Mary Margaret Knight was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the survivor of a twin birth that left her with a broken-mirror life tainted with anguish and heartbreak. Raised by a polio-handicapped, alcoholic, violent father and a mother stricken with sleeping sickness, she and her sister, Nora, became street survivors until the Child Welfare Bureau placed them in a Catholic orphanage in Charleston…only to be raised and abused by the Sisters of Charity. After five years the girls were released and returned to their ever-angry father and inwardly declining mother.
Mary Margaret escaped at age 17 after a five-day courtship and wedding to a Georgia farm-boy-turned-soldier. Ten years and six babies later, he decided to return to his roots in the red hills of Georgia, where she found herself plucking chickens, killing hogs, confronted by enraged roosters, creek leeches, venomous snakes, and a forbidding husband who was no less ill-tempered.
In 1950s rural Georgia, whether living in a small town or on a farm, Mary Margaret was always voiceless and powerless, a master of the art of obedience, a victim of the seclusion and discontent of being housebound by her despotic husband. Her life became defined by place-memories of a field, a room, a house, a religious conversion, a town misfit, a city tragedy, a dead child. Aside from her family, other people were superfluous. Her focus was on her children and little else.
This powerful and compelling memoir is a compilation of a son’s recollections of his mother’s vivid and poignant stories, those of an intrepid Southern woman who survived the Great Depression, World War II, and post-war poverty. It is a story of survival, a lesson in seeing the positive when all around is threatening, and a tribute to one woman’s hidden strength.
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Robert Bailey and his four siblings were born on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, then transplanted to Villa Rica, Georgia. After earning his BA, MEd, and Ed S, he worked for many years as a high school teacher and soccer coach. He taught advanced placement American government, psychology, philosophy, and comparative religion, and was also certified as an ESL and Gifted and Talented teacher. In 1976 he was named the Georgia Coach of the Year, and was recently inducted into his school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. During the 1980s he wrote an observational humor column for a weekly newspaper in Rabun County, Georgia, and is currently working as a personal fitness trainer at a local gym. After retirement, he spent three years at Mercer University supervising prospective teachers. Robert married his 8th grade sweetheart, and they have been married 53 years.
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