Exclusive Author Essay -- Courtesy of BarnesandNoble.com

My grandmother -- Mama Gracie, we called her -- was a pistol. She dipped snuff, packed heat (in the form of a .38 Smith & Wesson, which she carried in her purse) and sowed seeds of sedition among her kinfolk with as much commitment and passion as other grandmothers bring to planting petunias. A master of manipulation who could weep at will, a carnival sideshow of hysterical symptoms, dreams, visions, and premonitions, she was a tour guide of the emotions, specializing in the guilt trip -- and we were all frequent fliers.
Like Pick Cantrell, The Bridge's protagonist, I grew up in the small-town South, and for most of my adult life have made a nuisance of myself (and a fairly decent living) penning political cartoons that appear on the editorial pages of a number of American newspapers. Years ago at a family reunion I overheard something never before mentioned in the stories passed around the picnic tables along with the biscuits and sweet tea: I learned that my grandmother had been bayoneted by a national guardsman in a mill strike during the Depression. That this harridan who had so haunted my childhood was once a heroine of the labor movement -- a cause by then close to my liberal Democrat bleeding heart -- was as incomprehensible to me as finding calamari on the menu of a barbecue joint or the Bolshoi performing at the Grand Ole Opry.
Having weathered for decades Mama Gracie's emotional firestorms, I immediately empathized with the guardsman. I imagined my grandmother in her prime, physically formidable (and with a full set of teeth), loosing on the beleaguered young man the full force of her volcanic temper. I felt for him. In fact, on more than one occasion I'd wished for a bayonet myself.
Bewildered, I asked around, but my family was as in the dark as I was. Years later, after a stint at New York Newsday, we returned to North Carolina, this time to Hillsborough. We bought a historic house called Burnside, and immediately I began to feel a powerful attachment to the place. Over the next few months I learned more about the town and discovered that my family had deep roots here, that my grandmother had been born here, that my grandfather had worked as deputy sheriff at the courthouse not 200 yards from our front door, and that he and Mama Gracie had met and married while working in the cotton mills on the other side of town. My forebears were "lintheads," a term given then to poor whites because of the cotton dust that collected in their hair after long days toiling in the weave room. Although they'd worked less than a mile from where we now lived, their world was light-years from Burnside.
Even more shocking than the bayoneting or the deep roots my family had set down in town was the fact that the original owner of our new home had financed the textile mill where my grandmother was stabbed. But there were still more surprises in store.
A few months later at a book signing in Charlotte, a distant cousin pulled me aside and handed me an old, tattered pamphlet, bearing the title Burlington Dynamite Plot. The author was Walt Pickard, Mama Gracie's brother and my great-uncle. In it he described a conspiracy by the mill owners to dynamite their own property in order to frame and jail union leaders.
A short time later, I found in a textbook on the cotton mill culture the first documented evidence of the role my grandmother played in the General Textile Strike of 1934, the largest worker walkout in American labor history up to that time.
Soon it seemed local historians were lining up to talk to me about the notorious Gracie Pickard. My grandmother, however, was less than thrilled with her newfound celebrity. As feisty as ever in her late 80s, she threatened to sue the book's publishers for using her name without permission.
From these threads of family history my novel, The Bridge, was woven. It is a tale of love and betrayal, forbidden passions and long-buried secrets, of one man's struggle with his heritage and with himself -- and the ancient bridge where past and present meet.
But most intriguing to me personally as I wrote this book was the possibility that I had come by my rebellious genes honestly, that they had jumped a generation, and that I was more like my crotchety, cantankerous grandmother than I ever dared to think. (Doug Marlette)