Page 42 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
“You gonna tell your parents what we’re doing?”
The smile slipped off Isaac’s face. “They’ll find out soon enough.”
“So you really haven’t told them anything about your discovery?”
“I shared one secret with them,” Isaac reminded her. “Didn’t do anyone any good.”
“You don’t think this is different?”
They’d had this conversation three times already, and Isaac hoped this would be the last. “You really think they’re going to welcome this news? They didn’t take the last batch very well.”
“Your parents grew up hearing from everyone that gay people were hell-bound. That’s what their parents told them, it’s what the preacher told them. I’m sure they heard it in school. They need to get past forty years of brainwashing. That doesn’t happen overnight.”
Bella may have been right, but she didn’t have to live with James and Betsy.
“I understand they need time,” Isaac said. “That doesn’t mean I have to feel good about it.”
Isaac’s parents wanted to go back to the way things were. He knew this because his mother had told him so every day for the past three weeks. She bawled her eyes out talking about what a perfect child he’d once been. How he’d stayed by her side after Elijah was born and the demon of depression had done its best to kill her. How he’d stunned the preacher by reciting Psalms from memory at the age of four. How he’d won every academic award they gave out in the eighth grade—and how proud she’d been to see him walk up to claim them, looking like a little bitty president in his tan summer suit.
“What happened to my baby boy?” his mother would sob. “Where did I go wrong?”
“You never went wrong,” Isaac assured her. “I had a wonderful childhood.” He wouldn’t have said so if it hadn’t been true. That was the promise Isaac had made to himself—he wasn’t going to lie anymore. Not to himself. Not to anyone else.
When his mother reached to clutch his hands, her fingers were wet with tears. “Why can’t we be like that again?”
“I was always this way, Mama,” he tried to tell her. “What do you want to go back to? The days when I was hiding myself from you? When I was pretending to be someone I’m not?”
“You can’t tell me that tiny boy in that sweet little suit was a homosexual.”
“That little boy didn’t know the first thing about sex. But I promise you, he was the very same person who’s sitting here today.”
When the conversation was over, Isaac’s father had stopped him on the way out the door. James Wright hadn’t spoken directly to his son in ages.
“You’re killing your mother,” he told Isaac, his face a mixture of fury and grief.
It was almost more than Isaac could bear to see his parents suffering. They were good people. They’d spent their lives working to give him and Elijah every advantage they could. Their approval meant everything to their sons. But Isaac couldn’t change who he was to appease them.
“I’m not the one hurting you and Mom,” Isaac told him. That, too, was the truth. He could only hope that one day, they’d see that.
A truck roared by the Cummings porch, a cloud of black smoke billowing from its tailpipe and a Confederate battle flag slapped on its bumper. Everywhere Isaac looked, people wanted to go back. Back to a time when people like him either didn’t exist—or kept their damn mouths shut. Back to a time when there were plenty of confirmed bachelors, but nobody was gay. Back to a time when Black kids didn’t go to school with white children, and if they did, they weren’t valedictorian and theysureas hell weren’t best friends with the prom queen.
When it was announced that Isaac would be Troy High School’s valedictorian, there had been anonymous calls for a recount. Some parents just couldn’t believe it was possible that a Black kid could come out on top. They blamed everything from affirmative action to BLM. It was the students who’d eventually convinced their elders that there’d been no mistake. No one who’d ever seen Isaac in class would have doubted how hard he worked—or what he was able to accomplish. Still, even those who accepted the truth treated him like some rare bird—a flamingo that had flown off course and landed in their pond. Some were clearly worried that there were more on the way.
Isaac knew what those people saw when he walked down the street. They saw a future that scared them—a future where everyone had a chance (just a chance!) to be their best selves. If you were smart and worked hard, you might rise to the top. You could love who you wanted and dress as you liked. It was hard to argue with any of that in a country that proclaimed everyone to be free. So they had to turn ordinary people into villains. Black folks were criminals, their news channels shouted. Gay men debauched. Feminists were man-haters. Drag queens were groomers. Democrats were pedophiles. And all good Americans should take up arms against them.
Fighting the forces of evil—whether Black, gay, feminist, or fabulous—would take drastic measures, the hate-mongers told their followers. Books would need to be banned and laws broken. Some parts of the Constitution might no longer apply to everyone. And there were sections of the Bible they’d have to ignore, starting withlove thy neighbor.
They didn’t care if lives were ruined in the process. People like Mr. Minter, the high school’s musical director, would pay. Since he’d been run out of town for imaginary crimes, the school hadn’t put on a decent production. But for people like Lula Dean, that was a reasonable price. They had to do whatever it took to keep future generations from living lives more fulfilling than their own.
Instead of an equitable future, they preached a return to a glorious past. They walked around with Technicolor pictures in their heads—ideas planted by Hollywood of what the fabled South had been like. Theydreamed of aGone with the WindGeorgia that had never existed. Of white mansions with fluted columns and women in crinolines. Of mint juleps on the verandah and cotillion waltzes. Of happy Black folks tending the fields and benevolent slave masters introducing the heathen to Jesus. Of strapping young white men in gray uniforms marching off to fight for a cause that may have been lost but was no less noble.
The historical reality would have sickened them. Literally. After a month in the old South they would have been suffering from malaria, cholera, or yellow fever. The people they met during their travels would be dystopian versions of the characters from their favorite movies. Real-life Mammy would have spent her fertile years nursing white babies while her own were sold off to the highest bidder. Ashley Wilkes, the ideal Southern gentleman, would own a plantation designed to turn human flesh into dollars. The soldiers nursed by saintly Melanie would reek of gangrene after losing limbs to a cause whose origins eluded them. Pretty Scarlett would do her business in a chamber pot she kept under the bed.
This glorious antebellum South they yearned for never featured any of the ugly realities of the past—body odor, hookworm, rape, cesspools, death, disease, and whippings, not to mention the unrelenting poverty of the folks called white trash. Anyone who tried to open their eyes was ignored or vilified. They made heroes of sadists like Augustus Wainwright. They went around waving a flag they claimed was all about heritage. The flag for which their poor ancestors had fought and died, while the rich slaveholders who’d started the war were exempted from service by Jefferson Davis himself.
But there were uglier truths still—rabbit holes so horrifying even the most intrepid explorers of the past went out of their way to avoid them. Not long after his mind had been blown byThe Hemingses of Monticello,Isaac had stumbled across a passage in a Civil War–era diary written by Mary Chesnut, the wife of a high-ranking Confederate in Charleston, South Carolina:
The mulattos one sees in every family... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.
