Local author pens novel ‘Seven Full Days’ based on Ghana

April 22, 2019 | Sarah Heinonen
sarah@thereminder.com

Ferris Shelton, author of "Seven Full Days".
Reminding Publishing submitted photo

SPRINGFIELD – “How did anyone survive this?”

This was the central question that Ferris Shelton, now 59, asked himself when he visited the Elmina Slave Castle in Elmina, Ghana in 1998. Shelton said the conditions he saw there, preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stayed with him.

“When I went to the dungeon ­ – the sense of misery, the smell of urine and feces from centuries of accumulation,” Shelton said, it affected him deeply.

“This idea never left me,” he said. “It gestated inside of me for a long time.”

Twenty years later, Shelton has written a book, “Seven Full Days,” largely based on his reaction to the “very strange feeling,” he experienced while at Elmina.

In “Seven Full Days,” Jason, a successful black businessman, is haunted by dreams of an ancestor being processed through the Elmina Slave Castle, while during the day he struggles with his white bosses who demean him and his black co-workers.

While Shelton said he never had to deal with the racist comments and behavior to the same extent as his character, he has had experience with it. He said he was successful at Hasbro/Milton Bradley and his job there afforded him the ability to raise his children and buy a home, however, he was not a stranger to racist comments.

“I had to accept a lot of things,” Shelton said. “You let that stuff roll off your back. I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it,” he said, adding, “you can’t let it paralyze you.” Shelton said he dealt with it by showing them he was just as smart and capable as they were. He also said that he thinks his eldest son, who, like the protagonist is a successful black man in Atlanta, has been able to identify with his character’s situation.

Shelton, a Marine Corps veteran who is originally from Chicago, moved to Springfield in 1985. Shelton worked as a cost accountant at Hasbro/Milton Bradley for nearly 20 years, but in 1998, moved to Ghana for nine months for a job he had taken with the now-defunct company, Quality Grains. Five years after his experiences in Ghana, Shelton began work on his book.

“I don’t think I had a fully formed story when I started out,” Shelton said. He began his first draft writing in the first-person and said it was terrible. After gaining inspiration from storytelling masters, including Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe, he taught himself to write narratives by reading textbooks.

Working at Smith College as a database manager in the early 2000s, Shelton said being in an academic setting helped propel work on the book forward. He said he would make notes in the middle of the night, or at church. The current day sequences were written fairly quickly, he said, but the dream sequences took longer to write.

Shelton emphasized that the book is not about blaming anyone.     “Africans were just as blame-worthy as Europeans,” he said.

“I was trying to spin a good story, some suspense, some conflict. Good narrative fiction,” Shelton said.

To some extent, he said, people have lost touch with what matters.

“A 20-year-old rap artists – shouldn’t be our standard­-bearers,” said Shelton. He said there has been stagnation among black people since the 1970s and 1980s.

“I feel very strongly. Some of us are so lost,” Shelton said.

“My effort was to highlight the unique experience of multigenerational black people,” said Shelton. “As Americans, we celebrate Ellis Island, but my history didn’t come through that way.”

“Seven Full Days” is published by Levellers Press and is available on Amazon.

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