Book Summary:
Wofford’s Blood is an epic family saga saturated in Cherokee and North Georgia history. It is 1815, in the contested borderland between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation, and thirteen-year-old J.D. Wofford, son of a Cherokee mother and a white Intruder father, must choose where his loyalties lie. He spends his winters in his mother’s Cherokee world and his summers in his father’s world: Wofford’s Settlement, the most notorious Intruder outpost in North Georgia. The novel is based on the true history of James Daugherty Wofford, who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears and was one of the main informants for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney’s Cherokee History, Myths and Sacred Formulas.
Interview:
Donna Meredith: Writing any book is a big undertaking that takes many months if not years. How long did you work on this book?
Donna Coffey Little: Wofford’s Blood was my Covid novel. I started it in March 2020. It took me two years to write it and then another year to edit based on comments from readers.
DM: What motivated or inspired you to write this particular story?
Donna Coffey Little
DCL: I have long been fascinated by the landscape and history of north Georgia, especially the Native American history. I had started writing a nonfiction book about Pine Log Mountain. I stumbled across the story of the Woffords, who founded the town of Wofford’s Crossroads (now White, Georgia) near this mountain and just down the road from where I live. I wanted to understand this mixed white and Cherokee family and how different members of the same family made decisions to stay or to go when the Cherokee Removal happened. I also wanted to include the history of the Black Woffords, especially after I learned that Toni Morrison was descended from the enslaved persons owned by some of the white and Cherokee characters I am following. Her ancestors (my speculations based on wills and censuses) are embedded in Wofford’s Blood and will appear in the sequels. It’s a microcosm of American history to see how intertwined the Cherokee, white and Black branches of the Woffords are.
DM: Is the first-person narrator who visits the Smithsonian yourself, the writer? Is that where you found many of your resources?
DCL: Yes, that first-person narrator is a fictional version of myself, but that scene in the Smithsonian never happened. During Covid, the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives were closed for two years. They weren’t even processing document requests. However, I did get a lot of documents from the Georgia Archives and National Archives.
DM: What made you decide to write the novel as a series of interviews? Did you find any primary sources of such interviews you were able to incorporate?
DCL: I decided to use the interview format because I needed to hear J.D. Wofford’s voice, and somehow the concept of having him talk to Mooney brought that voice alive for me. There aren’t any interview transcripts, but there are many places in Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee where he describes conversations he had with J.D. Wofford. Those became the basis for some of my fictional interviews.
DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting? Did you spend time traveling through the areas described in the novel?
DCL: I traveled to all of the places I described in the book. That helped immensely when writing the setting. The hardest part was describing the Cherokee settlements. I did a lot of research on contemporary accounts of Cherokee buildings and landscapes.
Donna Meredith
DM: Another writer friend of mine, Darryl Bollinger, indicated that when he asked about healing plants and traditions, it was like a wall went up between them. Did any living Cherokee help you in writing this story?
DCL: I made contact with a Cherokee woman, Marsha Mullen, who is J.D. Wofford’s 5X great-granddaughter. We have corresponded quite a bit, and she has sent me a lot of their family lore. I was also able to send her things I came across in my research that she didn’t have. For information on Cherokee plants, I spoke to a Cherokee elder named Tony Harris who lives in Georgia and runs the Cherokee garden in Marietta, Georgia. He did not speak of sacred things, but he did talk a lot about the properties of healing plants. The parts of my book that touch on sacred things are based on information in Mooney’s book and in widely available notebooks written by Cherokee medicine men. I am sure that those things do not even begin to touch on the depths of Cherokee spiritual practices, which are private.
DM: Tell us a little about your background and what got you started as a writer.
DCL: I trained first as a scholar, with a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. I later realized that my true passion was creative writing, and I went back and got a low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Solstice Program. I was writing primarily poetry and nonfiction until I stumbled upon the Wofford story, which I felt needed to be written as fiction in order to bring the story alive.
DM: What are you working on next? Might you write a sequel to Wofford’s Blood?
DCL: Yes, I am working on a sequel entitled Wofford’s Nation, which follows J.D. Wofford through the 1820s and 1830s, when he is helping to build the Cherokee Nation here in the east, and then fighting against the pressure for Removal. In the third book, I will follow him on the Trail of Tears. I’d also like to write a fourth book on the Civil War era, during which Cherokee, white and Black Woffords fought on different sides and sometimes even fought each other.
DM: What question do you wish interviewers would ask you?
DCL: I’d like to be asked if I meant for the land itself to be a character in the book, because the answer is yes. I really wanted to recreate what the landscape of Southern Appalachia looked like in the early 1800s and to convey how sacred it was to the Cherokee people. The book is, in a way, an elegy to a landscape and a culture that has been erased in north Georgia, although it lives on in Oklahoma and North Carolina.
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