Davids Valley

By: R.S. Curtis

Narrated by: David Shipp

Set in the racially turbulent '60s, Davids Valley is a drama overlain with magical realism. A self-isolated, disaffected young resident surgeon, Dr. John David III, is pushed by Esther Freeman, an African American ghost, to visit his stroke-crippled and dying mother, Alice David, in Davids Valley, Oklahoma, John’s hometown, which was founded by his grandfather. After a prolonged absence, at home John discovers he has a son, Sonny, by the strong-willed, independent Native American woman, Betsy Guy, whom he has left behind. Burned by the loss of both of his parents at a young age, John has purposefully rejected any commitment that would risk a further loss of love.

John is besieged by Earl Hatch, the town’s mayor and the man responsible for the deaths of John’s father, Jack David, and Esther Freeman twenty years before. Scarred by hate and bent upon the destruction of the entire David Family, Mayor Hatch executes an elaborate plan to kill John, John’s five-year old son, Sonny, and Sonny’s mother, Betsy Guy.

The story is multi-colored. Beginning and ending on Bloody Sunday on the steel-gray Edmund Pettus Bridge above the muddy brown Alabama River, it has a dispossessed white sandhill crane, an ancient yellow school bus with a hand-painted message on its side, “BACK TO THE VALLEY,” a black Labrador dog wearing the red bandana of Sonny’s deceased Native American Chickasaw grandfather, Chick Guy, and an inclusive rainbow message from the Nobel Peace Prize winning Martin Luther King.

Ultimately, John reconciles with Betsy, stops Earl, and saves their family from a man-made thunderbolt, a purposefully set hay barn fire, and a pair of predatory tornadoes. And he learns from Esther that while there are a lot of reasons to hate, there is only one reason to love.

©2022 R.S. Curtis (P)2023 R.S. Curtis