New Release -- Blackberry Road by Jodi Lea Stewart #sundownpress #prairierosepub

Thirteen-year-old Biddy Woodson has learned how to sass and vinegar her way through life with eleven siblings in a sharecropper family in 1934 Oklahoma—even if it takes a heap of cussing to get through those hellish stacks of after-meal dishes.

Trouble sneaks in one afternoon like an oily Dustbowl twister when a beloved neighbor is murdered, and a single piece of evidence sends the sheriff to arrest Mr. Leroy, a black man who lives in the nearby woods.

Biddy knows Mr. Leroy wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she’s convinced the sheriff looks down on sharecroppers and negroes. Trouble rides heavy on the summer air with family issues and Mr. Leroy’s predicament. How can Biddy see justice done for the gentle man she knows is innocent?

Hauntingly terrifying sounds seeping from the woods lead Biddy into even deeper mysteries and despair, and finally, into the shocking truths of that fateful summer.  Though Biddy vows to see Mr. Leroy freed, she’s up against more than she bargained for. Help comes from an unlikely source, but can life ever be the same on BLACKBERRY ROAD?

EXCERPT

 I guess it shouldn’t matter why I turned into a big cusser or why, out of my eight brothers, I got my favorites…and two I kind of hate. You’ll find out about that soon enough. All I know is, we were minding our own business when trouble sneaked in one day like an oily twister on a sleepy afternoon. I reckon Nowata County, Oklahoma, is still yapping how we never had a summer like 1934, and I don’t blame them. Now, I want to tell you about it and how it changed everything—especially us.
      But I’m getting ahead of my own self.

 What’s important is the murder of a good man happened right under our noses, and that started a mystery in our neck of the woods like no one ever heard tell of, and probably never will again. That situation laid open truths about some folks like a hatchet tearing into new wood. Then Allen and Tommy—that’s two of my older brothers—cheated the devil hisself and didn’t die when the doctor same as said they had to. Who ever heard of such things?

 My story starts on May the fifth. I know the day exactly, on account of we’d been out of our school term for five days on the dot. Mr. MacGregor let us out early because of some important business he had to attend to in Oklahoma City. You can look in on us that day in May, and guess what you’ll see? It’s me, the girl, finally done washing and wrenching and drying a peak of hell’s dishes from our noon-day meal.

 Just so you know, doing the dishes for that mess of ornery brothers till my hands shrivel up is worse than cutting your own switch for a switching. Sometimes, it makes me so mad I cuss a blue streak and maybe a red one, too, only I sure don’t do it out loud.