A Soul So Rebellious

Proud, intelligent, stubborn, rebellious Mary Frances Sturlaugson was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the fifteenth child in a black family of twenty-four children. Mary's father scraped and clawed through life, carving out a meager subsistence for his wife and children. The family was a close one, though, and Mary's mother bound them all together with a faith and trust in God that her family often didn't appreciate. In A Soul So Rebellious Mary portrays vividly and forthrightly her struggle to survive in a hostile environment. Surrounded by intolerance and injustice, Mary learns to lie and to hate - a hate that sustains her when there is no food to eat. Mary shares, from the depths of her soul, her conversion from her own carefully nursed prejudices to the gospel of love and her total acceptance of the Church.