Kim Michele Richardson's novel, "The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek".
April 14th, I picked up my book. April 28th, I put the book down. Usually it doesn’t take me this long to read a book.
It never fails, but when I read Kim’s words, the cadence of a metronome starts to click back and forth in my head. That’s when I start to feel the words, the characters, the beat of these hearts start to connect with mine. Every good writer has a cadence, but none I feel more than Kim’s.
Chapter 3, I see the old mule Junia plodding along carrying Bookwoman Cussy Mary, stopping in the middle of the stream, she hesitates, listening; I can feel the trepidation of continuing, but when Junia does it's steady and forward. The beat goes on, one step after another...then it’s either a full stop, or a full gallop. Yes, good writing is like music to my ears, and Kim adds just the right amount of beats to her lines.
Stories like these always have me stopping and starting, hesitating to take time out to think; sometimes I’m upset about what’s happening to a character, one like Cussy Mary, the blue skinned bookwoman. She’s endearing, she’s loved, she’s hated, she’s ridiculed. You name it and Kim will take you there with unbridled emotions. And being an emotional reader, I’m sensitive to the words of every character in this novel. It levels me to unbelief, even though I know it as truths. How one human being can treat another human being, it doesn’t matter that this novel takes place in the 1930s, it still rings true in this year of 2019.
Years pass, but feelings don’t where prejudices exist. Hate versus love, love soothes my being, where hate turns my anger over and over within my soul to the point where I have to lay what I'm reading down before I explode.
Cussy Mary has blue skin, a rare genetic anomaly, and is treated as “colored” where anything other than white isn’t acceptable. She’s nineteen, living with her coal miner father, who also has his day to day trials; health, danger, unions, corporate greed; it feels like there is no relief in this downtrodden life where they find themselves in. To bring joy of the written word is hard to come by in this story, even with the deliveries of books and letters to patrons along Cussy Mary’s book traveling route; trying to add a bit of love and caring along the way to the people, both adults and children, it’s simply a struggle of one sort or another.
I have to put the book down and rest my eyes and my heart. This story isn’t just about the book women; it’s not just about the blue color of Cussy’s skin, or another colored skin; it’s not just about the hardships of this Kentucky life, it’s about human rights and the color of human hate that tries to squelch those rights to be able to live and love free, to work free and to marry free. Freedom is at the core of this story. How each of us finds it is shown to all by Kim Michele Richardson.
