Donna Coffey Little
Novelist Donna Coffey Little, who has written an epic saga about Cherokee life and culture, “Wofford’s Blood,” is featured Sunday, Jan. 18, at 3 p.m. as part of the annual “Sunday with Friends” literary series at the Washington County Public Library, Abingdon, Virginia.
The book is based upon interviews with one of the last survivors of the Trail of Tears, J.D. Wofford, done in 1891 by Smithsonian ethnologist, James Mooney. All the characters, places and historical events in “Wofford’s Blood” are based upon primary source material.
The main character J.D. is a teenage boy, who is caught between the worlds of a white father and a Cherokee mother. 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 place where the white world and the Cherokee world intersected).
The novel dramatizes the daily lives, the sacred myths and rituals, the gender roles and especially the coming-of-age events of young men’s lives in the Cherokee world. J.D. has high status in his community, an apprentice to a medicine man. A trip to Kentucky to kill a buffalo is his right-of passage into manhood.
Little says, “I was drawn to J.D. Wofford’s story because some of his cousins stayed in Georgia and passed as white, while he chose to go on the Trail of Tears and embrace his Cherokee identity. I also knew that later he was James Mooney’s main Cherokee informant in Oklahoma, and I wondered how he knew all of the things he told Mooney.
“I did a lot of family history research and archival research, looking at historical documents relating to the Woffords. I also interviewed Wofford descendants and collected their family lore and family photographs. I also knew that the novelist Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford and that her father George Wofford was from Georgia and was the grandson of enslaved persons owned by J.D. Wofford’s cousins. I wanted to imagine the experiences of the Black Woffords as well and to embed Toni Morrison’s ancestors in the book.”
Little is a professor of English and creative writing at Reinhardt University. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. She has published a chapbook “Fire Street” as well as essays, poems, and scholarly articles in “Contemporary Women’s Writing,” “Modern Fiction Studies,” “Women’s Studies” and many other journals.
There will be book sales and signings at the event.
The Sunday with Friends author series is sponsored by the Friends of the Washington County Public Library, a volunteer, non-profit organization whose purpose is to help strengthen the resources of the library and to make it a dynamic force in the community.
