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Overview
“This is the story of a girl who grew up in a gentle town in the Deep South, cradled by family and friends, worshiping Bear Bryant on Saturday night and Jesus Christ on Sunday morning . . .”
At a time when much of America is yearning to recapture the spirit and feelings of a more innocent era, comes this extraordinary memoir from one of our most beloved actresses: a story of reconnecting with the most important things in life.
Millions of TV and film viewers know Sela Ward as the Emmy-winning star of the series Sisters and Once and Again. But before she became a successful actress, Sela was first and foremost a small-town girl, the daughter of a family that lived for generations in a Mississippi homestead they called “Homeward.” It was there, within a tightly knit community of neighbors and kin, that Sela learned ways that would remain with her through life-humble virtues, like generosity, selflessness, and respect, that are “forged in the hearth of a loving home.” Now she has woven together nostalgic reminiscences, stories from throughout her life and career, and lessons on drawing strength and wisdom from a simpler place and time, to give us Homesick: a very special book on the challenge of raising a family, maintaining perspective, and carving away time for happiness amid the challenges of modern life.
“An ode to simpler, safer times that is likely to strike a chord among Americans in these unsettling days.” —The Baltimore Sun
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780061746932 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 608,179 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Sela Ward is the recipient of two Emmy awards for her work on Once & Again and Sisters, and a Cable Ace Award for her role as Jessica Savitch in Almost Golden. She recently founded Hope Village for Children, a permanent home for abused and neglected children, in Meridian, Mississippi. Sela lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their two children, and returns frequently with her family to her Mississippi hometown.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Ask any Southern woman to tell you about herself, and she'll start by telling you about her people. The roots of my family tree run deep into the red dirt of Mississippi, and from the time I was born to the moment I left home for college, I was surrounded and sheltered by its branches: parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, Boswells and Wards. As a child I listened keenly to their stories, though I was shy and quiet and asked questions only rarely. Now, with so few of them left, I spend as much time in their company as I can, and I ask everything I can think of. There have been Wards living in and around Meridian for six generations -- since the 1840s, as best as my daddy can figure. His great-grandfather was the first Ward to live in this part of Mississippi; the wooden homestead he built still stands on its cypress-log pillars in the tiny community called Enterprise, eighteen miles south of Meridian on Ward Road. My daddy's generation calls it Homeward.
The house is small by today's standards, but once it was part of a six-hundred-acre plantation that extended to the banks of the Chunky River. Today the family holdings are a fragment of what they were, but Homeward is still there, home to Daddy's sister Celeste and her husband, Fred. In the yard there are fig trees and magnolias, and lilies that Aunt Celeste tends like children. At the edge of the property stands a cypress barn that's been there longer than my seventy-nine-year-old father can remember. At one time the field was filled with cotton and cornstalks, but it's been many years since this was a working farm.
Though he lived in Meridian as a boy, my daddy, Granberry Holland Ward Jr., loves this land as if it had always been his. In a sense, it has. All his relatives lived in Enterprise. "I would go out to Grandpa's house every time I'd go down there," he remembers. "He was a justice of the peace for fifty years. They called him Judge Ward. He married just about all the couples in Clark County. They would come out to his house to get married. He had a wagon that was pulled by mules. He lived about three miles out of town, and when he needed to go into town he would let me drive, holding the reins all the way."
When he was a teenager Daddy would ride his bicycle to Enterprise, up and down fifteen miles of hills, to see his cousin James; the two of them were best friends. "We'd go skinny-dipping in a little creek that goes through the town there. It had a kind of deep part in it, and we would dive off in the water, swim there."
James was a popular boy in Enterprise. "He dated every little girl there, before he went in the service." But he got into a little mischief now and then. "He told me the girls would sit at a certain spot at the school, and when they'd have a short dress on, you could see up their leg, you know?" Did Daddy succumb to the same temptation? "I didn't ever know where that spot was," he laughs. "I never did sit there. I was a good boy."
Then, when Daddy was seven years old, came a day whose every detail he still remembers. He and his sister were outside at half-past four in the afternoon, laughing and dousing each other with a garden hose, when their mother came out to tell them their father had just died. It wasn't a sudden death; he had suffered from encephalitis for months. But the news transformed Daddy's life. For years thereafter, he recalls, "Wherever I was out playing, at 4:30 in the afternoon I'd run home and see if Mama was still living."
The concept of orphanhood was familiar to Daddy's family: his own first name, Granberry, came from the man who ran the orphanage where his grandmother -- Judge Ward's wife -- was raised. After his own father died, Daddy says, "The lady across the street told my mother, ‘It's too bad your husband died -- I know you're going to have to put all your children in the orphans' home.' That kept her all upset all the time." That never happened, but their father's death changed the family all the same: Daddy's seventeen-year-old brother, Thomas, had to go out and find work to support them all, taking a job at a lumber mill during the day and at a drugstore until ten o'clock at night. It was Daddy's job to bring his older brother his lunch every day; during the summer he hopped from lawn to lawn to save his bare feet from the sun-cooked sidewalks.
I remember, throughout my own childhood, listening quietly as Daddy and his kin told and retold stories about those times. It was the Depression, but "we didn't know we were poor," Daddy says. "We didn't know we didn't have anything, and for some reason it didn't matter. People were closer because we were all suffering in the same boat. I don't remember anybody feeling like they were better than the family next door. We had a big two-story house, and plenty of room to take others in. We took several children and their mother into our home when I was young, because of adverse conditions. It was no big thing."
Daddy's Aunt Margaret, his cousin James's mother, was like a second mother to him. When I was a child Daddy and Mama would take us down to Enterprise visiting Homeward on Sunday afternoons, and at least once a month we'd stop by Aunt Margaret's on the way back. I was so fascinated with her rambling yellow Victorian clapboard house. It always seemed dark to me; she never really had the lights on, and being there was like stepping back in time. The rooms were full of dark old furniture, embroidered settees, and stacks of handmade quilts everywhere; whenever I visited I'd find an excuse to go into the bathroom, just to stare at the porcelain pitchers and old-fashioned washbasins from the days before houses had running water.
What everybody remembers about Aunt Margaret, though, was her passion for
canning. Her kitchen shelves were lined with all types of fruits and vegetables
-- relishes and jams, tomatoes and figs and sweet pear relish. "If you ever went
to her house," Daddy remembers, "you would always leave with something in your
hand. She would give you some gift of food. She just loved people." The same was
true in my childhood, thirty years later. The figs and relishes I accepted
politely, but I couldn't wait to get hold of her blackberry
jam.