Author Mary Cronk Farrell

My newest book launched yesterday, giving me a little flutter of excitement as I scrambled my egg for breakfast, pretended to work, but mainly checked twitter and Facebook. Even at the grocery, I levitated a bit pushing my cart through the produce section.

But at the end of the day, the thrill of pub date always falls short of the high I get when I discover a great story, dig for the details and choose the right structure and words to tell it. That's what I love. 

Of course, I'm incredibly grateful and proud of the book on the shelf. And it's outright awesome to hear from readers. But a book launch doesn't happen every day. Me, sitting here writing, that's what happens everyday. And when I write a story like the following, my brain sparks, my blood rushes and I might as well be flying. It feels that thrilling.

So please, read on.

One little fact I discovered by accident started this story. I happened to read that 
the mother of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor served in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) during World War II.

Of course, that caught my interest, due to my latest book about the origins of the WAC in the 1940s.
 
My search for more information on Celina Sotomayor's military service turned up other information that completely took over my focus. For I'd found the extraordinary story of heartbreak and resilience that helped shape the first Latinx on our country's highest court.

But let's begin with Celina Baez's enlistment in the WAC.  in  fled extreme poverty in Puerto Rico to join the WAC in 1944. Like many soldiers during WWII, she lied about her age to enlist at 17.  She spoke little English and didn't know a soul in Georgia where she reported for basic training.
 
Celia brought with her a fervor for the value of education as a stepping-stone to improving one's circumstances. Possibly stemming from the way her parents protected the one pencil the family possessed, divvying its use between their five children.
 
Celina didn't let a lack of school supplies impede her academics. She studied by playing teacher to a number of trees behind her home, pointing at each with a stick and calling them by name to recite her lessons. This, in a country were the literacy rate stood at 39-percent and families earned an average of $200 per year, adjusted for inflation that's about $3590.

​But Celina didn't earn her high school diploma after her mother died and her father abandoned the family. She was raised by an older sister until joining the WAC at a time when few women of color felt welcome in the U.S. Army. There she trained to become a telephone operator.
 
When the Senate confirmed Celina's daughter as a Supreme Court Justice in 2009, it surely proved the American dream had come true for Celina.
 
But every story has its conflicts and challenges, its dark night of the soul, and so does Celina's. 

​After the war, Celina fell in love with a young Puerto Rican immigrant employed as a welder, Juan Luis Sotomayor.

Juan came from a warm extended family that gathered for feasting, dominoes, singing and dancing. He wrote poetry, cooked fabulous food and knew how to make the ordinary fun.

​After Celina and Juan married, she continued her education, earning a high school equivalency certificate. In 1954, she and Juan welcomed little Sonia and three years later a son, Juan, Jr.

In her early marriage, Celina worked at Prospect Hospital in the South Bronx as a telephone operator, then turned her studies to the medical field becoming a Licensed Practical Nurse.
 
The Sotomayor's happy life started to crumble when her husband began to drink heavily, and her young family fell victim to the disease of alcoholism. Celina and Juan started to fight, loudly and often. Tension filled their home. Work became a refuge for Celina as she signed up for night and weekend shifts at the hospital.
 
Young Sonia didn't understand how addiction was tearing apart her family, nor why her mother seemed cool and distant, while her father was fun to be around. She blamed her mother for her father's alcoholism.

When Sonia was 9 and Juan, Jr. 6, their father died of a heart attack, leaving Celina with no savings. She went to work six days a week, arriving home to make her children dinner, then retreating behind the closed doors of her bedroom to cry out her grief.
 
She mourned the death of her husband, her marriage and loss of financial stability.
And she was grief-stricken over all that she'd lost to alcoholism years before, the wonderful man she'd fallen in love with and the life they'd dreamed of together. 
 
Celina fell into depression and months passed before she gathered herself together and rose from her grief to nurture her children and supervise their education, which now seemed more important than ever.
 
She sacrificed and saved to keep her children in private school and purchased the only set of Encyclopedia Britannica in their Bronx housing project.  Her son Juan remembers studying for hours at the kitchen table. "We studied when we came home, it was natural and we enjoyed it. There was never any negative energy about it because Mom used to say, 'Just do the best you can'."

Celina went back to school herself, when Sonia was in high school. She studied with her teens at the kitchen table, pursuing a dream. At 46 she got her degree and became a registered nurse.
 
During all these years, her daughter Sonia had not come to terms with her feelings about her mother and the troubles the family went through in her early years. In the autobiography she published after joining the Supreme Court, Sonia wrote, "though my mother and I shared the same bed ... she might as well have been a log, lying there with her back to me."

"It wasn't until I began to write this book, nearly fifty years after the events of that sad year, that I came to a truer understanding of my mother's grief," she wrote.
 
"It was only when I had the strength and purpose to talk about the cold expanse between us that she confessed her emotional limitations in a way that called me to forgiveness."
 
Showing affection didn't come naturally to Celina who'd been an orphan from age 9 and lived through a contentious marriage. She told her daughter, "'How should I know these things, Sonia? Whoever showed me how to be warm when I was young?'"
 
Sonia had paid tribute to Celina the day President Barack Obama had chosen her as a nominee for the Supreme Court. “I have often said that I am all I am because of her, and I am only half the woman she is.” Sonia said before the president and a national television audience. “I thank you for all that you have given me and continue to give me.”
 
Understandably proud of both her children, Celina says she expected them to do well, "but I never envisioned them becoming what they are."
 
Her son earned his medical degree from New York University and owns a private practice specializing in allergy and asthma diagnostics.
 
Celina retired in the early 1990s, though she continued for many years using her nursing skills to aide neighbors in her apartment complex, on call for whoever was sick and rang the doorbell. One neighbor says Celina even “removed my cat’s stitches.”
 
Celina is now retired in South Florida with her second husband Omar Lopez. 

I hope you enjoyed this story as much as I did.  Let me know what you think in the comment section below. I've checked out the audio version of "My Beloved World," and from my local library and hope I can get to it before it's due. 



​Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/us/politics/28mother.html
https://www.npr.org/2013/01/12/167042458/sotomayor-opens-up-about-childhood-marriage-in-beloved-world

Standing Up Against Hate debuts today! It's the story of how black women in the U.S. Army changed the course of WWII. It's an honor and a privilege to tell the stories of these courageous women. Here's a sample of feedback I've gotten on the book.
★Starred Review, School Library Connection:
"A nonfiction writer for youth audiences, Farrell settles in to explain with depth and precision the fight black women faced both in and out of the military as World War II surged. Focused specifically on black women in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the book profiles several key figures, including Major Charity Adams who commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

"In addition to the deft writing, images are presented every few pages that reveal a score of brave women who persevered despite suffering discrimination. The women had to proclaim their equality in the face of segregation in the mess hall and in dispatching the unit overseas.

"The text also details how some servicewomen were jailed for disobeying orders or even beaten by civilians while wearing their uniforms. Organized chronologically, the text is accessible for middle school and high school historians who are intrigued by institutional racism or women in the military for research. It profiles milestones in the 6888th’s preparation and deployment, providing a well-researched understanding of the time period for black women in the military.

"The book is a gem that profiles an underrepresented narrative in American history."
​
Available at the links below or your favorite bookstore.

If only we could bottle it.

She grew up working in the tobacco fields of Wake County, North Carolina. Her parents had a large family, ten children, because sharecropping required many hands and all-consuming labor.

How did Clara Leach make the leap from the Jim Crow south to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army?
 
She wrote the story of her life after retirement to set the record straight. "I was increasingly encountering people who assumed that I was successful because I was born with a “silver spoon” in my mouth or I just “got lucky.”

At age five Clara cooked and tended younger siblings in a house with no electricity or running water, while her parents and older siblings grew and harvested tobacco for a white landowner.

Soon Clara graduated to field work. That included planting, hoeing, pulling weeds, walking the rows "topping" off the buds to stimulate growth, and picking worms off the leaves and squishing them.

​"Growing tobacco...is a very difficult crop...labor intensive," Clara says. "So my father and mother had ten children, and we were all employed full time on that farm in tobacco." 

Photo: The daughter of an African American sharecropper at work in a tobacco field in Wake County, North Carolina. Credit: Dorothea Lange, July 1939.

Clara's parents believed in education as well as hard work. And though she missed a lot of school due to farm work, Clara skipped two grades and graduated at sixteen, salutatorian of her class. 

The painful experience of prejudice at her segregated school in Wake County launched the attitude that would carry Clara from the soil of North Carolina to the halls of the Pentagon.

"Many members of the African-American community considered dark skin ugly. Unattractive. Undesirable. That message came across loud and clear in terms of which students were favored by teachers, and by other students," Clara says. "When I raised my hand, the teacher would never call on me."

"Instead, a kid with straight hair and fair skin always got picked. Some of them were really smart, but so was I. It was all part of a warped value system that some black people still embrace today-the closer you are to being white, the better off and more beautiful you are."

Clara's mother told her beauty was skin deep and that what others thought of her didn't matter. "It's what you think of yourself that matters," she said. It was a good lesson but it didn't take away the sting of being passed over.

Clara made a decision. ​

"I spent a lot of time getting even smarter, because I knew knowledge could never be snatched from me, regardless of whether I was high yellow or black as midnight," says Clara. Those early snubs and slights I experienced due to skin color further motivated me to excel. They lit a fire under me that drove me to succeed not just at academics, but at whatever endeavor I tackled."
 
She went college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study nursing. There Clara took part in the the famous Greensboro sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter. 
 
She told an interviewer for the Women Veterans Historical Project about her experience with non-violent protest. "When people push you, spit on you, curse you and do those kinds of things, it’s very difficult not to raise your hand. But in reality, when you think about it, it’s quite a powerful thing to be able to sit and do nothing while people do that." 

To fund her last two years of college, Clara signed up for the Army Student Nurse Program scholarship. After graduation in 1961. she entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a 2nd Lieutenant.

​Her values of hard work and a positive attitude continued to serve her well as she met obstacles as a woman and a black in the army.

"Obstacles are not really there to stop one’s progress. They are really opportunities for us to decide how we will overcome them to reach our goals. If we keep the goal in mind, then we can decide if we will go over, under, around or through the obstacle to accomplish it."

​In 1965, Clara became a  medical-surgical nursing instructor at Fort Sam Houston where she became the first woman in the army to earn the Expert Field Medical Badge.  She continued to rise in the ranks and continue her education, the first nurse corps officer to graduate from the Army War College and the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in military arts and sciences from the Army’s Command and General Staff College.
 
Assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Clara trained a generation of nurses and then became the first African American to serve as vice president and chief of the department of nursing at the hospital. In 1987 she was promoted to Brigadier General and named Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and Chief of Army medical personnel.

The list of Clara Leach Adams-Enders' accomplishments in the army is long and impressive, including formal distinctions like the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster and informal such as recruiting minority student nurses at Walter Reed. 
 
She led the Army Nurse Corps through two major combat operations, Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm. Clara is also known for her remarkable warmth and humility.
 
Retiring after a 34-year career in the army, she wrote a book about her life to inspire others, My Rise to the Stars: How a Sharecropper's Daughter Became an Army General.  She also runs a management consulting firm Cape Incorporated  with the mission of helping organizations manage their people with care and enthusiasm. 

With hard work, education and the right attitude, Clara Leach Adams-Ender made the journey from sharecropper's daughter to the highest ranks of the U.S. Army.  Her success also stands on the shoulders of those who trod this path before her.  Thousands of African American women overcame obstacles to serve with distinction in the U.S. Army during WWII. Read their story in Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII.

Here's a warm-up to get you excited for my new book. Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Help Change the Course of WWII tells the story of the first African American women to join in the U.S. army.
 
At least I thought it did. Turns out a black woman soldier in the 1860s beat them to it.

Cathey Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted in Company A of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment in St. Louis, November 1866.
 
She switched her name to William Cathey, and after what must have been a cursory exam, the army surgeon declared her fit for duty.
 
Private Cathay was 22-years-old and had actually been serving as an cook for the army throughout most of the civil war. Cathey told her story to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1875.
 
"My Father a was a freeman, but my mother a slave....While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City, [Missouri]....When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook."  

She had little choice. She learned to cook. At sixteen, swallowed by the union army, Cathey saw the Battle of Pea Ridge, a major battle of the Civil War fought near Leetown, northeast of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after which her unit traveled to Louisiana. "I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River." As a servant under General Phillip Sheridan, Cathey saw  the soldiers' life on the front lines as his army marched on the Shenandoah Valley. 
​ 
After the war,  African American soldiers were posted to the Western frontier, where they battled Native Americans to protect settlers, stagecoaches, wagon trains and railroad crews. They became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” apparently so-named by Native Americans, though history's a little thin on when and why.

​After working for the army throughout the war, it's little wonder Cathey came up with the scheme to enlist as the fighting came to a close. With cunning and courage she found a way to survive when opportunities for black women were few to none.
​
As a Buffalo Soldier, Cathey learned to use a musket, stood guard duty and went on scouting missions. After serving at Fort Riley, Kansas for some months, her company marched 563 miles to Fort Union, New Mexico.
 
Official reports show Buffalo Soldiers were often sent to the most bitter posts and suffered racist officers, severe discipline and crummy gear, food and shelter. In two years of service, mostly in New Mexico, Cathey needed hospital care four different times for illnesses ranging from "the itch" to rheumatism, yet maintained her secret.

Cathey enlisted for three years, but after two, she was tired of army life and wanted out.  She told the St. Louis reporter, “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post surgeon found out I was a woman and I got my discharge." 

All indications are that she was a good soldier. 

​After her honorable discharge, Cathey worked as a civilian cook and washer woman.  Until she could not longer work due to diabetes and nerve pain which required the amputation of her toes. She was unable to walk without a crutch. 
 
In 1891, Cathey petitioned for a veterans pension and benefits. The government rejected her claim, not because she was a woman, that was never argued. The army doctor who examined her found her to be fit, not disabled enough for benefits. There's no record of the life or death of Cathey Williams following that denial of benefits.
 
Sources:
 http://blackhistorynow.com/cathay-williams/
 http://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm

​Despite the risk of discovery and probable execution they found the strength to continue the grueling work for months. Starving and emaciated, disease-ridden and sleep-deprived, inch by inch they carved the tunnel in oxygen-starved darkness, directly under the feet of one hundred armed guards.​​​​​​​

In The Escape Artists, Bascom focuses on Davy Gray, the leader of the digging operation. Gray tried and failed to escape from five different camps in one year before Holzmiden.

Bascom was struck my the young pilot's determination and motivation for continually trying to escape. "He was driven by wanting to get back to his squadron and back into the fight. Less about being free, less about his own individual drive, but to get back into the fight knowing that he could be shot down again and killed."

The original conspirators had hoped to keep knowledge of the escape plan to a small group, but July 23-24, 1918, twenty-nine officers belly-crawled through the 16-inch high tunnel to freedom.  Unfortunately some were recaptured, and just ten made their way to Holland and eventually Britain, including Gray, Kennard and Blain.

​​​​​​​Bascom told me there are similar over-arching themes in every book he writes that stem from his teenage years. "I remember to this day sitting in classroom in 8th grade, the teacher wasn’t even talking about history, but she said. 'Never make a decision out of a fear of failure.' Defy the odds and keep going despite the fear of failure."

You can find out about all Neal's thrilling books here: www.nealbascomb.com 

Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly.​

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.
​
​Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.

​Today's featured story is about an African American woman who served in the Army Nurse Corps. She had the extraordinary courage to stand against hate in the most personal way, all day every day. 

Elinor Powell fell in love with a German POW and chose him, for better or worse, knowing their interracial marriage was against the law in 29 states. 

Elinor grew up near Boston, in a small town that was integrated. She played with white children, went to school with them and never saw a drinking fountain labeled “White’s Only”.  (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Magazine and Chris Albert)

When America called for nurses during WWII, Elinor wanted to serve her country.
But the segregated Army Nurse Corps came as quite a shock. Elinor deployed to Camp Florence, near Phoenix, Arizona, where her army uniform did not exempt her from Jim Crow laws. 

Off base, Elinor was refused service at a Woolworth's lunch counter. On base, she suffered further indignity, forced to tend German POWs, soldiers from the army gobbling up territory to expand Hitler’s white supremacist regime. 

Some POWs called the black nurses derogatory names, and the U.S. Army wasn't a whole lot better. There was a shortage of nurses to treat American wounded, but hundreds of black nurses were turned away. Elinor wanted to use her skills to aid men who'd been wounded fighting the Nazis. The Army posted her to the Arizona desert at a hospital for German POWs that rarely needed medical care. 

This was a case of labeling, the type still prevalent in America that allows us to immediately discount a group of people and their concerns. As you know, the words we choose to describe what we see are not idle, they determine what we see.
​
One award-winning curriculum developer offers teachers a lesson plan on the Haymarket that asks students to "read like a detective" to gain a clear understanding of a newspaper article published the following day by the Chicago Hearld.  
​
Only this one source is offered on the subject and the event is called a riot by teachers following this guide.  At the time, there were numerous English newspapers in Chicago, as well as German and Irish newspapers that would have reported on this event, many of the striking workers were German and Irish immigrants.

 
​The Post is getting great reviews, and I recommend it as good entertainment that raises issues very relevant today. Of course, we can't depend on Hollywood movies to teach history, but I am now inspired to watch the documentary film about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, for a more complete understanding. Click below to watch the trailer.

The earlier March 31 date of Anne’s death was set by Dutch authorities after the war when they did not have the resources to establish an exact date. The new evidence includes statements from a friend who saw Anne in Bergen-Belsen and remembered the Frank sisters showing signs of typhus in early February. Dutch health authorities say typhus deaths happen around 12 days after the first symptoms.
 
“In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to be sometime in February. The exact date is unknown,” the researchers said.
 
In the words of Bergen-Belsen survivor Rachel van Amerongen, "One day they simply weren’t there any more."
 
Seven decades after her death, Anne Frank stands as an example of resistance and courage in the face of inhuman cruelty and persecution.
 
To view a short video showing friends talking about seeing Anne in Bergen-Belsen, click here...