For the young Volina, there are worlds she reads about in the magazines her mother brings home — beyond her own world filled with domestic violence, frightening racism, and poverty. Volina will escape from Mississippi. But will she escape from her past, from who she really is? “Getting Honest” is the compelling, poignant memoir of Volina Cross, a woman who began life as one of sixteen children born to parents in the destitution of rural Mississippi. Some fifty years after leaving Mississippi, for what she assumed would be for good, Volina, an ordained Presbyterian minister, returns. It is only then that she realizes that in all those years, she has been on a spiritual journey leading her inevitably back to from where she came. She has come full circle and it is, she knows, no accident. Something has been moving her through her entire life, guiding her all along. The destination creates in her a profound need to reexamine her life, to consider her journey, and to discover what is required of her: a brutal kind of honesty. Like many of us, Volina has to come to terms with her past, she has to come to terms with herself.
