As I have done in past years, I am offering my memoir, Motherless Child - stories from a life for 99 cents from May 1 through May 14, 2013 Kindle version only Click here.
And my latest book, Tell Them I Died will also be available for 99 cents during that same period, May 1 through May 14, 2013 Kindle version only. Click here.
About Motherless Child - stories from a life:
Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She's healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn't marry her father. And there is also the unspoken question of "What kind of black woman gives her baby away?" How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer? This is Sarah Weathersby's first published work, a coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-single-black-pregnant and on the way to Germany, memoir.
Click here.
About Tell Them I Died
TELL THEM I DIED is a romance, but it is different from the standard romance novel in that the protagonists are all over fifty years of age, retired, and with discretionary time and funds to do whatever they want, and online friends to share every minute. And unlike other romances, much of the action takes place on the internet on social networking sites. We baby-boomers sometimes have the idea that we're grown, we know it all, and the rules that may apply to teenagers don't apply to us anymore. WRONG! The world of dating has changed a lot since we were teenagers, and even grown-a$$ adults can be surprised by STDs and domestic violence.
When it comes to long-distance internet romances, Sixty is the new seventeen.
Click here.
Sometimes you learn things about your family long years after the events, and suddenly things start to make more sense. Not secrets, not major events, but little things that make some of the rest fall into place.
Last year I hijacked the notes my sister LaVerne had been writing for fifty years, published them on Lulu.com as "The Gordons of Tallahassee." LaVerne's story stopped in Charles Town, West Virginia just after my sister Toni was born, four years before I was born. I had to call on my brothers to complete the story to Petersburg where I was born.
One of the things they told me was after Toni was born, Mother tried to get a job teaching, but there were no jobs in Charles Town. When she learned of jobs in Washington, DC, she went there to work at the Navy Annex during the week, and came home to Charles Town on the weekends. I asked, who took care of Toni while Mother was gone. LaVerne had enrolled in St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, and there was no other woman in the house, just Daddy and my four brothers. George told me they took care of Toni.
That created for me a new image of my family. I know it is common in large families for the older ones to take care of the younger ones, as surrogate parents. I had never pictured it that way when I came along. By the time I was a toddler, my brothers were in high school and college, and it was only Toni and me at home with Daddy during the day while Mother worked. We lived next door to the Episcopal Church where Daddy was rector.
Mother started her battle with cancer when I was eight years old, in an era when children weren't told very much about grown folks' issues. Through my years of puberty while Mother was dying, I thought I was raising myself. I remember Mother's insistence that we never settle for second-class even in the Jim-Crow south. We walked rather than ride in the back of the bus; held our thirst until we got home rather than drink from the "For Colored" water fountain. But the personal side of my mother is missing from my memory. I depend on family saga, in which Mother becomes larger than life. I remember her softness, but I can't hear her voice. My brother Michael says I sound like her, sing like her. Sometimes if I get deep within myself I can hear her say, "Poll tax." She made a do-it-yourself record of her speech about the Poll Tax one summer when she studied in New York. We played it after she died in 1958. The pre-vinyl breakable record didn't survive all the moves in the last 50 years.
Michael remembered this week that Mother wore Prince Matchabelli as her signature scent. I know how smells can evoke all kinds of memories, so I ordered a bottle on the internet. Somewhere in the back of my fading memory, she's still there, waiting to tell me something.
