An Exploration of the McVey Family’s Rise, Fall, and Disgrace

Readers of Magnolia Song were introduced to the McVey family, whose fortunes were at the heart of that saga.

Black Widow’s Waltz traces the family’s history from their arrival in North America, where four brothers-McVey came to fight in the French and Indian War in 1756. Once mustered out of the king’s army, they settled in the Indian territory of Western North Carolina, where they accumulated substantial wealth practicing the distiller’s arts learned in their native Scottish highlands.

At the dawn of the 19th century, the youngest brother’s son, Ian, eloped with his half-Cherokee first cousin. Pursued by the family, they trekked west; his young wife died in childbirth along the banks of the Tennessee River.

With a babe in arms, Ian settled along the Little Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, where he cultivated the family’s whiskey-making skills. He traded the finely crafted brown liquid for sufficient currency to buy over a hundred African slaves, whose toil built the first sizeable cotton plantation at the north end of the delta–not quite a hundred miles south of the river bluff on which Memphis would be founded.

That fortune—extinguished by the civil War—was rebuilt by Big Jim McVey through a postwar sharecropping strategy that he parlayed into one of the great fortunes of the south during the early twentieth century. His story is precedent to the events of Magnolia Song and is told by that novel’s protagonist, Seal Sterling.

After Seal details the family’s history through World Wars One and Two, Black Widow’s Waltz picks up where Magnolia Song ended, propelling the characters of the earlier work into more mischief, mayhem, and murder.