Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Author Spotlight with Sarah Weathersby



Sarah Weathersby is a self-described “retired geek and card-carrying-radical Old Broad.” She was born in the rectory of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Petersburg, Virginia during the time that her Daddy was rector. She attended segregated public schools in Petersburg until her Mother died, and she was sent to live in Washington, DC with her brother and his wife. Sarah graduated from high school in Washington, and went on to college at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey where she majored in German Literature and spent a junior year in Munich. She met her first husband while he was a student in the Theological School at Drew. They settled in North Carolina and raised two sons. Sarah earned her MBA from Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. After the death of her husband, she found her long-lost daughter who inspired her memoir, Motherless Child, stories from a life, her first published work. She lives in Raleigh with her second husband, when they are not traveling from Agadir to Maui, riding camels or bicycles.

I like to read a variety of genres, from literary fiction to speculative fiction; thrillers to romance. My favorite authors are Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Tananarive Due, Beverly Jenkins, Walter Mosley, Dean Koontz. I write because I can't help myself. I write about the things that keep me awake at night.

Motherless Child - stories from a life 

Imagine you gave a baby up for adoption forty years ago, and after years of trying to find her, she finds you. Now come the hard questions. She's healthy, beautiful, and successful, but she wants to know why you gave her away and why you didn't marry her father. And there is also the unspoken question of "What kind of black woman gives her baby away?" How do you explain to her that giving her away was the best gift you could offer? This is Sarah Weathersby's first published work, a coming-of-age-in-the-sixties-single-black-pregnant and on the way to Germany, memoir.
The Excerpt

Prologue


I never thought I would find Teal’s father almost forty years after I last heard from him. Jimmy is such a common name that I didn’t even try searching on the internet until the last remaining volume of my journal fell out of a box of tax receipts. I had written in the journal that he had married Paula. That turned out to be just enough information to find him as an associate with a full page on the Howard University website that had his photograph and enough other information for me to find a phone number as well. I was trembling when I left the message, “You will remember me as Sarah Gordon. I have some exciting news to tell you.”

He returned the call the next day, but he needed his teenaged son to help him with the call. He had had a stroke that affected the speech center of his brain. His speech wasn’t at all slurred, but it was difficult for him to put the words together especially over the phone. He remembered me, of course, and he seemed happy to hear I had found our daughter. Paula came on the line to explain that he might understand it all better if I wrote him a letter. That was going to make it easier for me as well; I was shaky, trying to say the right things, since I didn’t want to lose this contact. Teal wanted to meet her father.

It had been only three months since I had met our daughter, the child I gave up for adoption so long ago. I had tried many years to find her, and even signed up with the Adoption Registry, but until she decided to look for her birth mother, they would not give out the contact information. The idea of looking for her birth parents never crossed her mind until she became a mother herself. And now she wanted to know why I gave her up.

I called Teal to tell her that I had found her father. She seemed relieved that another piece of the puzzle was completed, and happy to know there was more family for her to meet. She had already developed a strong connection with my son Joshua through regular phone calls, and she hoped to have that same connection with Jimmy’s daughters. I wrote to Jimmy, and sent photos to Paula and their daughters by email. The following month she met all of her long-lost family on both sides, giving her the brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts as she had never had and always wished for.

The experience of finding Teal has been such a blessing, but also caused me to replay that time through my memory. I hardly remember the girl I was back then, and it’s difficult to sort out all the thought processes and reasons I gave myself. When I looked back over my life, I often wondered if I should regret giving a child away. How could I regret, when I didn’t know how the story ended? I knew that at the time, I could not have provided for Teal what two loving parents could give her. Now that I know they gave her more than I ever could have, I know it was the right decision for that time, and I have no regrets.
You can contact with Sarah at: 
Amazon Author Page: Amazon
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