Doing Time - Softcover

Lawson, Jack N.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1452039542 ISBN 13: 9781452039541

Verlag: AuthorHouse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Doing Time is the compelling, true-to-life story of a young woman, Annabel Lee, who is wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime committed by her wayward husband. Beginning before her birth, the story opens in the rural American South of the1950s, and tracks the brutal relationship into which Annabel Lee is born. As she grows, Annabel Lee cannot escape the cycle of violence and abuse that surrounds her. Naively, she elopes with her teenaged lover in the vain hope for an escape from her cruel past, only to discover that she has entered upon an equally harrowing stint in a women's prison. In the unlikely fellowship behind bars, and through her relationships with inmates, staff and particularly the prison's chaplain, Annabel Lee courageously moves from the scarred existence as a victim to the life of a survivor. Filled with the local color of life in rural North Carolina between the 1950s and 1970s, Doing Time is a poignantan-and at times humorous-story of multi-generational trauma and abuse, and the journey of the human spirit to healing and redemption.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jack Lawson grew up in North Carolina. As an ordained minister he worked as a prison chaplain in North Carolina and Ohio. He later served as a parish minister in the US and the United Kingdom. After earning a PhD in Hebrew Bible, he taught both ministerial candidates and lay people in the English counties of Kent and Norfolk. After leaving parish ministry in 1997, Jack worked for The Rural Community Council in Kent, focusing on rural economic regeneration and managing a European Social Fund grant between Kent and Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In the process he developed an intense love of France and the French people. Later, Jack spent more than 12 years as training and development officer for the Methodist Church in East Anglia. His book, The Concept of Fate in Ancient Mesopotamia, is an exploration of early human attempts at working out how much free will we human beings actually have. It examines poems, myths, prayers, rituals, divination and more. The author's first novel, Doing Time, reflects his years as a chaplain in a Southern US women's prison. It expresses how the harsh reality of domestic violence is the path that leads most women to prison. Jack is married to Chris, a former mental health specialist who worked with children and families in the UK. They now reside in North Carolina.

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Doing Time

By Jack N. Lawson

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Jack N. Lawson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-3954-1

Chapter One

Long Time

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons ... As You Like It

Annabel Lee had been named by her mother, Colleen Watkins-'fallen woman' and former English teacher. After leaving her teacher training college in Raleigh, North Carolina, during the late 1950s, Colleen had gone to teach high school in the western part of the state: rural Appalachian, Bransford County, on the eastern slopes of those ancient mountains. She had wanted to bring her love of the English language and literature to people that the times, culture and economy had seemingly passed by. It was her vocation-and her mission. It had all started so well, but ended ingloriously. In later years Colleen blamed it on Edgar Allan Poe-Poe had been Colleen's favorite American writer. The romantic in her was attracted to Poe's freely dabbling in the darker side of human nature and his tragic sense of life. She always harbored the thought that had she been around during his time, Poe's literary light would not have been doused in a bottle, and that his weak and sensitive heart would have enchanted the world for decades to come. However, Poe was long dead when Colleen Watkins, newly qualified English teacher, found herself moving to Bransford County and renting the small garage apartment owned by county sheriff, Wyatt McNair.

Wyatt McNair had been sheriff as long as anyone in Bransford County could remember. With each passing election, the office of sheriff had become something of a birthright, such that no one dared run against him. Generations back, the McNairs had come to North Carolina as a result of the crofters' clearances in Scotland. And like so many immigrant families, they gravitated to areas in North America that resembled their former homelands-and not always to their advantage. The McNairs had left the western highlands of Scotland, where stony earth grudgingly yielded any harvest and north Atlantic salt winds tortured whatever managed to grow or live there. But even with the Atlantic between them and their dispossessed crofts, they still managed to trade one difficult living for another: trying to grow corn and burley tobacco on the stony mountainsides of North Carolina.

Although Wyatt and family still eked out a small living from their one-hundred-and-fifty acres (of which thirty were under cultivation), it was as sheriff that he made his living. Perhaps the name helped: 'Wyatt.' It had the ring of the American west and one of its most famous lawmen. Being sheriff in a rural county in the South had its advantages as well: Wyatt didn't just uphold the law-he was the law. Thus whatever he chose not to see wasn't illegal. As the McNairs were good Scots Presbyterians, alcoholic wine never passed their lips at Sunday communion. Moreover, Bransford County was a 'dry' county-since before the days of Prohibition. Yet delve far enough back into the woods on an old logging path, find a good source of spring water and-if the breeze were right-the sweet smell of sour mash and wood smoke would betray the existence of a whiskey still. What the sale of burley tobacco at the warehouses down in Winston-Salem couldn't buy, corn whiskey could-and even more-tax free. Wyatt himself benefited from the moonshine trade, as his ne'er-do-well son and namesake, Wyatt Junior, ran a still just off their property and into the territory of a state forest. As the term 'moonshine' suggests, this illegal distillation of corn liquor took place 'out-of-hours.' Farmers and tradesmen by day became moonshiners by night.

Wyatt McNair, Jr.-or 'Junior,' as he was known-had tried many jobs since leaving high school eight years earlier. Intellectually lazy, but handsome and physically gifted, he had relied on looks, charm and one hell of a throwing arm to get him through high school. With his six-foot two-inch frame, Junior was the quarterback during football season and pitcher during baseball season. These were the perfect reasons for rarely having his homework in on time and for having his choice of pretty girls. As Junior didn't give his teachers any real trouble, and as his daddy was sheriff, Junior was allowed to 'drift with the breeze.' He graduated in 1949, just missed being drafted for the Korean War, and had hoped to go to a state university by means of a sports scholarship. However Junior's arm wasn't up to university conference standards and his brains even less so. Plus universities were still full of enthusiastic young men seeking an education on the GI Bill. So Junior worked the family land, and along the way failed at various attempts in local business. The natural fall-back for any such mountain lad was moonshining. The fact that his daddy was the county sheriff was his insurance. And McNair senior never ever let Junior drive the whiskey; it was just too big of a risk; and besides, there were dozens of hot-headed and lead-footed mountain boys eager to prove their prowess behind the wheel of a stripped-down Chevy or Ford.

The McNairs still churned out less whiskey than most of the family operations in those parts. This was, in fact, intentional. McNair senior might be outside the law on this account, but he wasn't a bad man. Far from it. Hell, everybody knew and could see that Bransford County was poor. And it wasn't as though the moonshiners were opium dealers, selling to mind-addled addicts. Besides, most of the call for 'shine came from the more prosperous Piedmont-Winston-Salem and Greensboro-and even the state capital, Raleigh. It was all just a case of supply and demand; after all, if people didn't want moonshine, there'd be no reason to make it. Nevertheless, as the local law and a Presbyterian elder, Wyatt senior had to be seen to be playing fair with Federal law. There would be the occasional visits from agents of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms-or ATF, as it was referred to sometimes. Everybody knew that there was 'shine being produced from North Wilkesboro to Asheville and nearly all points in between. The film "Thunder Road" was far from pure fantasy, and NASCAR, still in its infancy, was largely the domain of the fast-driving young men who transported the illegal liquor. So Wyatt senior had to produce results from time-to-time. The ATF men, or 'revenuers,' as they were called, were serious men in dark grey suits and they brought with them an arsenal of revolvers, shotguns, dynamite and axes. The former two for personal protection and the latter two for destroying any stills they should find. By mutual agreement with other still operators, Wyatt would arrange a schedule of whose still would be raided from year to year. It was a fair system. Suspected by-but unbeknownst to-the revenuers, the moonshiners would always be alerted to their arrival. As the revenuers approached the arboreal lair of the whiskey distillers, a shot or two would often be fired by the 'shiners-and in the general direction of the raiders. This lent an air of credibility to the raid and whilst the revenuers were ducking for their lives (there were human hearts within those grey suits), the 'shiners would make good their escape. The axes would come out for puncturing the whiskey vats and a stick of dynamite would then be tossed into the boiler to dispatch the still. Photographs would be taken of the raid, before and after, and the revenuers could take the self-congratulatory evidence of a job well done back to the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AuthorHouse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1452039542
• ISBN 13: 9781452039541
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland