Yankee Girl

The 1960s in the United States was the period of the Civil Rights Movement with its freedom marches and riots. Drawing on her own experiences as the daughter of one of the 150 special agents ordered to Mississippi by President Lyndon Johnson, Rodman sets her novel in the tense days of 1964 when violence was at its height with the Ku Klux Klan intimidating and murdering civil rights workers.

Alice’s father is an FBI agent and he has been sent to Mississippi to help protect black people who are registering to vote. Meanwhile Alice’s school has been obliged to accept its first black pupils, Valerie and Lucy Taylor, and Valerie turns out to be in Alice’s class. As a ‘Yankee’ so much about Mississippi ways is strange to Alice and the reader sees things through her bemused eyes: why are black maids refered to as ‘girls’? Why can’t a black girl try on a dress in the dress shop as she can? Why will no one make friends with Valerie? The casual racism Alice encounters makes for uncomfortable reading.

Rodman shows how Alice struggles, not always nobly, with peer group pressure and the longing to belong versus her disgust with the bigoted views of the white children in her class. On the one hand she identifies with Valerie as another outsider and on the other she fears that supporting Valerie will mean bringing upon herself the hostility and cruelty so openly directed at this courageous pioneer black pupil. In the end, it is another girl who has the courage to stick up for Valerie openly.

Rodman’s well paced novel is unputdownable and the events she describes riveting, not least in the reminder of how recently such things took place – Alice is a Beatles fan and judges boys on their resemblance to Paul McCartney. That there are more stories to be told about this turbulent period of US history – and ones where the experience and inner dilemmas of the black characters rather than the white are central – is certain but Rodman’s novel is an honourable introduction. Young readers will also enjoy the novels of  Mildred D Taylor, for example, which reflect the experience of Black Americans in Mississippi from the 1930s-1950s.