THE AUTHOR    Angie Williams 
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Angela Williams’ roots have remained deep in the Lowcountry of South Carolina—where the strength and values of Eva Aiken permeated her life. The middle of three children of Clara Lee and Russell Williams, early on Angie loved words and reading. At Queens College she began writing about Eva, who named her “Baby.”  After graduate school at Duke, she taught English from the California coast to the Maryland shore, writing snippets of Eva along the way.  She landed at The Citadel in Charleston for 20 years, calling on Eva’s wisdom time and again. 
Thanks to Texas Review Press, the Eva story found a home. Now a personal/professional coach, Angela enjoys her son Erick and daughter LaClaire’s family.  You’ll find her playing tennis, reading to her grandsons, or sipping tea on her porch overlooking the water that brought so many African Americans to its shore. . .and thinking of Eva.
THE INSPIRATION        Eva Aiken 
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Eva Edwards Motte Aiken grew up in Lowcountry South Carolina, one of six children of Bill and Hattie Edwards. Young Eva worked on the family’s cotton farm until she became a nurse’s aide and midwife at Berkeley County Hospital. Childless and having lost two husbands, at forty-two, she left the hospital and became a part of the Williamses’ household for twenty-five years.  
She moved to New Jersey in 1965 to live with her family, Miriam and Sam Taylor and their three children, until they all moved back south again.  Through the years, Eva was an active member of each church she belonged to and became a member of the NAACP. Eva was buried in Moncks Corner, SC, at the age of eighty-six. She still lives, however, in the heart of a child she reared from birth to marriage.  

the story

Hush Now, Baby emanates from personal reflections of Eva’s influence on my life, of civil rights issues, and the subsequent embarrassment that I knew so little, did so little. The urge to do something, if nothing more than reach back to touch the Eva wisdom, plagued me for years.

Turns out, this coming-of-age story grew larger than Eva and me or my family. It brought to the fore issues long hushed in our society, Southern culture particularly—alcoholism, abuse, philandering…and segregation issues.  
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