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.
Chapter 1
Once again, I had not slept well. It was the sixth night since Cullie and I moved back to Boaz. The dreams, virtual nightmares, were no doubt triggered by sleeping in my bed, in my old room. I hadn’t slept here since 1996 when I finished college and moved to Los Angeles. During the intervening twenty years I had visited at least once every couple of years, but I had always made sure I slept at a local motel.
I had to make some changes. Maybe I would ask Nanny Bev, my grandmother, if I could have mother’s room upstairs. That was probably a bad idea. Mother, Darla Sims Radford, may be needing it herself. Her husband, Raymond Radford, is in some deep shit with the law, accused of a multitude of crimes, including murder. Mom hasn’t been too open about her situation, but I suspect Raymond’s grandson, Ryan, will pressure Mom out of the sprawling Country Club mansion if his grandfather is convicted and sent to prison. Maybe, a new coat of paint and some different bedroom furniture will chase out the demons who have homesteaded my room since I was a kid.
I pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of jogging pants and walked down the hall and into the kitchen. It was 4:30 a.m. and the coffee was waiting, thanks to my automatic coffee brewer that I had brought. I couldn’t help but feel bad over the scene Bev and I had when Cullie and I had moved in. Nanny was a creature of habit, hated change, and believed anything smart enough to make coffee without your presence was also smart enough to be a spy.
The thought also reminded me of why Cullie and I were here. Bev was growing more senile by the day and Darla was too preoccupied to see the trouble Bev was in. It should have been apparent. Nanny was going on ninety years old but had a daughter whose dream had become a nightmare.
Darla was my biological mother, but I could hardly call her mom or mother. It was Nanny who had raised me. Darla had gotten pregnant at her high school graduation party in May 1972. She was still a kid herself. But, not one incapable of hooking up, eventually marrying, Raymond Radford, the man whose son, Randall, was one of the ones Darla had sex with that fateful graduation night. Raymond left his wife of twenty years for the young and pretty Darla. To his credit, he had offered to raise me, let me live in his big house. Nanny would not have it and literally made Darla sign me over for adoption. I doubt if I would ever forgive my mother for throwing me away.
Early morning was my time. It was now an ingrained habit, virtually like breathing. Since high school I had been a scribbler, finding deep satisfaction in putting words on paper. During college I had learned a lot about the craft of writing, but my short stories seemed hollow, with uninteresting plots. Not to mention, my characters were stiff and narrow. It was my first teaching job in Los Angeles where the early morning routine became the habit that continues today. Before my day job began, I had written at least a thousand words towards my current story. I owe my students, rather their seemingly unbearable lives, for transforming my writing from a head knowledge to a heart-throbbing adventure. My life, for the first time, had discovered meaning. I finally had a purpose and it was two-fold. Creating stories, short and long, that moved people, entertaining but also helping them discover something that made their lives more bearable or maybe even spurred them to reconstruct their circumstances and become a whole new person. The second purpose, closely related, was to inspire my students to read and write for themselves. I strived to motivate them to learn the power of words, others and their own. If they did, I knew the stories they read, and the words they scribbled, would provide virtual experiences, the cheap way: by traveling, hiking, swimming, flying, failing, succeeding, and dreaming. This would give them a better chance of coping with their current lives, and hopefully creating a better one in the days ahead.
This morning was the first in seven days that I had come to my writing spot. I had adopted this corner of the little used basement, windowless and damp, while I was in high school. Back then I was not a daily writer, scribbler was really what I was, but it was here that I attempted to fictionalize Darla’s story. It’s hard to realize how the little snippets I wrote, hardly the makings of the most rudimentary scenes, grew over the years into Out of the Darkness, my novel that won the PEN/Faulkner prize for best fiction in 2002. During the twelve or thirteen years it had taken to complete the story, it evolved far from where it had begun: Darla’s consensual sex with Randall Radford and the other four members of the Flaming Five (as they were called because of their basketball prowess), her pregnancy, and my birth nine months later. One thing I had learned in Out of the Darkness, was that horrible life experiences did not have to define one’s future. That too was what my protagonist had learned. I still had a way to go before this principle settled in my mind and heart as easily as my habit of rising at 4:30 a.m. every morning.
Today, I chose to work on another project I had put in a desk drawer nearly two years ago. Out of Control was born after that fateful night in December 2002 when I was gang-raped by the sons of the Flaming Five, including Ryan Radford, Raymond’s grandson. Sporadically over the past fifteen years I had attempted to gain momentum, but I always seemed to hit the wall. It was like my mind and my body were fighting each other. I guess it was because I was too close to the event. It had happened to me and my entire being, to protect itself, fought my every effort to relive the horrifying two-plus hours. Maybe now, back in the dark and dingy basement, where my only prize-winning story had sprouted, I could convince my writing mind and heart that my life would benefit, maybe even begin to thrive, by going deep to destroy the demons that were assaulting me lying upstairs in the bed of my youth.
At 6:15 a.m., I returned to my room, showered, dressed, and drove myself and a waiting Cullie to Boaz High School. It was my first day as an English teacher and Cullie’s as a ninth-grade student at the high school I had graduated from in 1991. I hoped our time here would be as rewarding as the last six years at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City. For reasons that were not difficult to list, I doubted things would be as good.
The Pencil Driven Life 