Excerpt from The Book Woman's Daughter by Kim Michele Richardson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Kentucky

They still call her Book Woman, having long forgotten the epithet for her cobalt-blue flesh, though she's gone now from these hills and hollers, from her loving husband and daughter and endearing Junia, her patrons and their heartaches and yearnings for more. But you must know another story, really all the other important stories that swirled around and after her, before they are lost to winters of rotting foliage and sleeping trees, swallowed into the spring hymnals of birdsong rising above carpets of phlox, snakeroot, and foxglove. These stories beg to be unspooled from Kentucky's hardened old hands, to be bound and eternally rooted like the poplar and oak to the everlasting land.

One
Thousandsticks, Kentucky 1953

The bitter howls of winter, uncertainty, and a soon-to-be forgotten war rolled over the sleepy, dark hills of Thousandsticks, Kentucky, in early March, leaving behind an angry ache of despair. And though we'd practiced my escape many times, it still felt terrifying that this time was no longer a drill.

I remember when I was twelve, and the shrill air-raid alarm sounded in the schoolyard as we were dropping books off at the stone school over in Troublesome Creek. The teacher yelled out to Mama, "It's a duck-and-cover drill," and then rushed us all inside, instructing everyone to crawl under the desks and cover our heads. It had been scary, but I still felt safe under the thin, wooden lip of the school desk.

Today, at sixteen, I realized how foolish it was to think that a little desk could protect anyone from a bomb—how difficult it was now to believe that hiding would somehow save me from the bigger scatter bombs coming.

I shifted my feet on the stiff, frozen grass umbrella'd under the Cumberland Forest, breathing in the cold as Mama helped me into her heavy coat. In every direction, hoarfrost crowned the forest surrounding our cabin, its gray crystals shimmering through pines, hickories, and oaks, as the twining psalms of chickadees and warblers announced the morning. Overhead, a turkey buzzard glided low, scanning for dead flesh. I shivered as the ugly bird dipped lower and lower.

"You must hurry," Mama chided for the second time, a pull of the cold escaping her breath. "He'll be coming up here to escort us to court anytime now. Remember everything we told you. Everything we practiced."

From the side of our cabin, the hood of a lawman's parked automobile poked out behind a thicket of chokeberries, the first rays of sunlight flashing off headlights and polished chrome.

"I'm frightened, Mama."

"That's not a bad thing, darling daughter. It'll make you more cautious."

Two weeks ago, my parents hid me in the cellar when the law showed up to arrest them for violating miscegenation laws, after a peddler happened upon our family and remarked back in town about Mama's strange blue color. Papa hired counsel, bond was posted, and yesterday word came of a revocation hearing while I stayed hidden in the cellar. Today they would go in front of a judge because of Papa's parole violation on his 1936 banishment order and for daring to marry a woman of mixed color—a blue-skinned Kentuckian.

After Papa got out of prison, we'd moved over to Thousandsticks from Troublesome Creek, and our family had been living in secret here for the last twelve years.

I saw the fear in Mama's eyes as she reached for the scarf. Her hearing was also set for today.

Hiding inside after the lawman arrived last night, I peeked out the curtains and saw him watching from his automobile to make sure Mama and Papa didn't flee the county before the hearing. He'd stayed all night and was out there right now sleeping in his official vehicle. "Mama, I don't want to leave you and Papa. My home." I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of her scratchy wool coat.

Excerpted from The Book Woman's Daughter by Kim Michele Richardson. Copyright © 2022 by Kim Michele Richardson. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.