          
                                  DIVINITY IN A BOX
          
                  By Bonnie Below Alcorn and Leonard J. Tidwell II
          
          
          
               The plot of _Divinity in a Box_ revolves around Varina Davis--
          whose parents in the 1960's named her after Jefferson Davis' wife
          and daughter and whose once prominent plantation family attempts to
          maintain traditional Southern values in the small, poor Northern
          town of Farmersville, IN--and Raymond Manis--a bi-racial male,
          raised by his single, white mother in East St. Louis, whose
          defiance and boredom with reality lead him to bartend in New
          Orleans.  From their sharply contrasting backgrounds, the pair
          restlessly evolve to the same spiritual point in life before their
          chance meeting in the Skip-It bar, where the story opens.
               Being raised under her mother's Southern Belle attitude,
          Varina finds her own existential spirit constantly challenged. 
          Plagued all her life with "ladies don't", she feels confined and
          limited; but without realizing, she conforms, nearly becoming the
          person her mother had planned for her to be.  After facing various
          obstacles (pregnancy, infidelity, abuse), she completes her degree
          at a nearby university and takes her first teaching job at the
          local high school where she befriends a free-spirited "skate rat"
          kid called C.J. who exposes her to the various inconsistencies of
          society's demands, especially those upon her as a teacher.  Their
          minds filled with unanswerable questions, the youth and Varina meet
          regularly at night in the graveyard outside of town to contemplate
          life's little contradictions.  From feeling trapped and abused to
          becoming the people Farmersville expects them to be, their lives
          parallel on several levels.  After an intense friendship, Varina
          accidentally kills C.J. in a car wreck from which she ultimately
          receives a large settlement. 
               Since Varina feels that Farmersville is miserably confining
          and her mental state after the accident will not allow her to
          return to the classroom, she takes her young son and flees
          Farmersville. She goes to stay with her friend and college mentor,
          Marie, who left the university near Farmersville to accept a
          position at Loyola in New Orleans.  There, Varina hopes to heal
          herself by writing historical fiction dealing with her family's
          attachment to the Jefferson Davis family; but soon after
          encountering Sting Ray Manis, the bi-racial bartender whose game is
          playing women, her novel research becomes two-fold: to investigate
          the family of her own namesake and to discover all she can about
          the interesting character of Sting Ray.  Because of her carefree
          spirit, trusting nature, and small town naivete, Varina exposes
          herself to the dangerous elements of New Orleans.  In the middle of
          her research, she is mugged and raped, which results in her being
          unconscious for a week.  Her misfortune, however, provides Ray's
          life with some critical direction that ultimately saves both of
          them from a living death.  In a diligent quest to heal themselves
          and to understand each other, they preserve a story for the future
          in the form of a mindchild--a novel.
          
          
               In our attempt to appeal to a diverse audience, we have
          labored to create a literary work that expresses present tensions
          arising out of both the distant and recent past. Internal and
          external conflicts emanate from differences in social class, age,
          sex, and race.  But most of all, _Divinity in a Box_ addresses the
          need for each individual to perform a personal quest to resolve the
          tension between desires and reality by finding that which will
          transcend them above the past and the present, above being rich or
          poor, old or young, male or female, black or white, above merely
          existing and into really living, whether in New Orleans or
          Farmersville.
          
