Author Sherry Lucille to Release Two Books in 2022: Truth Telling in Fact and Fiction
Author Sherry Lucille with the covers of the books authored by herself and her late mother that she will publish in 2022
By Jonathan Gramling
Appreciation for the written word goes back generations in Madison author Sherry Lucille’s family.
“My father had seven kids,” Lucille said. “I am the middle child. His grandmother, my great grandmother, was a writer. Her name was Bill Bryant. And she used to sell pamphlets in the early 1900s on the streets. One was ‘Never Marry a Drunken Man.’ My eldest sister before she passed away gave me copies of some of the pamphlets that my great grandmother wrote. It’s in the genes. It’s part of my destiny and my calling and I had no idea.”
And the passion for writing was on her mother’s side of the family as well. In 1989, Lucille’s late mother gave her a book that she had written and expressed her desire that it get published.
“She wrote the beginning of the book before 1957 and left it in Tallulah, Louisiana when she moved,” Lucille said. “And then she started it up again and finished it in 1981. That’s the book that we have. It’s about her life growing up in Tallulah, Louisiana and Fortune Fork, Louisiana in Madison Parish. And then a little bit about her life in Chicago where she lived before my brother and I moved her to Madison.”
The book called Mabel By Herself, reflects the historical period of the time as a backdrop to a family history.
“It is about my mom Mabel’s growing-up years, which included the history of her mother, her mother’s family, her siblings and her mother Lily,” Lucille said. “And then when she moved to Chicago, it was about her and my Aunt Dot who is really my cousin who will be 99-years-old on March 30th and is still alive. She is the one we are always going to see in Mississippi. Her story takes us from segregation to the civil rights movement and beyond. It is very focused on her family life and their experiences. It’s a pretty light touch. She talks a lot about this love family and her relationship to God and what she sees as essential for people to do well in the world.”
It’s a book that got published in due time.
“She did not try to publish it,” Lucille said. “She didn’t have the wherewithal to do that and I didn’t either until I started writing myself. That’s why I think timing is everything. She wanted to send her book to Oprah. And I actually may have done that for her, package it up and send it to whatever address I could find for Oprah. We’re really strong faith-wise. I got that from my mom. And we just believe in impossible things happening. So we just take steps and see what happens. All she would have known is, ‘Hey let’s send this book to Oprah and see what happens.’”
While Lucille had typed up the book, she didn’t do anything with it until this past January.
“I just typed it almost without reading it,” Lucille admitted. “My pastor, Alex Gee, called me in January of this year to tell me about a dream that he had about my mom. This is not a common thing for him to do. He’s not someone to go around and say, ‘I had a dream.’ Then he said to me, ‘How old would Mrs. Gaines have been if she lived?’ I said, without a pause, ‘100 on February 3rd.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my mother would have been 100-years-old had she lived.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to do something. You can’t let this just pass like it is every other day.’ I thought, ‘Well, what about that manuscript that she wrote? Wouldn’t it be cool to actually get that into book form for her 100th birthday?’ And that’s how it came about. And I literally already had the book in my hand.”
At the same time, Lucille was completing her fourth novel Falling. Her first three novels were interracial love stories. With Falling, she delves into Black love.
“Falling is what I call my first Black on Black love story,” Lucille said. “Even though I said my trilogy was done, my Love Changes, Love Dreams and Love Promises, I alluded to a character in Love Drams named Jasper Johnson. He’s the younger brother of James, the lead character. I talked about him being this negligent, not-around-when-the-family-needed him person. I just had a little tidbit about him in that second novel. But right around the time I was finishing Love Dreams, I was starting to formulate this story. And so this story is about a spoiled 27-year-old who has been traipsing across Europe and has gone to Africa, being spoiled by his uncle. It’s his uncle’s feeling that he is a little too uncaring. And so he sends him to go to school at a Christian college in a place called Three Falls, Tennessee, a fictional town. And it has a Christian Black Negro college there called All Saints Christian Negro College. He meets a girl there, kind of a plain girl on campus. He’s not interested in her, but through a series of events, they keep tumbling into each other. They form a reluctant kind of friendship. It follows their time in Free Falls together and then they have a traumatic event that happens. He doesn’t know what happened, but she has had some trauma. And then she leaves there and goes to Chicago and he follows her there. And they confront his past and his demons.”
Falling isn’t your typical romance novel although it certainly has romance within it. It is set in 1970-1971 and explores what true love is through the many phases and changes in the relationship between Jasper and Karen, the two main characters. And while it is written within a Christian setting and context, it goes beyond that to explore the depth of the relationship between the two main characters with a profound revelation at the end
“I think Jasper has the most transformation,” Lucille said. “And I think Karen had the most revelation. It’s who she is and life in general. I think she had kind of a Pollyannaish view and that was kind of ripped away from her. But she was able to survive it. She stuck with her values and her own sense of person. She didn’t need a man to make her. But it is nice to have one as long as you know who you are.”
Both books will be available for purchase in 2022.
“I am an indie author,” Lucille said. “I will be publishing both books. I anticipate a release date for Falling no later than September. I will probably have it available for pre-sale on Amazon and perhaps IngramSparks hopefully no later than May. It will be available in printed and digital form. My mother’s book will be released later this spring. I’m proofing it for sale. We will probably do a book launch in September with Katrina Sparkman.”
