A story of a wicked family and town folk. These people have real hard-core prejudices and passions. They are passionately resolved in their intolerance.
It was the first day of Smiley’s tenth year in the “Mentally Retarded Sophomore Class.” Smiley had prepared for his first-day-of-school-beating by donning Aunt Lettie’s blouse and his shit-kicking saddle shoes.
A full circle story. “What goes around, comes around.”
The sun goes down on the sleepy little coal mining camp community of Solitude, Virginia. But not before nationwide social change brings upheaval: The NYC Stonewall gay riots of 1969 had been vicious, but the real battle would be won or lost on another continent: Solitude, Virginia. Permelia Corn and Lee Moore entered the Solitude town limits. Lee drove the ’59 candy apple red Cadillac convertible onto main street. Rebellious red reflected off the plate glass of the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, the palladium windows of Ritz’s Restaurant, the colonial windows of the Court House, the stained, lead glass windows of the Opera House, and at last a smear of red reflected off the shiny glass windows of Solitude Funeral Parlor.
Lettie stooped in front of the stereo cabinet, her index finger caressing the trifold, eight by eleven photos of Brac and Chad in the fourth grade, and Lydia in the eighth. She laid the .38 snub-nosed special on the stereo cabinet. She turned the trifold face down on the cabinet. She thought about her children. She had never owned them, never owned herself, and now they could choose their own road in life. But she could choose when to exit this world and how.
“What goes around, comes around.”: “Woe to the wicked! It shall be ill with him, for what his hands have dealt out shall be done to him.”