He uses the preacher’s death to take advantage of the situation and Cussy agrees to the testing the doctor wants to perform if he’ll keep Frazier’s death a secret. When the preacher turns up dead on Carter land, the doctor knows a second dead Frazier man involved with the Carters will look suspicious. She’s only too happy to return to her home but before long her dead husband’s kin, the local preacher, begins following Cussy on her work route, accusing her of being evil because she’s different.

Fabric, and just that.” *Ĭussy’s married off to a cruel local man but karma swiftly knocks him down …dead. But in the end we’s all fabric, cut from His cloth. There’s the colorful and dull, ugly and pretty, old, new ‘uns. Some of us is more spiffed up than others, some stiffer, and still, some softer. Still, Cussy is careful never to offend or touch her patrons, many who remain fearful of her blue skin. Readers follow Cussy on her route and get to know her patrons who begin to welcome visits from “Book Woman”. Unfortunately for her, Cussy’s father made a promise to her mama that he’d make sure Cussy married and had a stable life. She loves reading and it brings her joy to travel the hills and bring books to folks so isolated they’d never have an opportunity to look at a book otherwise. Cussy is perfectly content to live at home with her father and bring in extra money as a pack horse librarian, thanks to Roosevelt’s WPA program. Folks are afraid of them, religious people seem to think they’re an abomination. Their blue skin leaves them outcast in Troublesome Creek. The local doc has been hounding Cussy and her daddy for ages to let him run some blood work and figure out their condition. No one understands why, but her folks and her all have an unknown condition thats been passed down through kin that leaves their skin tinged blue. She’s isolated deep in a Kentucky holler, her mama’s dead and her father is dying thanks to the conditions in the coal mines. “It sure makes a man yearn for it and want to flee it altogether.” *Ĭussy Mary Carter hasn’t had an easy life.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

The book troublesome creek