I
t is a broiling summer day, and 6-year-old Avocet Abigail ``Bird'' Jackson is staring at the Woolworth's picture of Jesus hanging on her bedroom wall.

`` `He was skinny, but I bet he was strong. I loved his silky, long brown hair. Wished mine looked silky instead of like a dried rat's nest. That lamb he cuddled was proof to me that He was a sweet, gentle Savior. And His eyes! They looked out upon the whole world with a loving, wise light, and I knew that they saw me in particular. . . . In my daydreams, Jesus and I would walk off into a blazing sunset, holding hands. I may have been nothing but a kid, but in that gauzy dream, I was gorgeous. There we were, Him with his Prell-perfect hair, and me sporting a good figure. In my heart of hearts, Jesus was my first boyfriend. And I was dead certain he loved me special. . . .''

The reality of Bird's life, however, screams otherwise. Before Women Had Wings, the gifted Connie May Fowler's partially autobiographical new novel, is a heart-bruising plunge into the wails and scrapes of what it sometimes must have been like to grow up poor in small-town Florida in the mid-1960s.

Readers who found themselves engaged by

Fowler's previous books, Sugar Cage and its less accomplished, less stirring companion, River of Hidden Dreams, will not need a map to find their way around this dismal territory. They are more than well acquainted with the dusty roads, tattered lives and smashed dreams of this place where love is mean, where troubles sprout up under the house like weeds, where promises are ``nothing but good intentions destined to be broken'' and where little girls are forced to grow up way too fast. Before Women Had Wings is Fowler's most honest, penetrating and therefore most disturbing look yet at this sometimes unspeakable world. It leaves us longing for a miracle -- a society freed from the frightening cycles of abuse, hopelessness and neglect that create the only rhythms for some children's lives.

A failed suicide

Bird, Fowler's narrator, is the younger daughter of Billy Jackson, a big, blue-eyed failed country-western singer, and his beautiful wife Glory Marie. Three months earlier, Billy had stormed into the family's general store on Prince of Peace Citrus Highway outside the little town of Lily and threatened to blow his brains out. Though he had been persuaded to lay down his gun that day, he soon enough will accomplish his miserable intention.

In the meantime, Bird and her sister, Phoebe, pass their days in an unrelenting cringe. Fueled by moonrise and liquor, the girls' parents punctuate their shouts and arguments -- and their theories of child rearing -- with slaps and punches. But at least it is summer now, and Bird ``wouldn't have to make up a lie to tell my teacher, not like the one I told in first grade about how a woodpecker had pecked me because I'd gotten too close to its nest, when in actuality Mama had seen fit to take a high heel to my face. . . . She explained that my smart mouth made her miserable.''

In fact, Glory Marie is the saddest and most scary female character to inhabit Fowler's fiction. Entrapped by alcoholism and a violent past, she loves her daughters with a terrible fierceness. Even after Billy kills himself, and Glory and her daughters drive to Tampa in search of a new life, ``the bad things Daddy had done tattooed themselves on her soul. The result was an endless inventory of Daddy's sins, a list she recited whenever the mood struck: `Your daddy cheated on me so many times that after a while I didn't even care'; `Your daddy stole the best years of my life'; `Your daddy hated his own mother'; `Your daddy didn't know how to truly love us.' . . . As Mama became less able to forgive my daddy, her anger grew like wildfire and began to burn us all.''

Trailer life in Tampa

In Tampa, where ``there are plenty of Cubans and you'll be exposed to different ways,'' the family settles into a trailer at The Travelers Motel, a scraggly enterprise owned by Louis Ippolito, a divorced New Yorker with three handsome sons. The youngest of these, L.J., provides welcome distractions for Phoebe, while Bird makes friends with Sam, a three-legged collie, and becomes fascinated by the gossip surrounding the mysterious Miss Zora, who lives in a cabin at the rear of the property. ``Wow -- a spooky colored woman with special powers. She sounded right up my alley! Maybe she burned black-cat bones, drank lizard blood, talked to toads. Maybe I could get her to put a spell on my teacher, or better yet, one on my mama, to make her nicer.''

Although Bird sometimes seems too articulate for her years and circumstance, there is no doubt about the depth of her perception of the subtle sway abusers can hold over their victims: When the family's welfare check is late and the electricity is shut off, Glory sinks into an alcoholic brood and pleads for Bird to ``Come here. . . . I need to hang on to you. . . . You're all I've got.''

But ``I didn't want to be all she had,'' Bird realizes. ``I didn't even want to be her daughter. My blood, poisoned with our family sins, turned hot, scorched my veins. . . . I must be the worst daughter in the world not to want to comfort my mama. Then I heard that voice inside my head. It said, `Go to her, Bird. You have to.'

``Slowly, I walked to the couch. Mama looked so weak. If I'd been of such a mind, I would have hit her.''

The details of poverty

As she skillfully demonstrated in her previous books, Fowler possesses an unwavering, gentle tolerance for the details of borderline Southern poverty: a tiny plastic woman waterskiing in a cigarette lighter; a supper of boil-in-the-bag creamed chipped beef; car rides that end in root beer floats and pork barbecue; a trailer's seedy, roach-infested interior and the Sunday morning secrets of Pentecostal shack churches.

We were charmed by Miss Zora and gratified by her great heart, dignity, wisdom and love for the natural environment, particularly for the Everglades lapping at the edge of her native Ochopee. ``It's a place of new beginnings,'' she tells Bird, ``a place where life starts over again every day. Yes. That's exactly right. It's the beginning of creation. Forever.''

At one point Bird explains that Glory Marie named her daughters after birds, because ``if we were named for something with wings then maybe we'd be able to fly above the s - - - in our lives.'' Though flight imagery is her particular enthusiasm, Fowler sometimes gets a little heavy-handed: Miss Zora (whose husband was killed when his crop-dusting plane crashed) believes sunsets are the gold wings of dead birds on their way to heaven. And when a tattooed, Whitman-quoting biker named Big Al takes Bird for a ride, he ``would point to a constellation, and then he'd aim the Harley in its direction.'' Still, we were inspired to look up Bird's namesake, the American avocet, in our field guide. It is a large, slimly handsome creature with an upturned beak and striking black-and-white plumage. Its call is a loud, frantically repeated Wheep, wheep, wheep.

More than once during Avocet Jackson's haunting, redemptive tale, we almost did.