Then Like The Blind Man: ORBIE'S STORY
About this ebook
Synopsis:
At nine, Orbie seems to live his life along a precipice. He is burdened with an overabundance of difficult choices which would be beyond the capacities of most boys his age--but Orbie is about to discover he's no ordinary boy. In the debut novel from artist and poet Freddie Owens, nothing is ever precisely what it seems: prejudice in not innate, the dead aren't really dead, and those in positions of power cannot be trusted.
Orbie finds himself deposited at his grandparent's home in Kentucky one summer, his stepfather, Victor having had a change of heart about including him on a family prospecting trip to Florida. Except "heart"doesn't seem, to Orbie, quite the right word to apply to his stepfather, whose tempestuous temper took him from the widowed family's salvation to its most dangerous element in one outburst flat.
Then Like The Blind Man: ORBIE'S STORY is an electrifying porthole to the South of the '50s, where, though inane prejudice may have dominated, kindness and justice also had a place. Orbie's sharecropping grandparents, by defying convention with unnerving grace, become founts of colloquial wisdom whose appeal is impossible to resist, and the Orbie they nurture--the best version of a boy who may otherwise have been lost--is someone the reader comes to love.
Michelle Anne Schingler / ForeWord Reviews
(2013) ABNA Quarter Finalist
Received IR Discovery Award for Best in Literary Fiction (2013)
(2014 )Finalist for Kindle Book Review's Literary Fiction Award.
Received Kirkus Review's STAR for exceptional merit.
Featured in Kirkus Review's Trade Magazine (January, 2014)
Honorable Mention: Writer's Digest 2016 Self-Published Book Awards
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About the author
Born in Kentucky, I grew up around Detroit. I would sometimes spend a week or two, once I spent six weeks, in Kentucky, staying with cousins or with my grandparents. It was an entirely different world for me, providing some of the best and worst times of my growing up years. I had a great time on a dairy farm with several of my cousins, milking cows, hoeing tobacco, running over the hills and up and down a creek that surrounded the big farm. I remember too, periods of abject boredom, sitting around my grandparent's old farm house with nothing to do but wander about the red clay yard or kill flies on my grandmother's screened-in back porch.
Certain aspects of these growing up years did come to light in the novel, Then Like The Blind Man: ORBIE'S STORY, knowingly at times, and at times spontaneously and distantly, as ghostly north-south structures, as composite personae, as moles and stains and tears and glistening rain and dark bottles of beer, rooms of cigarette smoke, haylofts and pigs. Here's a quote from the acknowledgements.
Two memories served as starting points for a short story I wrote that eventually became this novel. One was of my Kentucky grandmother as she emerged from a shed with a white chicken held upside down in one of her strong bony hands. I, a boy of nine and a 'city slicker' from Detroit,looked on in wonderment and horror as she summarily wrung the poor creature's neck. It ran about the yard frantically, yes incredibly, as if trying to locate something it had misplaced as if the known world could be set right again, recreated, if only that one thing was found.And then of course it died. The second memory was of lantern light reflected off stones that lay on either side of a path to a storm cellar me and my grandparents were headed for one stormy night beneath a tornado's approaching din. There was wonderment there too, along with avast and looming sense of impending doom. Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Pete Dexter, Carson McCullers, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Conner and Joyce Carol Oats, to name a few, are among my literary heroes and heroines. Tone and style of these writers have influenced me in ways I'd be hard pressed to name, though the discerning reader might feel such influences as one word follows another and I attempt to "stab the heart with...force" (a la Isaac Babel) by placing my periods (hopefully, sometimes desperately) "...just at the right place."