Preface to Black Sun Rising,
or La Corazonada

I BECAME interested in the history and plight of the Seminole Indian tribe when I was a boy. My mother and I would often stop at reptile farms in Florida on drives between our residences there and in Chicago during the 1950s. We came to know several of the caretakers and employees of these reptile farms well enough that we were regularly allowed entry very early in the mornings, hours before the farms opened to the public. I got to know a few of the Seminole boys who worked or had worked as alligator wrestlers, some of whom had lost parts of or entire fingers having failed to get their hands out of the way of gators’ jaws before they snapped shut. These boys continued working at the farms watering bird cages, cleaning snake enclosures and feeding the large reptiles, tossing hunks of meat at them with pitchforks.

As I got older, I read all I could about the Seminoles and how they combined with fugitive slaves, intermarrying with them, resulting in an integrated tribe known as Mascogos, or Black Seminoles, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, established a settlement in the state of Coahuila in northern Mexico. I wrote a story about this little-known coalescence with the idea that it could have been made into a film by one of the greatest directors of westerns, such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford, Howard Hawks or Sam Peckinpah. Unfortunately, by the time I finished writing it, most of these directors had retired or died, and the movie studios had virtually ceased producing westerns altogether. Black Sun Rising, or La Corazonada, as I titled the story, is meant to be read with this in mind. It is published here in its entirety for the first time.

—B.G.