You will see a lot of my family in my books. After all, that’s who I know best. When I first started writing Stalked By The Devil,
I imagined an elderly couple trying to save their pregnant granddaughter from an evil monster. As I thought about the grandmother, Cordelia
McIntire, I knew I wanted a very strong, highly principled woman. My mind
immediately thought of my great grandmother, Harriet Jackson McNabb. I didn’t know my great grandmother, but my
mother told me stories about her, and in later years as I took up genealogy, I
read other people’s accounts of her.
Harriet Jackson was a unique woman for her time. She was a
Jackson and came from Marshfield, MO. Harriet Jackson met John McNabb in
Marshfield and they married, but till the day she died, she was known as Ma
Jackson. It was quite confusing when I was younger hearing my mother talk about Ma Jackson when she was talking
about her father’s mother. Eventually the McNabb family moved to Bolivar, Mo,
which is often in my books. Ma Jackson was quite a character. She chewed tobacco, smoked a pipe, and spoke
her mind, once telling a newspaper reporter, she’d never vote for a yellow dog
democrat.
I have pictures of Ma Jackson, and as I wrote the first
chapters of my book, I could visualize her sitting by the bedside while her
granddaughter writhed in pain waiting for the doctor to come. The doctor had
been delayed by a blinding snow, her granddaughter is getting ready to deliver,
and Cordelia McIntire never shows any fear. If the doctor doesn’t come, she’ll
deliver the baby. My mother use to say,
“Yiou do what you have to do.” Since Ma Jackson raised my mother until age
fourteen, I’ve often wondered if she heard Ma Jackson say the same thing.
