The tales of bloodshed in Williamson County are legendary in Southern Illinois.

From the "Bloody Vendetta" of 1876 to Charlie Birger and bootlegging, these stories are ripe for study because of their outlandish nature.

Although it is a fictional study in persons involved in the event, Herrin native John Griswold's new book "A Democracy of Ghosts," gives one of the most acute and human insights into one of our area's worst moments.

Based on the 1922 Herrin Massacre, Griswold uses a variety of characters to recreate the atmosphere and detail leading up to and after the event. Although it features precise and haunting detail - you can almost smell the coal burning off the pages - "Ghosts" is not a historical account. It mines the souls of the region, creating a well-written and complex narrative that explores the heart of man.

Interestingly enough, Griswold has a personal connection to the massacre. His grandfather, William J. Sneed, was the model for the book's protagonist, Bill Sneed, who rises from child miner to state senator and United Mine Worker district president and is, arguably, in charge on the day of the massacre.

Griswold, who also writes under the pen name Oronte Churm in a column for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, teaches creative writing, literature and rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is working on a creative nonfiction account of his hometown, "Herrin, By God: The Brief History of an Infamous American Town," which is set to be published in the spring.

Flipside was able to speak with Griswold about the ghosts of his book and the process of exorcising them.

Where does reality end and begin with the situations in the book?

Since the book is a novel, it shouldn't be read as a historical textbook. It's fiction, and the characters are constructed. But the story's DNA, so to speak, is true to life. The mine, the massacre march, the trials and failure to convict, the introduction of the Klan to Southern Illinois that went hand-in-hand with bootlegging and its associated violence: All of it was of course not only real, but seemingly unstoppable, as if some genii had been released from its bottle with the massacre and refused to go back in.

The goal of a fiction is to make something true to its characters, their interior lives and the world(s) they inhabit. As I researched this event, certain people's experience stuck with me: the young woman with her baby in her arms at the cemetery, who stepped on a wounded strikebreaker begging for water; the African-American man praised for his 'frenzied' participation; the strikebreaker who survived several gunshot wounds, torture, humiliation and a cut throat. One of my early challenges was to flesh out one fictional world for all these different experiences, and that led to decisions in the writing.

In real life, for instance, a car pulled up to the line of marchers just before they were made to run the gauntlet. Some of the union men were heard to say it was "the president." But it wasn't the president of anything; it was Hugh Willis, a member of the union's state board, and he apparently was the one who gave the order to kill them all. The only president I might have expected it to be - and feared it might have been, in early readings - was William J. Sneed, my grandfather, who was president of Sub-district 10 of District 12, as well as a state senator. I liked the misunderstanding, though, and it led me to invent the theft of Sneed's car in the real-life looting that preceded the massacre. One looks for these fictional, dramatic opportunities and tries to use them.

My grandfather was a good man, I believe, as were most of the people of the region, but they were involved in preventable violence (a fictional, dramatic opportunity). Paul Angle, author of 'Bloody Williamson,' says Sneed knew the details of a miners' meeting before the massacre but "dodged" revealing them (fictional opportunity). We know Sneed was out of town the day of the actual event, and why (opportunity). And we know the ripples of violence that continued to spread afterward the event (opportunity).

I'm greatly impressed with the world you have re-created in the book. What kind of research did you have to do to bring the essential elements together to give that era of Southern Illinois history a voice?

Of course I grew up in Herrin, so the voices of its people are part of me. When I was a kid, Pop Bailey, the legendary Boy Scout leader, took us on 20-mile hikes all summer, pointing out many of the historical sites of the county. As most people have, I read the standard books on the subject, starting with 'Bloody Williamson;' 'A Knight of Another Sort,' by Gary DeNeal; 'Brothers Notorious,' by Taylor Pensoneau; and others, including those from SIU Press's excellent Shawnee Classics series. I also read materials in archives such as those at The Chicago History Museum, the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, and the Illinois State Historical Survey at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They contain a wealth of sources, such as the Oldham Paisley scrapbooks, clippings of the national media's reaction to the Herrin Massacre collected by the long-time Marion editor.

Why did you decide to write a fictional narrative instead of creative nonfiction?

I've been writing a long time and started with fiction. I'd already written a short story about the Birger-Shelton bombing that was published in the literary journal Natural Bridge and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. As I kept on the lookout for a dramatic situation that would serve a novel, I kept thinking of this event. There's something in it that comes close to classical drama, in which the seeds of the heroes' destruction are already planted.

The fact that you are related to the central character is an interesting facet of your having written the book. What was it like to deal with that? How did you treat the fictional Bill Sneed as opposed to the historical one?

I never met my mom's dad-he died in 1949-but I knew him in other ways. My mom idolized him as a man and a political figure, and she talked about him her whole life. I think he might have envisioned for his family a kind of political clan, not unlike that of the rising Kennedys, and my mom said he wanted to buy the entire block where his house was in Herrin and install all his grown children and their families in homes around him. But the dynasty collapsed after deaths, divorce, political defeat, and the usual scattering to the winds of the American family. Route 148 was called Sneed Highway in his honor at one time, but his name is largely gone now.

Except for the telegram he sent John L. Lewis, asking whether the steam shovel men at the Lester mine were affiliated with the union, he's even absent from histories of the event. Yet he was, in a certain specific sense, in charge of union actions in the buildup to the massacre. How to reconcile my mother's vision of him as a compassionate, smart, tough leader with any sort of complicity in the horrible events of June 1922?

In the end I portrayed him fictionally with the qualities I suspect he possessed in life: He was intelligent, self-educated, hardworking, dedicated to the right thing for his people, but trapped, along with everyone else on both sides, in something which-in our long view, looking back-there was no escape. They didn't know it in 1922, but the end of the boom times were over. The peak production year in the mines was 1923, and there was a coal depression, a global depression, and another world war on the way. Technology would change mine employment forever, and soon the 'Quality Circle' of relatively low-sulfur, high-BTU coal in Franklin, Williamson, and Saline counties would be mined-out. Later, people tried to suggest the Herrin Massacre broke the system, but they're wrong.

Within the fictional story, what were you trying to show by contrasting the relationships of the characters-the Sneeds, Sneed and Shelley, O'Rourke and Mercy, Sally and Bully?

There's a popular saying now that 'all history is local.' Certainly that's fiction's first principle. A novel has to be about individuals, even if it's going to portray swirling social forces. Individual men and women each have their own 'local' needs, desires, and irritations. They have different kinds of houses with different furnishings; they eat different things; they think and see in individual ways. That's what fiction is made of-individual lives.

But those individuals have sisters, brothers, husbands, common-law wives, or lovers; they often work in companies with other employees; they congregate in churches, parks, at concerts, and belong to political parties and unions; they drink together in mutual-aid clubs. They know people. And getting together on things is difficult sometimes, even with those whom you think you share everything-let alone with ideological enemies. A novel also tries to show how individuals come together or don't. My book imagines how the stresses on the people of that time affected them separately, as couples, and as groups.

One reason I like fiction, even as a reader, is that it can sink into those disparate views without judgment or commentary, in order to feel a character's loneliness, hope, fear, pride, and other emotions. Henry James believed that if a person thought he suffered, he did, and for Henry James that meant freedom as a writer to trace the psychological contours of any life.

So, for instance, I can show the interior lives of both James O'Rourke, a strikebreaker at the Lester mine, and Sally Greathouse, a miner's wife and labor organizer in her own right. They become paired in one scene when Jim has the misfortune of crossing paths with Sally. Southern Illinois readers may not sympathize much with him, but I hope they're led to empathize. And Sally is one of my favorite characters-a strong, perhaps brilliant, wife and mother, who happens to be a brutal killer. I hope I would never do as she does, but writing the novel has helped me understand her mind.

Is the Herrin Massacre symbolic or representative of the unique cultural identity of Southern Illinois- this place that historically isn't quite north, isn't quite south and economically depressed?

It's representative of the region's past, maybe, to the degree that what happened on June 22, 1922, was a culmination of the fears, anxieties, ambitions, and cultural tensions of those people at that time. Illinois is an oddly-shaped state, what someone called 'a Northern dagger into the heart of the South,' and I'm sure it didn't help that all of Lester's strikebreakers were sent down from Chicago. The area also had what historians Milo Erwin and Paul Angle identify as the qualities of a southern-Appalachian culture persisting from frontier days. Angle says these include not only positive attributes such as hardiness, bravery, and independence, but also negative ones such as hot-bloodedness, pride, obstinacy, jealousy of family honor, and a quickness to take offense at insults. Milo Erwin says the Bloody Vendetta of the 1870s was due to the 'the knock-down style of the West, coming in contact with the code of the South.'

But more importantly, several counties in Southern Illinois were once the heart of what labor scholar John Laslett has called 'the largest and most powerful, as well as the most radical, district union in the United Mine Workers�.' (He was speaking of District 12-Illinois-at the time of the massacre.) The UMWA came along just as coal was discovered in Herrin, and the city was as close to 100% unionized as it was possible to be in 1922. It was serious business, with a lot on the line.

What has writing this book meant to you, not only from a creative standpoint but in exploring this historical situation in the place where you grew up?

I was just reading an essay last night by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who says, 'I had learned to imagine Mexico before I ever knew Mexico.' Each of us has an imagined Southern Illinois of memory and invention that we carry around. Writing A Democracy of Ghosts helped me see mine more clearly. Now I'm finishing a nonfiction book on Herrin and know it in ways I never did before, not even as resident of 20 years. The working methods are different, but they both lead to understanding that's very meaningful to me.

brent.stewart@thesouthern.com / 618-351-5074