In 2020 I published a novel called The Empty Cell. It involved four main characters whose lives were impacted by the 1947 lynching of a young Black man, Willie Earle, in Greenville, South Carolina, my hometown.

One of these characters, Lee Trammell, was one of twenty-eight cabbies acquitted of Earl’s murder. Lee was in his early twenties, married with two sons: Lee Jr., who was six at the time; and Earl, who was three. Within a year, Lee hung himself, leaving his family adrift. I never intended to return to this material. But at some point, I began to wonder what had become of Lee Jr. He had loved his father fiercely, and that love was reciprocated, until the night his father came home from visiting the cabbie Willie Earle was accused of knifing:

“On Sunday, I’d come on home after visiting Mr. Brown in the hospital to find Lee Jr. playing with my shotgun. I took off my belt and taught him a lesson. I taught him you never, ever touch Daddy’s gun. I use that gun for hunting squirrel out on Paris Mountain. My heart ‘bout bust out of my chest when I saw him sitting cross-legged on the floor with that gun across his little lap. He might of hurt hisself or the baby. I had to make sure it would never happen again. I
was like dry kindling someone struck a match to. But if it was ‘cause of the gun, Mr. Brown, or that nigger, I didn’t know.”

That beating, along with his father’s disappearance, became the defining events in Lee’s life.

I caught up with Lee in Hidden Valley Road when he was seventy-five, living quietly in retirement in fictitious rural Blue Ridge, South Carolina. He had suffered for much of his life from depression. On her deathbed, when Lee was forty, his mother told him about his father, the lynching and the suicide. At his mother’s funeral, Lee’s ex-wife sat him down and insisted he see a therapist.

“The therapist’s name was Beverly Proctor, MSW…She was post-middle-aged, overweight, and empathetic, with a round earnest face and thin brown hair that didn’t cover her scalp…He understood he was there to talk and that he might cry, which he didn’t want to do. Therapy as he understood it was about telling things you wanted to keep to yourself. When she asked him to tell her something about himself, the pistol [his father had carried as a cabbie for protection] floated into his mind, falling slowly through the air, and he started with that.

He shed a lot of tears in that office over many months. He was amazed at himself. He had always been self-contained, private, guarded. Now he was a gusher! And when he left after each session, he felt lighter. As if his tears were drying up the mud.”

A lot of the novel traces Lee’s dealing with his neighbors down the road, the three Dunlap lads—Matthew, Mark and Luke—who fly a huge Confederate flag in their yard. Lee feels they’re responsible for driving the McBees, a Black family who were renting a concrete block house nearby, from the neighborhood. He also suspects them of puncturing the McBees’s four tires. He pays them a visit:

“A half hour later, all three of them came out of the house. They all wore worn jeans permanently stained with motor oil and red dirt. The oldest, biggest brother had a big bushy beard where a squirrel could live, Lee thought…The smallest brother, probably the youngest, had on a faded gray T-shirt with the name Alice Cooper in spooky script and an image faded almost into extinction of what appeared to be a guy licking a snake. The other fellow, who must be the middle one, was shirtless, his chest well-developed, as if he worked out…They don’t seem happy to see me, Lee thought, and this struck him as humorous. He stood up and offered his hand,
which hung in the air, untaken. “I’m Lee Trammell—your neighbor down the road. The trailer on the left. And your names are…”

When I stayed at the Rensing Center, an artists’ residency in Pickens county, I would see a white two-story house off in the distance that flew a big Confederate flag on a tall flagpole. I never drove by the house, but when I began to write about Lee and Hidden Valley Road, that flag was waiting for me.

Another origin: I, like so many people, was deeply affected by the massacre of nine Blacks who were participating in a Bible study class at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a young white man, Dylann Roof. Who was Dylann Roof, what was he like, who knew what he was capable of? Who could have stopped him? These are anguished questions. He was there in my mind when I wrote about Luke, the youngest Dunlap lad:

“Lee couldn’t help staring at Luke. He had that same sullen look he’d had the first time Lee saw him. His hair was cut in a bowl cut, which made him look like a simpleton, and maybe he was. His neck was thin, as if you could encircle it with one hand and squeeze, which Lee felt like doing…”

Smoky, Lee’s fifty-pound, mixed breed black dog, originated from Murphy, our thirty- five-pound rescue mutt. With Murf, Jeff and I experienced the same kind of deep love that Lee and Smoky share, available to me in Smoky.

I often walk the road that is the cover photo of HVR. Like Lee, I love nature; Like Lee, I love, as Wallace Stegner entitled one of his novels, All the Little Live Things. Except yellowjackets.

There’s aging in the book. When I mentioned to someone “I’m writing about an old man,” I was shocked to realize, I’m older than Lee!

Too many origins to trace go into the writing of a novel. But the novel is a world of its own. Writing, you get to live another life.