The Story Behind the Book

Set in the small-town south of the 1960s-70s, my novel, Bells for Eli, is inspired by a tragic incident that happened to my first cousin Danny on his second birthday. His family lived in Plainfield, NJ, at the time of Danny’s accident, and I lived with my family in the small town of Lancaster, SC.

As is the case in the novel with my character Ellison (Eli) Winfield, my cousin saw a Coca-Cola bottle sitting on the porch steps at his home and drank from it. Instead of Coke, though, the bottle was filled with Red Devil Lye, a chemical with properties like helium. According to my parents’ accounts, my uncle had been placing balloons over the neck of the bottle to inflate them for his son’s birthday party. Like Eli in the novel, my cousin survived the accident, but his life was forever changed.

Unlike Eli’s cousin Adeline (Delia) Green, the protagonist of the novel, I did not grow up in the same town as my cousin, and most of what I know of his challenging childhood came to me secondhand long after my own childhood.  My novel is an imagining of Eli and Delia growing up across the street from each other in a fictitious small-town South Carolina neighborhood, as Delia becomes Eli’s defender and they develop a deep and uncommon love, as they come of age in a powerfully transitional period of American history. Delia Green and Eli Winfield don’t intend to develop a relationship that defies reason. The depth of their love is born out of the human need to comfort and nurture, to overcome pain.

My cousin Danny was a frail boy with odd disfigurements and even from our infrequent visits during our early years, I sensed he must suffer bullying from his peers.  I remember one awkward time when Danny and I were about eight years old, and one of my close girlfriends happened to be at my house in Lancaster when Danny, his sisters, and parents arrived for a visit. While six of us—cousins and siblings and my friend Jean—played on the equipment in our backyard, my friend wouldn’t shut up asking Danny questions. What was wrong with him? Why he didn’t hang upside down on the monkey bars like the rest of us? Why did he have a string coming out of his nose? As I recall, my cousin basically ignored Jean and walked away from her, climbed to the top of the sliding board to sit alone, but her badgering and his response was enough to show me that he likely suffered far worse than questions from his peers back home.

During our adolescence Danny and I saw more of each other than we had in childhood. In contrast to the odd boy of my childhood, the cousin of my adolescence was an outwardly happy, physically healthy and quite handsome young man. He no longer bore the outer disfigurements of his childhood accident. No string running from his nose and tied behind his neck, no metal plate covering his tracheotomy that ran mucus like our childhood normal noses had, no fermented smell emanating from the hole in his stomach through which he’d been fed until he was ten years old. We became close because for one thing, his family moved to Charlotte, NC, only an hour’s drive from Lancaster, SC. For another, we were near the same age and when you were a female teenager in the late 60’s and early 70’s, it was cool to have a close guy friend to introduce you to members of the opposite sex. It was a tradeoff.  I set Danny up on dates with my small-town girlfriends, and he introduced me to his big-city Charlotte guy friends. He loved to give me advice on how to be “in the groove” and “with it.”

But Danny was also an adolescent who ultimately fell in with the drug culture, got in trouble with the law, and took life-threatening risks. His behavior reflected an obvious desire to escape his memories and feelings, to escape from himself, so I knew that underneath his assured façade he bore heavy emotional scars. The circumstances of Danny’s life affected me deeply, and from my early 20’s on, I began to think about how one small misstep could set the trajectory of a life. I knew that one day I’d write a story on this subject.

The kernel for Bells for Eli began in a short story titled “Law’s Passage” that won the SC Fiction Project many years ago and was later reprinted in Inheritance: Selections from the South Carolina Fiction Project. After the success of “Law’s Passage,” the desire to expand the story into a novel never left me, but for nearly two decades it lay dormant.  I published other short stories and won some regional awards over the decades, but I long delayed pursuing my dream of writing the novel that lived inside me because I lacked uninterrupted time and focus. I was teaching English to thousands of high school and college students for 33 years, raising my daughters, and taking care of failing parents, not to mention divorce. But after I retired from teaching, my children left home, and my beloved parents died, I began work as media relations manager at Magic Time Literary Publicity and became engulfed firsthand in the world of authors. The old spark took flame and for many nights of the week for a year, I wrote the manuscript that became Bells for Eli.

In a letter to his friend Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind.”  This is my hope with Bells for Eli: for my characters’ lives to resonate with readers after the novel ends. To consider the irony of fate the novel presents: how it can take with one hand and give with the other. How wounds of the heart from childhood might never leave and become the catalyst for decisions that bring this novel to a staggering conclusion, yet simultaneously, how boundless love can ultimately triumph in a world where cruelty and pain threaten to dominate.