Feathers in a High Wind

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.