FEATHERS IN A HIGH WIND

About the Book

This is the story of a small town girl, a newspaper reporter, who marries a country school teacher who is the son of a well-to-do farmer. He bears his bride to her first home and the school he is to teach that year, deep in the swamps of Arkansas. She learns here that the love of the land burns in her new husband like a passion. She makes a valiant effort to cope with manners, customs and conditions that prevail, but when she is to have her first baby, she refuses to place herself under the care of the community vet. She returns instead to her hometown for that event. Trouble then ensues as she suffers at the hands of her in-laws. The ostracism, criticism, humiliation and animosity are more than she can bear. With her subsequent move back to her husband she refuses to live with his parents, taking instead a two room house kept for the transient labor, it being the only alternative. She then struggles to make a home. This sets the stage for interminable conflict and “overcoming.” This book deals, too, with this woman's very real problem when she realizes that, though baptized into the Baptist church at the tender age of twelve, she does not know God, cannot feel that he hears her when she cries out to him from the depths of her suffering and despair. When the grueling business of bringing her second child into the world is accomplished, she decides she will search for God until she finds Him.

About the Author

Flossie Deane Craig was born in 1891 and is a native of Paragould, Arkansas. She lived in Little Rock, Arkansas; Louisville, Kentucky; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; Harms Ending at Shiloh, Hahira, Georgia; Clan's Harbor at Bethany, Hahira, Georgia; and spent the last 31 years of her life at Crestwood Farms in Valdosta, Georgia. She was a prolific writer--poet, novelist and journalist--at her typewriter almost daily, though always meeting her responsibilities as a homemaker, wife, mother, grandmother, great grandmother and friend. Her poetry and stories have appeared in many publications including: Kentucky Anthologists of Women's Poets (1928), American Lyric Poetry (1936), Louisville Courier Journal, Miami Herald, Hahira Gold Leaf, Valdosta Daily Times, Farm Journal, Progressive Farmer and Mind Digest. Once, after a fire that had destroyed what remained of her work (she had recently “cleansed” her work to start anew), she was haunted and beset by the ending of one such work: …were I seized in bondage, and cast into prison…by all else forsaken…. Words, words, my faithful, exuberant and friendly companions, I still would have with me. …and promptly sat down at her typewriter. She was spiritually attuned, well-read, an empathetic listener and a joy to talk with. So although we no longer have Flossie to converse with on this and that…we have boxes and boxes yet to go of her life's work. She lived and died courageously and at peace.