Life in Ringgold in the 1950s was much different than today, and the Klu Klux Klan's influence in the area at the time had much to do with that, says local author Janie Dempsey Watts. The events of the time influenced and inspired Watts' two historical fiction novels.
Her recently released "Return to Taylor's Crossing" is the sequel to "Moon Over Taylor's Ridge," and while both are set in a fictional town in Catoosa County called Taylor's Crossing - the original name of present-day Ringgold - it incorporates historically accurate places in the area as well as influential historical groups.
"I'm trying to show that one violent act can have a lifelong impact on all those involved, both the victim and the attacker," she said of her novels' themes involving the violence and turbulence which she said characterized the time. "In this area there was a lot of Klan activity in the 1950s and 1960s."
For example, Watts said, through research she discovered there was a bombing in Ringgold involving the KKK. Following a black and a white student getting in a fight at school, the KKK bombed a house in retaliation, killing a woman, said Watts.
Watts said her family was personally impacted directly by a separate attack in which the KKK ran off her grandmother's hired hand due to his skin color.
"My grandmother ran a dairy farm with her children and an African-American man that helped as the right-hand man and he was paid," Watts recounted. "In 1955, the Klan beat him up and told him to never come back or he would be killed."
It rocked the family for generations, she said. So, once she grew up, Watts searched for the kindhearted man she remembered helping her up onto the horses to ride horseback around the farm.
"My grandmother had to give up her dairy farm since she did not have good help," Watts added.
After finding the man, he became the inspiration for her two novels.
"I wanted to give him a story," the author said. "I always wondered what happened to him. A friend of a friend connected me to him. He had fond memories of the farm, but he had a tumultuous life as a result of the KKK running him out of town."
Watts won the Book Reader's Appreciation Group Medallion, a book seal for self-published books, for her novels. Both can be purchased on Amazon.