“What I wanted most was to be okay as a Blue. I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.”
Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
It’s been a long time since I posted, and I’m sorry about that. I’m going to be honest and tell you that my grandmother passed away kind of unexpectedly so I had to go home for the funeral and to help my mom. It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks and I didn’t have a ton of time to read while I was gone. But I’m back now and I just finished a really great book called The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.
Have you ever heard of the Blue Fugates of Kentucky? I’d heard of them in passing a few years ago but I knew almost nothing about them. Basically, Martin Fugate and his wife both had a recessive gene that caused a condition called methemoglobinemia. Their blood doesn’t carry oxygen efficiently to the body’s tissues. One of the effects of this is blue skin. Out of Martin Fugate’s seven children, four of them were blue. If a person develops this condition it can be dangerous, but apparently it’s not a big deal when it’s congenital. The Fugates generally lived long, healthy lives.
In The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, author Kim Michele Richardson’s Carter family is based off of the Fugates. The protagonist, Cussy Carter, is the last Blue in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky. She’s also a librarian with the Pack Horse Librarian Project, a project that really took place in the WPA under FDR’s New Deal. In an effort to get reading materials into the hands of people in the mountains of Kentucky, the Pack Horse Librarians would carry books and periodicals by horse, donkey, or mule. They would deliver directly to the people in their homes.
For Cussy, books are an escape from a hardscrabble life and the loneliness of being the last Blue. She traverses the mountains on her faithful mule, helping her patrons find joy in learning and comfort in her friendship. The relationships that she develops with the people on her book route were really sweet, and I enjoyed the care the author put into developing each of Cussy’s friendships.
This book was also interesting in that it brought to light the prejudice that the Blue people would have experienced. It’s true that it would be surprising to see someone with blue skin, but it didn’t occur to me that they might have been persecuted in the same way that a Black person would have been in a Jim Crow segregationist society. Cussy isn’t allowed to use a “Whites Only” bathroom and she’s not allowed to attend social functions in town with the white people because they see her as something other than themselves. Her family is even subject to miscegenation laws. The whole thing reinforced for me, again, just how ridiculous it is to classify people based on the color of their skin. In Cussy’s case, her blue skin was caused by a medical condition, but people saw her as sinful and less than them, even though a simple medication was able to make her “white.”
The one thing I didn’t love about this book was that Cussy was a bit of a Mary Sue. She was too kind, too charitable, too forgiving. On the one hand, I love reading about good people who do good things. There were so many uplifting moments in this book. But sometimes it felt a little unreal, because few people are as saintly as Cussy Carter, especially in the circumstances that she endured. I almost wanted her to have a bit more of an edge. A chip on her shoulder. Something that was less Pollyanna and would make her seem like a real girl.
Still, if you want a feel-good book with insight into a fascinating bit of history, this would be a good one to pick up.
Happy Reading!
