That picture is me. I was ten. I’m not sure who my daddy was. I’m not sure I wanna know. I think it was the man who sold me. I dunno. I was 13 when my momma went over yonder and whispered something to him before she came over and said to me,

“You special. We special. You ain’t like them.” My momma held my arm and looked at my skin.

“You beautiful, don’t you forget that baby, ok?” She rubbed my skin and looked at the field hands over in the cotton fields. I rarely saw them. I stayed inside with momma.

“Ok. Momma where we goin?”

“You gone go with Mr. Henry over there. He gonna be your new Master and he gonna…”

“Momma no I don’t wanna leave!” I grabbed her arm so hard it almost tipped my momma over. A tear fell out my eye and rolled down her light brown skin.

“Don’t you cry I’ll slap you! Mr Henry gone take care you just like Calvin took care of me. Now stop it or I’m gone slap you!”

I peeked through the door one night last summer and I saw it. Momma was naked with Masta Calvin. I saw what take care means. It means I’m gone get naked for Mr. Henry and he gone call me a fucking black bitch and then kiss me.

It was in that moment I knew I ain’t never gone see my momma again.

I would become momma.

Ok let talk to you readers directly. My name is Venus. You think I’m a fictional character? Don’t you.? The one thing I will give credit to Xplisset for is he treat me like a real lady. A lady. That’s also the problem.

First, I apologize I’m a woman of few words. Normally. Momma taught me to survive in this condition by keeping my mouth shut. It’s different for just slaves. But this thing ain’t normal and it’s time for my memories, my story, my spirit to live on in this book Xplisset is writing for you readers.

I had what you might call a quite animated disagreement with him this morning. He be letting his favorites, Nathan, Alex, run free do what they want, say what they want, but me he be trying to control.

Don’t let him get away with this. My words are just as important as them men. Hold his feet or should I say his fingers to the fire as he writes my story in his book. I think his heart is in the right place. I see him struggling. His struggle was nothing compared to mine. Nothing.

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The calm quiet of these concentration camps that we were liberating did nothing but intensify the smell of death throughout the place. It was evident from what remained of the sprawling warehouses and adjoining complexes that this was once an efficiently run Henry Ford style production plant. Except instead of employees, this company, if you could even call it that, relied on slave labor. Instead of cars, the end product was death.

Bodies were stacked up near the crematorium not for the dignified preparation of passing on that you and I would expect from one decent human being to another but rather these were the scattered remains of a product that had now become evidence.

I did everything in my power to keep it together as the Lieutenant of this outfit. My right hand soldier Sgt. Adams performed courageously along with the rest of my squad against the Wehrmacht and now was not the time for me to lose it. My men, the few who were left, needed my leadership.

Then I lost it. A girl half naked in ragged prison wear came directly to me stared at my name on my uniform and said, “papa” and pointed at a pile of dead bodies. She had meandered through the throngs of other soldiers perhaps because I was one of the few white faces there in that moment. She saw my name, Cohen, and perhaps this gave her some comfort amongst all this disorder and death.

I covered my eyes. I pretended they were hurting. The little girl reached for my hand. Adams took the girls hand and introduced himself.

The girl looked at Adams the way frightened children look at the shape of whatever story adults have taught them to fear. Not the man. Not the soldier. The story. The lie wearing his skin.

Then she asked, “Monster?”

“No.” Adams smiled and pointed at me. “Brothers, Americans”

“Brother?”

I saw Adams cover his eyes.

It was in that moment that I knew.

By the way, my name is Nathan Cohen. To you I’m a fictional character but to Xplisset I’m as real and dare I say even more real than the people he interacts with on a daily basis. Yeah, in his novel, War After War: The Big Payback, he’s got me playing the role of a Works Progress Administration agent assigned to the Federal Writers’ Project and tasked with retrieving and preserving the memories of our last remaining Civil War veterans before they exit to the eternal resting places. Of course, he had to do what writers always try and do and a lot of times fail which is make it interesting for you to read so he gave me an asshole for a partner.

His name is not even worthy of mention here just know that he and I see what you all in 2026 call The Civil War very differently. To him it was a War of Northern Aggression. To me it was a War of The Rebellion. Oh and not to brag but I have a Bachelor’s Degree in History and I came within a hair of getting expelled for my senior thesis title:

Motherfuck That Bastard William Dunning: He Can And Should Go To Hell

I’ll admit that I did indulge in a little too much whiskey at the time I conceived that title but my premise stands firm as the bedrock foundation this country was founded on.

Erasure of memory is as deadly as murder itself.

That moment I described earlier as I served as an Army officer is me trying to convince Xplisset to open his novel with it. That way, like a Jack Johnson 1 - 2 punch we can immediately transition to the Ebenezer Creek Massacre.

Oh and Xplisset don’t you say a goddamn thing. A man’s word is his bond.

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I’m on some trifling writer’s BS this morning.

It’s 300am. I’m not fully awake. Being fully awake would defeat the whole purpose of being awake at 300am. I need to access apart of myself that is not myself. This needs to happen before moonlight disappears and before the sunrise. Leave the daylight writing hours to those who hide behind slick smooth sounding brochure phrases which scream “see look I can write better than you can ever dream! Subscribe to me!”

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lol

Deference To Inspiration (The Subconscious)

I can’t make those claims because I didn’t write this. If I were writing this it would have been strict adherence to premise and then from there an outline and then from there a conventional by the numbers series of arguments and precepts which build toward a conclusion and tie it up in a nice bow tie with a call to action at the end. Boring.

I’ve been doing this long enough to develop this skill of spontaneous inspiration such that I have to intentionally turn it off sometimes. What you are witnessing is me publicly practicing for my immersion week where I finish this manuscript by binge writing 7 days back to back 20 hours a day. I haven’t picked a date yet but I’m thinking sometime before the end of June. Aside from the Blackout Briefs, it will be just morning and evening Author Room updates with not too many excerpts to give away the whole book but just enough to build anticipation. There will however be plenty of process displays such as pics of me looking COOL as all hell writing this thang in various locations and in different positions with sunglasses on.

Payback Politics

I’ve decided that Payback Politics will be a major theme of my novel War after War so much so that it will become the subtitle. Therefore as of right now the full title is War after War:The Big Payback. Payback Politics is a phrase I coined up to describe the arrogance of an empowered political class whose entire motivation isn’t a legacy of policies that reshape society for the benefit of society as a whole as in the case of the New Deal proponents, The Civil Rights Activists, and the Reagan Revolution adherents, but rather its primary purpose is to use federal power in the settling of scores and as a demonstration that someone is finally going to make “them” feel it.

There is a type of arrogance that accompanies The Payback gangsters in power that blinds them to their own unforced errors. I can’t help using Superbowl LI as the prime example of how Payback Politics ends in the ruin of its adherents and the near ruin of the country. This is from my January 9th essay PAYBACK ALWAYS LEAVES A CRIME SCENE

I took my inspiration for the subtitle from James Brown’s song The Payback. Once I get over this hump I will immediately begin writing a screenplay adaptation which will make full use of this song in select scenes.

There is Few if Any Like It

This work of historical fiction I’m working on will do what no other work save Birth of A Nation and Gone With The Wind has attempted to do which is to create a narrative that ties the antebellum period to Reconstruction well into Jim crow and connect it to Nazi Germany. I know what you’re thinking. You can’t possibly connect completely different eras using the same characters. I thought the same thing for years before I came up with this narrative.

There are documented cases of civil war veterans that survived into the 1930’s. One of my central characters, Alex, is a black civil war veteran and former slave who has seen slavery up close and personal, has worked as a federal agent as part of a posse of federal troops to confront violent militant white supremacists groups which were terrorizing black voters and Republican officials throughout the South, and lived long enough to witness first hand the white washing of history by watching the Birth of A Nation from a segregated movie theater.

He is interviewed by Works Progress Administration agents looking to preserve a historical record and from these memories spring forth a revelation of events that are so extraordinary they cause a rift between the two agents as they both see this nations violent and checkered moral history through 2 different lenses.

It’s no different than today where we cannot any longer agree that Martin Luther King was an American hero and icon. It’s no different then today when we cannot any longer no longer agree that slavery was an evil worth the lives of millions of soldiers to wipe it off the land that holds all these truths to be self evident…

We Gone Be Alright

Take solace in the fact that it doesn’t matter whether it’s Progressive wielding Payback Politics as during Reconstruction or right wing reactionaries today wielding they all will eventually collapse on themselves as they fumble the ball dancing on there way to the end zone. My novel will demonstrate this as it makes you laugh and cry a few tears.

I’m increasing the spots for a dedicated page for early Author Room supporters from 20 to 38 spots to symbolize the number of states in the Union at the end of Reconstruction in 1876. Currently there are 22 spots taken. Get your star and name in my upcoming novel before it’s too late. You will receive a free signed copy. Sign up for the Author Room.

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Ok let me just state this plain. I spent night after night after night trying to craft this intro. Then I realized how much I am handicapping my own efforts, and how much I’m quietly taxing the goodwill of the people who’ve invested in me through this work. I need to be saving my best for this novel, and not burning it all up on one essay like it’s a bonfire I can stand next to for warmth.

Because when I look at current events unfolding on the national stage, and then I look back at the Civil War and what came after it in Reconstruction, it feels odd how, in my mind, they almost blend into one major event. Like the same storm system circling back over the same house, just wearing a different name tag.

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Author Room

If you’re just landing here, an Author Room post is me letting you into the workshop. It’s where I take a live theme from the news, trace its roots back into history, and then show you pages from the novel while it’s still being built.

War After War is my Reconstruction-era novel about what happens when a country loses the plot and tries to write a new one while the ink is still wet. It follows Lieutenant Logan Dixon, a Union officer with a complicated past, and Alexander, a Black man who grew up with Dixon on the same plantation and remains his lifelong friend, as freedom arrives loud, uneven, and dangerous and as the two of them, alongside Venus, a former slave who grew up on the same plantation, end up teaming together during Reconstruction to fight guerrilla warfare against militias trying to drag the old world back into place.

Andrew Johnson’s Blueprint

And this is exactly why I do these Author Room posts. I’ll be in the weeds building War After War, then something in the news hits like a tuning fork and suddenly the past starts ringing in the present. That happened to me this week when fellow Substacker dug up a quote from President Johnson that fit so perfectly into the mess of a puzzle we’re trying to make sense out of with the war on DEI.

Hold up. You think I’m talking about President Lyndon Johnson? No. I’m talking about the drunk one. I’m talking about Andrew Johnson.

The one who was the polar opposite of President Lincoln’s more progressive stance on civil rights. The one who ascended unexpectedly into the seat of power after a Confederate sympathizer assassinated Lincoln. And once he got there, Johnson used that power to resist Reconstruction efforts, especially when it came to bringing the full benefits of citizenship to newly freed African Americans. Instead, he treated Reconstruction like it was less about building a new democracy and more about reconstructing the bruised ego of a Southern white populace that felt humiliated by Sherman’s scorched earth strategy.

Here is the quote directly from ’s post Nike. The EEOC. And A Reconstruction-Era Legal War :

The first clear articulation of what we now call “reverse discrimination” came from President Andrew Johnson, in his veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866—one of the very Reconstruction-era laws now being repurposed to attack modern inclusion efforts. Johnson vetoed the Act just two years after emancipation, at a moment when formerly enslaved Black people had no land, no money, no political power, and no material security. And yet he argued that extending basic civil rights to them was unfair to white Americans. He warned that the Act would establish, “for the security of the colored race, safeguards which go infinitely beyond that of any that the general government has ever provided for the white race,” and that it would operate “in favor of the colored and against the white race.”

And that’s the part that keeps snagging in my throat. Not just because it’s cynical, but because it’s familiar. Two years after emancipation, with Black folks broke, landless, and exposed, Andrew Johnson could still look up and claim white people were the ones being wronged, that basic protections for the formerly enslaved were “in favor of the colored and against the white race.” That’s the early blueprint for what we now call “reverse discrimination,” and it rides the same old engine: humiliation dressed up as fairness. And in real life, humiliation doesn’t heal anything. It just looks around for a target it can safely punish.

The Ground Shift

It’s tempting to get lulled into the big battlefield scenes and the equally huge egos of the participating generals when researching the Civil War. It’s tempting to make the story all cannons and speeches and maps.

But then you start to notice the widow whose sons were sent away to fight under the Stars and Bars for a cause they weren’t even invested in. They didn’t own any slaves. They were just drafted into a pride project. You start to notice the newly freed people who were suddenly thrust into a world they had no muscle memory for. No land. No protection. No stable rules. Just a new kind of exposure.

The more I dug into the passages, the more I saw a people caught in what I can only call The Long Kiss Goodbye. That moment when history changes the locks while you’re still inside the house. And by the time you realize the ground shifted, it’s already too late to walk back to the world you thought you were living in.

Mourning Disguised as Rage

The Long Kiss Goodbye is what happens when a whole country is forced to grieve in public, but nobody’s allowed to call it grief. A huge swath of the populace are mourning the loss of everything they grew up with, and might not have even agreed with, but it held the familiar world together. Not because it was perfect. Because it was legible.

It’s the slow-motion breakup with the old order, and when I say “it held the world together,” this is what I mean: NATO as the backdrop hum of safety, NAFTA as the promise that “global” wouldn’t mean “gone,” unions as the last everyday lever a working person could pull, the New Deal and the Great Society as proof the government could still do big things for regular folks, political correctness as that awkward social glue that kept the peace in mixed company, mainstream media as the referee you could hate but still recognize as the referee.

And that’s just the grown-up stuff.

And then the cultural anchors vanish too, the stuff you didn’t realize was holding your nervous system together until it was gone. Like, can you believe MTV is basically gone. Not “stopped playing music” gone, we been knew that. I mean shut down, nada, stopped broadcasting. Dayum.

So when people act irrational, when they lash out, when they start treating politics like payback instead of policy, I don’t just see “opinions.” I see mourning disguised as rage. I see a goodbye kiss that lasted too long, long enough for somebody to mistake it for love, long enough for somebody else to pull away and swear they were never touched in the first place.

Charleston After Liberation

Paul Starobin, in Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War, drops you into a newly liberated Charleston where the symbolism hits before the policy does. The first federal soldier to enter the defeated city was a Black U.S. Army man, riding a mule up Meeting Street with a “Liberty” banner, and Union forces included U.S. Colored Troops, with “Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston” as a rallying cry. Charleston’s formerly enslaved people, now free beyond the lash, weren’t quiet about it. “I’se waited for you, and prayed for you… and you done come at last,” an elderly Black woman told federal soldiers. In that aftermath, planters evacuate on Confederate orders, then come back and start over in whatever shelter they can find; one of them, John Townsend, swears loyalty to the Constitution and the Union, not as some moral epiphany, but as survival choreography. New power was in town with new oath on your tongue, means you got to keep it moving. (Starobin, pp. 217–219.)

Milledgeville and Sherman’s March to the Sea

Milledgeville wasn’t some random detour, it was one of Sherman’s loudest stops during the formal military campaign known as “Sherman’s March to the Sea.” His strategy wasn’t just to win battles, but to break the Confederacy’s ability to keep fighting by cutting its nerves: rail lines, telegraph, supply depots, and the confidence that government still meant protection, all while the army lived off the land and kept moving. So when the columns rolled into Georgia’s capital, the statehouse wasn’t just a building, it was a symbol, and symbols were the point.

And I need to be crystal clear about this before you read the excerpt: Lieutenant Dixon is my fictional instrument, but what you’re about to see in that statehouse is not “creative license.” The takeover, the mock legislature, the public humiliation, the pillaging of the library, the scattering of the treasury, the whole thing turning into a drunken stage show, is a documented event that transpired. It just doesn’t sit comfortably inside the Lost Cause bedtime story, so it gets treated like an embarrassing photo nobody wants on the mantle. That’s why this excerpt matters to my concept of The Long Kiss Goodbye: it shows the old world being dismantled in real time, not politely, not gradually, but like a stage set kicked over while the audience is still seated.

Excerpt from War After War

Here’s the excerpt from my novel War After War, when Lieutenant Dixon, Logan Dixon, a Union officer trying to keep his moral footing while the world slides under him, is present as Milledgeville is being taken, and the statehouse becomes a stage.

Wait a minute, almost forgot to ask you to share this and restack.

And if you want to support this work with an Author Room subscription, here’s what you’re actually getting: excerpts directly from War After War as it’s being built, in real time. You’ll be the first to get copies of the finished book, and the first 20 Author’s Room subscribers will have their names printed on a dedicated thank-you page inside it. Most importantly, your subscription sends an undeniable signal to agents and publishers that this work is already finding its readers, already building demand, already moving in the world before anybody in a Manhattan office decides it’s “worth taking a meeting.”

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Milledgeville, Georgia — November 23, 1864

The town announced itself first by sound. The clatter of wagon rims over river stones, the thin squeal of axles, the brittle snip of telegraph wire somewhere up the road. “Cut ‘em clean,” a cavalryman had said at dawn, and the wire’s last note still rang in Logan Dixon’s skull like an insect the army would not hear again. Mud kept its own music: a sucking, patient appetite at every hoof-lift; boot soles peeled free with wet kisses and slapped down again.

They passed families in flight. A woman with sleeves rolled up to the elbow drove a mule, her boy beside her hoarding a cradle in his lap. Behind them a cart stacked with bedframes, a washboard, a cedar chest; a man ran alongside with a Bible wrapped in oilcloth, as if the book might drown. Another wagon piled high with barrels of syrup rocked like a ship; a girl steadied them with bare hands. “They’re headed for the asylum,” Sergeant Mills said, pointing with his chin. “Folk say they shoved state papers and books up there in the night.” Private Harlan whistled through his teeth. “Four wagons of books to cure the crazy. Georgia got her treatments backwards.”

Cavalry recon had come in the evening before, lighting brushfires with their cigars, slicing wires, poking at redoubts that turned out to be empty. “Mayor already surrendered, asked for protection,” Ames reported, trotting up. “He’s got a family, sir.” Logan nodded. On the ridge they saw the imprint of three abandoned rebel works, lines of raw earth half-melted by rain; the bayonets that should have bristled there were only broom handles, forgotten when everyone ran. “Cadets guarded the place late summer,” another man offered that they were boys from the Georgia Military Institute, “drilled on the square like bantam roosters. Governor Brown even scraped up a prison militia out of the penitentiary, pardons for a musket.” Harlan spat. “Reckon the killers took the deal, and the honest men stayed in their cells.”

By late morning the road widened into Greene Street, and the army began to dress ranks out of habit, straight lines restoring themselves from march-ragged files. A regimental band struck “Yankee Doodle,” then tried “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” knuckles purple where the cold bit through gloves, drumsticks tapping measured comfort against the winter air. Harlan sniffed. “Hear that? Sounds like we’re a parade and not the tail of a storm.” A pair of companies peeled off toward the capitol square, and from the column’s shoulder Logan saw two men clamber to the dome and lash a U.S. flag to the staff. The stripes flung themselves horizontal in a sudden breath of wind, and a ragged cheer answered from below. “There it is,” Mills said. “The Union Stars and Stripes are back on top.”

Then came the freed people, pouring from lanes and alleys as if the earth itself had given them up. Some were barefoot, others in rags still marked with plantation dye.

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My future literary agent is going to want me to delete this.

Why? Because thinking out loud, in public, about the blueprint of a novel is supposed to depress demand. You’re not supposed to show the scaffolding. You’re supposed to let people imagine a heroic artist alone at a typewriter, catching lightning in a bottle like it’s a casual Tuesday, like some magical Negro Hemingway who just wakes up, stretches, and the Great American Novel falls out his sleeve with his lint. That myth sells. I get it.

Here’s the truth, though. I struggled. I stumbled. I circled the same scenes until they got dents in them. And yes, there’s shame in the fact that it isn’t finished yet despite the time I’ve set aside for it. Not because I don’t love the work, but because loving a thing doesn’t automatically build it. Discipline does. Structure does. And, apparently, so does swallowing pride and admitting you need witnesses.

So to my future agent, don’t panic. I’m not giving away the whole book. I’m telling you how it finally started moving. The greatest leaps of progress on War After War came when I opened it up right here and realized something I wasn’t expecting. People actually want to see this story on bookshelves. They want the receipts. They want the names kept. They want a novel that doesn’t just reenact history, but fights over who gets to remember it.

And that matters right now, because we are living in a moment where erasure isn’t an accident, it’s a strategy. A “clean” version of the past is being marketed like a product, and anything that complicates the Noble Lie is treated like contraband. If I’m building a book about the trap of payback and the long war for memory, then hiding the process like it’s shameful would be me cooperating with the very thing the book is trying to expose.

So no, this isn’t me “rambling.” This is me refusing to let the wrong people own the story.

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The Good Crisis Made Me Go Back for Venus

I didn’t plan to reopen the manuscript and start moving load bearing beams around.

That’s not how writers like to tell the story of writing. We prefer the myth. The plot “arrived,” the characters “spoke,” the book “took over.” We like to act like we’re just standing under a waterfall with a bucket, catching genius. But The Good Crisis did what real crises do. It knocked the theater down. It made me look at what I was pretending not to see.

I went back into War After War and realized I had been doing what the country does.

If you are new here, let me say what the story is, plain. A formerly enslaved Black man named Alexander Freedmen survives the Civil War and the long counter insurgency that follows it. He lives long enough to become a problem for the people who want the past scrubbed clean. In the 1930s, two federal interviewers show up expecting a tidy veteran narrative. Instead they get a record of the wars America likes to call afterthoughts. The after is where freedom gets tested. The after is where terror returns in uniforms and in sashes and in polite language. The after is where a country decides whether citizenship is real or just a rumor.

The story moves in a straight line through time. It starts on a South Carolina plantation, then breaks into flight, then hardens into war. Alexander becomes a soldier in the United States Colored Troops and rides with Black men in blue into the liberation of Charleston under a banner that reads LIBERTY. Logan, the planter’s son turned Union lieutenant, serves in a different lane and ends up with Sherman. He lives up to his reputation as the brash officer who will confront authority, even in uniform. After Ebenezer Creek, when General Jefferson C. Davis abandons the freed people by pulling up the bridge, Logan tries to challenge him and fails, and that failure becomes a moral wound he carries. During the war, Venus moves differently. She becomes a quiet intelligence asset for the Union, relaying information from inside enemy-held spaces and listening rooms. The details stay deliberately spare here, but her role shifts from surviving power to bending it, using proximity and perception as weapons long before anyone would have called it espionage.

The shooting does not stop at Appomattox it only dampens into insurgency. The novel follows them into the War After War. Alexander and Logan are recruited as agents of the state, what we would now call federal agents, tasked with breaking up a multi state network of white militias composed of former Confederates who are determined to snuff out Reconstruction by attrition. Night riders, courthouse coups, assassinations, voter intimidation, guerrilla warfare waged not in open battle but through exhaustion and terror. That shadow war pushes them toward Wilmington, where the love triangle comes to a head and the country’s future gets decided in smoke. From there the fight shifts again into the propaganda war that tries to turn victims into villains. It’s a novel about what happens when payback feels like justice but ends up handing your enemies the story.

At the center is a triangle of survival, and it is also a love story. Not the clean kind. Not the kind built on fantasy. I want to show love in its purest form, which means female agency and consent, and I can only do that by showing what love looks like before power shatters it and what it takes to rebuild after.

There is an innocence early on. Two boys, Alexander and Logan, both sweet on Venus in that tender, awkward way kids are when desire is still mostly wonder. It is rivalry, yes, but it is also protection and loyalty and the first clumsy attempts at devotion. Then the rape happens and innocence does not just get bruised, it gets rearranged. The question becomes how you pick up the pieces without turning love into another form of coercion.

That is part of what the book is doing under the war story. It is showing people trying to reconstruct mating rituals free from domination. Trying to learn how to touch and be touched without taking. Trying to build a language for desire that does not sound like ownership. Black people have been trying to do that work for over a century in the shadow of what was done to us. That is why the blues exist. That is why quiet storm exists. That is why slow jams exist.

They are not just music. They are a people teaching themselves how to love when the world tried to train them to survive instead.

And that triangle comes to a head in Wilmington, where private devotion collides with public terror and where love, stripped of romance, has to prove what it really is.

I even have the cover in my head. Not as a demand, but as a north star. A field of uniforms and badges, not the glamorous kind, the kind that tells you institutions are present. A soldier’s silhouette. A law badge. Maybe a banner. Maybe a Bible pressed against ribs. The visual argument is the same as the narrative argument. The people who carry paper and people who carry rifles are fighting the same war. And to my future literary agent, relax. I’m not one of those authors who will hijack the process and micromanage the cover until everybody hates me. I’m giving you the shape of the feeling so the book doesn’t get dressed up in the wrong costume.

And here is the part that finally made me stop pretending this was just a personal writing problem. Every Civil War movie I grew up on gives you a slice. A battlefield here. A noble speech there. A charging line of men in blue, then a fade to black and a piano score that tells you the nation learned its lesson. Nobody connects the dots. Nobody takes you from the before, to the after, to the present, and shows you that the war did not end, it only changed uniforms.

I felt that absence in my gut the day over ten years ago I walked into the most renowned bookstore in my part of Florida and saw a whole wall devoted to Civil War battles. Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, maps and muskets and generals, a museum gift shop of blood. Not one single solitary book on Reconstruction. Not one. The long fight to make freedom real was missing from the shelf like it never happened. That is not an accident. That is the memory war in retail form.

That is why this manuscript matters to me. It is not just the cannons. It is the policy. It is the insurgency. It is the propaganda. It is the present tense of the past. And it is also why I had to go back and face what I had left half in shadow. Venus was there, yes. A name. A presence. A future spy. But she was still orbiting male decisions, male guilt, male courage, male suffering. Which means I was repeating the very pattern I claim I’m trying to expose. Women turned into scenery in the story of power.

And then Minneapolis happened. And that line, those words, came through my screen like a bullet you don’t hear until you’re bleeding.

“fu*ki*’ b**h.”

Two words that are not just profanity. They are a permission structure. They are the sound of somebody who believes the law is a costume he wears when it benefits him. They are the sound of power unmasked, contempt with a badge on. I’ve been hearing it in my sleep because it doesn’t belong to one moment. It belongs to a lineage. It belongs to every era where the people with guns and uniforms and courts and newspapers decide they can speak to women like they are not human and still expect the world to call it order.

That’s when I understood something I had known intellectually but hadn’t let myself write all the way down into the floorboards of the book.

Rape isn’t a subplot in American history. It’s not a side effect. It is one of the engines.

On plantations, the routine sexual violation of enslaved women wasn’t “scandal.” It was policy without paperwork. It was the invisible clause inside the deed. A young girl “acquired” for “service” wasn’t a rumor. It was the dark half of respectability. In the daylight you parade her like decor, your cultured house servant, your proof you’re refined. At night you treat her like she’s a thing you purchased for use. Like she’s a… and here’s where the satire isn’t even satire because the truth is that ugly, like she’s a piece of furniture with a pulse. Like she’s a nightstand that breathes. Like she’s the property you can’t show company, but you can’t live without. And then you wake up the next morning, wash your hands, and sit in church like God is supposed to cosign the arrangement.

So yes, rape is the catalyst event in my story. I’m not worried about “giving too much away” by saying that. If anything, I’m naming the truth that too many Civil War narratives sanitize into manners, uniforms, and battlefield nobility. The war begins in the bedroom. The war begins in the lock on the door. The war begins in the moment a man decides another human being exists for his appetite and his silence.

My Auntie Mary character understands this because she lived it. In the world of the plantation she is the one who holds the people together, the woman who has buried children, stitched wounds, and learned when to speak and when silence is the only shield left. In a scene from the novel she prepares Venus not because she thinks it is right, but because she herself endured his assaults years earlier and survived by learning what the daylight would never admit about the dark. She knows exactly what happens when a young girl walks into that room unprepared and believes the lie that obedience will spare her.

That preparation scene matters to me now in a way it didn’t before, because it is the first place where the book tells the truth about what power costs, not in theory, but in flesh. And it matters that young Alexander overhears it. Because Alexander’s education doesn’t start with letters on a page. It starts with the understanding that the world has one set of rules in the daylight and another in the dark. It also mirrors what every Black man on that plantation had to hold inside himself, a contempt swallowed so completely it hardened into posture. The knowledge that a white overseer could take their women at any time without consequence, and that the only way to survive was to pretend it didn’t hurt. That lesson teaches boys how to bury grief, how to turn rage inward, how to learn silence as a kind of armor. Alexander hears that lesson too, and it shapes how he understands power, love, and what it costs to keep going.

Which brings me back to payback.

Because if rape is the catalyst, then payback is the most natural response. It’s the most human thing in the world to want to burn the whole plantation down and call it justice. It’s the oldest desire there is. You hurt mine, I hurt you. You take something from me, I take something from you. That’s why that Minneapolis moment and the spin that followed it hit me so hard. Not just because it’s cruel. But because it shows how fast institutions will try to normalize cruelty when cruelty serves power. And when cruelty gets normalized, the oppressed start dreaming of payback the way thirsty people dream of water.

But here’s the trap, this is the part my essay last night kept circling like a hawk over roadkill. Payback feels righteous, but it produces unforced errors. It leaves evidence. It leaves a crime scene. It hands your enemy the narrative weapon they’ve been begging you to give them. They don’t even have to beat you in a fair fight. They just have to point at the wreckage and say, “See? They’re animals. See? They’re violent. See? They’re the threat.” And then they use your reaction as the justification for their next round of repression.

That’s not a moral lecture. That’s a field report. That’s Reconstruction. That’s Wilmington. That’s the long American habit of provoking Black resistance and then using the resistance as proof that Black freedom was a mistake.

So The Good Crisis didn’t just inspire me to “give Venus a bigger role.” It forced me to admit the deeper thing. If this book is going to tell the truth about the War After War then it has to tell the truth about what begins the war inside the home. And if it’s going to tell the truth about payback, it has to show why the desire for it is understandable, and why, strategically, it can become the very mechanism that hands power back to the people who started the violence in the first place.

That’s the work now.

Not romance. Not nostalgia. Not bloodlust.

Record. Strategy. Memory.

If you don’t want to be enraged, stop here. Close this page.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman just dropped $10,000 into a GoFundMe for the ICE agent who shot Renée Good, then went on X to say he did it because he believes in “innocent until proven guilty.” Funny how that standard never seems to apply to Good. He also said he meant to give to her family too, but it was too late.

That GoFundMe was launched by Clyde Emmons, who bragged on Facebook that he did it because “the stupid c*nts wanna make a go fund me for that stupid bit** that got what she deserved.” A separate fundraiser for Ross rants that Mayor Jacob Frey is an “anti-American traitor” and adds “who is Jewish.” These are the people trying to turn her death into a payday.

Now take a breath. This is exactly how the trap of payback gets baited. They want the match strike. They want the outburst. They want the clip. They want the wreckage. They want to point at your anger and call it the problem.

So do the opposite. Choose persistent, informed, sustained action. Keep receipts. Keep names. Keep dates. Keep patterns. Support the work that stays alive after the Friday dump and the next distraction.

If you want to fight back in your own way, become an Author Room member. That buys me time to finish the novel, gives you exclusive excerpts here, and puts you on the list of the first 20 supporters who will be mentioned in the published book and receive a free copy when it releases. It also lets me walk into a literary agent or publisher meeting with proof that this book already has committed people behind it, not hypotheticals, not vibes, twenty real names who raised their hand early.

The cost is $99. And if that number makes you hesitate, just remember what you just read. Somebody out there treated $10,000 like pocket change for the man who killed her and then called her a “fuck** bi*tch.” Your $99 is not payback. It’s staying in the fight long enough to win the story. Scroll to Author Room below:

STAY IN THE FIGHT TO WIN THE STORY

I hear the screams of mothers sacrificing themselves to give their children a chance to cross over, to the other side. I hear the cries of husbands trying to shield their wives and children from the bullets of approaching Confederate soldiers. I hear it happening at an impassable creek, a crossing the Army has already made, after the freed families have been directed to wait their turn and let the troops and wagons go first. I hear and see one family in the water amidst all the chaos, calmly giving their daughter a swimming lesson as bullets fly and people drown attempting to get away, to the other side of the creek. The daughter made it across. She never saw her parents again.

The song “Near the Cross” by the Mississippi Mass Choir plays along like a movie soundtrack in my head as I watch her swim to the other side of the creek. “Rest beyond the river” is the refrain I keep hearing. Those that didn’t make it across did make it across. That little girl finally made it with the help of soldiers already waiting on the far bank, the Army safe on the other side, watching helplessly in horror as the scene unfolded. They were just following orders. General Jefferson C. Davis told them to dismantle the bridge they had used to get across that creek in their march towards Savannah.

Before you keep reading, let me say this plainly.

If your mind placed the villain in gray, you are not alone. If you assumed the men cutting that bridge must have been Confederates, and that any “Jefferson Davis” must be a rebel, that’s the trap this country lays for us. It teaches you to look for evil only on the obvious side, then it asks you to call it history and move on.

This was real. The bridge came up under a Union command, not a Confederate one.

And it gets worse once you learn who that man actually was.

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A Traitorous Name

I’m drawing the backstory here from **Bennett Parten’s **Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation. In that telling, you learn he had a traitorous name. Jefferson Columbus Davis. First and last names that echo the Confederate president, Jefferson Finis Davis. By the time Sherman’s army marched, infamy followed him, and not just because of the misfortune of that name.

Parten lays out what happened in Louisville in 1862. Davis, insulted and humiliated by Union General William “Bull” Nelson, demanded an apology. Nelson dismissed him in front of witnesses. Davis went hunting for a pistol, came back, and shot Nelson dead at the Galt House Hotel. He was arrested, and then he was back in uniform anyway. No trial. No reckoning. The Army needed bodies, and a certain kind of man could always find a reason to be kept.

That’s what protection looks like in America when it decides you’re worth saving. White male privilege did what it has always done. It turned the hanging he deserved into a footnote.

Ebenezer Creek

Then Parten shows you the throughline that makes Ebenezer Creek feel less like a freak accident and more like a pattern with a signature. Davis had been complaining in writing about freed people following the column, calling them a burden, insisting the march could not afford their mouths or their bodies. He started tightening the noose with orders. No wagons for women and children. No horses or mules except for the servants of mounted officers. Deterrence first.

And before Ebenezer Creek ever happened, there were previews. Bridges raised too soon. People stranded while Confederate cavalry hovered at the rear. Panic. Families plunging into water. Some not coming back up. In Parten’s account, Davis kept doing it, again and again, until the creek that would carry the name for what it became.

So when you picture Ebenezer Creek, don’t picture a momentary lapse. Picture premeditation. Picture a man who had already learned he could spill blood in broad daylight and still be protected. Then picture what that does to the people who have no protection at all.

The people in the water had no such shield. No rank. No court. No sympathetic paperwork. No second chances. Just bodies and panic and current. They were freedmen in name, and expendable in practice, people he could see die just as ruthlessly, in broad daylight, with nothing to fall back on.

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And Parten makes another point I don’t think we talk about enough.

The soldiers who witnessed it, men who had been marching for weeks, men who thought they knew what war was, came out of that swamp changed. They watched freed people risk everything for freedom, watched mothers and children drown for it, watched families get shattered in front of them, and something snapped into place. Not pity. Respect. A hard, sobering respect. In Parten’s account, you can feel it in the way they condemn Davis, in the way they speak of indignation spreading through the ranks, in the way some of them start saying, in plain language, that anybody willing to die for freedom is entitled to it.

And here’s the part that still burns.

Slavery had been a fact on the page for generations. It could be argued about at dinner tables and filed away as “how it was back then.” But this betrayal in real time, this bridge coming up while women and children were still on the wrong side, this spectacle of people dying for the very freedom America claimed to be marching toward, this is what shocked consciences in a way the abstraction often didn’t. Ironically, it wasn’t the system that spawned the horror that pierced the nation’s nerve in that moment. It was the moment the horror became unavoidable.

And that is why this scene will not let me go.

It is also why I’m done saving it for later.

War After War

I wrote War After War with this tragedy placed later on. But the voices kept telling me to put it at the opening.

So I intend to open the novel War After War with this, because it was supposed to come later, but the voices kept telling me it belonged on page one. Not as a history lecture. Not as a documentary. As a door you have to walk through, because the rest of the story does not make emotional sense unless you feel what was done to people who had already tasted freedom and were told to wait for it politely.

Those that didn’t make it across did make it across.

I keep coming back to that line because in my head the ones who went under still crossed to the other side. They crossed into witness. They crossed into a place where they could look ahead and see their descendants, generation after generation, still marching. Still pushing. Still insisting on a full human life.

And in that vision they get to watch something else too.

They get to watch their people, in later generations, finally cash pieces of the check America wrote in its founding documents and tried to bounce every time Black bodies stepped up to the counter.

If this section grabbed you by the chest, if it stayed in you longer than you expected, that is the exact reason the Author’s Room exists.

Imagine if you could have been part of a Francis Ford Coppola newsletter while he was conceiving Apocalypse Now. Not the finished film, but the hard decisions, the revisions, the doubt, and the moments the story finally clicks.

Join the Author’s Room tier and you’ll get sneak peek excerpts from the War After War manuscript. You’ll also get the live Q and A, and you’ll be in on the first wave of author signed copies when the finished novel is published.

Author Room

You are not just “supporting a writer.” You’re helping keep a certain kind of memory alive, the kind that makes it harder to be lied to. If you can do it, come sit at the table. If you can’t right now, stay anyway. I’m still glad you’re here.

Why did I hide it? Maybe because there’s always a first, and we never know we’re watching it.

There was a first modern human, the first one whose mind could hold an idea that wasn’t in front of his face. Not memory. Not instinct. Imagination. That leap forward. The ability to conjure a thing that isn’t there, to see a story before it exists.

And with that new power, he disappeared into the dark caverns to meet what the mind can summon when the lights go out. He came back trying to translate the vision, trying to give the tribe language for what he saw. And the tribe did what tribes do when fear gets embarrassed: they called it madness, they called it evil, they tried to silence him.

Later, some tribes learned to protect the shaman instead of burning him, but the old reflex never died. It just changes costumes…from inquisitions to Salem to the little modern rituals of ridicule.

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And that’s the part that should make this easier: you’re not reading this in a village that burns people at the edge of town.

Substack, at its best, is the rare tribe that protects its shamans. It’s a place where the one who goes into the cave can come back out and be heard, even if the vision is strange at first, even if it makes people uncomfortable, even if it refuses to fit inside the neat little boxes the world hands us.

And still…my fear persists. Because the oldest fears don’t need torches anymore. They live in us. They sound like laughter you haven’t even heard yet. They look like a blank stare. They feel like that moment right before you admit, out loud, this is what you’re called to do and you worry the room will decide you’re ridiculous.

Here’s the ugly bind you live in when you’re the kind of person who reads, studies, and keeps reaching for understanding: the tribe treats you like contraband and currency at the same time. One day you’re the “know-it-all,” the try-hard, the one who “thinks too much.” The next day, when the room is on fire, everybody suddenly wants your map.

Even the Bible mirrors that tension. In Genesis, the Tree of Knowledge isn’t framed as a cute upgrade. No. It’s the moment innocence collapses and consciousness turns on. And notice what happens socially: when the leap toward knowing brings consequences, the story funnels blame onto a woman. Eve becomes the face of the disruption, the one the tribe can point to so it doesn’t have to face its own hunger for comfort. The pattern is ancient: when knowledge changes the social order, somebody gets tagged as the problem.

So if you’ve ever felt that hesitation, ever dimmed your curiosity, softened your intelligence, played smaller so you wouldn’t be mocked or resented then you’re not imagining things. You’re feeling the old tribal reflex pressing on you: know, but don’t make us uncomfortable with what you know.

So here’s the reveal. The “this” I’ve been hiding from you isn’t a scandal. It’s a book.

For nearly a decade I’ve been carrying a novel called War After War. It follows two childhood friends who grow up on the same plantation with one born into slavery, the other the son of the plantation owner and they get thrown into the violent reordering of the world. After the war, they don’t just walk away and call it peace. They join forces in the fight to preserve freedom during Reconstruction, when the country starts trying to take back, through terror and law, what it couldn’t hold onto on the battlefield.

And I’ve been hiding it for the same reason you’ve hidden parts of yourself: because saying it out loud turns the private calling into a public risk.

Now that you know what I’ve been carrying, the only honest thing left is to stop treating it like a private hobby and start building it in public.

So let me ask you to imagine something: what if George Lucas had a platform like this while he was still wrestling Star Wars into existence? Not the finished myth, no, the messy becoming. The false starts. The character problems. The days the story wouldn’t cooperate. The little breakthroughs that finally made it click. You wouldn’t just be a consumer of the final novel film adaptation you’d be a witness to the forge.

That’s what the Author Room is going to be here. Alongside the receipts and the analysis you came for, you’ll also get the book in motion: pages, problems, choices, and the hidden scaffolding and also why a character needs a particular wound, why a scene has to hurt, why a single sentence can take a week.

And in the next Author Room, I’m going to tell you what started this decade-long obsession in the first place as to what haunted me, what image wouldn’t lift, what question kept reopening. Once I name it, you’ll understand why War After War wouldn’t let me go… and why I’m done hiding it.

If you want to help me bring War After War across the finish line, join the Author’s Room (default $99, minimum $81). You’ll watch this novel get built in public with draft updates, research receipts, character framing plus one exclusive excerpt and one live Q&A, and when the book is published you’ll receive an author-signed copy of War After War.

And to be clear: this is historical fiction. It’s a novel meant to move you, entertain you, and haunt you in the best way. This is not a documentary. But the bones are real: Reconstruction is the buried origin story of so many modern battles over votes, bodies, and who the law protects, and fiction is sometimes the only way truth gets past the guards in our heads.

Set your amount: $99+ gets you in. You can fill in this field and lower it close to $80 if that’s your lane or set it as high as the sky if you want to really underwrite this work. Adjust up or down as you need but either way, you’re helping prove there’s an audience for stories bigger than another cape.

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