“Night Bird Calling” by Cathy Gohlke … and a GIVEAWAY!

Welcome to Friday Reads!

 

 

The publisher has offered to give away a print copy of this book (US ONLY). You can enter by using the Rafflecopter link at the bottom of this post. (Contest ends January 22, 2021.) Click To Tweet If you’re the chosen winner, I’ll contact you for your information.

 

About the book…

When Lilliana Swope’s beloved mother dies, Lilliana gathers her last ounce of courage and flees her abusive husband for the home of her only living relative in the foothills of No Creek, North Carolina. Though Hyacinth Belvidere hasn’t seen Lilliana since she was five, she offers her cherished great-niece a safe harbor. Their joyful reunion inspires plans to revive Aunt Hyacinth’s estate and open a public library where everyone is welcome, no matter the color of their skin.

Slowly Lilliana finds revival and friendship in No Creek—with precocious eleven-year-old Celia Percy, with kindhearted Reverend Jesse Willard, and with Ruby Lynne Wishon, a young woman whose secrets could destroy both them and the town. When the plans for the library also incite the wrath of the Klan, the dangers of Lilliana’s past and present threaten to topple her before she’s learned to stand.

With war brewing for the nation and for her newfound community, Lilliana must overcome a hard truth voiced by her young friend Celia: Wishing comes easy. Change don’t.

Click here to read the first chapter.

 

Amazon purchase link

 

The Color of Innocence

by Cathy Gohlke

After we’d moved from the farm, there was a brief period in my childhood when, divorced and alone, our mother needed to hire childcare for my brother and me while she worked in the city to make ends meet. I never understood why the dark-skinned lady who took care of us insisted we stay home for the brief half hour between the time she left and Mama returned home, why she didn’t want us to stand with her at the bus stop to wave her off, or why, on days we needed to meet our mother in town after work for some reason, she made us stand at a distance from her while waiting for the bus.

More worrisome still was why she sat us—two young children—down in the front of the bus, behind the bus driver, then trooped to the back to sit with her friends, other women of color who worked as maids and childcare givers during the day. We didn’t want to sit behind a man we didn’t know. We wanted to sit with Mildred, who’d cared for my brother all day and me after school. But the grown-ups, black and white, outnumbered us and stood firm.

I never thought of my parents as prejudiced, but my Southern grandfather, kind and generous to a fault, a godly man in every way I knew but this, communicated to me his age-old fear of people who wore a different skin color than ours. The lessons weren’t overt but came through loud and clear in the renaming of Brazilian nuts that found their way into our Christmas stockings, or in the way he pulled me close in the Saturday farmers’ market when we went to buy watermelon, telling me not to “look those people in the eye. You don’t know what they’ll do.” He was always polite and friendly to everyone but kept his little white granddaughter half a step behind him, blocking my view and theirs.

It ran a mystery to me why my grandparents’ neighbor kept a separate drinking glass on her back porch for the man who mowed her lawn in North Carolina’s hot summer sun or what she meant when she grimaced and said she’d never drink from a glass he’d used, but didn’t bother to wash it, either.

Those experiences, from both races, made me aware of the “otherness” of skin color, something I, as a child, hadn’t really noticed or thought mattered. On the farm where I was born, our closest neighbor was black, an older woman everyone called Nanny. Nanny was the kindest, most generous, and loving lady I knew outside my mother and grandmothers—pretty much the only other lady I knew at that age. People were just people, different on the outside, the same on the inside. It wasn’t until we moved into the suburbs that I learned not everyone thought that way.

Life and the news astonished me during years of the growing civil rights movement. Why couldn’t hungry people sit down at the Woolworth lunch counter and order a burger or a grilled cheese like me? Why were there separate water fountains in the city marked “Colored Only” and “Whites Only”? Why was the wonderful park where we all picnicked on Sundays for the “white people” of the county? Why was there such anger and fuss when the park was forced to open for everyone, regardless of color? Why were police on the news dragging protesters through the streets by their hair? Why in the world would authorities turn fire hoses or billy clubs on people marching for freedom? Wasn’t freedom what we as Americans were supposed to be all about? Wasn’t it what we fought the Revolution and the War Between the States to achieve?

Perhaps it wasn’t until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that my confusion turned to fear. Coming on what seemed to me the heels of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and shortly before Robert Kennedy’s, it appeared the world had gone stark raving mad and there was no stopping it.

I remember hearing a grown-up say after King’s assassination, “Well, it’s a sad thing, but what did he expect?” And my heart sank. Don’t we all have a right to expect to be safe? To expect human dignity? Fair laws and wages? Humane treatment? What happened to the Bible’s commandments and Jesus’ parables about caring for the widow and orphan, about helping those in need, about freeing the captives and downtrodden from oppression, about loving our neighbors as ourselves? Why weren’t the grown-ups asking the questions children asked?

Changes in laws and desegregation came slowly. Changes in attitudes more slowly yet. Sometimes those changes came through fire and sometimes they came through blood.

I began to see the grown-ups in my world through new eyes. They couldn’t hold the line—they either didn’t walk the talk they preached on Sundays, or fearful for them and theirs, they couldn’t. That was, in so many ways, the end of childhood for me, the last of my color of innocence.

So what now? If so many laws have changed, if there are social programs in place trying to rectify wrongs of the past, why is there still so much disconnect between races in our country? Why is there still so much “us” and “them” between people of every color and ethnicity? Is it because we still have so far to go in practicing what we, as Christians, preach? Is it because all the years of holding one race back while enriching the privileges of another have taken their toll and led to their natural consequences?

We can’t change the past, but we can do better, be better for the innocent we bring into this world.

Today I see my young grandchildren play with and have friends in shades of every skin color. Thankfully, they don’t see “otherness”; they simply celebrate the joy of friendship. I hope it will always be that way, but I wonder. I don’t see that grown-ups have conquered prejudice, and it is the prejudices of grown-ups that contaminate children.

Change—growth—is still desperately needed and is now very much a vital part of our national and global conversation.

To achieve peace, progress, equality, and unity we must look one another in the eye, reach across the divide, accept that others are as important, worthy, and precious as we believe ourselves to be. We must own that while some races and groups of people have been given privilege and given opportunity, from others those gifts have been thwarted or withheld, and we must commit to changing the status quo. Owning our past and how we achieved our present is essential to building a better tomorrow.

Building that tomorrow includes a commitment to teach our children and grandchildren respect, appreciation, and compassion for others as well as a strong commitment to social justice. Generational healing begins with the current generation.

Healing in our land will happen one person, one hand, one voice at a time—not in silence or complacency but through compassionate, practical action. The conversation is building. We have the opportunity to participate, to create a symphony—more beautiful, richer, and fuller than the angry voices of our past and those that fear change. Now is the time to ask, What is my part in that symphony?

 

My review…

Trigger warning: spousal abuse and racism

I’ve read a number of Gohlke’s books, and I’ve always enjoyed them. She doesn’t shy away from tackling difficult topics. Her latest addresses abuse, racism, and family secrets. They’re woven together to create an engaging tale.

Night Bird Calling shows the reader a glimpse of what it might’ve been like to grow up in the old south, where former slaves and the KKK meet in a small town in North Carolina. Traditions run high with people leery to break free. There is a faith element, and you can see God working through the characters, but it’s not preachy. Overall, this is an emotional, thought-provoking read. It’s a timely tale, even though the story is set around eighty years in the past.

Some of my favorite quotes:

• “In the end, when people hear something ugly long enough, they believe it’s true. They want to believe it to set it in a box they can understand and label.”
• “The thing is, we can’t let our fears or things we don’t understand weigh us so far down that they keep us from picking up and going forward. We’re still on this earth for a reason…”
• “Mama and Daddy taught me that color doesn’t matter, that class is only a fallen man-made notion, and that every man has the responsibility to better himself as he’s able.”

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy, but I wasn’t required to leave a positive review.

 

About Cathy…

 

Four-time Christy and two-time Carol and INSPY Award–winning author Cathy Gohlke writes novels steeped with inspirational lessons from history. Her stories reveal how people break the chains that bind them and triumph over adversity through faith. When not traveling to historic sites for research, she and her husband, Dan, divide their time between northern Virginia and the Jersey Shore, enjoying time with their grown children and grandchildren.

 

Visit her website at cathygohlke.com and find her on Facebook at CathyGohlkeBooks.

 

 

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