About the Book
Standing in line to enter a movie theater to watch "Dr. No," the first James Bond movie, Simon Klien sees a cute Black girl standing in a separate line that leads to the balcony, the "colored" section. A friend takes notice and tells him, "Stick with your own kind. You're in the South now."
It's the steamy summer of 1963. Simon's family, Jews from St. Paul, Minnesota, have moved to the small town of Pickettville, Alabama, where Simon's father has taken a job on a nearby Army base. Simon is as mystified of the South as Southerners are of a Jew. While gathering information for a story he is writing for his high school paper, he becomes friends with Cecilia Goodwin, the Black girl he saw at the movie theater. They have much in common, talking about the Civil Rights movement, literature, the looming Vietnam War, and, of course, football while sitting on her porch swing, Southern tradition. They eventually fall for each other but must keep their relationship a secret, until both of them decide they have had enough of the South's social restrictions and put their romance on public display, to Simon's mother's delight, but to the horror and of so many others. This is the year Governor George Wallace declared, "Segregation forever!" Told by Simon many years later, this coming-of-age Southern novel foretells the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and America's deepening involvement in the Vietnam War, all while Simon's parent's marriage falls apart, and he learns of the corruption, nepotism, and xenophobia of small-town Alabama of that era, a state that he now looks back on with fond memories, as he experienced a life-changing romance. Chapter One (Excerpt)
The next time I saw Cecilia Goodwin was the day she was on national television, looking much as I'd remembered her, though considerably older. She was wearing her characteristic gold-framed bookish glasses, her hair, streaked gray now, was drawn back, as always, in a grandmotherly bun, and she was proudly wearing a West Africa brocade dress on which there was a pattern of various-sized circles, all of different colors, in orbit around a larger orb that, to my way of thinking, represented the sun, her.
She had always wanted to be at the center of a movement, and there she was, her dream realized, standing before a crowd outside the Camden, New Jersey, police department. A week before, a Camden policeman had shot and killed a young Black man. Someone in the department had leaked the body cam footage of what had happened, and the footage had gone viral.
As I watched Cecilia speaking to the crowd, I recalled when we had first met, in the late summer of 1963, in Pickettville, Alabama, and then our time together. In January of that year, George Wallace, the new governor of the state, had given his infamous inauguration speech on the steps of the Capitol in Montgomery, promising, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" Those in attendance-all of them, save for the Black groundskeepers in their overalls-responded to his promise with thunderous applause. They truly believed that the South would rise again, and Governor Wallace would see that it did. The Black groundskeepers, however, maintained a stony, defeated expression.
Cecilia and I graduated from high school in Pickettville, but from different schools. I graduated from an all-white one, she from an all-Black one, in keeping with the governor's promise.
