While sitting in the hallway outside of his first grade classroom, young Bobby Dorsey overhears his teacher reporting his misbehavior to his mother, Margaret, through a vent in the classroom door. He is shocked when he hears his mother tearfully confess that he is the unexpected result of a high school affair, that she never intended to have a child, and that he would have been aborted if not for the intervention of his grandmother, a devout Southern Baptist, and her pastor.
The unexpected and unwanted birth of Bobby causes Margaret to feel she was robbed of the fun of her high school years. Driven to complete her lost adolescence, she exposes Bobby to a string of boyfriends, with whom she often has a sexual relationship. Bobby becomes aware of those relationships at far too early an age for him to understand what is going on. Some of Margaret’s boyfriends are cruel and abusive to Bobby. This coupled with his mother’s indifference, eventually leads him to feel an outsider in his own home in the small East Texas town of Purvis.
His mother’s preoccupation with her own life and lack of concern for him causes Bobby to become increasingly curious about his absent father, who he learns is managing a motel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The more Bobby learns about his father, the more his fantasies about him grow. He wonders if he might find the love and acceptance with him that he had not found living with his mother.
Therefore at ten years of age, Bobby concludes that Purvis is not a good place for him to be, and that he needs to go live with his father in Chattanooga. So begins a modern Huckleberry Finn tale filled with adventure and intrigue as Bobby embarks on an almost nine hundred mile journey from Texas to Tennessee. He encounters fascinating people, and has several narrow escapes from busybodies who want to take over his problem and solve it for him. Enough people had judged and condemned him. Enough had screwed up his life in Purvis. He wants nothing further to do with the likes of them. His life is now in his own hands until he reaches his father whom he is convinced will be the answer to all his problems.
Does Bobby reach his father without experiencing more abuse? Would his father be able to provide him the love and support he never found in Purvis? Does Bobby take the damage from his childhood abuse along with him?
This novel deals both dramatically and spiritually with the following current hot topics: The abortion issue, childhood physical, emotional and sexual abuse and prejudice including homophobia. It illustrates how one generations abused become the next generations abusers. It drives home the point that a person’s RIGHT TO LIFE is far more than a mere right to birth, showing that love, compassion, understanding and forgiveness are also basic human rights that deserve the same impassioned advocacy seen among current anti-abortionists.
