Since, in the best Southern tradition, I was named Edmund Valentine White III, sometimes when people look up my books on Amazon they find 'Chocolate Drops from the South' by my grandfather.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don't belong anymore to anyone, that I'm not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.
At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.
It's Frederick Dierks Bentley, but my whole family goes by their middle name - my sister, my brother. So from day one, I've always been called Dierks.
I'm from Switzerland, so I grew up with great chocolate.
The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
My maternal grandmother had what might be described in a school report as a 'lively imagination.' She told us that she was a direct descendant of Sir Christopher Wren.
My thought was I should try to stick with names that people may recognize like Robert Johnson, Son House, and Hoagy Carmichael, so if somebody cared to research, they would find a wealth of material.
I was named after my two uncles. Roger Lee and Richard Allen. They simply changed the spelling to Leigh-Allyn to make it more feminine.
If you're going to be related to someone it might as well be Dickens.
All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.