Author: Elizabeth Carroll Foster

Publisher: iUniverse

ISBN: 978-0-595-48384-6

Elizabeth Carroll Foster’s Southern Winds A’ Changing is historical fiction at its best.  Her realistic characters come to life in a life and death struggle with the harsh farmlands of Arkansas and the racial changes that are trying desperately to take hold in a community that fights change of any kind. 

This is one new author who stands up to be recognized.

While young Allise Weston DeWitt struggles with the mind-numbing pain of her first delivery, evening hours of dusk give way to a deep enveloping darkness that hide the sinful deeds of her young husband, Quent.  As his share-cropper blacks leave the cotton fields after a back-breaking twelve-hour-day, Quent traps sixteen year old Maizee in the weighing shed and rapes her.   To Quent’s cold mind, Maizee is just a black girl with no soul or spirit requiring humane treatment in a white world. 

Allise delivers a beautiful healthy baby boy who is named Peter Weston DeWitt in honor of her father.  And although she doesn’t put her doubts into words, Allise is all too aware of her young husband’s absence on this night and other nights to follow.

After Maizee is raped a second time by Mister Quent, she tearfully tells her parents and in fear for themselves and their daughter, Maizee is taken away to live with her aunt fifty miles away in Texas.  As time passes Maizee soon realizes she is pregnant and will soon have a baby—a white man’s baby.

Allise’s days are filled with watching her baby son grow, but she never-the-less wrestles with the knowledge that, coming from a Northern Quaker heritage, like the blacks in the community she doesn’t quite fit in.  As she witnesses the terrible treatment of the blacks in Dear Point, she begins a crusade of her own to make life better for them.  Although Allise is ostracized by most of the people in her church and town, she stands her ground and goes out of her way to enlighten the children where she teaches school about the social and inherited differences of coloreds and whites.

Racial injustices abound throughout the Southern States and as her own children grow, Allise tries to instill in them a feeling of compassion for their fellowmen. But as her children begin to show signs of having minds of their own and their own beliefs, she feels she has failed.

You will want to read this wonderful saga of life in the early south and go along with these families as they work together to make life better for themselves and others around the country.

The characters of Southern Winds A’Changing will warm your heart and make you cry as you go along with them in their trials of life in a land where beliefs and religions have been passed down from one generation to the next.  And where the age-old saying is, “that’s just how it is.”

A wonderfully insightful book.