M. F. Jones  

My paternal grandfather, 

Robert Tyre ("Bobby") Jones, Jr. 

Those trips South required two entirely different wardrobes, one for Tuxedo Road, the formal Jones residence where we had to be on our best behavior, and one, we joked, for “Tobacco Road,” home of my other grandmother, “Maa,” where we spent the hot, lazy days fishing in the tidal river that ran through the marshes in front of the house, riding my grandmother’s Shetland ponies, and playing in the dusty yard under the palmetto trees. It’s easy to guess which clothes and environment my younger sister, brother and I preferred.

"Tobacco Road" - Me, my sister, Adele 

Walker Jones, and our little brother, Robert 

Tyre Jones IV in a stroller improvised 

by our grandmother, Dell Massey

My Southern cousins liked to tease me to the point of tears by calling me a Yankee. I didn't know what that was, only that it seemed to be a shameful thing. Later, when I was ten, my father acquired The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War  by Bruce Catton, with its accompanying recording of songs of the time, and the photographs and the music kindled a fascination with the conflict. When I was twelve, my mother suggested that I was at last old enough to understand and appreciate what, for her and other Atlantans, was a sacred text: Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.  It made a deep impression on me, and, naively, I identified with the Confederates rather than the Yankees so vilified by Mitchell and my cousins. 

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MY LOVE OF WORDS and reading came from my grandfather Jones (called Bub by his grandchildren) and his son, my father, Robert Tyre Jones III. As my grandfather succumbed to a painful neurological disease that gradually paralyzed him, he drew upon the intellectual resources that had enabled him to succeed at Georgia Tech’s school of engineering,  as a student of English at Harvard, and as a law student at Emory University, as brilliantly as -- if less publicly than -- he had as a golfer. He loved language, and poetry, and Shakespeare. My father would sit on countless evenings beside the armchair to which Bub was confined, assisting his father by holding the cigarettes for Bub to smoke and raising a glass of bourbon to his father’s lips, as the two of them talked about literature and quoted poetry.

My father shared this passion with me also. Poetry gave scope and richness to a life that, for Dad, was constrained by living in the shadow of his famous father, coping with his father's and his wife's chronic illnesses,  and working in a humdrum job.  His tastes were eclectic – Robert W. Service’s verses, especially “The Cremation of Sam McGee” which he could recite from memory; Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” rendered in Dad’s version of a Cockney accent; Thomas Gray’s poignant “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; “The Fool’s Prayer” by Edward Rowland Sill. When I was bullied in grade school, my father coached me on dealing with cruel people by means of Rudyard Kipling's "If" and Shakespeare's "Polonius' Advice to Laertes" from Hamlet:  “[If] being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating….” and,  “This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Though the advice was lofty, it helped: like my grandfather and my father I was learning that literature could put life’s sufferings into a perspective that made them bearable.

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THE MOST FORMATIVE PART of my education was high school, when I attended a Catholic boarding school in Connecticut, a tiny institution of only 75 female students, run by a community of nuns.  It was an intense experience, the inspiration for my novel-in-progress, Immaculate Heart. My time there – 1964-68 -- coincided with the upheaval of the Catholic church and the greater society, as  traditions and  mores were challenged and overthrown in the wake of the Vatican II liturgical reforms, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam war, and in the rise of the rebellious youth culture. I learned to question  inequalities in society – so glaring in the upper-class Georgia milieu that I experienced on my family’s trips south -- and  to seek ways  to redress them. I spent two summers at the school working as a counselor in a program for teenaged girls from the poor sections of nearby Norwalk and Stamford, Connecticut, and New York City. I was impressed by the spirit and spark of these young women who  had been denied most of the advantages I had,  to my shame, taken for granted up until then, and inspired by the passion for social  justice of the nuns who led the program.  

I also learned from the example of these nuns that it is possible to have an intensely personal relationship with God – something that intrigued me and that I have been compelled to explore ever since.

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I went on to work in magazines, though always with a focus on books, which I excerpted and condensed into article-length features for Redbook, Family Circle and Reader’s Digest. Living and working in New York City I met my husband, Douglas Hedwig, a professional trumpeter who played for the Metropolitan Opera and later went on to become a tenured professor of music at Brooklyn College.  We have a son, Marcus Hedwig; raising him was both the greatest challenge and greatest achievement of our lives. We are proud of the man he has become and thankful that he is our best friend. 

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In the early 2000s my husband  began playing, as a hobby, with a Civil War -style brass band that performed on original instruments of the era and in faithfully-reproduced uniforms.  The band played at major re-enactments at Gettysburg, Antietam and Cedar Creek, as well as at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Ford's Theatre. Participating in these events reawakened my fascination with this period of American history and ultimately led to my beginning to write a trilogy of Civil War themed novels.  

Research for those books opened my eyes to what I had never fully appreciated before in my infatuation with the Glorious Cause as portrayed in Gone with the Wind: those who claimed that the Southern motivation in the war was to protect “States' rights" meant, primarily, the right to own slaves. 

My fictional hero, Lemuel Sanders,  joined the Confederate army, but, like many from his part of eastern Tennessee had never witnessed slavery firsthand and had no commitment to it. He joined the war for notions of adventure and glory, and to protect his home from Northern invasion.  He could have easily fought for the Union, however. His part of east Tennessee was divided, as was evidenced by the fact that my two great grandfathers, both from this region, fought on different sides of the conflict. 

The title of the first book of the trilogy, “Somebody's Darling,"  comes from the terribly sad song on my father's scratchy American Heritage recording that had held me spellbound when I was ten. 

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