The Story that Stayed
Some stories don’t begin when you start writing them.
They begin long before that—carried through families, told in fragments, reshaped over time.
The story behind Reckoning at Chauncey was one of those.
It centered on two men—Edd Coogler and Lester Montford—and a moment in 1925 that ended in gunfire inside a small-town store. But the event itself was never the whole story.
What stayed with me were the contradictions. The way people remembered it differently.
Some said one man fired first. Others said the opposite.
The truth seemed to exist somewhere between those versions—and somewhere outside them.
That’s what I wanted to write.
Not just what happened.
But how it was carried.
