as the sycamore grows: A Hidden Cabin, the Bible, and a .38 by Jennie Helderman

as the sycamore grows: A Hidden Cabin, the Bible, and a .38 by Jennie Helderman

A cabin behind a padlocked gate. No power. No phone. Only Revelation and a .38. A true story of abuse, loss, redemption, and hope that winds from south Texas to a sycamore tree in Tennessee.

Mike escaped his father’s fists, but years later glimpsed himself in his father’s casket. Ginger named the sycamore tree for her son, Trent. It grew slowly like independence. This is Ginger’s story and Mike’s, yet it didn’t begin with them. Journalist Jennie Miller Helderman’s harrowing narrative takes the listener inside Ginger and Mike’s world. She interviewed both the abuse survivor, her abuser, family members, friends, and others who knew the couple. In this special, updated edition, Helderman revisits what has happened to Ginger in the interim and offers resources for those with violent partners. During Covid-19, cases escalated dramatically, because isolation from friends and family is one of the main tools in an abuser’s arsenal of weapons.

Jennie Miller Helderman was born into a story-telling family in North Alabama too long ago.

“In my family you had to do one of two things,” Jennie says, “either thread a red worm onto a bream hook or tell stories. I did both.”

Today she tells her stories, like when her cousin died and his wife had the burial policy but the one-legged woman had the body. Or about driving her mother and a coconut cake to the family reunion in a cow pasture in South Alabama.

And stories of other people in four nonfiction books, numerous magazine profiles and features, and a 600-word short story that earned her a Pushcart Prize nomination for Fiction.

In 2012, Sandy Hook teacher Kaitlin Roig saved her first-graders by hiding them in the bathroom. Jennie’s exclusive story, “The Face of Courage,” appeared in The Key, the 150,000 circulation magazine of Kappa Kappa Gamma Fraternity, and took top honors among stories in all alumnae magazines in 2012.

As the Sycamore Grows tells a true story about a seventeen-year abusive marriage; a Sleeping with the Enemy in the Tennessee backwoods, as told by Ginger, who escaped, and Mike, who abused and held no remorse. The nonfiction narrative walked away with six literary awards and a book club “Book of the Year” prize between 2010 and 2011.