Page 12 of Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Book
She was done by two-fifteen. Then she drove to the school and picked up her son. After a stop at the bank, they left town, just the two of them. She handed her son the only thing she’d packed. A copy ofBuffy Halliday Goes to Europe!
Chapter 5
Our Confederate Heroes
Everybody in town was talking about the Nazi like they never saw it coming. If they didn’t, it was only because they hadn’t bothered to look. Delvin Crump saw everything. He knew what was what.
Six days a week, he walked the same route through Troy. Never once in twenty years had he met with trouble. Most folks smiled and said hello when they saw him. Some weren’t all that personable, but hardly any were rude. If you’d followed Delvin around for a day, you’d have come away convinced that the people of Troy were the nicest on earth. As long as you didn’t look at their mail.
He’d had Nathan Dugan’s number for years. He didn’t need to see the packages from Relics of the Reich to know there was something wrong with the man. Dugan’s wife and kid, both nice enough, were skittish as two beat dogs. On several occasions, Delvin had spotted Dugan glaring at him through the living room window when he dropped off the mail on Saturday afternoons. Dugan never greeted him at the door. Delvin said a prayer for Mrs. Dugan and her boy. People said the two of them had fled town. He hoped like hell they were gone for good.
But it wasn’t the sick motherfuckers like Dugan who got to you. If you were sane, you knew those types were out there. It was all the little surprises that did you in. The pimple-faced teenager who’d started getting mail from a white nationalist organization. The Confederate flag you glimpsed hanging over the living room couch of a local lawman when he opened the doorfor a package. It was the woman you’d been friendly with back in high school who kept a Curious George doll in her front window throughout the Obama presidency.
The hatred hung in the air like a virus. Occasionally, you’d get a blast of it from the news playing on the television set of some sweet old lady. Half the county was hooked on opioids or meth, but the big story was always crime 150 miles away in Atlanta and the perpetrators were always Black. Twice a day, Delvin walked past the monument in front of the courthouse that didn’t honor the three generations ofhisfamily who’d fought for America—but instead commemorated a Confederate general who’d done his damnedest to destroy it.
Everywhere Delvin went—whether a football game or the grocery store—he’d spot the infected. It got to the point where he didn’t know if he could go another day without calling folks out. He started staying home so much that his wife and kids called him a hermit. He didn’t explain. He didn’t want them to know what he knew. More and more he just kept to himself.
It was sheer luck that he happened to glance at Lula Dean’s library as he passed. Lula was one of the people Delvin went out of his way to avoid. She’d greet him at the door on a hot day. Offer him lemonade and yammer on about the weather. Meanwhile she was making lists of books that Delvin’s kids shouldn’t be allowed to read. When you have everything, the only luxury left is taking things away from others. It was an indulgence that Lula Dean certainly seemed to relish.
Delvin wished he could make her listen tohisstory. He’d start with his great-great-great-grandfather, who had broken the law when he taught himself how to read. Remind her that when the public library was built back in the fifties, no one inhisfamily had been allowed inside. Show her the newsreel of his father, age ten, being spit on by his classmates the year Troy’s grade school was integrated. And maybe then she’d understand why Delvindidn’t wantanybooks taken away. His family had fought like hell for the right to read them. In the Crump house, the written word was sacred. There wasn’t a week that went by without his daughters checking out books from the library. His oldest girl, Jasmine, was readingTheir Eyes Were Watching God.Nahla, the youngest, had startedThe Hate U Give.
If those two books hadn’t been at his house, Delvin had a hunch they would have been yanked off the library shelves. Lula Dean and her goons had bannedAnne Frank,and now she was offering upThe Art of Crochetin its place. How do you improve yourself without challenging your mind? How do you leave a better world for your children? Delvin wondered. Then he remembered that was the point. People like Lula didn’t want change. They were perfectly happy with the way things were. He skimmed the titles on the top shelf of Lula’s little library. Then he came to an abrupt stop at the second from the right on the bottom.Our Confederate Heroes.
NotLeaders of the Confederacyor evenConfederate Heroes.Those would have been bad enough. No, this book to which Lula Dean had given her stamp of approval was about our heroes.Ours.Not yours, Delvin Crump. How dare you ever think you were one of us?it asked him.Sure, your family has lived on this land as long as anyone else’s. And yeah, y’all fought for us. But everyone knows you don’t really belong here.
Not once in his life had Delvin Crump ever contemplated burning a book. When he’d joined the army, he had taken an oath to defend the Constitution, which gave all Americans the right to free speech, including the backward-ass bastard who’d writtenOur Confederate Heroes. But it was time to take this piece of shit out of circulation.
Delvin dropped the book into his mailbag. That night, when his wife and kids went out to the movies, he fired up the grill. As the coals were getting hot, he opened the book to page one.
124 was spiteful.
Delvin stopped. He knew that first line. The second, too.
Full of a baby’s venom.
Carefully, reverently, he unwrapped the book from the dust jacket.There, emblazoned in gold on a bloodred background, was the book’s true title.Beloved.
Someone here did that, Delvin marveled. Someone in Troy, Georgia, had smuggled a story about the dark legacy of slavery into Lula Dean’s pretty purple library. 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.
Chapter 6
The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
Crystal Moore had a schedule, and she stuck to it every day of the week. She locked up her classroom at Troy Elementary at four-thirty and was home by five. Between five and five-thirty, she took off her work clothes and folded laundry or tidied the house. At five-thirty she started dinner, which was always on the table when Russell pulled into the drive precisely one hour later.
Thursday was chicken parmesan night. Russell’s favorite. But it was seven o’clock and he still wasn’t home.
Crystal hated to bug her husband at work. Russell managed the Piggly Wiggly on 441 right outside Troy. He always said it was like running his own country, and the Piggly Wiggly couldn’t have asked for a better king. No one loved produce like Russell Moore. He could pluck a perfectly ripe cantaloupe out of a pile with his eyes closed. He was a master of meat, who chose the very best cuts for his own barbecues and would often wax eloquent on the subject of marbling. And every Saturday, he liked to greet kids at the store entrance dressed as the Piggly Wiggly mascot, Mr. Pig. Each year around September, Crystal’s second-grade students would discover her secret identity as Mrs. Pig and pandemonium would briefly ensue.
Crystal and Russell had been married for twenty-five years, and she could count on one hand the number of times he’d been late for dinner.
“Hey, honey.” Russell sounded winded when he answered the phone. That alone was unusual. Managing the Piggly Wiggly might have been mentally taxing, but it didn’t require much in the way of physical exertion. “I just saw the time.”
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah. The supply chain is still all kinds of screwed up. We got a bunch of shipments in all at once. Gonna take us a bit to sort through them. You okay there?”
“’Course.” Crystal watched the cheese congeal on top of her chicken.
