It’s the summer of 1968, and Chris McAndrew should be relaxed and looking forward to his senior year of high school in Shortridge, North Carolina. But this year, the local black school, Booker T. Washington High, is closing, and all of the students there will matriculate at the formerly whites-only Shortridge High. The School Board fought long and hard against this integration, and when nothing prevented it, did everything they could to make this year as uncomfortable as possible for the black community. Class activities and trips are eliminated, and if any black player should even think of scoring the winning point in a football game, there will be hell to pay. Chris is convinced it’s just plain wrong to treat anyone this way, but speaking up means being labeled a “nigger-lover” by the rest of the whites in Shortridge, especially his girlfriend Susan Marks’s angry father, Wade.
But as Chris and his best friend Cam get to know the new students, especially Malachi Stevens, a particularly gifted singer and football player, it gets harder to be friends in the classroom but treat them as less than human when school lets out. Susan and the rest of the town continue to try to convince Chris that “they” are the ones taking everything from the white population and polluting it, but somehow that doesn’t make sense. The situation finally comes to an ugly head when a local NAACP representative is murdered and found by his young daughter, and a teenage biracial couple flee to South Carolina to get married, only to return under a shadow when they find out it’s illegal. With the Vietnam War hanging over their heads and the railroad industry that supports Shortridge sliding under their feet, the graduating class of 1969 must at least agree on one thing: the times, they are a’changin’.
This heartfelt and engaging coming-of-age novel is Meacham’s first, and is based partially on his own experiences growing up in Hamlet, North Carolina.
Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library’s catalog.
Few people look back on their high school years without cringing at least a little. Social mores often seem to be at odds with creativity, and your social group has a lot to do with what you experience and how you feel about it. For young women in Melva, North Carolina, one of the rites of passage is participating in the Annual Miss Livermush Pageant. Although Janice Wills, a junior at Melva High School, agrees to take part in this tradition mostly to make her mother happy, she also has an ulterior motive. Janice is a budding anthropologist and she reasons that one way to make the next few weeks bearable is to approach the pageant in the same way the approaches life: as an anthropological study. How else could she get excited about a festival devoted to liver pudding? Just as she begins to develop fascinating hypotheses about adolescents, Janice’s friends throw her a curve ball. All of her “observations” seem to them to be mean-spirited criticisms. Being around her is no longer fun. Only when she takes an honest look at herself does Janice find the beauty surrounding her and the value of livermush-loving Melva.
