Just So You Know
Updated: Nov 6, 2022
Birth of the Legacy
I am sometimes asked if The Vance Legacy is autobiographical. It isn’t. The Legacy stories are fictional and are products of my creative imagination. I sometimes get the impression that some people would feel more comfortable with my story if it were about my family as we thought “Roots” was about Alex Haley’s family. This belief was proven untrue years ago and more recently after the airing of the “New Roots Series,” on A&E and the History Channel. According to a June 2, 2016 article on Salon.com, Haley’s family saga was a, “work of imagination rather than history.”
Although the Legacy stories are no more autobiographical than any other novels in this genre (Roots, Gone with the Wind, etc.) all historical fiction is based on some historical fact. The black concubine on southern plantations was a well-known and securely kept secret but no less fact. This is one of the things that sparked my imagination.
What if the planter was actually in love with his slave? What if Mammy in Gone with the Wind was a svelte mulatto woman whose beauty was captivating? To what lengths would the planter’s white wife go to win her husband back from the arms of his slave? These are the questions that sent my imagination soaring and produced the novel. The Vance Legacy is at its heart, a story of forbidden love and the consequences of betrayal.