by Robin Talley
They’re not looking at us anymore. They’re talking with their heads bent close together. Closer than a colored girl and a white girl really should if they know what’s good for them.
Unless they know more about what’s good for them than everybody else is supposed to.
I keep watching them together as the bus pulls off and rolls away from us. I keep watching them in my mind even when they’re too far away to see.
I don’t understand everything that’s happening, but I think I might be starting to.
And I think I know what Sarah meant when she said I’m the one who really decides.
* * * * *
Author’s Note
WHEN I TALK with people about this book, they sometimes ask, “Was desegregation really that bad?” I never know exactly what to say. Every state, every school, every student had a different story. There were schools in the South that integrated largely without incident. But there were also schools where the integration process was much worse than at the fictional school in Lies We Tell Ourselves. In Birmingham, Alabama, a black minister was beaten with chains and baseball bats when he tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white high school. In Norfolk, Virginia, a black high-school student was stabbed by a white man while walking up the steps to her newly integrated school. Fortunately, they both made full recoveries—but there’s no doubt that the danger faced by those involved in the early school desegregation battles was very real.
I grew up in Virginia in the 1990s, only one generation removed from these events. My parents were teenagers when the white public schools they attended were first integrated through the token desegregation efforts that took place in much of Virginia in the 1960s. The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling mandating the end of segregation came down in 1954, but many school districts in the South would remain effectively segregated for another twenty years or more.
A lot of schools today are still struggling with similar issues to the ones they dealt with decades ago. Sadly, discrimination, inequality and hate violence are very much still with us.
In my day job as a nonprofit communications strategist, I’ve served at organizations focusing on educational equity, gay rights, women’s rights and beyond. I’ve worked on issues ranging from affirmative action to fair pay for women to the military’s old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gay service members. Though the issues we deal with now are much narrower in scope than school desegregation, it’s amazing how often we seem to be having the same conversations today that activists had at the peak of the civil rights movement.
Lies We Tell Ourselves was a difficult book to write. I wasn’t there to witness the school integration battles, and I’ve certainly never experienced anything like what Sarah, Ruth and their friends do in these pages. So I did a lot of research, focusing on memoirs and oral histories from the people who were on the front lines. Those histories were painful to read, and this book was painful to write. But none of it compares to the pain, and the heroism, of the people who lived it.
When a student like Sarah signed up to be on the front lines of the desegregation battle, it meant every single day she was plunged into a situation that was uncertain at best and dangerous at worst. It meant saying goodbye to what you knew—to your friends, your community and often your safety. It meant surrendering your life as you knew it for a cause that was much bigger than you.
For white students at integrated schools, desegregation meant a major life change, too. Although some were as opposed to the integration movement as Linda and Bo, many white students had never given a thought to it until they found themselves facing closed schools or potential violence in the hallways.
Although the sources I drew from for this story focused on real desegregation battles in Virginia and in Little Rock, Arkansas, the setting, characters and situations in Lies We Tell Ourselves are entirely fictional. There is no actual town called “Davisburg, Virginia.” Sarah, Linda and the other characters in this book are not based on real people.
However, under a set of policies known as Massive Resistance, several school districts in Virginia did close their schools to avoid integration in 1958, including in Norfolk, Front Royal and Charlottesville. Another Virginia school district, Prince Edward County, shut down its entire public school system in 1959 and didn’t reopen its schools until 1964. For more on what really happened in those school integration battles, do a search on “Massive Resistance” or check out some of the other sources listed below.
Memoirs I read while working on Lies We Tell Ourselves included The Norfolk 17: A Personal Narrative on Desegregation in Norfolk, Virginia in 1958–1962 by Andrew I. Heidelberg; Students on Strike: Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Brown, and Me by John A. Stokes, about Prince Edward County, Virginia; Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High by Melba Pattillo Beals; A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls Lanier; The Long Shadow of Little Rock by Daisy Bates; and Lessons from Little Rock by Terrence Roberts. I also learned a lot from David Margolick’s book Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock and his article in Vanity Fair, “Through a Lens, Darkly.”
I watched and listened to interviews with the pioneers who integrated schools in Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, including several members of the Norfolk 17, as well as black students who integrated all-white schools in other districts. For those interested in learning more about the history of integration in Virginia, I recommend two videos: “The Norfolk 17,” produced by WHRO in February 2009, and “It’s Just Me... The Integration of the Arlington Public Schools,” produced by Arlington Educational Television in 2001.
I also relied on many newspaper articles in my research, including clips from the 1950s and 1960s and recent retrospective pieces. I found a Virginian-Pilot series on the Norfolk 17 printed in 2008, “When the Wall Came Tumbling Down” by Denise Watson Batts, especially helpful. Other newspapers I consulted included the Daily Press of Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Roanoke Times, the Washington Post and the Charlottesville Daily Progress.
Also of help to me in my research was a series of oral histories in the Virginia Black History Archives, “African-American Richmond: Educational Segregation and Desegregation.” I also relied on articles and papers by scholars including Carl Tobias, James McGrath Morris and James Andrew Nichols.
Other nonfiction books I recommend for those interested in learning more about this era include The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, Freedom’s Children by Ellen Levine and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson.
The values many of us take for granted today are the result of hard-fought battles that happened years, decades and centuries ago. Working alongside the civil rights leaders we revere today, like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of now-forgotten activists who sacrificed everything they had so people today could live the way we do. Every generation needs to remember that—and to remember that it’s up to us to make sacrifices of our own for the ones who will come next.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK NEVER could have been finished, let alone published, if I hadn’t had a lot of help.
Many thanks to my agent, Jim McCarthy, who picked me out of the slush pile and didn’t blink an eye when I sent him this book, even though it was completely unlike anything I’d written before.
Thanks to my editor, T. S. Ferguson, who believed in this book, fought for it and worked his editorial magic on it. Thanks also to Natashya Wilson, Tracy Sherrod, Lathea Williams, the amazing design team and everyone else at Harlequin Teen who helped make Lies We Tell Ourselves a reality.
Thanks to the librarians in the Virginia Room at the Arlington Central Library, who pulle
d newspaper files and video clips and copy after copy of vintage yearbooks for me, and who didn’t seem to think it was weird at all that I kept taking pictures of every page with my iPhone.
Thanks to Jessica Spotswood and Caroline Richmond, the very first people I told about this book idea, whose support was key to my getting started on that extremely intimidating first draft. Thanks also to all of my other awesome writer friends who read my early drafts of Lies, even the really terrible ones, and were kind enough to give me fantastic feedback despite said terribleness, including Andrea Colt, Jaclyn Dolamore, Kathleen Foucart, Amy Jurskis, Miranda Kenneally and Anna-Marie McLemore. Their help was essential to getting this book in print.
Thanks to all my writer-and-reader friends in the DC MafYA, the Fourteenery and beyond. With such a wonderful writerly community, this job doesn’t feel nearly as solitary as it’s probably supposed to.
Thanks to my parents, Ray and Jean Reed, and to my aunt Sheila Talley, who always supported my writing, and who shared with me their memories of Villager blouses, circle pins and growing up in 1950s Virginia under segregation. Thanks to Mary and Steven Smith, who listened to me talk about my writing for years and encouraged me to stick with it.
And finally, thanks to Julia, for understanding and believing in this book, and in me.
Questions for Discussion
Common Core aligned and suggested for book club use.
How does the theme of the title, Lies We Tell Ourselves, present itself through the course of the book?
How do the lies and truths that start each chapter relate to the story as it unfolds? How do they impact your understanding of the novel? Cite quotes and phrases from the book to support your answer.
What are some of the parallels you can draw between being black and being gay in 1959 Virginia? How are the two similar and different? Use evidence from the text to justify your response.
Sarah spends much of the book trying to protect her younger sister, Ruth, who is very strong in her own right. In what ways does Ruth exhibit her strength? Cite specific words, phrases, and actions from the book to defend your response.
Why do you think Judy is so much more accepting of the black students than Linda and the rest of their white classmates? Support your answer with specific character traits and quotes and phrases from the novel.
Why does Sarah fall for Linda, who spends much of her time speaking out against integration?
Sarah and Linda have grown up in very different worlds, but in what specific ways have their lives been similar?
Linda tells Sarah that she hates her father, but she is constantly reciting his beliefs. Why do you think that is?
Chuck becomes involved romantically with a white girl. How does what happens to him relate to Sarah’s relationship with Linda?
How is our current problem with bullying and cyber bullying in America’s schools similar and different to the racism and abuse experienced by the African American students of this era?
How does the shift in first person point of view from Sarah to Linda and finally to Ruth, impact the reader? Why do you think the author chose to do this? What does it accomplish?
How does the author use Linda’s school newspaper editorials to help move along the plot and shed light on both her character, and the opinions of the white segregationists of Davisburg? Defend your analysis with quotes and phrases from the text.
There are a variety of themes in this novel. List a few of them. What parts of the text helped you identify these themes?
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ISBN-13: 9781460330456
Lies We Tell Ourselves
Copyright © 2014 by Robin Talley
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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