Author Rita Williams

A sobering survival story of the heart, mind and soul!

In this book, Rita Williams' accounts of her childhood and coming-of-age provide a keenly focused view into the lessons and hardships of poverty and racial discrimination, not to mention puberty itself. Making these lessons much more compelling than most, the turbulence in Rita's young life plays out against a backdrop of the stunning beauty and cruel harshness of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, all of which is described with magical clarity by Ms. Williams.

Orphaned at a young age, Rita takes the reader along with her as she is flung by wicked fate into an unforgiving life under the stern guardianship of her "Real McCoy" Aunt Daisy, a hunting guide and trapper in the mountains of the Colorado wilderness. Tough as any mountain man, Aunt Daisy is not ready for, nor able to coddle, a small child. Little Rita must toughen up to the mountaineer's lifestyle, or else! Funny, heart wrenching, and often just plain shocking, Rita Williams' book exudes a fearlessness that few writers ever muster. Powerful, courageous books such as this one often change minds and opinion. "If The Creek Don't Rise" shines bright light into dark corners of human relationships and emotions - corners that many writers are fearful to even obliquely illuminate, especially when the subject at hand is purely personal.

In the end, this book leaves the reader with a tremendous appreciation for not only the hardships of others, but also with an increased self-awareness. Ms. Williams' efforts are unique in that her book is not a "mountain wilderness survival story" about a plane crash or stranded, lost campers running out of food or freezing to death. Rather, it is a mountain wilderness survival story that is just as perilous nonetheless. It is the mind and soul, however, at risk of a "starvation and freezing death" in the high mountains.

An amazing tale of tremendous courage and a survival story like no other, this book is a must-read!

'If the Creek Don't Rise: My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War'

Product Description

When Rita Williams was four, her mother died in a Denver boarding house. This death delivered Rita into the care of her aunt Daisy, the last surviving African American widow of a Union soldier and a maverick who had spirited her sharecropping family out of the lynching South and reinvented them as ranch hands and hunting guides out West. But one by one they slipped away, to death or to an easier existence elsewhere, leaving Rita as Daisy's last hope to right the racial wrongs of the past and to make good on a lifetime of thwarted ambition. If the Creek Don't Rise tells how Rita found her way out from under this crippling legacy and, instead of becoming "a perfect credit to her race," discovered how to become herself. Set amid the harsh splendor of the Colorado Rockies, this is a gorgeous, ruthless, and unique account of the lies families live-and the moments of truth and beauty that save us.