Connie May Fowler

Domestic abuse runs in families, children often learning and later imitating the violent behavior of their parents when they have families of their own. How can this cycle be broken? Connie May Fowler explores this question in her striking 1996 novel “Before Women Had Wings.”

Set in Florida in the 1960s, during the Johnson administration, the story is told by Bird, a little girl whose actual name is Avocet. Her mother wanted to name her daughters after birds, and her older sister got show more Phoebe. Avocet, being so unusual, was soon replaced with the nickname Bird. And bird imagery flies in and out of the novel, including its title.

In Bird's family, her father often beats her mother after both have spent a night drinking, and then her mother beats her two daughters. These beatings are often brutal and graphic, such as a coffee mug struck hard into Phoebe's face and Bird being whipped with a belt, the buckle end striking her bare back repeatedly. Their mother confesses that her father beat her as a child.

Following Bird's father's death — was it suicide or murder? — their mother takes the girls to Tampa and moves into an old motel. She works in the office to pay for their cramped quarters, while buying food and alcohol with government checks. Every night Bird's mother resumes her drinking, while her two daughters walk on eggshells.

Miss Zora, an old and mysterious black woman, also lives on the property. Bird's mother dislikes her and tries to get the motel owner to evict her, but Bird forms a deep relationship with this woman who, despite her apparent wisdom, has lost contact with her own daughter. White authors often have difficulty creating authentic black characters, choosing to bestow on them moral perfection and often mystical powers. They can have similar difficulties with Indian characters in western novels. Fowler comes close to this, but in the end she makes Miss Zora a realistic, imperfect and vulnerable human being.

Bird and Phoebe dream of flying away from their abusive home, yet they love their mother deeply, just as their mother loves them when her anger is under control. Fowler finds a way to make love provide the answer to this terrible situation. show less

Contains spoilers.

First, I must mention this book’s subject is harsh. Even those experienced with books that has violence towards children including “The Kite Runner”, the violence is graphically brutal and too probable. Be warned.

The story is in two segments. Set in the South in 1967, Billy Jackson (father) and Glory Marie (mother) along with their daughters, Phoebe and Bird (real name Avocet) are barely scrapping by running a small rented store, living with furniture that they show more don’t own. Billy is a drunk with lost hopes of becoming a country music singer. The household reeks of expectations unmet, alcoholism, anger, and the worst – violence towards Glory Marie, Phoebe and Bird, excess to the nth degree. The first half ends when Billy kills himself over his failures in life. In the second half, Glory Marie and the girls re-settle in Tampa, living in a trailer. The mom kicks up her alcoholism, tormenting the girls verbally, emotionally, and physically. The persons who make life bearable are the owner and family of the cottage/trailer motel, a semi-permanent cottage guest named Miss Zora, and the girl’s half-brother Hank.

I had extreme feelings throughout the majority of the book. I wanted to punch the father for his cruelty, alcoholism, whoring, cowardice, and violence towards all his family members. I wanted to slap the mom awake and have her recognize her own values; she was the one running the store while the father drank and whored. She has not needed him for years. Instead, she became him, drinking more and escalating the beatings even worse and was simply evil in one scene. I pitied Phoebe the most, who took more beatings from both parents than Bird. When she was old enough, she stayed away as often as she can, self-preservation as a survival tool. The narrative, Bird’s, alluded to Phoebe being weak in doing so; that’s bull. Bird is 9 years old; her immaturity and brattiness is clear, a source of Phoebe’s beatings. Even so, she too suffered and found her saviors in Miss Zora and a chance meeting with a biker who shared a violent past in the hands of his parents. Her strength was perseverance.

The book employed several symbolisms to depict the plight of the mom and children. In one scene, vultures swooped down taking away (and presumably eating) a momma cat and her babies. A life sucks moment if you will. Another is tied to the book title. Both daughters are named after birds, Phoebe and Avocet. Miss Zora taught Bird the dangers of pesticides on creatures including birds, weakening the egg shell making them vulnerable to be eaten. Bird thought of themselves – “like those baby birds born in a web of DDT: doomed from the start, some other creature’s lunch before we even had our wings.”

My favorite character is the biker, Big Al, who taught Bird the damage of verbal abuse, making the child think he/she deserves the beatings. No one does. It was a powerful and necessary turning point for Bird. Interestingly, Big Al also taught Bird beauty via Walt Whitman, “Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

The subject is rough; the book has some good moments, difficult to ‘process or absorb’, and even harder to “like”.

One quote:
On the downtrodden:
“…Dumb-assed crackers who drink till dawn in a sorry attempt to forget about all the things they will never have, never become. But there’s no forgetting when you’re white trash - smirks, stares, stolen glances remind you at every turn that you’re not worth squat. So the men, raging drunk, bullshit each other into believing that bruised fist and broken noses will act as charms, paving their way to heaven. And we females – girls and women alike – can’t find enough strength in our battered souls to escape, so we birth our boys into legendary scoundrels, characters made better in the crosshairs of half-truths. Yes, smiles break out all around as we cast daddies, brothers, husbands into near-respectable village idiots in the stories we spin over bowls of homegrown, freshly snapped peas, clotheslines draped with bleach-scented, bloodstained damp sheets, sinks filled with suds and supper-crusted dishes. And after all that, we still aren’t decent. We’re still trapped.” show less

This book left me feeling so empowered. I felt like I was Clarissa Burden at points. I didn't have the same pressures she had growing up, and as far as I know my boyfriend hasn't started photographing models in the nude in our backyard (although he has grown awfully fond of our new Mustang...LOL) but I have the same self-doubt about myself.

I love how everything in this book has a perspective on what is going on. From the fly in the beginning to the armadillo and rats in the end their show more actions are described in how it relates to what is going on in the story. I won't even begin to guess the reason for this, but to me it signified that everything has a conscience and is aware of what is going on around them. Which is something I wholly agree with.

The title is so appropriate for this book. From Clarissa's day dreams to the end of the book, everything she does leads up to her flying in so many interpretations of the word. The characters were great, even the ones that I loathed. I connected to much with Clarissa that I could feel what she was going through, physically and emotionally. Not only did I laugh a few times, but I also was near tears a few times. While the abuse Clarissa suffered from her husband wasn't physical it still was hurtful, and when Iggy talks to Clarissa I wanted her to tell him to shove it and leave him. Because if I were in her situation that is what I would want to do (but I don't think I'd word it as nicely... LOL).

There's so much I want to say about this one, but I don't want to give ANYTHING away. The story resonated so much with me that I want to tell the world about it, and at the same time I think that every one will get something different from this one so I want you to have your own opinion. To me it was about Clarissa learning to rise above what she's been told about herself her entire life, which is also what she believes about herself (at least at the most basic level of the story).

So in fear that I'm going to word something wrong and ruin the story for someone else I'll just say again that it was an empowering book and leave it at that. I highly recommend this one to everyone! show less

I stumbled across Connie May Fowler's works many years ago and have been enjoying her unusual writing ever since. With her trademarked meandering writing style, imitating and reflecting the heat shimmering over her fictional creation of Hope, Florida, Fowler has created the story of a woman beaten down by life, held hostage to her loveless marriage and her own inadequacies by self-esteem lower than a boa constrictor's belly who will finally rise up and learn to fly on her own.

Clarissa is a show more writer with two wildly successful books under her belt. She and her husband, Iggy, moved to Hope six months prior to the midsummer day (the summer solstice) during which all events of the story take place. As the day heats and grows, Clarissa watches as Iggy cavorts with his nude models (he's an artist or sorts) and is herself followed by a determined ghost who needs Clarissa to tell her terrible story and that of her husband and son as well. It is through the minor interventions of the ghost Olga and the imaginary voices in Clarissa's own head that she grows in strength as the day does, determining that her husband won't bully her anymore, that her opinion of things is valid, and that she has more worth than she's ever given herself for having.

The story seems to almost swirl through the pages, defying conventional narrative techniques. With ghosts unimagined and unacknowledged by Clarissa, a fly drunk on the appealing smell of the main character, a boy with a pet rattler, and a dwarf circus, this book is chock full of the unconventional and the unusual. And despite the craziness, Fowler manages to make this story of a woman's self-realization and strength completely normal and believable. Clarissa takes baby steps throughout her day and while her weaknesses make the reader groan, these small lapses into who she has been for all of her previous life make her newly fledged character all the more realistic. There are twists aplenty contained within and horrors too. The final culmination is a bit rushed but it nicely reinforces Clarissa as a woman with whom to be reckoned, a fighter. Once I picked this one up, I didn't put it down until I was finished, mesmerized as I was by the place, the characters, and the story itself and rooting for Clarissa to break free, to fly. show less