally notable writer.
In order to compare reality to fiction, I have found historical evidence of two native women who became very modernized [rather than saying 'civilized'] in a European way. Many native women were already civilized in many ways. Granted my two examples were part white and part native. They were, however, basically raised native, though they were also educated in European subjects. But, then, Sunny was as well in a sense. She learned to read and write to some degree in English and Spanish. And she was given the opportunity, by he father, to meet and interact with Mexican and American officers and traders, and with Catholic priests as well. To use a descriptive phrase used by Betty Keller, one of the biographers of E. Pauline Johnson (Canada's "Mohawk Princess"), both Johnson and Hawaii's Princess Ka'iulani (last heir to the Hawaiian throne) were seen by whites as: "... both the cultivated lady and the princess from the primeval forest." This phrase is my character Sunny and her cousins, especially, certainly Natty the writer. The phrase essentially defines them. In a politically correct modern world (which I totally reject, by the way), the phrase may seem condescending, but it is really a compliment. Pauline Johnson cultivated that image as a writer and in her performances across Canada and on trips to Europe as "The Mohawk Princess". Her father was an important Mohawk chief and came from a line of very historically important chiefs.
This view, valid or not from individual case to case, is part of the mystique and appeal of the native woman to the white men who marry them even now in our era: that is to say_ men who marry women of cultures with closer ties to the more simple and pastoral life of past eras and cultures that today might still have close ties to that lifestyle such as in Africa, South America, Southwest Asia, and Southeast Asia (as well as the far North regions of North America). Such women can often be among the world's most sophisticated, yet their slightly distant sisters in the hinterland can have their ear to the earth. It is a positive cultural truth to be proud of, not a negative. And, even when the woman is quite modern and sophisticated, there is an older reality that sometimes peeks through, a reality of a native earthly knowledge (depending on the individual girl of course).
My Filipino wife is in very many ways more sophisticated than me, a simple Appalachian, suburban, country boy, she being from a city dwelling family of the medical and business world. And yet, from years of visiting her grandparents' and aunts and uncle's pastoral plantations and following her mother's dealings with medical treatments in sometimes rustic settings, she can often come up with some obscure, folk practice that usually makes the food taste better, the wound heal quicker, the baby laugh louder, etc. Well, you get the idea.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Finally the story of Sunny and the people dear to her is complete. In what is perhaps an unusual way, the latest volume, East & West From Texas, was completed after its immediate sequel, but this has been an unusual series in several ways. It began as one little stand alone novel, almost a novelette, but the ideas and inspiration kept flowing as if these were real people and someone was telling me their story so I could tell others. Details are just below the next news announcement.
NEW WEBSITE
Announcing our new website dedicated to the recently published volume 4 of Sunny of the Old Southwest. The site is attractively dramatic and contains extended excerpts that are longer than we've done for any of our novels before. There is even a slight challenge as one long excerpt takes a little effort to find. Happy hunting
Newly published:
East & West From Texas
This historical novel involves the broadest scope in geography and time of all of the novels, although the final novel To the End of the World (previously published) travels the farthest (to the Philippines).
This fourth novel opens as Aaron Jefferson and his Navajo wife, Sunny, who have settled in North Central Texas along the Brazos River, must deal with the risks faced by their friends on the frontier during the Red River War, the last violent gasp of the Comanche nation. It was a time that created widows, orphans, widowers, slaves, and other victims. It was a time of broken lives and broken people, and Aaron and Sunny seek to protect exposed settlers who have received land from the Double H Ranch to which Sunny is now the heir. Her now well known healing and comforting skills for victims of violence and lives broken and ruined by the harsh life of the frontier are brought into play once more.
In the second part of the novel, Aaron returns home to the Shenandoah Valley for a visit and to introduce his Native American wife to his family. As always perhaps, going home is melancholic at best and emotionally traumatic at worst. It can be cathartic, therapeutic, and sometimes devastating.
In the third part of the book, one of the three Navajo women returns to Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, bringing her husband and children along. It is, of course, a somewhat traumatic visit because her Diné ('The People') who had been incarcerated unfairly for four years are still (nineteen years after returning home) rebuilding the homeland that had been scourged by the forces of the U.S. Government. The journey involves a secret mission, as she and her husband knowingly encounter a business/legal problem that they had believed they were prepared for. Finally understanding the great risks involved, they further realize it may have been a mistake to have traveled with their children.
Previously Published, Volume 5, the final book
In the second part of the novel, Aaron returns home to the Shenandoah Valley for a visit and to introduce his Native American wife to his family. As always perhaps, going home is melancholic at best and emotionally traumatic at worst. It can be cathartic, therapeutic, and sometimes devastating.
In the third part of the book, one of the three Navajo women returns to Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, bringing her husband and children along. It is, of course, a somewhat traumatic visit because her Diné ('The People') who had been incarcerated unfairly for four years are still (nineteen years after returning home) rebuilding the homeland that had been scourged by the forces of the U.S. Government. The journey involves a secret mission, as she and her husband knowingly encounter a business/legal problem that they had believed they were prepared for. Finally understanding the great risks involved, they further realize it may have been a mistake to have traveled with their children.
Previously Published, Volume 5, the final book
To the End of the World The year is 1902, and America has ventured into overseas imperialism during the War with Spain in 1898 and the Philippine American War that followed. Now, as the latter conflict winds to an end, the forces of history, an adventurous son, and noble deeds draw two ordinary yet unique Westerners into danger once again. Having long ago bravely ventured into a deeply loving marriage that was daring for their times and having been heroes to each other and to those around them, Sunny and Aaron Jefferson bring their unique abilities and courage to a different, beautifully exotic, and sometimes dangerous land. Through the mission of two American adventurers, this novel introduces the reader to the early moments of the complicated relationship between the people of the picturesque and sometimes troubled Philippine Islands and both official America and her people. It is a relationship that remains an enigma even now, 117 years later. Like the experience of the American conquest, endured in her small part of it by the Navajo woman, Jóhonaá (Sunny), it is a story of missed opportunities. But what of Aaron and Sunny Jefferson's voyage to America's new tropical colony? Their goal is always to do the right thing, and they do not miss opportunities.
Quality fiction is imagined reality.
Quality fiction is imagined reality.