My Journey
Jacqueline Freeman Wheelock
Born approximately twenty miles inland from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I have been taken with the idea of knowledge between book covers ever since a library rolled into the “colored” section of my rural community when I was no more than six. Bearing huge books with glossy rainbow colors, the bookmobile captured my fancy effortlessly. Little did I know that the wide-eyed fascination of a small girl would blossom into a fierce determination to write, and one of the unexpected joys of my life has been the love from kind readers.
My passion has been to reimagine the mind of fictional antebellum slaves by moving them from the limitation of exceptional strength in body only to the full humanness of mind and soul—to treat them as the thinking, spiritual beings they were born to be by exploring, along with other human issues, how and why so many of them became Christians.
My journey as a writer includes “Christmas Lights” in Christmas Stories From Mississippi; two novels: A Most Precious Gift, listed among Amazon’s 100 bestsellers in Black & African American Historical and Christian Fiction works for weeks, and In Search of an Emerald; and a number of devotionals in Daily Guideposts beginning in 2019 and contracted through 2023.
A member of the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW), my awards include the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award from the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Conference in 2000 and honorable mention for “Alaska, By and By” in the William Faulkner Awards for Short Fiction in New Albany, Mississippi. Among the many loves of my life are my husband Donald, my son and daughter and their spouses and daughters, the ocean, and God’s beautiful blooms—both flowers and people. Finally, my wildly-assorted interests range from mediocrity as a student of crochet to a connoisseur of seafood gumbo.
Sleek Storage for Memories and Love
The shiny piece had often inspired my chase toward the historical. So it was my joy to restore one of my deceased mother’s 1950s chifforobes. With no closet space in our house, over time, Mama managed to purchase three small inexpensive wardrobes known as chifforobes—chests with a compartment for hanging clothes on one side and a parallel stack of drawers on the other. Often embellished with a mirror atop the sleek drawers, for a budding baby boomer like me, who could ask for anything more?