Whiskey Chitto Woman

Marguerite Hudson

Format ISBN Price   Paperback (6x9) 9781425961053 $ 13.40   Dust Jacket Hardcover (6x9) 9781425961060 $ 20.10

The opening scene depicts my great grandmother Ellen Johnson fanning her children as they nap on a pallet in the dogtrot of their home in western Louisiana. Laying her palmetto fan aside, she greets John Johnson, her father in law, as he brings a letter from her husband, Aaron Johnson. It is the summer of 1865, and Aaron’s name has never appeared on the list of the dead. His right leg was amputated just below the hip after being hit by a mini ball in the Battle of Mansfield, Louisiana, and he was sent to Shreveport where he stayed for 16 months to recover. Then he was sent by steamboat to Alexandria where he is paroled. He writes for someone to come take him home.

The young determined wife insist on making the 60-mile trip herself, yet after much ado, is convinced to take a 16-year-old neighbor boy, Sammy James, to accompany her. The journey is fraught with many incidents as they travel through the Sabine Free State, an area famous for outlawry, jayhawking, and marauding. The plot illustrates unbelievably beautiful scenery of (then) Rapides Parish, the roughness of wagon travel and camping, but most of all, the courage and bravery of this young woman.

Marguerite Hudson, a retired English Teacher, wrote Whiskey Chitto Woman, her first novel. She wrote Emmett Cope: A Tribute of Remembrance, and was part of a trio who wrote Crème de la Crème, a cookbook. She holds two MA Degrees, one from Northern Colorado University at Greeley and one from Northwestern University at Natchitoches, LA. She taught at Ouachita Parish High School, Monroe, LA; Haynesville High School; Bossier High School; Bossier Parish Community College; Centenary; The Barksdale Air Force NCO Academy and Louisiana Tech at Barksdale. She served eight years on the Bossier Parish School Board. Presently, her plans are writing another novel and traveling to South Texas where she enjoys a set of special friends.

 President Lincoln and his staff decided that the capture of Texas and the Trans-Mississippi headquarters at Shreveport, Louisiana would be the next objective in that area. Source: Mansfield Historic Site. Mansfield, Louisiana.

    The patchwork quilt lay on the floor in the middle of the dogtrot hall where a hint of breeze aided by the to and fro of Ellen’s creaking hand-made palmetto fan cooled her two small children. It was that quiet, swelteringly hot time of a Louisiana June day after lunch when the children napped, and Ellen waited daydreaming as she gazed out into the hot brilliant sky that enfolded the barn, vegetable garden, chicken coop, pea patch, fields, and pastures that were her world. She was waiting for her husband to come home, and she was waiting for the crape myrtle to bloom.