Every Daughter's Fear by Joanna Warrington

Author:Joanna Warrington [Warrington, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17: JASPER

After interviewing Dr Kelsey in New York, Jasper took a domestic flight down to Georgia, where he hired a car to embark on a journey to Plains, a quaint rural town and birthplace of Jimmy Carter.

When he’d arrived in the States, he hadn’t known what his specific area of focus should be with regards to the election. He’d been instructed to explore Carter’s background, find any dirt on the guy or interesting stories about his childhood. But Jasper wanted to focus more on the issues that drove the election, and in particular social issues, because that was where his interest lay.

As he drove through small rural towns, he thought about how remote and cut off it was from Washington. Anyone growing up in these parts had to be a real visionary, dream big, think big, for it took a particular mind to set the bar so high, to break free from the shackles of the family business, the family gene pool. But coming from these parts and diving in to rescue the family’s peanut farm, Carter had shown to America he could roll his sleeves up and get stuck in. And after all, the next president had to come from somewhere and that could be a Texan cattle ranch, the Blue Mountains of Virginia, or the vineyards of California.

The sky was ironed into a denim blue, leaving a faultless fabric above his open top car, and the air was pleasantly warm. But despite this, there was something chilling about driving through the Deep South. The sudden realisation this was a state that used to lynch people. Despite the civil rights movement and legislation, had that reign of terror really stopped or did the evil people just cover their tracks better? What did Carter think about the racial issues facing his country, or any other social issue come to that?

With these thoughts running through his mind, he pulled over when he saw a welcoming roadside diner, its bright signage declaring it made the best peach pie in the whole county. His stomach growled. It had been a long time since he’d eaten. Cutting the engine, he stepped out onto rusty red soil. Powdery and dry, it was whipped by the slight breeze into a cloud of fine grain. It occurred to him then as he made his way over the dusty carpark to the entrance, that the racial questions facing America, as well as the legacy of Vietnam, the shadows of Kennedy and the cloud of Watergate that continued to hang over the political establishment were well-worn subjects to write about. He needed something fresh to explore––a scandal the press either chose to ignore, or not pursue.

The thalidomide scandal.

The subject closest to my heart.

The official line was that the country had escaped the devastation of the drug. The scandal had briefly flared, and the crisis had led to modern drug safety laws, but what about all the forgotten victims? Interviewing Kelsey, he learned that nobody knew how many victims there were.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.