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I don't remember Mama crying when Granny
Ruth died, but the day after she was buried, Mama gathered
together all the pillows in the house and went into the room
where her mother's foot-pedaled sewing machine stood silent.
Taking a pair of black-handled scissors, she cut open the
tops of Granny's pillows. Aunt Blanche asked Mama what in
Jehoshaphat's name did she think she was doing, cutting up
all the pillows like that. Mama answered something about finding
a crown inside one of those pillows Granny Ruth had fashioned
from chicken feathers.
"Sometimes," she explained, "when a person
sleeps on a pillow for a long time the feathers will mold
together to make a crown ..."
It's the 1960s and nine-year-old Karen
Spears is living in a trailer in middle Georgia. Her father,
David Spears, was killed in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam,
and left behind three young children and a wife with a ninth-grade
education. Hero Mama is the gritty, searing, and
beautifully written story of what happened to this Southern
family in the aftermath of a soldier's death.
At first the widow Spears appeared to fall
apart -- turning herself into a beer-guzzling, good-time girl,
while her children responded in kind. Eventually she recognized
how much her children needed her and, with mule-headed tenacity,
she earned her nursing degree and bought the family a real
home fashioned from bricks, rising above her own flaws to
forge a better life for her kids. Now Karen Spears Zacharias
pays tribute to this woman of guts and determination -- her
Hero Mama -- who battled overwhelming adversity to pull her
family up and make them proud of her, and of themselves.
Hero Mama is also the story of
the South, where a young girl grew up against an emotionally
charged landscape of racism and bigotry, where the daughter
of a fallen soldier had to face the stigma of a war nobody
wanted, and where a family in crisis pulled together to achieve
its own version of the American dream. It is a triumphant
tale of reconciliation between a daughter and her father,
a daughter and her nation, and a daughter and the people of
Vietnam. It is a story for any daughter who has loved her
father -- and for any daughter who has had to discover how
deeply her mother really loves her.
Karen Spears Zacharias's
work has won dozens of writing awards. She has lectured at
numerous Vietnam veterans' events; serves on the national
advisory board of the Virtual Wall and the Orphans of War
Foundation; is a contributing columnist for The Veteran,
the magazine for the Vietnam Veterans of America; and is a
member of Sons and Daughters in Touch, a national organization
for adult children of servicemen killed in Vietnam. She lives
in Oregon and Georgia.
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