Tag Archives: history

To that Texas politician: You can have my books when you pry them … well, you know the rest

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If I were to turn this space into a full reporting of every assault on books and literacy and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom of choice, I’d never get anything done. The folks at Book Riot – that’s their image above – are doing a good job of keeping track of every petty tyrant’s ambitions to tell you what you can and can’t read.

But I will note this: In a month of frustration and anger at the attack on books and our freedom – and you bet your ass those two are connected – by everything from greedy AI companies (who need to go broke and out of business sooner rather than later, please and thank you) and petty tinpot wannabe dictators over their own little fiefdoms, there’s little that has presented as so ignorant and intolerant as “We’re coming for the books,” uttered recently by repugnant Republican Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Here’s how the Texas Tribune reported it on August 19:

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.

Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.

“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”

The law from last year, Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect.

Patrick is no stranger to controversy over his ignorant, intolerant and politically questionable acts. I’ll leave it to more comprehensive online sources to tell you about that.

Book Riot notes that this is “manufactured panic over the content of books in school libraries,” and there’s certainly some head-shaking in noting that Patrick was conducting a publicity stunt for his podcast. The far-right activist/busybody who stood on stage with him was his next podcast guest and she’s put together a list of 2,200 “dirty books” that Patrick is touting as the state’s unofficial list of books that will get school libraries in trouble.

All of you know this space has become increasingly noisy lately regarding authoritarian-wannabe and oligarchs’ attacks on books and writing and publishing and privacy and freedom, because please have no doubt that anytime a politician and would-be authoritarian wants to ban books in school libraries, what they really want to do is control every aspect of your life, from your reading material to who you marry and how and when you reproduce.

Huge sweeping generalization there? I’m not gonna go the easy route and compare these wannabe dictator moves to the best-known authoritarian movement of the 20th century, But that’s what’s at work here.

So to cop a phrase from the old gun lobby bumperstickers, “You can have my books when you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.”

As Kelly Jensen so ably put it in that Book Riot piece:

If laws like SB 13 are about local control, then why does one partisan activist brag about having been engaged in censorship attempts at 163 schools where she doesn’t have a student or pay taxes toward? Why does one partisan activist get to decide which 2,200 books are illegal in Texas?

This isn’t about local control. It’s about Republican control of anything and everything, down to local availability of books.

What is the Nickajack and how does it relate to my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS?

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Anyone who follows me on social media – bless you dear folks – knows that I’ve been promoting my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS, which publishes June 1 from our own Constellate Publishing.

When I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019 I was living in Indiana but had a history with Tennessee: My parents were from the little town I based Seven Angels the town on. And I had family members in Tennessee and still do. More than three years ago, I moved from Indiana to Knoxville, where the finishing touches of the novel were written.

I didn’t get to hear “Southern Comfort,” a song by the sister blues/rock/country duo Larkin Poe, when I was writing SEVEN ANGELS, but I’ve grown to love the song and feel it relates closely to SEVEN ANGELS with its story of a woman who returns to her home place.

There’s a verse in Larkin Poe’s “Southern Comfort” that struck a nerve:

Left my soul in the Nickajack
God willing, I’ll find my way back
Counting down, my days are numbered
Gimme, gimme that southern comfort

But what is the Nickajack?

There are more accomplished historians than me – I’m not one at all, really – who can tell you better what the Nickajack is or was, but it was basically parts of two states, Alabama and Tennessee, that didn’t support the Southern ideal of slavery and whose leadership considered secession from the Southern secession movement.

The Nickajack would have been a state of its own, independent of Tennessee and Alabama, and an ally of the North. Leaders of the Nickajack modeled their secession plans after West Virginia’s exit from Virginia.

It never came to that, fortunately or unfortunately, because that would no doubt have cost lives if hostilities had broken out.

And the defeat of the South by the Union meant that the boosters of the Nickajack’s statehood movement dropped their plans.

So when the Lovell sisters of Larkin Poe sing about leaving their souls in the Nickajack, they’re talking about a pro-Union, anti-slavery part of the country, made up of parts of Alabama and East Tennessee, where I live now and where SEVEN ANGELS’ main character is from. Gloria Shepherd is a prosecutor’s investigator in Knoxville as the story begins but she returns to her home of Seven Angels in Crockett County, where much of the story takes place.

So now you know at least a little about the Nickajack. There’s more out there, especially about the Native American history of the area and the African American history of the Nickajack, and I’ll link to that below.

Credit to the Justin Brown and the Battleground substack for a lot of history and for that illustration of the Nickajack above.

https://battleground.substack.com/p/statehood-nickajack

And more info here:

https://www.quora.com/What-if-the-proposed-state-of-Nickajack-had-successfully-separated-from-the-Confederacy-and-was-admitted-into-the-Union