the essay robin yocum sparknotes

Robin Yocum

Jimmy Lee Hickam, with the help of some and to the consternation of others, fights to create a new destiny and future for himself. Jimmy Lee grew up in the poorest part of Appalachian Ohio with a family history of trouble. His family has been in the same Appalachian hills for generations, and they included moonshiners, drunkards, and thieves. Jimmy Lee is convinced that he will be the same until a coach and a teacher take a chance on him.

Jimmy Lee’s ability to play football, and a coach who believed in him, kept him in school his junior year. Jimmy Lee’s English teacher takes a chance on him and saves his eligibility for the upcoming football season. That faith results in a fabulous essay that few believe Jimmy Lee wrote.

This is a story of finding a door outside of one’s current situation and a way to transcend the times and judgments of others. It is a celebration of students who surprise themselves and the adults who believe in them.

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“A heart-rending tale . . . with deep insights. The writing is plain and unadorned, and completely in tune with the people and place. Highly recommended.”

— Midwest Book Review

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Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam...

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9781628727173

Robin Yocum

Skyhorse Publishing

08 October 2012

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5 questions with Robin Yocum '78

BGSU alumnus’ latest novel, ‘The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,’ to be released April 27

By Bob Cunningham ’18

Robin Yocum ’78 is an Edgar Award-nominated author known for his fiction set in the eastern Ohio River Valley. His next novel, “The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,” will be released on April 27.

“Favorite Sons” was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. “A Brilliant Death”  was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar Award and the Silver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.

Yocum grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant, Ohio. He has a Bachelor of Science in journalism  from Bowling Green State University. He also was a placekicker on the football team.

He joined the Columbus Dispatch in 1980. He worked at the paper for 11 years, including six years as the senior reporter on the investigative desk. He won more than 30 local, state and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.

He is the principle at Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing consulting firm in Galena, Ohio, that he founded in 2001.

1.    Did your journalism career help you as a crime fiction author?

Absolutely.

From a nuts-and-bolts perspective, I understand cops, how they conduct their investigations, and what happens when someone enters the justice system. I don’t use that information a lot in my books, but it’s nice having that background.

The most interesting part about the crime beat was the people. It’s the crime beat, so you’re not dealing with the cream of society. I covered more than 1,000 deaths during my time covering the cops, and I interviewed killers, rapists and a host of other people you wouldn’t want living next door.

I have never fictionalized any of the stories that I covered for the paper, but I do utilize the personalities of the cops and the criminals that I met along the way.

When I write a novel, I assign real people to play the roles of my characters. Of course, I don’t tell anyone and they only live in my head, but it helps me with developing the personality, mannerisms and inflections of my characters. Some of the people I met on the crime beat play their roles magnificently for me. If I know a character isn’t going to live to the last page, I have someone I don’t like play the role.

2.    What is it about your hometown of Brilliant, Ohio, and the eastern Ohio River valley that attracted you to setting your stories and characters there?

It is said that you should write what you know. I know the Ohio Valley.

I loved the grit and the grind of the valley in which I grew up. It’s where I spent my formative years. It was a highly industrial area with a lot of first-generation immigrants who ate kielbasa, wore babushkas and spoke in heavy, Eastern European dialects. They came to work in the coal mines and the steel mills, and my great grandparents were among them. Every man I knew left for work in the morning with a hard hat in one hand, tin lunch pail in the other.

In those days, the factories used the Ohio River as an open sewer, and the pollution in the air made it all but unbreathable. When I was playing high school football, we would do grass drills in the morning when the dew was heavy on the ground. It would mix with the fly ash from the power plant, and when you finished, your white pants would be black. When it dried, you could brush it off like dried oatmeal. God only knows what we were sucking into our lungs, but it was all I knew.

I grew up believing the Ohio Valley was a special place. We supplied the steel that powered the industrial revolution and won two world wars. But as I got older, I realized that people outside of the valley didn’t share that opinion. I remember playing in a baseball tournament outside of the valley and a parent from the other team called us, “a bunch of river rats.” I told my dad what the guy said, and they about came to blows.

Here’s a funny nugget. When I was playing football at BGSU for Coach Don Nehlen and he wanted to chat it up with one of the guys, he would say, “How are things in Lorain, Alex Prosak?” or “How are things in South Canton, Mark Miller?” Then, he would look at me, shake his head, and say, “Yocum, you and those boys from down in that valley!” He would say “valley” like he had a mouthful of curdled milk. It was hilarious.

3.    What’s it like being nominated for the Edgar Award and other fiction awards?

It was flattering. The Edgars are the Academy Awards for mystery writing and there were hundreds of books entered, so to be one of the last four standing was pretty cool. Of course, it would have been much cooler to have won, but maybe next time.

With that said, I don’t write to win awards. I write because it gives me a creative outlet. And, well, it helps pay the bills.

One of my short stories was selected for the anthology, “2020 Best American Mystery Stories.” It was nice to see my work in there with some very big names.

4.    What can you tell us about your new novel, “The Sacrifice of Lester Yates?”

This book has been years in the making.

This was the novel I set out to write about 12 years ago. I wanted to do a novel about a prison guard who comes to believe a death-row inmate was wrongfully convicted. The first thing I did was create the crime for which he would be convicted and sent to prison. That involved four boys who somewhat accidentally kill another kid, then conspire to cover it up. I became more interested in the plight of those boys, so the entire direction of the book changed. That novel became “Favorite Sons.”

I started working on a sequel, but couldn’t get any traction with it, so I put it on the shelf. I dusted it off a few years ago, moved most of the action from Columbus back to the Ohio Valley, and things fell into place.

In “The Sacrifice of Lester Yates,”Hutch Van Buren is the former Summit County prosecutor and current attorney general for the State of Ohio. He feels like a glorified paper-pusher and hates his job. He is approached by a prison guard with evidence that could exonerate Lester Yates, who is on death row, convicted of being the infamous Egypt Valley Strangler.

Hutch begins investigating the case against Yates. The governor, who is a candidate for U.S. president, is unwilling to give Yates a commutation because it will go against his law-and-order reputation and potentially damage his presidential run. Unless Hutch can produce the real killer, Yates will go to the death chamber — sacrificed for political gain. If the governor becomes president, then Hutch will be his choice for U.S. attorney general. Thus, Hutch finds himself fighting a political machine of which he is a part.

I try not to write whodunits. I try to write books where the protagonist lives and operates in a world between black and white, good and evil. It’s a lot more interesting to see how people interact with the forces around them.

5.    When you were a journalism major at BGSU – and a placekicker on the football team – was writing novels for a living a dream of yours?

If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m not sure I was thinking much past Thursday night at the Brathaus when I was at Bowling Green. But, yes, it was always in the back of my mind. I had to read “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”for a political science class at BGSU, and I remember thinking, I bet I could do this.

My first attempt at writing a novel was not long after I graduated in 1978. It was awful. If I ever find that manuscript, I’m going to burn it.

Writing is like any other skill — playing an instrument, painting, kicking a football. The more you work at it, the better you get. I was a reporter for 13 years, and that certainly helped hone my skills. We all go through these transitions in our lives in which one opportunity leads to another. The newspaper business was my gateway to becoming an author.

I wrote two true crime books, but writing fiction was still something I wanted to do. As the crime reporter, I was writing about the deeds and misdeeds of other people. I wanted to create something that was uniquely mine – start with a blank sheet of paper and fill it with my ideas, my words.

It took me a while to get it right. I could paper a large room with the rejection letters I received, but I knew I just had to convince one editor that my writing was worth publishing, so I kept grinding. My agent sold “Favorite Sons,”which was published in 2011, and things got much easier after that.

While I can’t say that I dreamed of becoming a novelist back in the day, I will say this for a fact: Everything that I have accomplished has been a direct result of going to Bowling Green. I really believe that. Coach Nehlen recruited me as a preferred walk-on. He said if I made the team, he would give me a scholarship. I did, and he was good to his word. That scholarship gave me an opportunity that I might never have had. I could very easily have ended up working next to my dad in the steel mill. I am forever grateful to Bowling Green.

To learn more about Robin Yocum and his books, visit his website, Robin Yocum .

Media Contact | Michael Bratton | [email protected] | 419-372-6349

Updated: 04/23/2021 03:51PM

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Editorial reviews

Robin Yocum's novel The Essay is an inspiring and humorous story about Jimmy Lee Hickam, a kid who lives in rural Ohio. As Jimmy sees it, when he grows up, he'll either be locked up or boozing and working at the mill. A teacher shows Jimmy, though, that there just may be another way to get out of Appalachia. Listening to Fleet Cooper is a joy. He brings to life a variety of characters, from gruff drunkards to Jimmy's idealistic teacher. Cooper's performance can be anywhere from quiet and touching to loud and bellicose.

Publisher's summary

Jimmy Lee Hickam grew up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. It is the poorest road, in the poorest county, in the poorest region of the state. To make things worse, the name Hickam is synonymous with trouble. Jimmy Lee hails from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hardscrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. This life, Jimmy Lee believes, is his destiny, someday working with his drunkard father at the sawmill, or sitting next to his arsonist brother in the penitentiary. There aren’t many options if your last name is Hickam.

An inspiring coach and Jimmy Lee's ability to play football are the only things motivating him to return for his junior year of high school - until his visionary English teacher cuts him a break and preserves his eligibility for the coming football season. To thank her, Jimmy Lee writes a winning essay in the high school writing contest. When irate parents and the baffled administration claim he has cheated, his teacher is inspired to take his writing talent as far as it can go, showing him the path out of the hills of Appalachia.

Terrific characterizations, surprising revelations, gut-wrenching past betrayals, and an unforgettable cast of characters born of the dusty, worn-out landscape of southeastern Ohio make The Essay a powerful, evocative, and incredibly moving novel.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Literature & Fiction

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By: Dale Peck

• Narrated by: Ted Coluca Jr.
• Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 99
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 76
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 77

Sprout Bradford has a secret. It's not what you think he'll tell you he's gay. He'll tell you about his dads drinking and his mother's death. The green fingerprints everywhere tell you when he last dyed his hair. But neither the reader nor Sprout are prepared for what happens when Sprout suddenly finds he's had a more profound effect on the lives around him than he ever thought possible. Sprout is both hilarious and gripping; a story of one boy at odds with the expected.

Excellent Coming of Age Story

• By marie on 07-17-13

Unstoppable

By: Tim Green

• Narrated by: Tim Green
• Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
• Overall 5 out of 5 stars 188
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 152
• Story 5 out of 5 stars 152

If anyone understands the phrase "tough luck", it's Harrison. As a foster kid in a cruel home, he knows his dream of one day playing for the NFL is a long shot. Then Harrison's luck seems to change. He is brought into a new home with kind, loving parents - his new dad is even a football coach. Harrison's big build and his incredible determination quickly make him a star running back on the junior high school team. In no time, he's practically unstoppable. But Harrison's good luck can't last forever.

Listen to it with you kid

• By mamamijo on 07-06-14

Carrying Albert Home

• The Somewhat True Story of a Woman, a Husband, and Her Alligator

By: Homer Hickam

• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 209
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 181
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 181

Elsie Lavender and Homer Hickam (the father of the author) were high school classmates in the West Virginia coalfields, graduating just as the Great Depression began. When Homer asked for her hand, Elsie instead headed to Orlando, where she sparked with a dancing actor named Buddy Ebsen (yes, that Buddy Ebsen). But when Buddy headed for New York, Elsie's dreams of a life with him were crushed, and eventually she found herself back in the coalfields, married to Homer.

Absolutely Delightful!!

• By Sharon on 03-01-16

Signals: New and Selected Stories

By: Tim Gautreaux

• Narrated by: Joe Barrett
• Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 27
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 26
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 27

After the stunning historical novels The Clearing and The Missing , Tim Gautreaux now ranges freely through contemporary life with 12 new stories and eight from previous collections. Most are set in his beloved Louisiana, many hard by or on the Mississippi River, others in North Carolina, and even in midwinter Minnesota. But generally it's heat, humidity, and bugs that beset his people as they wrestle with affairs of the heart, matters of faith, and the pros and cons of tight-knit communities.

Perfection! Amazing writer/amazing reader

• By Monique on 01-08-19

Football Genius

• Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 122
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 91
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 93

When Tory White's mom gets a job with the Atlanta Falcons, Tory demonstrates his uncanny ability to call football plays before they happen. With Troy's genius, the Falcons could be unstoppable-- if only the coaches would take him seriously!

pretty engrossing

• By Pournima Navalkele on 01-20-24

Our Story Begins

• New and Selected Stories

By: Tobias Wolff

• Narrated by: Anthony Heald
• Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 192
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 140
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 135

Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.

• By chris on 04-11-08

Bullet in the Brain

• Length: 13 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 280
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 253
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 251

Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....

The Perfect Example

• By Sarah on 08-01-17

The White Boy Shuffle

By: Paul Beatty

• Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
• Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 143
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars 128
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 127

Paul Beatty's hilarious and scathing debut novel, The White Boy Shuffle , is about Gunnar Kaufman, an awkward, black surfer bum who is moved by his mother from Santa Monica to urban West Los Angeles. There, he begins to undergo a startling transformation from neighborhood outcast to basketball superstar, and eventually to reluctant messiah of a "divided, downtrodden people".

So beautiful

• By mp on 06-15-18

Pay Dirt Road

By: Samantha Jayne Allen

• Narrated by: Sandy Rustin
• Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 358
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 319
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 319

Annie McIntyre has a love/hate relationship with Garnett, Texas. Recently graduated from college and home waitressing, lacking not in ambition but certainly in direction, Annie is lured into the family business—a private investigation firm—by her supposed-to-be-retired grandfather, Leroy, despite the rest of the clan's misgivings.

Great Narration

• By Cindy Buell NZ on 05-04-22

We'll Fly Away

By: Bryan Bliss

• Narrated by: James Fouhey
• Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 38
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 31
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 31

Best friends since childhood, Luke and Toby have dreamed of one thing: getting out of their dead-end town. Soon they finally will, riding the tails of Luke's wrestling scholarship, never looking back. If they don't drift apart first. If Toby's abusive dad, or Luke's unreliable mom, or anything else their complicated lives throw at them doesn't get in the way. In a format that alternates between Luke's letters to Toby from death row and the events of their senior year, Bryan Bliss expertly unfolds the circumstances that led to Luke's incarceration.

Great Story Except....

• By Willizz on 05-18-18

Please Ignore Vera Dietz

By: A. S. King

• Narrated by: Lynde Houck
• Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 107
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 92
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 91

Vera’s spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie Kahn. And over the years she’s kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything. So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone - the kids at school, his family, even the police. But will she emerge to clear his name? Does she even want to? Edgy and gripping, Please Ignore Vera Dietz is an unforgettable novel: Smart, funny, dramatic, and always surprising.

Moving, disturbing, and humorous

• By Julie on 08-26-11

The Flood Girls

By: Richard Fifield

• Narrated by: Kathleen Early
• Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 1,738
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 1,569
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 1,564

This snappy, sassy redemption story set in small-town Montana is "a wild and crazy debut novel by a talented young writer" (Jackie Collins), filled with an uproarious and unforgettable cast of characters you won't want to leave behind.

WOW! Just WOW.

• By chamilton on 07-09-16

Rats Saw God

By: Rob Thomas

• Narrated by: Johnny Heller
• Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 41
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 33
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 33

By his senior year, Steve York has come through the worst two years of his life. His parents have divorced, and his girlfriend has betrayed him. Worse yet, after running away to live with his mother in San Diego, forays into the drug culture have turned his A-average into a thing of the past. Steve's only hope to graduate on time and avoid summer school is to write a 100-page paper for his guidance counselor. Unfortunately, he has to write about something he knows, and all he knows well are the last two years of his life.

• By Mary on 06-26-09

• Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans

By: Dan Baum

• Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
• Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 130
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 113
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 113

Nines Lives is a multivoiced biography of a dazzling, surreal, and imperiled city, told through the lives of nine unforgettable characters and bracketed by two epic storms: Hurricane Betsy, which transformed New Orleans in the 1960s, and Hurricane Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings this kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.

Do not miss if you're interested in New Orleans

• By Kelly on 03-22-18

Fourth of July Creek

By: Smith Henderson

• Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Jenna Lamia
• Length: 15 hrs and 41 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 758
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 674
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 674

After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral 11-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah. With courage and caution, Pete slowly earns a measure of trust from this paranoid survivalist itching for a final conflict that will signal the coming End Times. But as Pete's own family spins out of control, Pearl's activities spark the full-blown interest of the FBI, putting Pete at the center of a massive manhunt from which no one will emerge unscathed.

The Ghost of Tom Joad & the Wrath of Grapes

• By Mel on 06-30-14

By: Michael Harvey

• Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
• Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 109
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 100
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 100

Kevin Pearce - baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton - was 15 when he left town in the back of his uncle's cab. He and his buddy, Bobby Scales, had just committed heinous violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn't want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin's future would remain as bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work, except in Brighton things never work the way they're supposed to.

Mystery gets no better.

• By William H. Harrington on 10-27-18

By: Sean Doolittle

• Narrated by: Basil Sands
• Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 195
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 185
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 186

It was one hell of an inheritance for former Chicago reporter Tom Coleman: a broken-down pickup truck, ramshackle campground, a canoe livery - and one pot-smoking, barely working employee he doesn’t need, doesn’t want, and can’t afford. But the truth is, after losing a child and a marriage, Tom doesn’t really care.

Narration is awful

• By Karen Martin on 03-09-21

Chasing Spring

By: R.S. Grey

• Narrated by: Alia Tavakolian, Ricco Fajardo, Jeannie Tirado
• Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
• Overall 4 out of 5 stars 228
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 208
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 208

I thought I'd left Blackwater, Texas, behind for good. I didn't belong in the small town, but my dad wouldn't listen. He dragged me back home in his beat-up truck and dropped a bomb along the way: Chase Matthews was moving in with us. He was the golden boy of my high school, my former best friend, and the last person I wanted sleeping across the hall. His presence was too great a reminder of the ghosts I was trying to forget.

This book bummed me out.

• By Lauren Helms on 07-06-16

What listeners say about The Essay

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Absolutely terrific!

This book was amazing from beginning to end. The story moved along nicely and although I knew it was going to be a feel good to the end story, I enjoyed it anyway. The narration is top notch too.

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Ecellent book!

From beginning to end, the author developed a wonderfully engaging story that makes you root for the main character and his brother. An excellent story line, very well written, edited and narrated!

• Carolyn Staub

A tale about a teen who overcomes adversity with some key characters in his life who support & encourage him. Narrator was wonderful.

• Amazon Customer

Justice by karma

karma, fate and a twist of justice. Is it the name or the game? Pictures painted by words - lifelike.

I really enjoyed this book. I would totally recommend it ......not my typical listen .....But it was fantastic

• Diane Hollifield

Aurthor really knew how to draw you in. Nice little read for me. loved it

• Momma Llama of 2

Great Book!

I loved this book. Highly recommend reading or listening to it. Wonderful storytelling and interesting story all around.

• Mary mckenzie

I could listen to this over and over

I know people say that they never right reviews, I really never have...until now. This book was one of the best books I have listened to in a decade and I listen to many. There were times I laughed out loud and times I teared up. Bravo. Listen to it, you won't be disappointed.

The Burden of a Bad Name in a Small Town

Born into the poverty of rural Ohio amongest the dilapidated and abandoned coal mines that once fueled dreams, James Lee Hickam had three strikes already against him. The strikes being his last name, synonymous with white trash in their Ohio corner, older brothers who had already ruined any chance of change in their generation and a woe is me alcoholic father whose big talk and shallow pockets kept in in trouble. Anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows the truth in everyone knowing your business and who your related to speaks volumes of your character deserving or not. James Lee Hickam had the odds stacked against him. But two teachers of different subjects saw something special in him and spoke up. This story is the power of the pen at its finest. It's one young man's journey to find out who he is and what he's capable of regardless of the last name he was born with.

Could not stop listening

I was transported to red dog Road and I could not stop listening. I was drawn into the story.

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The Essay: A Novel by Robin Yocum

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The Essay: A Novel Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

• ISBN-13 978-1628727173
• Edition Reprint
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• Publisher Arcade
• Publication date October 8, 2012
• Language English
• File size 931 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., skyhorse publishing.

It was never easy being the class dirty neck, the derisive term used for those of us unfortunate enough to have grown up along Red Dog Road, a dead-end strip of gravel and mud buried deep in the bowels of Appalachian Ohio. I accepted my social status early in life. After all, it doesn't take long for a kid to realize that he's the outcast. A few days in school are all it takes, really. The exclusion is obvious and painful.

My classmates didn't accept my offers to come over and play. Parents ordered their kids inside whenever I showed up in their yard. I was never invited to birthday parties or sleepovers. When party invitations were passed out in class, I pretended not to notice, or care, when the little white envelopes were placed on desks all around mine. Usually, my classmates were considerate enough to at least pretend that I didn't exist. The exception was Margaret Burrell, an invidious little brat with an untamed mane of black hair that hung around her head like a hoop skirt, a pronounced underbite, and a lisp, who in the second grade waved a handful of invitations in front of my face and said, "I'm having a theventh birthday party, Jimmy Lee, and we're gonna have ithe cream, and cake, and gameths, and pony rideths, and you ... ain't ... invited." She shoved her nose in the air, spun on a heel and strode off, confident in her superiority. It was not unusual treatment. When I was paired with someone for a science project or square dancing in gym class, they would shy away, trying to create distance between us, as though the mere touch of my skin might cause the onset of poverty and body odor.

In our society, you can no longer ostracize the black kid, or the fat kid, or the mentally retarded kid, but in Vinton County, it is still perfectly acceptable to ostracize the ones who are poor, white, and dirty. That was me. Like my brothers, who walked out of Red Dog Hollow before me, I quietly accepted my role as class dirty neck with no small amount of anger and frustration.

When you are the outcast — white trash — your mistakes are more pronounced and open to ridicule. Or, worse — laughter. Such was the case with the erection I threw every morning in Miss Singletary's first-period, junior English class.

This cyclical eruption was purely the product of adolescent, hormonal rampages that I was no more able to control than man can control the tides. I would think about dinosaurs or football, envision myself as a tortured prisoner of war, or review multiplication tables in my head. Nothing worked. Every day, precisely at eight forty-five, exploding like a damn party favor in my shorts, I sprouted a pulsating erection that stretched the crotch of my denims and left me mortified.

Across the aisle, Lindsey Morgan would stare at my lap with rapt attention, as though it were the season finale of her favorite television show. If I looked her way, she would avert her eyes and choke back laugher. Occasionally, if my erection was especially pronounced, she would tap the shoulder of Abigail Winsetter, who would pretend to drop a pencil to steal a glance at my crotch before bursting into uncontrollable giggles.

"Something you would like to share with the rest of the class, Miss Winsetter?" Miss Singletary would ask on each such occasion.

"No, ma'am, sorry," she would eke out, her face turning crimson and the vein in her temple pulsing like a freeway warning light as she vainly fought off the laughter.

I failed two six-week periods of junior English primarily because it is impossible for a seventeen-year-old to focus during such eruptions. When the bell rang at nine-thirty, I would get up holding a notebook over the protrusion and make three quick laps up the stairs, through the second-floor corridor, and back down, working off the erection before American history.

I knew, of course, that Lindsey was telling all her friends about my problem and they were having a grand laugh at my expense. It was just one more thing that Lindsey and her clique of uppity friends had to laugh about. Even by the modest standards of Vinton County, Lindsey's family had money. She also had friends and nice clothes, a smooth complexion, and straight teeth. My family had no money, and I had none of the accoutrements. This made me a pariah in her eyes. It wasn't that Lindsey was openly mean to me. It was simply the way she looked at me, as though my presence in her world was merely for her amusement.

Lindsey's father owned the Vinton Timber Company, a sawmill where my dad worked as a chain offbearer. By all accounts, Mr. Morgan was a benevolent man and a good employer. My dad was a perpetually unhappy soul with the disposition of a chained dog, and there wasn't much about life that suited him, particularly his job at the sawmill and Mr. Morgan. During his many drunken tirades at the Double Eagle Bar — a redneck place where the toilets never worked and pool cues were more often used as weapons than instruments of sport — my dad called Mr. Morgan everything but a white man and told anyone who would listen that Mr. Morgan locked the door to his office every afternoon and got head from his secretary, a plump divorcee named Nettie McCoy, who had hair the color of a pumpkin and a mole the size of a dime above one corner of her mouth. I don't know if the story was true or not, but I desperately wanted to repeat it to Lindsey just to see her get hurt, but I never did.

My name is James Leland Hickam, and I was born with a surname that was synonymous for trouble throughout southeastern Ohio. I hail from a heathen mix of thieves, moonshiners, drunkards, and general anti-socials that for decades have clung to both the hard-scrabble hills and the iron bars of every jail cell in the region. My ancestors came to this country from Wales in the 1880s and into Ohio from Kentucky just after the turn of the century. I am not privy to why they emigrated from England or migrated from Kentucky, but given the particular pride Hickam males take in their ornery nature, I can only imagine that my kin crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Ohio River just slightly ahead of angry, torch-carrying mobs.

My namesake and grandfather was an expert car thief and career moonshiner who died in prison when I was in elementary school and of whom I have only a faint memory. He had a thicket of gray chest hair that sprouted over the top of his T-shirt, walked on the cuffs of his pants, and smelled of liquor and dirt and testosterone. Years before my birth, he lost an eye in a still explosion and wore a black patch over the empty socket. When my mother wasn't around, he would flip the patch upward and treat me to a peek at the void, which was rank and dark and sunken, rimmed with a yellow, pustulant discharge that both repulsed and intrigued me to where I never passed up the opportunity to look.

I was barely six years old the day the sheriff's deputies and agents from the state department of liquor control led my grandfather away in handcuffs. He had spent the morning at his still, which was tucked into a ravine and hidden deep in the woods behind our home. I was playing in a dirt patch near the porch when I heard the clinking of glass and looked up to see him walking out of the tree line pushing an old wheelbarrow that he had lined with a quilt and loaded full of quart canning jars of moonshine. That's when an armada of sheriff's cars charged up our hillside and liquor-control agents swarmed out of the weeds, materializing like locusts on the wind. The wheelbarrow tipped and quart jars exploded on the craggy hillside as Grandpa Hickam turned and made a futile attempt to escape. He had taken only about four steps before he was tackled and mauled by a half-dozen law officers. As they led him to a waiting cruiser, his pants falling down to mid crotch, Grandpa's eye patch dangled like a necklace and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead, snaked around the open socket and disappeared into a three-day growth of beard. That was the last time I ever saw him alive.

In the years to follow, none of the Hickam males fared much better than my grandpa. My dad was a wiry, banty rooster of a man who never in his life walked away or backed down from a fight. While he delivered plenty of beatings, he earned as many in return, evidenced by a needle nose that pointed off toward Cincinnati and a patchwork of white scars that danced across his jaw. Nick Hickam liked to drink, shoot off his mouth, and attempt to prove his worth as a man by picking fights with men twice his size, usually with predictable results. Every deputy and police officer in Vinton County knew my dad and had laced him upside the head with a blackjack at least once. He had more public intoxication and disorderly conduct arrests than anyone in the county, and Nick Hickam was never one to go peaceably.

My oldest brother Edgel was eleven years my senior and serving a stretch in the Mansfield State Reformatory after being convicted of burglary and arson. The middle boy, Virgil, who was four years younger than Edgel, shared my father's penchant for alcohol and worked for Barker Brothers & Sons Amusements, traveling the South and Midwest setting up and tearing down rides at street festivals and county fairs. My male role models consisted of a moonshiner, a belligerent drunk, a convict, and a carnie. I also had an assortment of ne'er-do-well uncles and cousins occupying prisons and halfway houses around the state. These were the Hickams of Vinton County, Ohio.

Physically, I took after my mother, a squat, thick-chested woman of Dutch descent who worked the breakfast and lunch shifts at Hap's Truck Stop on U.S. 50 near Prattsville and whom everyone knew as Sis, though her real name was Mildred. Mom was no stranger to hard work, having grown up working on her family dirt farm in Scioto County. She had strong forearms and a pair of thick hands that could hold four breakfast platters at once. Two afternoons a week she drove over to the county seat of McArthur and cleaned houses for a couple of elderly women who couldn't get around very well and the wife of a county commissioner who claimed to be allergic to dust, though Mom said the only thing she was allergic to was work. I think Mom knew she made a mistake of titanic proportions when she married in with the Hickams, but she seemed resigned to her fate. Mom had a pretty face, eyes the color of a Carolina sky, and a sweet temperament, and when a trucker who had taken a shining to her asked why she stayed with a man who liked to drink and brawl and occasionally rake the side of her face with a backhand, she shrugged and said, "I'll be the first to admit that being married to Nick Hickam is not all sunshine and kittens, but when he's not in jail he goes to work regular, and that's more than you can say about a lot of the men who live on Red Dog Road."

Red Dog Road followed Salt Lick Creek for a half mile into the hills until it buried itself into the township dump, which was nothing more than a gash of scarred earth left behind by a long-forgotten strip mining company. There was no trash pickup for much of Vinton County and thus there was a constant parade of pickup trucks kicking up dust and heading past our place to dump trash and dead appliances and motor oil and God-only-knows-what-else into a rat-infested pit that reeked on hot days and was surely leaching chemicals into our wells. Before he went off to prison, Edgel took great sport in going out to the dump to shoot rats with Dad's .22-caliber rifle, usually to the great annoyance of Chic McDonald, who scavenged the dump for scrap metal and still-good items that he could drag back to his perpetual yard sale.

The houses that lined Red Dog Road were paint-starved and frail, looking as though a strong wind would splinter them across the hillside. More often than not, the roofs were corrugated steel and turned into sieves during a heavy rain. Wringer washers stood by the front doors, outhouses were not uncommon, and running water came from wells laden with iron oxide that stained sinks and tubs and toilet bowls a bright orange. Children, barefoot and dirty, played with mangy dogs in dusty yards strewn with trash and rusting cars.

Beauty was rarely a part of my youth. The exception was the visits to my grandfather Joachim's farm in Scioto County. Papaw Joachim died when I was in the fourth grade, and when he was breathing, like almost everyone else in Appalachian Ohio, he didn't get along with my father, so my trips to the farm were few. But the beauty remains engrained in my memory. It was a magnificent piece of land that ran from a bluff nearly to the Ohio River, where the morning fog rolled off the shoals and snaked around the tobacco plants on its uphill creep toward the white farmhouse, which stood in stark contrast to the dense green of its surroundings. The Silver Queen corn he raised was so nourished by the unctuous soil that it towered along his lane and created a cavern of green that by the end of July could only be penetrated by the noonday sun. The stone outcroppings in the pasture above his home stretched into a plateau lush with trees and full of deer and rabbits. It was like much of southern Ohio in its beauty. There was, of course, the exception to this natural splendor, such as the godforsaken stretch of Vinton County land on which we lived.

Our house was built into a steep, rutted slope on the tallest hill lining Red Dog Road on land so rocky and thin with soil that honey locust trees and foxtails struggled for footing, and copperheads sunned themselves on the exposed stone. The hills were once like those in Scioto County, lush with dense groves of oak, shagbark hickory, buckeye, eastern cottonwood, black walnut, and beech trees. But in the 1920s, the hills along Red Dog Road were timbered out, the tree trunks cut to ground level. The erosion that followed swept away the topsoil and left precipitous, moonscape slopes of rock and clay. The sun baked the surface and created dust as fine as talcum powder that swirled in the slightest breeze, often creating mini twisters that skittered over the rocks and covered your teeth and nostrils with a fine, brown film.

A quarter mile beneath our house stretched the abandoned Hudson Mining Company's No. 2 mine. It had been more than three decades since the mine closed, yet its spider web of shafts continued to collapse upon themselves with such force that our windows and water pipes rattled with each implosion. The natural resources above and below the ground had been stripped away, and it was unsuitable for farming. It was worthless, and thus the only property my family could afford. In 1961, my dad paid twenty-three hundred dollars for the dilapidated mining company house — a two-story, brown, asphalt-shingled home with a metal roof and a slight list to the west. The window trim and porch were painted an industrial gray, which blistered and shed with each passing summer until it had the parched feel of driftwood. The wooden gutters were full of dirt and maple saplings sprouted from them each spring, sometimes growing nearly a foot high before performing a death bow when the gutter could no long support the roots.

The only access to our house was a dirt drive gouged by years of runoffs that made a treacherous descent from below our front porch to Red Dog Road. The rusting corpses of every two hundred dollar car my dad had bought in the previous fourteen years lined the drive; saplings and thistles pushed up through engine blocks, and vacated trunks provided refuge for families of raccoons and possums. Each year, the junkyard grew and the drive became steeper and more dangerous as the spring rains washed away another layer of clay, pushing stones and mud flows across Red Dog Road and into the Salt Lick Creek.

Across Red Dog Road from our house was the man-made mountain of red dog — a "gob pile," in miner parlance — from which our road got its name. For dozens of years, before going out of business in the early sixties, the Hudson Mining Company dumped its red dog on the marshy plains that served as the headwaters of Salt Lick Creek. Long before I was born, Salt Lick Creek was a cool, clear-running stream that made a shaded trek through a canopy of poplars, oaks, and weeping willows. Trout and crawfish and freshwater clams thrived in waters that traversed eastern Vinton and Athens counties, emptying into the Hocking River two miles north of its confluence with the Ohio. The gob piles were full of sulfuric acid and eroded iron. As rain water seeped through the red dog, it collected its contents and carried them to the Salt Lick Creek, turning the pristine stream into an ecological nightmare. The runoff from the mountain of red dog caused the stream's waters to run orange, killing off the fish and plants. The massive roots of the willows drank in the poison and slumped into the waters. The mud flats and stones and tree trunks near the waters all became stained in dirty, muted orange. As a young boy, I watched dump trucks haul loads of smoldering ash up the hill. When they dumped the still-hot loads, plumes of white smoke seeped out of the hill, giving it the ominous look of a volcano primed to erupt. Even so, local boys still took sheets of cardboard or food trays and slid down its slopes of red dog like volcanic bobsledders, sucking red dust into their lungs and leaving their teeth covered with a powdery, red scum.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07M6RSYJP
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; Reprint edition (October 8, 2012)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 8, 2012
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 931 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 257 pages

About the author

Robin yocum.

Robin Yocum is the Edgar-nominated author known for his fiction set in the Ohio River Valley.

His next novel, The Sacrifice of Lester Yates, will be released in the spring of 2021 by Arcade CrimeWise, an imprint of Arcade Publishing.

He is the author of five additional works of fiction:

A Perfect Shot

A Welcome Murder

A Brilliant Death

Favorite Sons

Favorite Sons was named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. A Brilliant Death was a Barnes & Noble No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for both the 2017 Edgar Award and the Silver Falchion Award for best adult mystery.

Yocum joined the Columbus Dispatch in 1980. He worked at the paper for 11 years, including six years as the senior reporter on the investigative desk. He won more than 30 local, state and national journalism awards in categories ranging from investigative reporting to feature writing.

Prior to joining the Dispatch, Yocum was the associate sports editor of the Martins Ferry, Ohio, Times Leader, and a reporter for the Lancaster, Ohio, Eagle-Gazette.

He is the principle at Yocum Communications, a public relations and marketing consulting firm in Galena, Ohio, that he founded in 2001.

Yocum grew up in the Ohio River village of Brilliant, Ohio, and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University.

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Germany Rebuffs Claim Its Arms Sales to Israel Abet Genocide in Gaza

Germany argued against the accusation brought by Nicaragua at the International Court of Justice, but Germans are questioning their country’s unwavering support for Israel.

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By Marlise Simons ,  Erika Solomon and Christopher F. Schuetze

Germany on Tuesday defended itself against accusations that its arms sales to Israel were abetting genocide in Gaza, arguing at the International Court of Justice that most of the equipment it has supplied since Oct. 7 was nonlethal and that it has also been one of the largest donors of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.

The case at the U.N. court in The Hague pits Germany, whose support for Israel is considered an inviolable part of the country’s atonement for the Holocaust, against Nicaragua, which brought the allegations to the court and is a longstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Debate over Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been muted in Germany, whose leadership calls support for Israel a “Staatsräson,” a national reason for existence, and where people have historically been reluctant to question that support publicly. But the mounting death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza have led some German officials to ask whether that unwavering backing has gone too far.

Lawyers for Germany said Tuesday that the allegations brought by Nicaragua had “no basis in fact or law” and rested on an assessment of military conduct by Israel, which is not a party to the case. Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, an official at Germany’s Foreign Ministry and lead counsel in the case, told the 15-judge bench that Nicaragua had “rushed this case to court on the basis of the flimsiest evidence.”

On Monday, Nicaragua argued that Germany was facilitating the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by providing Israel with military and financial aid, and it asked for emergency measures ordering the German government to halt its support. The court is expected to decide within weeks whether to order emergency measures.

Some German news media said it was absurd that Germany should have to answer to accusations from Nicaragua, whose authoritarian president, Daniel Ortega , has jailed critics or forced them into exile, and has been accused in a United Nations report of crimes against humanity.

“Ortega, of all people, now appears to want to campaign internationally for the observance of human rights,” an opinion article in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said.

Germany is Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the United States. In 2023, Berlin approved military equipment to Israel valued at 326.5 million euros, or about $353.7 million, according to figures published by the economics ministry. That is roughly 10 times the sum approved the previous year.

The case in The Hague coincides with growing concern in Berlin that unconditional support for Israel has damaged Germany’s other important international relationships, especially as outrage at the civilian death toll in the war has grown around the world.

Stefan Talmon, a professor of international law at the University of Bonn, said the case has provided a rare opportunity for some Germans to discuss their discomfort with the Israeli offensive, which Gazan health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians.

The case “put the plight of the Palestinians more in the sight of ordinary Germans,” he said.

Sudha David-Wilp, a senior fellow and regional director at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, said, “There is always this concern over how not to slide into antisemitism, but there shouldn’t be this atmosphere where we can’t have this debate at all.”

Germany and its allies, she said, “see a need to defend other democracies like Israel but at the same time want to make sure their values are respected.”

Analysts say that the German government is slowly toughening its stance toward Israel in any case, not because of the court case, but largely because of growing criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war from its main ally, the United States.

Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recently said that Germany would send a delegation to Israel as a reminder of the duty to abide by international humanitarian law even in war.

For a country whose leaders have long maintained that the country’s past crimes give it a special duty to protect against genocides, it has been particularly jarring to be taken to court and accused of complicity in a genocide.

The proceedings in The Hague, which concluded Tuesday, were the third time this year that the U.N. court — usually a low-profile venue for disputes between nations — became a forum for nations to put pressure on Israel and support Palestinians.

The court heard arguments by South Africa in February that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and ordered the Israeli government to take steps to prevent such atrocities. The court has not ruled on whether genocide was in fact taking place, an allegation that Israel has strongly denied, but it instructed Israel to take steps to prevent it .

In a separate case, the court heard arguments on the legality of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank , based on a request made more than a year earlier by the U.N. General Assembly.

Legal experts have questioned whether the international court has jurisdiction in the case brought by Nicaragua. Lawyers for Germany argued on Tuesday that it does not, and should throw the case out.

They also said that Germany has tried to balance the interests of both Israel and the Palestinians, and presented figures showing that Berlin was among the largest individual donors to the U.N. and other agencies that provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.

“Germany has always been a strong supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people,” Ms. von Uslar-Gleichen said. “This is, alongside Israel’s security, the second principle that has guided Germany’s response to the Middle East conflict in general, and to its current escalation in particular.”

Christian Tams, a lawyer for Germany, denied Nicaragua’s claims that Berlin had increased weapons supplies to Israel since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. He argued that since then, Germany had approved four export licenses for military equipment, with three of the licenses for training and testing matériel not suitable for combat. The fourth license was for 3,000 portable antitank weapons.

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a political analyst. She is Sudha David-Wilp, not David-Whilp.

How we handle corrections

Marlise Simons is a correspondent in the Paris bureau, focusing on international justice and war-crimes tribunals. In almost four decades at The New York Times, she has been based in France and Italy to report about Europe and previously covered Latin America from posts in Brazil and Mexico. More about Marlise Simons

Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. More about Christopher F. Schuetze

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

The United States dispatched its top military commander for the Middle East to Israel after President Biden stated that, despite recent friction , American support for Israel “is ironclad” in the event of an attack by Iran.

A coalition of a dozen liberal organizations and labor unions sent a letter to the White House demanding that Biden end military aid to Israel until it lifts r estrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza , the latest indicator of shifting mainstream Democratic opinion on the war.

The Israeli military announced what it called a precise operation to kill members of Hamas in Gaza , a day after a strike there killed three sons  of one of the most senior leaders of the group.

Mobilizing the American Left: As the death toll in Gaza climbed, the pro-Palestinian movement grew into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States . Democrats are feeling the pressure.

Riding Rage Over Israel: Jackson Hinkle’s incendiary commentary  has generated over two million new followers on X since October — a surge that some researchers say is aided by inauthentic accounts by the online celebrity.

Psychedelics and Trauma: Thousands of festival-goers were using mind-altering substances when Hamas-led fighters attacked on Oct 7. Now, scientists are studying the effects of such drugs at a moment of trauma .

Turmoil at J Street: The war in Gaza has raised serious concerns within the Jewish political advocacy group about its ability to hold a middle position  without being pulled apart by forces on the right and the left.