Standing Against the Wind

Description

Tallahassee, Florida resident Martha Perritti pens the second in a series of autobiographical family sketches woven in the pages of her historical novels.

In Standing against the Wind, Perritti offers up her new-found Cherokee heritage through the eyes of three women. It took about three years to research, discover and write this novel based on family legend. Following various segments in the book, Perritti provides historical notations that connect actual facts to the story.

Perritti was 60 years old before she learned three of her great grandmothers were Cherokee Indians. These are the three that lead us through her book. Names have been altered for privacy.  (The tin type in the misty background on the cover of the book is Martha’s great grandmother.)

The story opens in 1813 when her great, great, great grandmother Polly was born in the Cumberland Gap. Later she is pulled from her home and forced to join a march that the Indians called nun-da-ut-sun-y, or, the trail where they cried. The white man labeled it Trail of Tears.

Polly escapes this treacherous removal and settles in the Black Warrior Mountains of northern Alabama. Polly’s son William marries Martha, a Cherokee, and Martha’s son John Allen marries a Cherokee, Rhoda.

Both Martha and Rhoda would not escape the Indian removal program. Eventually, four generations of Perritti’s family would have to vacate their land in what is now known as Alabama’s Bankhead National Forest.

This fascinating epic will open your eyes to the rich culture of the Cherokee and to little known facts surrounding the Native American removal program. It will also open your heart and mind.

A rosebush, planted by an ancestor, becomes an important symbol in the book. The women we meet pass along an unwitting will for survival. It is a sad story, a fulfilling story, and one that will carry on with a beauty that wouldn’t be complete without the thorns. Presently, the family rosebush spreads over six feet high and about twelve feet in width in the Bankhead National Forest. Clippings from this hardy wild rose flourish at family gravesides and porch sides today.

Much like the attributes of her Cherokee ancestors, Martha Perritti is a self-taught writer and an independent scholar.

Title: Standing against the Wind

(limited first edition released, October 2003)

Publisher: Lifestyles Press

Greensboro, North Carolina

404 pages, hardcover

ISBN: 978-1-58320-029-2