Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

by Kirsten Miller

“My child is exactly how the good Lord made her. And any adult who suggests there’s something wrong with her can go straight to hell,” Beverly had informed Mrs. O’Connor. “You ever embarrass Lindsay again, and I swear to God, I will send you there myself.”

“The Nazis were monsters to kill little girls.” “I know that’s what people say,” Mr. Stempel told her. “But most of them weren’t. They were just ordinary people. That’s what makes them so terrifying. Monsters you can fight. But when the people who come for you in the night are your neighbors and coworkers and classmates . . . When you never know who’s sick and who’s not . . .” He shrugged. “Sick?” “Hate is a disease, Dawn.”

When you have everything, the only luxury left is taking things away from others.

How do you improve yourself without challenging your mind? How do you leave a better world for your children?

Maybe some folks in town were supervillains in disguise. But somewhere out there, at least one person was fighting for good. And that was a fight Delvin Crump had been looking for all of his life.

Her daddy had been a man of God. He’d even handled a snake or two in his youth, but he’d never censored his children’s reading material. As far as he was concerned, if your faith was shaken by foul words or sex scenes, then you must not have had very much to begin with.

The self-righteous ones were always the biggest hypocrites.

“Sounds to me you don’t want to think at all. You just want to believe everything you’re told. ’Cause if you sat down and thought it through, you’d know that I’m right.

“Yeah, well, don’t give her too much credit. She didn’t invent it. Using fear to control people is about as old as time.”

He’d been raised in the church. Not her church, of course, but he knew what the rules were. God had made them perfectly clear. You do not kill. You do not covet. You honor your parents. And men who diddle other men go straight to hell.

Folks in town said Wilma Jean was demented, which gave Lula immense satisfaction. In her prayers, she thanked Jesus that the woman’s wicked ways were finally being punished.

Darlene knew how things worked in Troy. Rich girls stuck together. Poor girls fended for themselves.

Beau took a step back from the window and grinned. There was nothing he loved more than seeing something he wasn’t meant to see.

Mood.

“You get to choose whose footsteps you’ll follow. Find a set that went in the right direction. Somewhere out there, you have an ancestor who made the world better. Whoever they are, decide to take after them.”

“The first thing you need to do, Beverly, is keep learning. There are people in this town who are stuck. There are some that insist on going backward. You want to make up for what your ancestor did? Learn everything you can and do your best to lead the way forward.”

To people in uniforms, trailer trash was still trash, no matter what shade their skin was.

Once she got an idea lodged in her head, there wasn’t anything short of brain surgery that could get it back out again.

There were always plenty of roles for actors with authentic Southern drawls. Evil state troopers. Evil sheriffs. Evil overseers. Evil army generals. Evil hillbillies. Evil corporate types. Evil grand wizards. Evil coaches. Evil cartoon characters.

“You got anything other than this gay shit?” Mitch asked, peering into the cooler. “Beer can’t be gay,” Jeb explained. “It’s a liquid.”

“Every firefighter carries Narcan these days. More often than not, we’re the first ones to respond to medical emergencies, so I see a lot of junkies. Last one was twenty-four years old. Good kid. Injured his knee playing football first year of college. Coach got the doctor to give him Oxy. Told him it was totally safe. When the season ended, he couldn’t stop taking it. And when the prescription ran out, he turned to heroin. He died, in case you were wondering. We got there too late to save him.”

Opioids are equal-opportunity killers. I’ve seen people of every description taken down.

“It’s a slippery slope between tolerating Nazis and becoming one, Mitch. Ask anyone who lived in 1930s Germany.” Mitch reached the gate. “I can’t. They’re all dead.” “And that’s a big part of the problem.”

Mara sighed. It wasn’t her first time at the racist rodeo. “You know what I think, Melody? I think you’re scared that your children are going to open a book and discover the truth. They’ll realize that the Holocaust happened and that slavery was worse than they ever imagined. They’ll find out that both men and women like sex and that gay and trans folks are just regular people. These seem to be the things you’re trying so hard to hide from them. Why is that?”

“I know you’re worried about Isaac’s soul, but we’re going to lose him while we’re here on earth,” Elijah told her. “And I really don’t think hell could be any worse.”

Lula had everything she needed to be blissfully happy. Instead, she insisted on taking part in a game that made her life miserable. It never occurred to her that she did not have to play.

Delvin declared. “Once Jesus arrived on the scene, all those Old Testament laws no longer applied. The New Testament tells us we’re supposed to follow Christ, not the old ways. And as far as I know, Jesus never said a damn thing about gay folks or barbecue. But he sure did talk a lot about love.”

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.

“Were they always so anxious?” The doctor lifted Keith’s shirtsleeve and swabbed a patch of his skin with iodine. “Nope,” Keith said. “They keep saying the world’s changed. But I’m pretty sure it’s them. I don’t remember them being so scared when I was a kid.”

The South’s greatest gift to the world is its culture. Half the music people listen to these days has its origins here. Hell, the South gave the world barbecue and you want to honor a slaveholding asshole who lost a war in the middle of the nineteenth century?

Then she thought of the women who’d survived. Who’d raised their children against all odds and refused to give in. And she imagined their strength inside her. Those were the footsteps she wanted to follow.

We’re supposed to be the nice people, aren’t we? How can we use phrases like Southern hospitality if we don’t really mean them? If we do, maybe we shouldn’t have statues that make people feel scared or unwanted.

Then one day he realized the war meant nothing to him. He didn’t believe in the cause. The Afghans weren’t his enemies. The battles that needed to be fought were all back home.

You had to know a person’s political leanings, astrological signs, and pharmaceutical history if you wanted to interpret their “news” correctly. Sorting the facts from the fiction was exhausting, confusing, and occasionally hilarious.

Every evening, Melody got down on her knees to pray for justice. She called out to the Lord and begged him to punish her husband and restore her rightful position in town. But it seemed even Jesus was ignoring her.

The two men shared the same values. Women were tolerated as long as they satisfied you and fed you and hid everything about themselves that you might find objectionable.

She’d always assumed most people saw things the way she did. Her father used to say they belonged to a “silent majority” that represented the best of America. Now Melody was beginning to wonder if there might be a much bigger group who’d been holding their tongues—people

But listen—why are you letting a bunch of old Greek men tell you what a hero ought to be? They’ll have you thinking you got to go to war and kill people to prove yourself. Women have always known better than that. Most of us get what we want without slaughtering anyone. In fact, now that I think of it, the best hero story I ever heard was all about flowers.”

I thought I knew a lot about our history, but every time I go there, I learn something new. A lot of it’s tough for people to hear, but it’s important, you know? It’s like finding out you were born with a health condition. Maybe you didn’t do anything to deserve it. But if you ignore it, nothing’s going to get better. You gotta look at the problem before you can fix it.”

I grew up with many kids who shared the same advantage. Contrary to popular belief, the rural South is home to countless principled, well-informed people. But I also knew kids who were far less fortunate. Some simply had no access to the truth and grew up in a vacuum that would eventually be filled with disinformation and conspiracies. A tiny but notable minority were fed a diet of hatred and lies from an early age. My heart breaks for those kids. How can you come to know what’s right when all the information you’re ever given is wrong?

But I fear there are more sinister elements at work behind the scenes. They know keeping people scared and ignorant is an effective means of controlling them. Removing books about the Holocaust makes it easier to use Jewish people as scapegoats. Banning works on the subject of slavery prevents conversations about what we owe the people this country so grievously injured. Convincing parents that novels featuring LGBTQ+ heroes can turn their kids gay will distract them from the fact that American children keep dying from gun violence and our schools are woefully underfunded.