David and Jonathan: The Price of Shame

David and Jonathan: The Price of ShameA Novella by Charles HarveyIn a small Southern town in the late 1950s, Ruth believes the Lord spared her son for a reason. From the night David is born, a warning shadows her joy: shame will sit at her table if she lets him wander too far. Years later, when David's closeness with another young man begins to stir unease in their community, Ruth becomes convinced that she alone must protect her son from what the world and God might do to him.
But protection can harden into fear. And fear can turn an ordinary Sunday into something irrevocable. Set against the quiet pressures of family and expectation, David and Jonathan is a literary novella about love constrained by silence and the devastating cost of believing you are right. Written in the tradition of James Baldwin's moral dramas, it explores forbidden love and religious fear in the rural American South.