The final book of the Freedom Trilogy, a saga of life on the storm ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Visual Liberties is the final book in the “Freedom Trilogy,” the saga of the little Bayou town of Freedom, Mississippi. It all started with The Backside of Nowhere and was followed by Return to Freedom.
Molly Ashton is now a college student majoring in art. She is trying hard to grow up, find her way in the world, but it seems she does nothing but make bad choices ... until she makes friends with Francis Gossing.
Francis is socially awkward but an artistic genius, and he is haunted by a frightening vision of his mother and a man with a gun. He can’t tell if the vision he’s obsessed with is a memory or a nightmare from long ago.
Struggling to find their way in the world, Molly and Francis find an unexpected ally in the person of Travis Earl Warner, the once famous artist known as Red Warner who has abandoned the world of art to live a hermit’s life at a fishing camp on the Mary Walker Bayou.
Excerpt
Calling Bitsey Ashton a square peg in a round hole would be like saying the Titanic was a motorboat that sprang a leak. Bitsey is more like a trapezoid with razor edges, capable of drilling herself into any hole of any shape no matter how big or little. She’s now middle aged with grown daughters. At least the daughters think they’re grown; Bitsey is not so sure about her youngest, Molly, a brand new freshman at Mississippi University for Women on the Gulf Coast. Big sister Jamie Lew married Abdul Taylor and is living in New Orleans. Those sharp edges of Bitsey’s have been sanded smooth by hard times and tragedy—most devastating, the loss of her son, Justin.
She can fool most people into believing she’s just like a normal person, which has proven to be a blessing to her husband, Malcolm; but there are times when he wishes she’d get a little of her edge back.
Bitsey poked her head out of her mother’s womb two weeks prematurely on Christmas day, 1966. She came out screaming and flailing her arms and legs. Beet-faced. Hard little knots of muscle showing in her calves and biceps. “This’un’s gonna be a fighter,” her mother said with self-evident pride. The proud mama, Geraldine Fordham, seventeen at the time, was not married and refused to tell anyone who the baby’s father was. She said it was nobody’s damn business. Truth was, she didn’t know. Conception happened when she was living in a crash pad in Nashville. Throughout the six weeks that she lived there, at least two dozen hippies called the place home for a night or two or at most a month. They’d climb off the Greyhound bus at the downtown station and make their way as if by internal radar to Centennial Park where they would inevitably run into someone from one of the many crash pads in town such as the house on West End Avenue where Geraldine lived. Multiple sexual partners amongst the many West End hippies was the order of the day. Free love. Whatever gets you through the night. One of the men Geraldine slept with was a tall man with long blonde hair and charismatic personality. She slept with him only once, but they did not use a condom. She liked to think he was the father of her baby, but she knew she would never know for sure. He vanished from her life before she even knew she was pregnant.
Geraldine was a big woman. Not fat but big boned as she liked to say. She was loud and outspoken. Once she got started on any of her favorite subjects—war, love, sex, art, literature, the degradation of popular culture and the blight of consumerism—she was next to impossible to shut up. She wouldn’t even pause between sentences but filled the silences with ums and ahs and indescribable sounds and nobody else could sneak a word in—a trait her daughter would learn from her as a means of self-preservation. Geraldine loved to sing and did so often, whether others wanted to hear her or not. When she announced her pregnancy the commune threw a party to celebrate, and Geraldine told everyone she planned on having her baby at home. Natural childbirth of course. No anesthesia. She had heard about giving birth in a tub of warm water and thought that would be cool. She wanted someone to film it. But her housemates talked her out of birthing at home. They said it was too dangerous. What if something went wrong? Wimps, every one of ’em, Geraldine thought.
After the baby came out and Geraldine exulted about how she was going to be a fighter, she said, “That was a piece of cake, a mere bagatelle. I could’a done it at home if ya’ll hadn’t been such worry warts.” She called the baby the itsy-bitsy one and the name stuck. Soon it morphed into Bitsey.
Determined to confront the hazy memories of his troubled youth, Oliver Matthews, a retired detective and confirmed bachelor, returns to the picturesque town of Henley-on-Thames for the first time in years.
The Apple Tree Blossoms in The Fall, is the life journey of Carineh - a child, a teenager, a wife, a mother, but most of all a woman of purpose. From stories of her parents held-up by bandits; the white donkey gifted by Khomeini; her father's death f
