Judgment Tree with (Gary E. Parker)

Judgment Tree with (Gary E. Parker)

In this episode of American Civil War & UK History Podcast host Daz is joined by author Gary E. Parker to discuss his fascinating historical fiction novel, Judgment Tree.

Rather than focusing solely on famous battles and military leaders, Parker explores the war through the experiences of ordinary people forced to make extraordinary moral choices. The novel examines the complex relationship between power, race, loyalty, conscience, and survival, showing how the consequences of those choices could extend far beyond the battlefield.

Grounded in meticulous historical research, Judgment Tree brings the Civil War to life as a deeply personal and often uncomfortable period of American history.

Gary's Book
https://a.co/0cPGgqn5

ACW & UK History's Website.
https://www.acwandukhistory.com/

ACW & UK History's Pages.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

To keep up to date with everything American Civil War and UK history, head over to our website ACW and UKhistory.com. And remember, this podcast has a PowerPoint presentation that goes along with the show. So if you would like to see the PowerPoint presentation, then head over to our YouTube channel at American Civil War and UK History. Cheers. Hello everyone, I'm Dad and welcome to American Civil War and UK History Podcast. This presentation is available as a video on our YouTube channel or as a podcast from wherever you get your podcast from. And if you're watching on YouTube, remember to hit the subscribe button and give us a big thumbs up. And please visit our website at www.acwandukhistory.com where you'll find the podcast, blog posts, and links to all of our social media pages. The link is also available in the podcast description. And joining me today, I'm pleased to say, is author Gary Parker. Welcome, Gary. Thank you. I'm glad to be with you from Atlanta, Georgia. It's a long way away. We're good to be here. Excellent, fantastic, my friend. So recently you have written a new book called The Judgment Tree, which um is based around so it's um historical fiction, but it's based around obviously real events, isn't it, Gary? So um we're going to be talking about that. So um how did you get into sort of the American Civil War and history in general?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, I'm very much interested in history. In fact, a long a long time ago, I was a history major in university here in the United States in South Carolina. And um from that point on, I continued. I've read a lot of history. Um, I've written a good bit of history in different novels that I've written. And and I've always been kind of a uh my my major in history at the university, a lot of it centered around uh the American South. I'm from the South, grew up in the South, and so it wasn't that I ignored the rest of American history or world history, but um a good bit of my early studies focused on um the Civil War and you know Reconstruction and those time periods in the American South. So this has been a long-standing interest, and and judgment tree kind of came out of some of that interest.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Yeah, and again, living in the area you live in, you've got plenty of Civil War um sites that you could probably go and visit, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah, in fact, as as you may know, probably know, um Georgia was a centerplace of the Civil War, and Sherman in particular marched down from Tennessee after the battle there at Missionary Ridge, came down to Resaka, came down to Kennesaw, came down to Atlanta, um, and of course he burned Atlanta. That was the famous uh, you know, he burned Atlanta. And then he was headed down toward Maica, and then he made a turn, a left turn, and went over to Columbia, South Carolina. So uh Sherman's March is all through it, all through Georgia and North Georgia, Ringo, right down what's now Interstate 75, and um came into Atlanta, burned the city, and then went on from there.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, and obviously I know you've got a fantastic history center there as well. Have you ever gone to see the cycle rama there in in the museum?

SPEAKER_00 3:15

I actually have not. I I I I hate to confess that, but I have not uh done that, and um uh that's a good that's a good nudge on me to go do that.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, go and do that, mate, because I know someone that works there as well. I'll get I'll give contact with a guy and you'll get a special talk. Yeah. Okay, mate. So, okay, let's talk about your book then. So, what inspired you to write Judgment Tree?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

You know, it started actually with a conversation over a cup of coffee with a friend of mine in Charleston, South Carolina. He's a he's a friend I've known for over 30 years, and he had a great-grandfather, James Booth, who is a character in the book, who um who got word while he was fighting down and around James Island in South Carolina, he got word that his wife was gravely ill and might die, and that if he wanted to see her again, he needed to come home. And so he deserted. In that era, thousands and thousands of men on both sides deserted. Um, many of them would go home for a couple of weeks and get the crops in or put the crops out or whatever, and then they would go back. They call it French leave, um, going AWOL, coming back. Well, when James Booth got home to see his wife, um, he got arrested for desertion. And the the the official penalty for desertion in the Civil War was um execution, either by firing squad or hanging. And so they arrested him and they planned to execute him by firing squad. Now, in the Civil War, there were only just over 300 or so men, cumulatively on both sides, that were actually executed. But every now and again they would execute one to make the point that you can't be deserting. And so they were going to execute James Booth. Uh, the story told and reported is that he was actually in the back of the wagon with his pine box that they were going to bury him in on the way to the firing squad spot, and there was another soldier in his outfit, a man named Elisha Tyler Jackson, who didn't think they should hang him and went to the captain of the guard there who's about to hang him and begged for him not to hang him. Well, the the captain said he didn't have the authority not to hang him. But if if Elijah Tyler Jackson could find an officer to give him a pardon to give him the authority to not shoot him, that he would not shoot him. And so he this guy goes off in war to find a pardon to find an officer to let him off from not being shot by by firing squads. So that's the that's the seed bed of the story, and that's all true. And so I took it then, and um, you know, what what I call added water, you know, that's a that that may be a phrase you're you're aware of or not, but you in other words, you expand it way beyond that story, and it came the uh judgment tree as the result of taking that story of a real character, James Booth, and then expanding it widely across you know the Civil War in the north, New York City in the riots, um, to the battles in Georgia, Tennessee. So it goes from it goes from New York City to Gettysburg to South Georgia to North Georgia, Missionary Bridge, and it it expands from there.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Okay, so the the emphasis and and the main character is James Booth. But are there any other key figures that are going to pop up in this book that you've uh you know written into this and and that he meets along the way? So who are who would they be?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, there's actually three key men figures and at least two key female, well, three key female figures as well. It's it's James Booth, who was a real character. Roscoe Pierce, who was not a real character, but is a a substitute broker. And in the Civil War, substitutes were allowed. A rich man could pay a poorer man to take his place in the Civil War fighting. It was called the law of substitute. And Roscoe Pierce is in the north in New York City at the beginning of the book as a broker finding substitutes for richer men. So he's a key character. Another key character is Axel Strong. Axel Strong is a colonel in the Confederate Army, and he wakes up after the Battle of Gettysburg in the dead man's wagon. They thought he had died. His men that had him thought he had died, and he discovers that his son is missing. And he has made a promise to his wife that he will bring his son home from the war. And so now he heads out um to try to find his son, to find out what happened to his son at Gettysburg. So the three main characters, the three main characters are James Booth, who was real, Roscoe Pierce, who is a fictitious character, and Axel Strong is also a fictitious character. Roscoe Pierce is kind of the antagonist that you meet in the story. Axl Strong and James Booth are protagonists, and so these men converge eventually in the little town of made-up town of Blue Ridge, uh Georgia, North Georgia, where all these battles are about to take place. And then the women, Rosella is a slave woman who belongs with Rosco Pierce, uh uh antagonist. And she's got a small son, Gabriel, with him. And so this relationship between Rosella, who wants freedom, and in New York, even though she was officially free, um, she was still with Roscoe. And then Axel Strong's wife, who also in a variety of ways supports him and also at times conflicts with him because he does things for others that she doesn't want him to do. And then James Booth falls in love with a young girl called Rachel and wants to prove himself. He's too young to join the war at the start of the story, but he eventually joins as a substitute for another man, a richer man, who pays him the money. Then he takes that money and goes to Rachel's father and says, Now I have some means. I deserve to be able to court your daughter, and he's allowed to join the army at that point. So now he's a soldier, he's got some money as a substitute, and he does that to prove to her father that he can make something of himself. These three men, Axel Strong, Roscoe Pierce, James Booth, and the three women who love them and support them in some ways and conflict with them in other ways, are the main characters in the story.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

And so obviously, you uh you mentioned there and touched a little bit on the New York draft riots, which is quite an interesting, you know, thing to base a story around as well. So tell us, and and and of course, obviously it's a real event. So how important is it for you to uh you know um try and portray those events as historically uh correct as you can, sort of within the confines of a story?

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Yeah, that that's a great question. And and the truth is I this story is extremely accurate. There may be things that were changed slightly to fit the narrative of the story, which fiction writers always have some poetic license. But like the New York riots, for example, things that are in the story that are true. Um when the riots started, it was primarily Irish rebelling against the idea that now they could be conscripted, drafted into the war. Up until that point, though the conscription law was in place, they hadn't pretty much left um certain groups alone. But it the New York riot started because the Irish were getting drafted. And the riot started at first against the rich men, against rich people who could pay their way out because the poor Irish could not. And so, in the story, all that's true, that it happened on that particular day, July 13, 1863, and they did things like, for example, they burned down the first Brooks brothers, which was in New York. And so that's that's a true account, all that's true. There were people hung. It started off as a riot against rich people, and then it turned against African Americans, turned against black people because the Irish were saying, Well, we're fighting this war because of you, and now we're having to go off and die. The rich men can pay their way out. You, as an African-American, a black person, you're the reason for it. And so the the mob turned, there were thousands of people in the streets burning, looting, tearing things up, killing. The numbers of approximately 11 black men were lynched during this. That's all true. Brooks brothers burned down other big in other big properties on the on the uh streets of the wealthy homes. They actually attacked an orphanage called the Colored Orphanage Asylum. About 200 and some odd kids there live there. They burned it to the ground, the mob did. And there was one little girl who died during that. And part of the story centers at the very beginning around Roscoe Pierce, who's in New York during this time, and he's trying to get out of New York with Rosella. He's trying to get out to a train because they're just burning the city, you know. And he accidentally shoots a little black girl. And so that's one of the points at which the story begins. And now he's he's a he's a tough guy, and he's killed. At one point, he says that, you know, I I've I've shot nigh to nine men, but I swear to you, that little girl was an accident. His own conscience begins to bother him, not because he killed somebody, because he's been a tough guy and he's killed a lot of people. Um, but this this begins to niggle in his heart. So um uh that's all true. Well, that's all about the riots in New York. And it actually took, they actually brought men who had just fought the Battle of Gettysburg. They brought them in by train, and only when they got about 4,000 soldiers in town could they get the mob, the about a three-day riot, could they get it under control? And that's how they got it under control. So all of this converges from New York, Gettysburg, down south from there. So all of that's um in the story, and I took Roscoe Pierce and Rosella and put them right in the middle of that New York riot, and the things that happened there made a difference for them later on down the road.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

And so, how do they end up then down in Georgia? I mean, obviously, I don't want to ruin the book for people, but you know, so obviously you're going from the New York draft riots, and then obviously in 64, as we know, Georgia's under siege by Sherman, isn't he? So is that the basis of your story in Georgia around all of that events that are going on in 1864?

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah, it's not so much, it's not the Battle of Atlanta, it's the battles north of there in Rissa. That's where it's set in a little fake town near Rissa. And so Roscoe Pierce gets from New York down to Georgia. He's at he's originally from this little town in North Georgia, Blue River that I make up. And he when he escapes New York finally, he goes to Camp Curtin, which is a real camp during the civil during the Civil War, the Union camp in um uh Pennsylvania. Over 300,000 men um came through there at one point or another during the war. And he came there because it was a huge prison, and he was working, uh, this is all fictitious, he was working for a young young John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, for example, was one of the rich men who paid himself out of the war. He was in his 20s, 21, 22 years old during the war, in um Cleveland, Ohio. And so in the fictitious story, Roscoe goes to Camp Curtin, and then he goes to Cleveland. He's kind of the fixer for Rockefeller, and then he gets in trouble with Rockefeller, and then he has to go south. And remember, he's not a um he's not a soldier, he's a profiteer of the war, and he's managed both in the north and the south to stay out of the war with money and bribes and other things like that. But now he's in trouble, and he's got to go south, and he goes back to where he can just lay low in this little town in South Georgia. So he and Axel Strong were originally from this little town, and they've always had kind of a begrudging, um, I wouldn't call it a friendship. It's been kind of, you know, they're different men. Axel Strong has a uh moral compass stout as a fence post. Roscoe Pierce has no moral compass, it's whatever enriches him, um whatever pleases him. So these two men from opposite sides of the moral universe converge back in in uh Blue Ridge, uh Blue River, and um and and James comes up from the south, from South Georgia, because he's got an aunt who lives in this little North Georgia town, and she has written him a letter because she's thinking about making him her heir. So that's how they all get to to um to North Georgia.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Nice, and then as you said, it's near Rissa. So is that featured in the book, The Battle of Rossoka, in in some aspect?

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, it's it's featured in the sense that um the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, where Axel Strong and James Booth are at one time, and so then uh Axel Strong gets injured, comes back to recover from his injuries. As I said, James goes there to see his aunt, who may make him her heir, and that's where he meets the girl, Rachel, that he falls in love with. And so the battle of Rasaka is in the story, but it's not so much about the fighting, though there are a couple of scenes where they're fighting. It's about the fact that that's where James is fighting, and you do see scenes where James's fighting. And and and then that's the scene from which he deserts to go back because he finds out that Rachel, whom he married at Christmas of that year, uh Christmas of 1863 before 1864, 1864, and he finds out that she's ill, and he goes back to see her, and that's how they're all three there at that time after and and the aftermath during the battle of Saka and then in the aftermath.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Okay, so at its heart, what is what you're trying to get across to the reader of this story? What is it a mixture of you know I suppose adventure, um, a bit of a war story, a bit of love story. So, what what's the emphasis on you know what you're trying to bring to the reader for this experience?

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, it's uh it's what it's an epic saga um with the idea of how do men and women make decisions. For example, Axel Strong starts the war because it starts fighting in the war as a Confederate because that's what Southern men of honor did. But at one point he gets injured in the war, and a black escape from the South named Aridanis, who's a character in the story, finds him wounded near to death and hides him and nurses him back to health. And so he begins, Axel Strong begins to deal with the question of what is really honorable here? This experience, the war, he's trying to figure out really what he is fighting for now. Uh his son is dead, um, he's injured, he's close to death himself, and this this black man who nurses him, they have this conversation in a cave where he's hidden one night, and and they talk about what's honorable and what's not. And Eridanus uh makes a statement at one point, you know, um, if you cut me open like you've been cut open, you know, we bleed the same color. And then um, you know, Axel Strong later on reflecting on this says, you know, when you hug a black man, it feels the same as when you hug a white man. And so it's this sense of what is honor. And then Roscoe Pierce, the bat the bad guy, has done terrible things in his life. And is there anything he can do to make up for having accidentally shot this young girl? How is he going to live out his life when he doesn't have a sense of anything of being right and wrong? And James Booth is a young, naive boy who wants to make something of himself, and so he joins the war. And the war is not as noble as he thinks. It's it's bloody, it's brutal. And so all these three, and then three women around them, are dealing with what's honorable, what's worthy of your life. What kind of principles do you have? And so it's this that's kind of the the out and back of the story is how are they gonna, how are they going to how are they gonna do anything that's valuable in the world in which they live, in the times in which they live, because it's it's a shifting sand underneath their feet in terms of what they're going through. So I think that's really the story is you know, human uh human desires and human wants and human struggles, they're all the same. They're universal, whether it's the Civil War, World War I, or World War II, or you know, we all have these different kinds of conflicts. We want to do the right thing, but what's the right thing? You know, I think that's the the story is how these three men and the women around them deal with the conflictions of of war and home and battle and and those kinds of things. I'll stop there. That's a pretty long time.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

That's all right, mate. That's fine. Um, so what I what I'd love to know is so obviously when you sit there at the beginning and you think, right, I'm gonna write another book, how do you come to the decision of what to base it around? So obviously. This one and probably many others you've based around the Civil War, say, for instance. So, how do you come to that decision? And obviously, you know, then making a character, I suppose, is easier because, like you said, you found the real a real person that was involved in a lot of this stuff, so that's quite easy, I suppose. But how does an author come to that decision?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

You know, I I have written um this is my 21st novel, um, traditionally published novel, not self-published, nothing wrong with that, but that's not what I've done. Um and each one has um they've all started in some sense differently. Uh I haven't written in I I did I did four murder mysteries were my original four books. Then I did what you would call historical novel family sagas, three there were trilogies, three books in each of those uh series, one called Highlight the Blue Ridge Legacy series, one called Southern Tide series. Um but I haven't written, I haven't tried to write just in one genre. I've had an agent tell me, well, you should just write in one genre. You'd sell more books. And my answer was you know, I write out of what interests me at the time in my you know journey and at the time in my life passes. And so the Civil War story came because a friend of mine told me this story, and I love the Civil War and I wanted to go from there. My book prior to this, which came out two years ago, called The Playbook, is a story about a football coach, a female football coach in a North Georgia town. I said I'm both in Georgia, Georgia, because I know that area real well. But it came out really out of the COVID experience, and I remember a young woman kicking an extra point for Vanderbilt during that experience, Vanderbilt University football, American football. And I thought, what would it be like to be a female who did that? And I had two very strong, intelligent daughters and a wife who is the same. And so I thought, well, what if a woman loved it so much that they wanted to make their living out of football? American football. And so there are women now who are assistant behind-the-scenes coaches in in the NFL. If you ask AI how many head football coaches there are in America who are female in high school, you get it says two. So, anyway, that story to answer your question came out of what would it be like if there was a woman coach? Well, where would I put her? Well, let's put her in North Georgia, a small high school in a small town. How would they deal with a woman coach? You know, how would she deal with having formerly lived in Atlanta as a big city lawyer? Now she's in this little town, and what brought her there? Why is she there? You know, why is she coaching football now? She was making a lot of money as a as a lawyer. So that's a that's where my ideas come. They're my observations, they're things I hear, stories I hear, watching culture. Um, you hear something, you see something, you note something. I do a lecture called Listen, Look, See, Note, Write, you know, where you're these ideas come in different places. So I haven't written in genres. I write what interests me at that particular time.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

Yeah, that's nice to hear, mate. That's nice. And I I like the fact that you said, you know, to to to your publisher, no, I want to do what I want to do, you know, that's fantastic. That really is. Because again, you know, you don't want what why would you want to be the one trick pony, you know, that does the same thing all the time. I know that does, yeah, and it does sell books, but you know, I find that fascinating. And also I I feel sorry for you in a way, Gary, because I bet when you go out, you're constantly having to write stuff down because you just keep seeing things that inspire you. Yeah. The only time you probably don't is when you're sleeping, probably.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

I used to do it on a yellow legal pad by my bedside because I'd wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. Really? Now I send myself an email. I send myself an email when I got an idea for something. Nice. I just I just email myself and then it's there, and I I go and look at it, and okay, and and I do the same at night. I keep my phone beside my bed. I probably shouldn't do that. But I do that because occasionally, if I wake up early or whatever, and I have an idea, I just send myself an email.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

I think that's fantastic, mate. I really do. Um, okay, so what are you hoping that that the readers are going to get from from this story?

SPEAKER_00 26:21

Um at the end of the story, and I'm not going to give the ending away, um, there is a redemptive twist that is um surprising. Um, and that redemptive twist is a pretty clear um story note that says something really significant about the human condition. Um and again, I won't give it away. I will I will say it makes a reference to a um a classic novel that all of us should have read in in high school or at least college, university. Um and that classic novel made this point in its own way, and this story here makes its it makes its own point in a in a redemptive way. Because my stories, I like to write stories that have hope at the end, encouragement, inspiration. And though this is a very brass knuckle down in the you know, it's real life, people dying, bloody scenes. It's it's not it's not overly so, but at the end, I don't want it to be, I don't want people to read it and go, oh gosh, I feel so sad. I want them to feel maybe they feel sad, but they also feel inspired by whatever made them sad. And I think you can do both things, you know. And uh so I want them to take away you know the lesson that you find in the redemptive twist, which I think is a hopeful inspiration for us.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Yeah, absolutely. And uh yeah, so Gary, where can people get your book from if they would like to purchase uh your new book?

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Yeah, and you can get it at anywhere you buy your books, Amazon, um, you know, Thrift, Barnes and Nobles, any of those. And uh so it's available in Kindle, hardback, and um and audio version. I think they're all out. I think the the book itself is either it was either on pre-order, I think it's now available. I looked at it yesterday and I think it was available. So coincidence there at the normal spot you buy your books.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Excellent. And I know uh obviously uh you know I've got a list of all your books in front of me here, and you started back in 1979, I believe. Isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Uh not quite. Uh a little bit later than that. I think it was now there is another Gary Parker who writes creation science, and that's not me.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

No. I think this is definitely you, but yeah, because it's got judgment tree on there, but there's something there's quite a few go way back. Yeah, it's got all your series on there anyway, yeah. And uh what you mentioned. Um so okay, then as you said, you know, you can't walk down the street or go anywhere without having to think of what's next. So, what is next for Gary Parker as far as you know a novel or a book is concerned?

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Well, um I'm thinking about writing a story about a fictitious story about the integration of the PGA tour in America, the golf tour. Um the the after football and and baseball and basketball had all been integrated, the PGA tour still had not. And so it was 1960 and and after um that it was finally integrated in 1962. And I've had, again, my history interests, and I'm a golfer. And um uh so I'm thinking about writing a book with a fictitious character. I don't know if I'm gonna name him Sticks, which is uh uh uh an aphorism for golf. A good golfer is a stick, and he's really skinny, but he can hit the ball a mile. Or slacks because he loves to dress perfectly, you know. But anyway, he's gonna be a black golfer trying to get on the PGA tour. And my my my early title is The Ball Won't Know I'm Black. And and try to tell the story of um of the integration of the USA PGA tour in a fictitious way. It's not been done, and so I'm a little bit afraid to tell you that because somebody's liable to go do it before I can get it done. But that's sort of my next idea.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Okay, Gary, thank you. And also, um, while whilst I was doing research into your book, I did come across an article that you um have published with Emerging Civil War about um Mr. Booth. Um yeah, so I'm actually affiliated with Emerging Civil War, so yeah, that was come across a fantastic article um that you wrote about him. So that's fantastic. Thank you. So so Gary, what I'm gonna do, my friend, is I will leave a link for your book in the podcast description and also that article. So if people want to see the real story behind the story, they'll be able to get that connection there. But um I really uh I really do thank you for coming on and giving up your time and coming to talk about your new book, mate.

SPEAKER_00 31:10

I enjoy doing this and enjoyed meeting you, and I I'm interested in how you got interested so much in American Civil War.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Well, that's uh that's uh a simple answer, and that is because of a movie called Gettersburg.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

So I'll there you go.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Okay, I first watched that in 2004, and now I'm really good friends with Ron Maxwell, the director as well. So, you know, full circle, that's crazy. Um that's great. But um, I'm at I I managed to interview Ron uh uh in October last year, and uh it was like my my podcast career, which is about five years now. Um, but to be able to interview the guy that you know basically started my Civil War uh fascination, and yeah, that was it really. I saw that movie and I was just fascinated by it. But yeah, okay, Gary. Well, thank you very much. Um, all that is left to say at this point is cheers. You too, sir. Have a great day, take care.