Motherless Child stories from a life eBook Sarah Gordon Weathersby
Download As PDF : Motherless Child stories from a life eBook Sarah Gordon Weathersby 
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.
Motherless Child stories from a life eBook Sarah Gordon Weathersby
Motherless Child is an easy, flowing read that I found difficult to put down. This memoir kept me engaged and fascinated from beginning to end. This beautifully written story was about the life of a woman of color whose life was so extraordinarily different from my own. For our generation, growing up black and female in America could be so uniquely different for each of us. But what none of us seem to be able to avoid is being subjected to racism, covert or otherwise. But, I loved how Sarah Weathersby handled the kind she was dealt--encountering it even while studying abroad. Her semi-charmed life is described to us with good humor, drama, sadness, hope, resolve and phenomenal spirit! The author warmly invites her readers into her world--her psyche, her heart and her "business" without the least bit of self consciousness--like a close friend would do. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and dreaded reaching those last few pages knowing that the end was near. Time was up for me, the reader, but indications were that the best was yet to come for my new found friend. Hooray for her!Product details
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Motherless Child stories from a life eBook Sarah Gordon Weathersby Reviews
I lived an apparently sheltered life. A child of the 50's and 60's (I was born on New Year's Day 1953) I had my coming of age times in the free-love, flower power, sex-drugs-rock and roll mythos of an nirvana that existed only in the Age of Aquarius that found fertile ground in the LSD driven imaginations of the times. From afar, and the emphasis is on afar, I lived through the days - and murders - of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X. was glued to the TV when man first set foot on the moon, and the Nation wondered Who Shot J.R.
And yet, I was profoundly naïve.
You see, My first experience with `colored' people was as a kindergartener. They lived down the street from our company owned home in South Plainfield, New Jersey. I played with their children - they played with us. We went to their birthday parties, they came to ours. My earliest memory of church - and especially the glorious singing - was their church.
Time, life, and we moved on, and yet one thing remained constant. There were always `colored' people in the neighborhood where we lived, and to us growing up, they were just other neighbors. Not better, not worse, and not even really different. Just better tanned. I grew up in the racially tense 60's without ever really knowing that they were the racially tense 60's. In fact, it wasn't until high school in Miami Florida when Miami Dade's finest and a flock of Television news reporters showed up at our high school in Northwest Dade County to both film and quell a non-existent outbreak of racial tension that it finally dawned on me that these people with whom I'd grown up, played, shared meals, and some of whom were my best friends, were `different' and that we weren't supposed to get along. I was just another white kid in an integrated setting who got along and thought it was like that everywhere.
I give you this background as a point of reference, and a stepping off point for what comes next.
I just finished reading Motherless Child, Stories from a Life by Sarah Gordon Weathersby (©2009 by Sarah Gordon Weathersby. Published by LuLu.com ISBN 978-0-6152-1294-4 and available at , $17.99).
In her preface, Ms. Gordon Says this
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?
Motherless Child is her `coming of age story from those same 50's and 60's, but from a world I never experienced. Sarah tells of her life growing up in the restless, racially violent days when it seemed that the only answer to someone who stood for equality was to shoot them down like dogs in a street. Sarah experienced racism first hand in ways of which I was frighteningly unaware, and could never have imagined. And, she experienced it in a completely unexpected way. Racial Invisibility.
And all of this while carrying the burden of being single, black, and pregnant in an era when `good girls' were neither. Sara bore the burden of having to make the ultimate decision to give up her child, and live with a guilt only someone in her circumstances could imagine, for the next forty years.
Motherless Child left me wanting to seek out this author myself, and hug her both for the child she was and the woman she became.
I strongly recommend this book to men and women of all races, but especially to anyone who wants to read an open hearted, eloquently stated epoch of the times, from a perspective few of us can imagine. It jumps around at times, and occasionally repeats itself, but I give Sara's story 9 out of 10 stars.
Oh - one last thing. Oprah, if you're listening, here are three things you really need to do
1. Interview Sarah Gordon Weathersby on your television program
2. Make her book, Motherless Child, an Oprah selection
3. Turn this story into your next film project.
Opening the cover of Motherless Child - stories from a life is like arriving at Sarah's home, where she welcomes you with that special brand of southern hospitality, invites you to sit down for a spell and have a nice tall drink of ice tea while she tells you stories from her past. Reading this book brought back memories from my own childhood of sitting in my grandmother's parlor and having her tell us stories of life from yesteryear, while gently rocking back and forth in her rocking chair. I could almost hear the creak of the floorboards as her chair went back and forth over that well worn track.
I tend to stick more with fiction reading than non-fiction, but as I was looking at the previews for potential review, Sarah Gordon Weathersby captured my attention. The preview left me wanting to read more and to find out what happened to the people that I had already met through the pages of the preview. Ms. Weathersby tells her life's story in a very conversational style, inviting the reader to get to know her and her family in a very cozy manner. She starts off with some of her earliest memories, which happen to be when she was two years old. Being the youngest of 7 children of an Episcopalian minister, Sarah was both the pampered pet, and at the same time left to her own devices quite a bit because everyone was going in different directions all of the time. One of her earliest memories was of being a two year old at Christmas time.
My brothers enjoyed participating in the fantasy for me, and that year they came home on Christmas Eve wanting me out of the way so they could wrap gifts, told me I had to go to bed because they heard sleigh bells in the sky, and sent me off to bed clutching my favorite rag-doll, Sally. The next morning, there were animal footprints through the house, that my brothers said were made by the reindeer. I found out years later they had dragged the dog through the dirt, and walked him through the house.
Can't you just imagine the boys dragging that poor dog through the house to make the footprints? Although Ms. Weathersby starts with some of her earliest memories, and the book ends with the most recent, Motherless Child is not written in a strictly chronological manner. She starts off to tell you about one point in her life, and in order to help you understand will embark on another story which provides the back story to the fabric of her life. Through the telling of her life, Ms. Weathersby also provides the reader with a keen perspective of history as it was happening from her point of view. We see the major events, such as John F. and Robert Kennedy's assassinations, as well as Martin Luther King's through her eyes and her observations of her family and friends to the same events.
Motherless Child was written to give her daughter Teal, whom she had to put up for adoption 40 years before, the story of her life and why she couldn't keep her baby. The agony over the decision to do so, and the hole that left in her heart for all of those years after, come shining through the words on the page. We feel the pain of separation along with Sarah, as well as her inability to forgive herself for having made that decision and how it colors her life from that point on.
Through Sarah's eyes, we see her awakening to the division of people by the color of their skin, how her mother developed her sense of pride of self and what she could accomplish, and how it felt to go from an all black school to a racially integrated one. Through the pages of Motherless Child I came to admire Ms. Weathersby a great deal. No matter what she set her mind to accomplish, she did. After choosing to attend a university which only had six black students in her first year, she decided to learn German and ultimately studied abroad for a year in Germany. She spoke the language so fluently that when she confronted a professor about the lack of black faculty on the staff, she was then offered a position at the school as long as she completed the necessary graduate work. While she chose not to follow that course of action, she later decided to throw her hat into the extremely male dominated technology ring at a time when it was just starting to put its name on the map. Working myself in the technology arena, I am well aware that it is still male dominated, but far less so than when Ms. Weathersby joined the ranks, and yet she continued to excel in her field. I don't think it ever occurred to her that she might not succeed at anything she tried, and so she did succeed.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the cover of the book. It is very simple in concept as it appears to be family photos on a mantle, yet in its simplicity conveys to the reader a sense of what the book is about. While Motherless Child - stories from a life was written for her long, lost daughter, and was extremely cathartic for the author to be able to tell her story, it has a much broader appeal. My husband an I recently attended a production of the musical version of The Color Purple, based on the novel by Alice Walker, and I feel that the appeal of Motherless Child mirrors the appeal of The Color Purple. Through the eyes of Sarah Gordon Weathersby, we see and experience a slice of life from a very intimate perspective. This book delivers laughter and tears as we experience Sarah's life with her, and leaves the reader feeling uplifted. Bravo.
This was and is a great read and also a historical account of one's life and experiences. I happened to know some of the people in the story.
Bob Ransom
I LOVED IT AND I KNOW THE AUTHOR PERSONALLY. SHE'S AWESOME.
Love this book. It was written by my cousin. You must read them all.
Very personal story of a private life. I found that the author was such a strong individual who faced her life with dignity and strength. When circumstances were such that she could've given up she faced it and dealt with it. I totally was awed by her life since I have grown up at the same time but in a different geographical area with different family structure.
I have only total admiration for the author.
Motherless Child is an easy, flowing read that I found difficult to put down. This memoir kept me engaged and fascinated from beginning to end. This beautifully written story was about the life of a woman of color whose life was so extraordinarily different from my own. For our generation, growing up black and female in America could be so uniquely different for each of us. But what none of us seem to be able to avoid is being subjected to racism, covert or otherwise. But, I loved how Sarah Weathersby handled the kind she was dealt--encountering it even while studying abroad. Her semi-charmed life is described to us with good humor, drama, sadness, hope, resolve and phenomenal spirit! The author warmly invites her readers into her world--her psyche, her heart and her "business" without the least bit of self consciousness--like a close friend would do. I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and dreaded reaching those last few pages knowing that the end was near. Time was up for me, the reader, but indications were that the best was yet to come for my new found friend. Hooray for her!
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