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Forsaken
A Novel
Ross Howell Jr.
NEWSOUTH BOOKS
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright © 2016 by Ross Howell Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-317-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-396-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015956099
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
For Mary Leigh
Contents
Notice to the Reader
Charles Mears, Virginia Christian, Ida Belote, Dr. George Vanderslice, attorney George Washington Fields, and many other characters in this novel were real people, but the book itself is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, court records, articles, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. The language used in the book includes crude idioms and epithets that reflect the authentic language of the period. The author intends no offense, disparagement, or hurt.
— The Publishers
August 16, 1912, the day after her seventeenth birthday, Virginia Christian died in the electric chair at the state penitentiary in Richmond, Virginia; she is the only female juvenile executed in the commonwealth’s history. She had been found guilty of murdering fifty-one-year-old Ida Belote in a bedroom of the woman’s Hampton home.
Times-Herald reporter Charles Mears covered the trial and interviewed the girl after she was sentenced. Though she confessed her guilt, Mears twice wrote William Hodges Mann, the last Confederate veteran to serve as governor, asking him to spare her life.
— The Author
1.
My Testament
I was born Charles Gilbert Mears on August 21 in Southampton County, Virginia, during the financial panic of 1893. Mother told me the midwife moved her pallet onto the gallery to catch the breeze. She spread damp cloths over my mother and the two of them prayed for nightfall. The midwife sang, “Bend down, Jesus, bend down low!” I was born at twilight. Mother said from that evening on nothing was so restful to her as listening to the ratchet of katydids in the gloaming.
I never knew my father. In the
