Bouquet of Thorns

About the Book

From the Confessions of St. Augustine to Bill Clinton’s My Life and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, the memoirs of extraordinary individuals wrestling with the demands of history and struggling with the singularity of their own character have fascinated readers worldwide. In his extremely entertaining memoir, BOUQUET OF THORNS, James Nekia McKiever offers readers something more than a romp through the highs and lows of his particularly eventful life. Through these pages he very courageously allows readers access to the most intimate workings of his mind, body, and spirit. The result is total immersion into one man’s journey through the depths of painful rejection and unrelenting grief to the victorious heights of spiritual illumination and personal empowerment. Upon his birth on November 30, 1933, McKiever enters an aging world completely at odds with the personality of a child who would grow up to sport fine clothing, sing, dance, preach, and teach his way around the world. Located along the southern fringes of Savannah, Georgia, the very unique community of Beaulieu was populated largely by the descendants of former slaves who had lived on the coastal island of Ossabaw before relocating inland during the 1800s. They had survived by adhering to safe traditional modes of social and political conduct in all things, whether related to work, race relations, sexuality, religion, or individual personality. So exceptional and representative of a different era are the members of this fishing and farming community that a number of McKiever’s relatives are featured in a documented study of it called Drums & Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. The book was produced in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration’s writing program and published in 1940 by the Georgia Writers Project. As members of this very closed community, Melissa and Dave McKiever, the author’s grandparents, are not thrilled when their daughter becomes pregnant with their grandson from a man married to another woman. This pregnancy proves so controversial that it does two things: on the one hand, it brings an end to Melissa and Dave McKiever’s marriage; on the other, it unites them in their common cause to see to it that their grandson not only lacks for nothing but, in comparison to other children in his community, is ridiculously spoiled. However, in contrast to his grandparent’s overindulgence,young McKiever meets with constant abuse at the hands of his mother and in the form of perpetual negligence by his father. Upon discovering that she is pregnant, his mother tries more than once to abort the child. Failing this, after his birth, she takes him into the woods and leaves him there to meet whatever deadly fate might befall him. Fortunately for McKiever, his angel of a grandmother seeks him out and carries the infant to an island, where she raises him during his toddler years and baptizes him in biblical teachings and spiritual songs. Nevertheless, once reunited with his birth mother, he remains painfully aware of her ambivalence towards him. Like Iceberg Slim in Mama Black Widow, the author refuses to sugarcoat or glamorize in any way his relationship with his mother or the impact of his lack of one with his father. Life with the former means a daily ritual of scrambling to avoid beatings while life without the latter means suffering the emotional and spiritual trauma of rejection. The big question that McKiever raises in Bouquet of Thorns is how does a boy with a deeply sensitive and imaginative temperament make peace with a community that does not approve of such qualities in its male children? What happens when his young unmarried mother finds herself more bewildered than overjoyed by his existence? How does the boy adapt to the stigma of being different while also remaining true to himself? The humor, determination, and sometimes outrageous arrogance with which the young McKiever faces his childhood oppression fill these p

About the Author

James Nekia McKiever is a singer, former model, counselor, and ordained minister who holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Savannah State University and a Master’s degree from Atlanta’s Interdenominational Seminary. He was born in a coastal community just outside Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up in the 1930s and 1940s before migrating first to New York City then California. Serving humanity as a social minister rather than one restricted to a single church, McKiever has delivered his prophetic messages of faith, compassion, and brotherhood in sermons and songs around the world. Bouquet of Thorns is his first book.