This story is about a
girl Alice Ann Moxley who’s family move to Jackson, Mississippi from Chicago. Accent and southern custom, it turns out, are the list of troubles in her new hometown. This year is 1964, and her FBI agent father has been sent Jackson to protect black people who are registering to vote. It was in the news that down south the Ku Klux Klan has burned down Negro churches and the civil rights workers have been murdered. A Negro girl named
Valerie Taylor joins her sixth grade class - the first of two black student at her new
school as a result of a mandatory integration.
Alice entice the
popular girls at school, whom she labels the
Cheerleaders and whose driving force is the tart-tongued Saran. But when she finds out how hard it is to penetrate the clinque she figures
Valerie , being the other outsider, will be easy to make
friends with. No such luck, as
Valerie doesn’t seem to be looking for friends, rather,
valerie silently endures frequent harassment from the cheerleaders, much worse than what
alice is put through, and soon
alice realizes that the only way to befriend saranne and the girls is to seem like a coconspirator in their plans to make
Valerie miserable.
Though
Alice personally experiences the dangers of racist motivations - her father is not very popular with the KKK- it takes a horrible tragedy for her to realize the complete ramifications of following the crowd instead of her heart.
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