Imagine sleeping with the enemy in the hills of Tennessee when the enemy totes a Bible and packs a .38. Mike shoved and slapped but his primary tools were isolation and economic abuse, until he discovered the power of the Lord. As the Sycamore Grows is a nonfiction narrative about ending the legacy of abuse. Ginger McNeil was brought up to pray and obey, but she escaped the padlocked cabin in the woods where she lived off the land with no electricity or telephone. Today she's a court advocate in the domestic court system. Her husband Mike admits the abuse, holds no remorse, and would do it all again. God made women to serve, he says. It's their job. Both Ginger and Mike speak, as do family, friends, ex-spouses, and others. Threading through the story is loss: the alienation of families, a spiritual void from betrayal by their church, and the death of the son Ginger had abandoned.
Jennie Helderman is a 2007 Pushcart Prize nominee whose latest book, As the Sycamore Grows, has won six literary awards and endorsement from 500 book clubs.
Author Jennie Helderman was born into Alabama politics, story-telling and creek bank fishing. "I had to tell stories, just like I had to thread red worms onto bream hooks. I've been writing all my life and don't ask. I won't say how long that is."
She entered politics herself as a pre-schooler, campaigning for her dad, and broke a glass ceiling at age ten as the first girl to page in the Alabama legislature, the same year she wrote and produced her first play.
Since then she's written As the Sycamore Grows and two holiday gift books, Christmas Trivia and Hanukkah Trivia. She has also chaired the editorial committee for a 150,000 circulation quarterly and written magazine articles and short stories.
She's taught school in rural Alabama, done social work, led community projects and promoted women's issues. For six years she chaired the board which oversees Alabama's DHR, the state's largest agency and the one that looks into all abuse.
She's climbed Mt. Vesuvius, worked at Pompeii, hiked across Spain and rafted the Grand Canyon. She likes to play Scrabble, read mysteries and do photography.
If she doesn't learn to write faster, she'll never tell all the stories crawling through her memory, like when her cousin died and his wife had the Mrs. and the burial policy but the one-legged woman had the body. Or about driving her mother and a coconut cake to the family reunion in a cow pasture in south Alabama. Or about living in the center of the civil rights movement.
As the Sycamore Grows swept the 2011 Reader Views Literary Awards, winning first place in Humanities, first in Biography/Memoir and first over all categories as best book in the southeast region.
