Seething with old prejudices, wealth, poverty, voodoo, and young hot blood, TRIUMPH, a Novel of the Human Spirit will take you through the Louisiana swamps, New Orleans, the Texas prairies, and into the bustling but racially troubled city of St. Louis in the mid-twentieth century . . . and lead you to a place where people are accepted because of character and heart—nothing more, nothing less.
Triumph
A Novel of the Human Spirit
by Jodi Lea Stewart
Genre: Historical Fiction
At a time when the world needs more warmth and acceptance, two little girls – Mercy and Annie, take us on a journey where color doesn’t matter, and character and heart are the only things that do!
Deep in the Louisiana swamps, 1903, five-year-old Willy is kidnapped by a Vodou Priestess. One day, he will fight bloody battles in France and come face-to-face with the horrors of Vodou.
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Denton, Texas
1903
All he knew was this baby girl was the gift he and Arlene had prayed for, yearned for day after day. When his friend Jack got word to him asking him if they still wanted a baby, he had answered promptly. Throwing a few vitals in the small trunk and loading it on the wagon, feeding the chickens, milk cow, and the horses early in the day, and getting his neighbor to come feed them until he returned was what he did. Then he hitched up his horse team and started the two-day wagon ride from Denton to Fort Worth to pick up the baby Jack had stumbled across with no explanation of how he had done so.
Arlene cried most of the way, and it wasn’t sad crying, he didn’t think, but tears of joy and relief. Once, she said, “I’ll call her Ruby, after my mother,” and that’s the most of what she said on the journey.
By now, he was used to Arlene’s weeping. She’d done it continually ever since little Rosemary was laid in the ground that awful blustery day. Her little brother Thaddeus had preceded her in death by a week. Both youngsters gone, victims of the fever. Unable to have more children, Arlene had taken to her rocking chair holding the little clothes she had sewn for her babies and crying for the better part of a year.
He had watched helplessly with his own heart breaking but not willing to put any more burden on his grieving wife by showing his own sorrow. Quietly, he kept up their ranch without a word, tiptoeing around Arlene, sometimes carrying her to bed or to the table to pick at the food he clumsily prepared.
When Jack—who had ridden in the Texas Rangers with him in their wild youth—came through the Territory for a visit before his annual trip to New Orleans, he was shocked at the state of his friend and his wife.
“In all haste, you must do something!” he proclaimed in astonishment. “Both you and your missus are skeletons. For the love of God, take in an unfortunate child who has no home, Ernest.”
“I would gladly take any child under our roof, Jack, if only the Good Lord would bring us one.” Ernest buried his head in his hands and wept for the first time since the horrible tragedies.
Jack had witnessed this man chase outlaws through New Mexico and Texas into the burning sands of Old Mexico for days at a time with only his iron grit to sustain him. Ernest had tamed killer horses no one else dared approach, engaged with gusto in shoot-outs with banditos so cruel they were barely human, men who fought to the death rather than surrender. Now, here was his friend lost in an agony Jack sympathized with but did not understand.
Jack had been fending for himself since orphaned at the age of twelve, had never seen fit to marry, and had no children he knew of. The raw pain of his friend had touched him, nevertheless, and when he traveled to New Orleans for his yearly gambling venture with his previous, now pooch-bellied and cigar-smoking Texas Ranger compatriots, he stumbled upon a circumstance that would forever change his own life and the lives of his Texas friends.
TRIUMPH, a Novel of the Human Spirit is for readers who enjoy high-concept books written with a literary pen, and those who wish to see justice fulfilled and old prejudices shattered.
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Jodi Lea Stewart is a fiction author who believes in and writes about the triumph of the human spirit through overcoming adversity via grit, humor, and stubborn tenacity. Her writing reflects her life beginning in Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, later moving as a youngster to an Arizona cattle ranch next door to the Navajo Nation, and, as a young adult, resuming in her native Texas.
Growing up, she climbed petroglyph-etched boulders, bounced two feet in the air in the backend of pickups wrestling through washed-out terracotta roads, and rode horseback on the winds of her imagination through the arroyos and mountains of the Arizona high country. Her lifetime friendship with all nationalities, cowpunchers, and the southern gentry allows Jodi to write comfortably about anything in the Southwest, the South, and far BEYOND.
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This looks like a very impactful novel. Thanks for hosting this shindig.
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