daughter of a daughter of a queen by sarah bird

Then, at least in Bird’s imaginative tale, Williams encounters Sgt. Laundress, pot-scrubber, prostitute - thankless, degrading jobs - were her only options. Philip Sheridan’s vast army as a cook’s helper, marching with the fiery Irishman through the decisive, scorched-earth Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864.Īfter the war, what were her choices? Return home? She had no home. What is known is that Williams was born a slave in Missouri around 1844. She heard of Cathy Williams in the late ’70s while researching African American rodeos, and has only now, 40 years later, felt obliged to tell the tale in book form. Williams’ life is screenplay stuff, which Bird wrote first and tried (and failed) to sell in Hollywood. I hope that this is the beginning of Cathy’s story being told in so many other ways.” The fact that a 69-year-old white woman tells the story of young black slave-turned-soldier who lived in a previous century has raised some eyebrows in publishing circles. “Daughter” taps into the current national zeitgeist with a wise, courageous character of color who died (probably) in 1893. Indeed, Bird has written a strange, surreal, Twain-like fable, a meditation on the value of acceptance, whose MLK-like moral might be: Skin color and gender should not determine the weight of a person’s character. More coverage in the Sunday Taste/mySA section. Participants: Sarah Bird, Julián Castro, Elizabeth Crook, Adrian Davila, Joe Holley, Pat Mora, Mimi Swartz Where: Marriott Rivercenter, 101 Bowie St. The author seems to want to do nothing more than mill some pulp from their forbidden romance, when Cathay’s story was about so much more.When: 10 a.m. worst of all is the love story between Cathay and Swayne, which is instantaneously built and completely ahisoric. While Cathay almost springs to life as a full-blooded woman, in several ways she comes off as a breathing chunk of cardboard. But the author falls into several traps when it comes to portraying her black characters as well-rounded people (and is far, far worse at portraying the native American characters who appear later in the text), and sadly, stereotypes permeate the novel. The novel’s battle scenes are properly rousing, and the observations of army life feel realistic and work well, as do the well-detailed difficulties of posing as someone of the opposing sex. The book does do several things right, including the excellent points made about the way black men and women had to live through horrors and debasement, to eke out survival, and of the lies they were forced to tell to the white people they loathed to make it to some semblance of survival. Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen had so much potential. Sarah Bird misses the mark by a wide mile as she relates the real-life tale of Miss Cathay Williams (the author persists in misspelling her name as ‘Cathy’ throughout).

Daughter of a daughter of a queen by sarah bird