I Followed Close Behind Her

The theme of infanticide, like incest, is one of the most abhorent and least understood conundruns. What makes up the kind of person who, like Susan Smith, would drive her two babies into the lake and leave them to drown? Is she, or are other women who have commited such acts, products of a society that expects too much from them? Are they tools of the forces of evil? Misguided souls we could and should try to understand and forgive? What goes into the history and development process of these women? The valley of Rosewood Hill, South Carolina, holds many secrets. Author Darlene O'Dell explores the cracks and crevices, the shining and the dark, ferreting out the personalities, the histories, the pathology of its people. Her debut novel leads the reader into unknown territory. America's south is still a dark and mysterious place; one hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, southerners haven't gotten over their grief of losing the Civil War. This grief has honed people to the bone, made survivors out of them, taught them how to live on both subsistence farming and subsistence self-image. They bear the imprint of poverty of spirit, land and soul, and what happens as a result is often a shock, a horror to the outsider.

Annie Jacquelyn Rosewood grew up in this territory. She was one of those who heard about the fall from grace of Susan Smith. She was there to hear about the deaths of the three adults and four children who were drowned in that same John D. Long Lake that Michael and Alex Smith had been drowned in--they'd all been there to view the children's memorials. An accident, it was said, of the second incident at the lake. The lake was her stompin' ground. She returns in the book to find what the land of Rosewood Hill could explain about the desolate atmosphere of my childhood. This book is about incest, loyalty and friendship, Patsy Cline, the Great Smokey Mountains, the background of women like Susan Smith. Annie says, I want to tell my story (and how it relates to the drowning of those children. ...had I told it earlier, the children Smith drove into the lake on that October night might still be alive.