GASP! PRECIOUS JEWELS may contain sleaze!

Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga, might have been brought to you by an Adventist publishing house, but I am afraid that my family were a little bit too human.  Several reviewers in the publishing company recommended that the book be published as long as the "sleaze" was removed.   

"Out!" cried one reviewer.  "I want the sleaze removed!"

Sleaze?  In my book?!  Well…

I admit that perhaps my great-grandparents, Jtun and Pearl Holt, married too many times (although mostly to each other.) 

Then there's that troublesome compromising scene at Holt House in chapter five.  It's not explicit, but it is clearly conveyed what happened…and it was naughty.

In chapter six, things get complicated for Jtun and Pearl's daughters, Grace and Ruby, when their paths cross that of Yankee schoolteacher brothers.  And on we go, this family that is so prone to controversy!

"These people are sinning too much," I can imagine the reviewers worrying.  And perhaps more importantly, "Can this book be read aloud in a family setting?" 

My answer to both those concerns is to refer them to the Bible.  The Bible is read to children and it is not a book of saints. 

Excuse me?  Am I comparing my book to the Bible?  Well, yes, but not to say that is of equal import.  Specifically, I am comparing the family saga in Precious Jewels to the family sagas of the Bible.  There was some pretty big sinning in those Bible pages, but the power of the Bible stories is that those people had beliefs, and though they didn't always measure up, those beliefs defined them.

Despite the "sleaze," Precious Jewels is a faith-driven story of four generations of passionate people, torn between their hearts and the burning desire to do what God wanted them to do.  That is the story that I had to tell, and I couldn't tell it if I extracted the "sleaze." 

So the publishing company and I parted ways, although I think we both respect the stand of the other.  They have specifications that they must hold to as a denominational publisher, just as I have specifications that are important to me as a teller of stories about real people.

BEWARE! PRECIOUS JEWELS is Politically Incorrect!

Already eyebrows have lifted because the word "nigger" appears several times in the first chapter of Precious Jewels.  I have been informed that I have committed a transgression against "political correctness" in allowing my characters to speak as they most certainly did speak in the late 1890s at the Holt home in Yazoo County, Mississippi.

A hundred years later, the Mississippi Holts still recalled the shock that rippled through the family when Carolina Pearl Holt converted to "that nigger religion" and that was the term that was still used in reference to the Seventh-Day Adventist church when I interviewed a 92-year-old distant cousin in Mississippi in the 1990's.  She was still of the opinion that her Aunt Pearl had lost her mind.

I have in my possessions the articles that were published in the Yazoo Sentinel, some of them written by my great-grandfather, Jtun Holt.  These articles, "politically correct" in their day, were full of racist rhetoric.  I have watered the narrative down considerably in order not to over-use a word that the present day "word police" are trying to abolish.  But I am against the abolition of a word just as I question the burning of books for fear of the knowledge inside them. 

It is not the word "nigger" that is evil.  It is how it has been abused.  To forbid it to be ever written is silly.

"Nigger" is simply the word "Negro" spoken with a Southern inflection, and "Negro" means "black." 

That being said, its meaning has been changed through the way it was used, just as the swastika's meaning changed from an ancient symbol of good fortune to something sinister and evil when the Nazis took it for their own.  We cannot use it nowadays for decoration because of the Nazis.  But we can write about it and show its image in the context of history, just as we can describe the ignorant ideas about the Jewish people that led to the Holocaust.

I have considered rewording the first chapter of Precious Jewels in order to omit the word "nigger", but found that it came across awkwardly and artificial.  The fact is my ancestors were racists, and so have I portrayed them in the story.  The issue of racism comes full circle in this family saga as each generation encounters it and ultimately chooses to overcome it.