The primary aim of the "Novel Excerpts" blog category is to showcase my creative writing, specifically from the novels I've written. Hopefully, these posts will provide a glimpse into my storytelling style, themes, and narrative skills. It's an opportunity to share my artistic expressions and the worlds I've created through my novels.
The Boaz Schoolteacher, written in 2018, is my fifth novel. I'll post a chapter a day over the next few weeks.
Book Blurb
In the summer of 2017, Katie Sims and her daughter Cullie, moved from New York City to Katie’s hometown of Boaz, Alabama for her to teach English and for Cullie to attend Boaz High School . Fifteen years earlier, during the Christmas holidays, five men from prominent local families sexually assaulted Katie. Nine months later, Katie’s only daughter was born.
Almost from the beginning of the new school year, as Katie and fellow-teacher Cindy Barker shared English, Literature, and Creative Writing duties for more than 300 students, they became lifelong friends.
For weeks, Katie and Cindy endured the almost constant sexual harassment at the hands of the assistant principal. In mid-October, after Cindy suffered an attack similar to Katie’s from fifteen years earlier, the two teachers designed a unique method to teach the six predators a lesson they would never forget. Katie and Cindy dubbed their plan, Six Red Apples.
Read this mystery-thriller to experience the dilemma the two teachers created for themselves, and to learn the true meaning of real justice. And, eternal friendship.
Prologue
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was 2002 and I was home for Christmas. It had been a whole year since I had visited my mother and my grandmother in our hometown of Boaz, Alabama. This year, unlike the previous five years where I had stayed in Los Angeles fully focused on my high school teaching and writing, I had seen them in April when they had flown to Washington, D.C. to see me awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in the Great Hall of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
I had driven my rental car from the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport and arrived in Boaz during late afternoon of the 23rd. Instead of going straight to mother’s house east of Boaz on Bruce Road, I opted to drive west on Highway 168 to old downtown Boaz to see if the fountain in the center of town was active or lying dormant. It had become something of a tradition for me after my grandmother had shared the story of how Darla, my mother, had met her husband, Raymond Radford. I loved Mama Bev’s oft repeated statement, “love is never stagnant, it is bursting forth, new every day.” It was, to me, a silly and too simple an expression. I had never known anything but the stagnant type of love. When I parked and walked to the center of town, the fountain was worse than stagnant. There was no water anywhere in sight. The huge basin that fed the fountain was empty.
I never saw anyone. I was walking back to my car parked in a dark parking lot on the south end of town and past the little building that housed the two public restrooms when someone grabbed me from behind and forced a black hood over my head. The whisper of voices told me there were several of them. I was shoved into the back of what had to be a van and driven for miles. I knew I was going to die. I couldn’t sit up but could feel a combination of hard and soft hands traveling across my bare legs. One quick stop by the van and I could hear the vehicle’s tires rolling across a graveled road.
I was removed from the back of the vehicle and led inside a tent. I knew it was a tent by the smell. Everyone knows that Army tent smell. Over the next hour I was laid across a bed covered with what had to be an animal skin and raped by at least five men. They made lots of sounds. The man inside me would moan and groan. The bystanders would laugh and jeer. The only words I ever heard were, “teach the little bitch not to write about Boaz.” Maybe I shouldn’t have set my one and only novel, Out of the Darkness, in my hometown.
When the five had each taken a couple of turns each thrusting inside me without a single condom, they drove back to town leaving me behind the public restrooms. That day, I never saw one of the men nor the vehicle they were driving. They left me hooded and tied up enough to make their getaway before I could untie my hands and remove the hood from my head.
It was as though they wanted me to know who they were. I did. But, I never went to the police. Instead, I drove to McDonald’s and went inside to the restroom, refreshed my makeup and straightened my clothes the men had hastily redressed me with, drank a cup of coffee, and drove home to an eager mother and grandmother worried that my plane had been late.
That was nearly fifteen years ago, nine months before Cullie, my beautiful daughter, was born. When I first saw her face and the sweetness of her smile, and felt the tenderness of her skin, I swore to myself I would forget the horror of that night, and instead, invest my life keeping Cullie safe and focused on the good all around her.
The Pencil Driven Life 