YA

YA Romance Across Segregationist Lines: Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

By Dahlia Adler / September 30, 2014 at 2:00 pm

9780373211333_p0_v2_s600Segregation and the battle for civil rights is a fundamental part of American history, showing our nation’s people at both our ugliest and our most inspiring. Lies We Tell Ourselves, a debut YA novel by Robin Talley, examines that time period with the story of one of the first fully integrated classes in Virginia in 1959, alternating between the points of view of Sarah, one of the few new black students, and Linda, her white classmate who also happens to be the daughter of a major opponent of integration. Every day is a struggle for Sarah to maintain her composure and grace in a world that doesn’t want her, and Linda doesn’t make it easy. But Sarah also forces Linda to see the humanity of the new students, and her beauty, and talent, and before long, the two find themselves becoming friends…and more.
Lies We Tell Ourselves is simultaneously an extremely difficult one and a very easy one. There are truly brutal scenes of violence and strong language, and what makes them hardest of all to read is knowing this is a well-researched book, and Talley’s depictions in fact fall right along the spectrum of desegregation experiences. It’s also supremely well written, well paced, compelling, full of gut-punching moments, and impressively skillful at teaching empathy without moralizing. I knew as soon as I finished it way too late the same night I started it that it would be a favorite of the year, and many months later, that’s still held up to be true.
For a little more insight into the research and stories behind Lies, I reached out to author Robin Talley, and she provided some tidbits that didn’t make it in to the book:

  • “Most of the harassment of the black students in Lies We Tell Ourselves comes from other students and teachers; only a few scenes show Sarah and her friends interacting with other adults in the community. One thing I would’ve liked to show more was the way many black students integrating previously white schools were harassed by white adults, many of whom would travel to these schools from neighboring towns or counties. In a lot of cases, those adults were the cause of the biggest problems. They were the major instigators of the violence surrounding Little Rock’s Central High School when it was first integrated in 1957. It was white adults, too, who screamed at six-year-old Ruby Bridges each day when she walked into her elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, and who made it necessary for federal marshals to escort her into and out of the school every single day.”
  • “Lies We Tell Ourselves only hints at ‘segregation academies,’ but these were a major part of life in the 1960s during the integration battles. Often, as soon as a court ordered a school system to desegregate, white parents in the area would rush to create hastily organized all-white private schools so their children could get an education without being subject to having black classmates. Many of these private schools continued to operate long after integration was enacted statewide, and some of them are still around today. The Fuqua School in Farmville, Virginia, for example, was created in 1959 as an all-white private school to get around the integration order in Prince Edward County. It didn’t admit non-white students until the late 1980s. Even today, only a tiny handful of students there are minorities.”
  • “Speaking of Prince Edward County, someone could write a whole other book about what happened there. A desegregation lawsuit that started in Prince Edward County ultimately wound up being part of the groundbreaking 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that struck down segregation laws. But the white leaders in Prince Edward County were having none of it. In 1959 the Board of Supervisors closed every single one of the county’s public schools to prevent them from being integrated. The schools didn’t open again until 1964. For the five years in between, white students were able to use taxpayer money go to the private segregation academy that is now the Fuqua School. Black students had either to move to a different county, piece together what education they could at home, or simply not get an education at all. It was horrific.”
  • “In cheerier news, Lies We Tell Ourselves makes a reference to a tattered paperback novel Linda finds in a library when she’s looking for information on homosexuality. The book she finds is Spring Fire, by Vin Packer, a pseudonym for Marijane Meaker. Published in 1952, it centered on a scandalous relationship between two sorority sisters and was the first of the “lesbian pulp novels” that were sold at bus stations with lurid covers throughout the 1950s and 60s. These books tended to have very sad endings, due to fears of censorship—in Spring Fire, one of the sorority sisters goes crazy and the other decides she was actually straight all along—but nevertheless these books were popular reading with lesbians at the time who had no other literary representations of their lives.”

Lies We Tell Ourselves is out today!