Wofford’s Blood

An epic family saga saturated in Cherokee and North Georgia history, this novel is based on the true history of James Daugherty Wofford who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears and was one of the main informants for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney. In 1815, thirteen-year-old J.D. Wofford, son of a Cherokee mother and a white Intruder father, must choose where his loyalties lie. He spends his winters in his mother’s Cherokee world and his summers in his father’s world: Wofford’s Settlement, the most notorious Intruder outpost in North Georgia. In the Cherokee world, J.D. is an apprentice to a medicine man. In the white world, J.D. and his best friends Jimmy and Tony call themselves the Thunder Boys. All part Cherokee, they swear an oath of loyalty to one another. When J.D.’s cousin Meley Jane is abducted and Tony’s father Carolina is falsely accused, the boys ride into the Cherokee Nation to rescue Meley Jane from a band of white outlaws and save Carolina from being lynched.

Donna Coffey Little is professor of English at Reinhardt University and founder of Reinhardt’s Etowah Valley Low-Residency MFA. Her publications include the chapbook FIRE STREET as well as essays, poems, and scholarly articles in StorySouth, Tiferet, Georgia Backroads, Calyx, The Atlanta Review, The Florida Review, Women’s Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Contemporary Women’s Writing.