Please join us for a reading by Roccie Hill from her book, THE BLOOD OF MY MOTHER, and a Q&A hosted by Book Passage for this event organized by the Left Coast Writers.
Saturday September 7th, 2024 — 2 PM
Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||
A powerful, historical saga about refugees in the West: family, race, and overcoming adversity.
A mixed-race woman fights for her life as a refugee, slave, mother, and farmer in this saga inspired by the story of Roccie Hill’s great-great-grandmother, an unforgettable journey of a woman growing and enduring under multiple flags and through the turbulence of history.
“A family of refugees walks a thousand miles to a new home where they’ve been told they can find land to farm. One of them, Eliza, is a young mixed-race girl — and the great-great-grandmother of Roccie Hill, author of “The Blood of My Mother.” This story starts in 1827, when the promised land, now Texas, was part of Mexico. Refugee families “traveled in packs like hounds for survival.” This centuries-old irony is not lost on the novelist or the reader.
‘Eliza comes from the union of her Anglo drug addict father and a mixed-race delta woman who died in childbirth. Her father was a sharpshooter. People noticed. He fought the Mexicans, made good money — in 1800s Texas, he’d found his calling. But when her father dies, her Uncle James set about building the biggest plantation in Texas. Workers? He secretly bought ten Negroes in New Orleans. Eliza’s sister Lou was white, so she was sent to be fed, clothed, and educated. Eliza was not as pretty or as untainted. She got nothing. She was, she tells us, “a girl without value.”
“Eliza is sold by her uncle into slavery. There begins this story about what it takes to survive as a refugee, the outcasts Eliza collects along the way, and the strength she, an outcast herself, shows them. “But enduring is not healing or prevailing,” she writes. “It is only persevering; this, a refugee’s rough duty.”
“This isn’t a novel told by some white guy who read a history textbook. It’s not about big moments of battle courage. It’s about events you never heard of, like the Runaway Scrape: thousands of settlers walking across Texas in the rain for weeks to escape, hundreds dying along the way. It’s about white children kidnapped by Comanches who never wanted to be “rescued” because their indigenous culture made so much more sense. It’s about the very personal moments during the clash of indigenous, Mexican, and white cultures on the prairie. It’s about women who persevered because in the end, that’s the only privilege they are ever granted: the right to persevere.
“During an early escape, a starving man rushes Eliza on the riverbank, grabbing for her arms and head. She jerks her rifle high and pulls the lever clean and swift. “That was the first time I ever killed a man,” she writes. “You want to know what killing him felt like? Didn’t feel like anything.”
*excerpted from Head Butler review by Vanity Fair contributor, Jesse Kornbluth
Roccie Hill is an American writer and a native Californian who received her MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. After graduate school, she moved to Salinas where she worked with César Chavez as part of the United Farm Workers union.
She lived in England and France for a total of 15 years, working for several nonprofits, including the Official French Committee for the Statue of Liberty celebratons in Paris. She also produced a variety of short films and celebrity/royal events in England, as well as an exclusive dinner at the private home (Highgrove in Gloucestershire) of His Majesty Charles III in support of the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust.
Upon her return to California, she continued as a non-profit executive as the Executive Director of Guide Dogs of the Desert, as well as the Chair of the California Association of Non-profits Public Policy Council.
Roccie has published three novels, several short stories, a play, exhibited her photography, and studied the history and genealogy of US borderlands cultures in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. She is a professional genealogist, with a focus on Native American ancestry. She is a former Board Member of both the Palm Springs United Nations Association and the Palm Springs Writers Guild, and current Board Member of the Genealogical Society of Hispanic America-Southern California.
She is a recipient of The President’s Lifetime Achievement Award (Barack Obama) for Volunteer Service (2016).
Inspired by the life of Roccie’s great-great grandmother and Texas pioneer, Eliza Green Moore, The Blood of My Mother is Roccie’s third novel.
As with many creative people, Roccie cheats at Scrabble.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, NYT Bestselling author & Oprah Book Club Inaugural Choice The Deep End of the Ocean, said this:
“Robbed by fate and evil doers of everything except her ferocious spirit, Eliza fights for her own space in the pitiless frontier that will become the state of Texas. Combining lyrical prose and non-stop action, Roccie Hill conjures an unforgettable character who somehow triumphs over nearly unthinkable privations. Hill’s Eliza springs to life as a true American original. I could not stop reading.”
Patricia Wood author of LOTTERY. Shortlisted in 2008 for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, said this:
“Lonesome Dove meets Where the Crawdads Sing. I simply could not put this novel down. Vividly written, The Blood of My Mother is a gripping saga about a perilous time in our nation’s history and a woman who survived it against all odds. It is a novel about how love and hope transcend man’s inhumanity to man. I was pulled deeply into the story and was held there until the very last page.”