An Unforeseen Life

"If it's a boy," Bill Strong announced to a crowded courtroom in Louisville, Mississippi, "I'll send up black smoke; if it's a girl, I'll send up white."A few hours later, white smoke was billowing from the Strong family chimney. This smoke - determined by gender - would come to define Mary Ann Strong Connell's life in ways she never could have expected. When Connell was eight, fire took the life of her younger brother. Connell blamed herself for the accident, and guilt became a motivator for the remainder of her remarkable life. Readers of An Unforeseen Life will relive Connell's extraordinary life as one of the first women practicing law in Oxford, Mississippi. In 1982, Connell convinced the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan to move their march off the Ole Miss campus. In 1999, she was called as an adverse witness in the wrongful termination trial of football coach Billy Brewer, who had once been her classmate. As a professor, Connell chastised a first-year law student named John Grisham, "if you don't get serious, you'll never succeed at the practice of law." Connell's drive to defend those least able to stand up to the powerful led to a battle with Oxford's colorful mayor John Leslie (who took to calling her "The Sewer Queen") and to embracing clients who paid her with a sack of coons. Readers will applaud as Connell clandestinely enrolled in the Ole Miss law school while raising four young children and when she attended Harvard Law School for an advanced degree. An Unforeseen Life is a powerful memoir about a woman who embraced opportunity in spite of the facts - a funny, touching account of a life "most richly blessed," if sometimes in unexpected ways.