Prisoner of Hope
by
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Marjorie Hawkins cleaned her small two-bedroom home early that morning. The date was March 13, 1913, and her older children—Jerome, Wanda, and Loretta—were outdoors helping their stepfather, Red, water the family’s early spring garden. They lived in a sharecropper house for free, but they were obligated to help their landlord with the crops. In the fall they harvested the cotton.
All of them would work in the fields from sunup to sundown, picking the cotton from the prickly open bolls. They would place it in the long sacks they wore on their backs. When a sack was full it was weighed and thrown into a wagon. The landlord would take the cotton to a gin where the tiny seeds were removed. The family could hope to make up to 50 percent of the money received for the raw cotton. In many cases, this was the sharecroppers’ only income for the year.
They chopped the weeds out of the cotton in the late spring and summer months to assure a good crop. This too was a sunup-to-sundown job. They often received a small sum of money for the work—maybe a dollar a day.
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About the Book
This book is based on a true story about a boy born into a poor and uneducated family in 1913.
The young man felt unwanted, unloved and had hope for a better life.
Often feeling imprisoned by his circumstances, he remained hopeful.
He sought to find answers about the existence of God.
The adults he questioned never gave him a satisfactory answer.
His life was full of physical, emotional and mental abuse.
His journey to find hope led him to many adventures including a home with some bootleggers, a five-year stay as a deckhand and cook on a barge on the Mississippi River from the ages of 12-17
His suicide attempt was miraculously interrupted by a phone call .
This book will make you think. Sometimes it will bring tears to your eyes and other times make you laugh.
It is a story of hope filled with tragedy and triumph.
It begins in a town on the Mississippi River and you will enjoy meeting the people in the book.
You will be amazed at the events that transpire in his life from birth to death.
At the end of his life, he was chesrished by many.
About the Author
Helen Harris grew up in a pastor’s home where she developed an interest in people and their personal story.. In addition to that, she had aunts and cousins who were great story tellers and she still remembers most of them. She began telling stories at age six and is full of real life stories
She wrote one story in the seventies that was published. She wrote a newspaper column in a local town paper for about ten years. She gave up the job when she became a registered nurse and began a full time job in a hospital.
While there she had one surgeon who would beg for a story during a surgical procedure. He asked her to write them up for a book and he would pay for the publication. She never found the time to write them down for him.
At age 77 she has completed her first book at the request of Jay William Hawkins who lived the story in this book. Although this is her first book, she has begun another one.