Wilhelmina: An Imagined Memoir ~ Paperback ~ R J McCarthy

Wilhelmina Johnson Hamlin died in 1930, shortly after the birth of her 6th child. She was 26 years old, remarkably unknown, and ordinary. Yet in her "ordinariness," she was an extraordinary human being. A woman of color, living at a tenuous, often harsh, time for African-Americans, she created a legacy of love in her brief life. Chancing upon her, the historical framework of her life was clothed by the imagined workings of a mind that bequeathed loving memories. Her story unfolds as a series of linked chapters in which she explores the events that have shaped her life. Through the prism of memory, moment, and thought, she cherishes the good, willing herself to ponder but not dwell upon the less than memorable. The majority of her formative years spent in an orphanage, she weighs its effects upon the primary issues that color her life including family, loss, the mysteries of the world, her mechanisms for sustaining happiness, and, shadowing everything, racism. Yet insistent as it is, she never allows racism, as it probes her thoughts, to appropriate them or her ample spirit.Author BiographyBorn and raised in New York City, fiction writer, RJ McCarthy, has lived in the South more than half his life. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1972 and worked as a Clinical Psychologist before retiring in 2006 to devote himself to writing full-time. McCarthy is a member of the Virginia Writer's Group, the North Carolina Writer's Network, and both the Franklin County and Vance County Arts Councils. He's been writing fiction for 40 years and has a binder full of rejections to prove it. Quarry Steps Up, crime fiction, was his first published novel. Married and the father of two adult children, he and his wife, Susan, reside with two dogs and three cats in Henderson, North Carolina.