THE MARTIN LUTHER KING MITZVAH: ADAM JACOBS’ WALK HOME
In my novel The Martin Luther King Mitzvah (to be published by Fitzroy Books in 2018), my main character Adam Jacobs is a twelve year-old boy with a crush on his seventh grade classmate Sally Fletcher, and he follows her home along Beach Avenue in the fictional town of Beachmont, New York. The inspiration for Beachmont is my hometown of Larchmont, a bedroom community in Westchester County and just up the coast from New York City.
In June of 2009, I took some photographs of my old neighborhood, including Beach Avenue right in front of the house where an author named Phyllis McGinley lived in 1966. I modeled a character after her in my novel, named Gladys McGinley, and Gladys’ house is on Beach Avenue as well, on Adam’s route home.
In Photo 1, you are looking north on Beach Avenue, back in the direction of Adam’s school, Beachmont Elementary. It’s about a ten-block walk back to school, but Adam has other things in mind, namely Sally Fletcher and her bouncing ponytail in front of him. In Photo 2, you have turned around in the same spot as Photo 1, and you are looking south on Beach Avenue toward Long Island Sound. Where the sidewalk stops and there is a right turn, you can see where I walked down Hazel Lane to my house (Adam lives on the fictional Oak Drive in the novel.) In Photo 3, you are almost at my house on Hazel Lane, which is two houses down from here on the right, but the house is hidden. It’s really a beautiful walk home for a kid.
If you go down to the end of those double yellow lines and go around the corner to the right, you will be on Kane Avenue, and my house was on the corner of Hazel Lane and Kane. In Photo 4, you are looking down Kane Avenue at my house on the left, where the double yellow line goes around the corner. I usually approached my house from Kane Avenue, but in the novel, I have Adam go down Beach Avenue almost all the time…because that’s where Sally is walking. In Photo 5, you can see the gate (which was an unpainted wooden gate and a lot older when I was a kid) that I opened in order to get to my house, which I usually entered through the back door which leads into the kitchen.
So this is my old neighborhood, and this is what I visualized as I wrote The Martin Luther King Mitzvah, which is a love letter to Larchmont and those great days of the 1960s, when Martin Luther King was giving speeches about civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, and Pete Seeger was singing his heart out for social justice.
