We Deserve Monuments

“‘I teach,’ Mom said, swatting away her three degrees, her Georgetown tenure, her bestselling nonfiction book, and her superstar status as a nationally renowned astrophysicist as if they were yesterday’s weather report.”

Avery’s breathless recitation of her mother’s accomplishments shows both her appreciation for Zora and the role model she struggles to compare herself to. Time in Bardell reveals to both mother and daughter their relative relationships to academic success; Avery learns there is more to life than following her mother’s footsteps, while Zora learns to treat her Bardell childhood and her adult accomplishments as two parts of the same whole, rather than two separate identities.

“I thought about texting something snarky back. Something like, hey bitches, my grandmother is DYING. There were more important things to worry about than stupid AP classes.”

Avery’s priorities shift early in the novel as she gets to know Letty—and learns about all the things she has missed in the years away from her grandmother. Her ability to reprioritize soon after she leaves her DC friends’ orbit heralds her growing realization of the way these friends did not support Avery, instead expecting her to go along with their interests.

“I traced her maiden name with my index finger. ‘It’s so weird to see you with a different last name.’

‘What was weird was changing it when I married your dad. I was a Harding longer than I’ve been an Anderson, you know.’”

Avery and Zora’s disagreement about what is “weird” about Zora’s last name shows the differing perspectives between mothers and daughters, an ongoing theme in the novel. This lack of understanding of each other’s perspectives causes conflict in the novel until the different generations learn to communicate clearly about their experiences.

“‘There was an incident with the pancakes,’ he said somberly. ‘We don’t want to talk about it. They were good men.’

‘Pancakes are beyond gender,’ I said, and Dad laughed.”

Avery’s joking comment about genderless pancakes, and Sam’s accompanying laugh, indicate their family’s openness about discussing gender and sexuality. This makes it difficult for Avery to fully comprehend Simone’s worries about coming out to her mother, which in turn highlights a cultural difference between Bardell and DC.

“Simone and I are the only non-white faces in the room.”

Avery’s observation illustrates the de facto segregation in Bardell’s schools, as discussed in “The Freshman” interlude. The discussion of Bardell’s white students overwhelmingly attending the private school while its Black students overwhelmingly attend the underfunded public school is directly linked to desegregation, as white supremacists founded Beckwith Academy directly in response to Bardell High’s desegregation. This still-existent symbol of segregation and racism reflects the theme of Intergenerational Trauma and Privilege. This is not something that the Black community in Bardell can avoid confronting daily, as the town still functions as it did many generations prior.

“Seventeen years of Bardell ran proudly through their veins, and I was nearly dizzy with facts by the time we stopped near a looming brick building.”

Avery’s burgeoning friendship with Simone and Jade allows her to begin seeing Bardell from an insider’s perspective, rather than identifying it through all the ways it is different from DC. This ability to see the town for what it possesses instead of lacks enables her to deepen her friendships and understanding of her family’s history.

“‘White people didn’t want to visit the South and be reminded of all the evil shit they were responsible for,’ Jade said. ‘They wanted to be pampered. They wanted weddings on plantations. They wanted an idyllic Southern fantasy.’”

Jade’s comments about the way white people wished to erase the legacy of “evil shit” contrasts with her presentation of “an idyllic Southern fantasy,” which depends on maintaining emblems of slavery (like plantations) while ignoring their racist, violent history. The novel examines how this separation is mentally possible for white people, but likely impossible for Black people, whose lives and families are affected by the Aggregate Burdens of Racism.

“Amelia convinced herself everything was fine, repeated it like a mantra, and believed her husband when he kissed her in front of their bedroom mirror and told her she was as beautiful as a painting.”

“The Belle” interlude highlights the way Amelia’s initial discomfort with living on a plantation (and joining a family with a long legacy of white supremacy and racist violence) fades into complicity in perpetuating an image of Southern history devoid of its dependence on enslaved labor and anti-Black violence. This identity, as emphasized by Lucas’s comparison of her to a picture, illustrates how certain ideologies of white Southern womanhood are mutually dependent on white supremacy and anti-feminism.

“My heart panged at the relaxed ebb and flow of their friendship, how they could easily brush off their parents’ interactions like they had nothing to do with them.”

Avery’s jealousy over the supposed patterns of Jade and Simone’s longstanding friendship is ultimately proven incorrect. Though Jade and Simone eventually make amends, the fight between all three friends in the middle of the novel illustrates that neither of the Bardell teenagers can disavow their families entirely. Though they can overcome this difference, Jade and Simone must address, rather than just “brush off” the different experiences of being white and Black teens in a racist society.

“I didn’t always need to keep my focus forward.”

Avery’s decision to distance herself from the family motto, “focus forward,” helps her explore the things that are more important to her than academic achievement. This lets her embrace that what she previously saw as “distractions” may actually be intensely emotionally important to her, leading her to gradually accept that achievement for achievement’s sake is not her purpose in life.

“Weed wasn’t for girls like us, same as alcohol. Experimenting was seen as a shameful waste of time.”

The contrast between Jade and Simone’s casual use of substances and alcohol and Kelsi and Hikari’s disdain for substance use illustrates the different attitudes toward “wasting” time between Avery’s friend groups. Jade and Simone implicitly suggest that time enjoyed is not time “wasted.” Avery’s reference to “girls like us,” suggests, furthermore, that her DC friends held stark distinctions between “right” and “wrong” ways to be a girl, an attitude that Avery increasingly sees as closed-minded.

“I hid my tears from them at the domestic slave trade exhibit. I felt a full-bodied rage in the Jim Crow era section.”

Avery’s responses at the National Museum of African American History and Culture illustrate how Black history is not merely history to her; it is, instead, something that lives on and continues to influence her life and sense of self. That Kelsi and Hikari find her emotional reaction excessive, therefore, is a further layering of racist violence, as they scold her for expressing her grief over the mass violence perpetrated against the Black community over time.

“‘You know, Jade is trying to get the Bardell Historical Society to build a statue for her [mother].’

‘Like the world needs any more statues of white people.’

I laughed. Mama Letty didn’t.

‘You know, Jade’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘Her family is shitty, but she’s really nice.’”

Mama Letty here makes a broad statement about the overrepresentation of white people in Southern monuments, especially those people who were complicit in upholding white supremacy, as the novel shows Amelia to be. While the novel broadly agrees with Letty’s assessment (and no statue of Amelia is built), this conversation is intensified by the revelation at the end of the novel that Letty killed Amelia as revenge for the Olivers killing Ray. Only Amelia’s murder, however, is mourned by Bardell.

“She told me that before her, Ray was engaged to someone else. ‘Some light-skinned girl. Vivian […] His parents didn’t want him to be with me. They thought I was nothing but a dumb dark girl from the sticks.’”

Letty here references colorism within Black communities, in which ideologies of white supremacy contribute to the idea that being a light-skinned Black person is preferable to being a dark-skinned Black person. Though the novel does not present this prejudice as overwhelmingly violent as anti-Black racism, it nevertheless adds another emotional injury that Letty has faced, again feeding into the Aggregate Burdens of Racisms.

“Raymond’s father had always told him working for the rails was a Good Black Job.”

Raymond’s father’s comment illustrates the limited opportunities afforded to Black people in the Jim Crow era while suggesting that Raymond ought to nevertheless be grateful to have a position that ranked on the preferable side of those limited choices. Hammonds’s capitalization adds a wry nod to this characterization, which illustrates it as a commonly accepted term, a strategy that Black people might have used to endure the prevalent racist violence they faced, and a signifier of the time’s overt racism (which the text contrasts with subtler but persistent racism in the modern day).

“At the Perfect Spot, I’d wondered if I was falling in love with this friendship, but in the tub I knew.”

Avery’s recognition of the love she feels for her friends illustrates one of the many forms of love that the novel addresses and treats with equal importance. While the romantic plot between Simone and Avery is prominent, it does not supersede the friendship plot—even when that plot includes both Simone and Avery. Likewise, familial love is given center stage in the text, creating an implicit argument that all forms of love are important to understanding oneself.

“Do you know how lonely I feel sometimes? Listening to all the fucking white boys in school call me fat? Fucking Aunt Jemima? Can you imagine how much worse it would be if they knew I was a lesbian, too?”

Simone here describes the pain of facing an intersection of racism and anti-fat bias, indicated through the reference to Aunt Jemima (the emblem of an American breakfast brand, known for pancake syrup, which only changed its icon in 2021, due to longstanding criticisms that the emblem relied on stereotypes from minstrelsy). Her fear that she will also face anti-gay bias if she comes out highlights the novel’s exploration of intersectional identities and the particular intolerance that LGBTQ+ Black girls face.

“Ray told ‘em he was sorry, but the store was closed for the night […] You should’ve seen their faces! How dare a Black man talk to them like that?”

Letty’s painful recollection of the night Ray was killed highlights the self-importance of the sheriff’s men who killed him, an identity built by violent anti-Black racism and ideologies of white supremacy. The contrast between Ray’s politeness and the white men’s shock at his supposed “disrespect” highlights the entitlement of the white men and the omnipresent racial politics of the Jim Crow era.

“While Mom bemoaned being in the middle of nowhere, I liked how the small city felt manageable. Predictable.”

Avery’s shifting perception of Bardell illustrates how relocating from her hometown in DC allows her to gain perspective on her own likes and desires, rather than those of her parents. While Zora misses the bustle of the big city she chose to live in, Avery increasingly connects with a quieter locale, culminating with the reference, at the novel’s conclusion, that she works in national forests.

“Oliver men didn’t face consequences for boyhood pranks or violent bar clashes, of course not, not with the klavern on their side.”

This interlude causally invokes a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, whose support the Oliver family uses to perpetuate their racist crimes. The contrast of “Oliver men” with “boyhood pranks” alludes to a common criticism that when adult white men do wrong, their misbehavior is disregarded as boyish antics, while even young Black boys are compared to violent, adult criminals for any impropriety.

“Tallulah explained how the Beckwith Winter Formal was named the Cotton Ball for many years before certain people started to get so offended at everything. ‘It’s tradition,’ she said. ‘It’s honestly offensive that people are so offended by it. It’s part of Bardell’s history, you know.’”

Tallulah’s inversion of what is truly offensive about calling a dance the “Cotton Ball,” invoking a common crop of the South that was collected by enslaved people, builds on the novel’s presentation of the way white Southerners promote a vision of Southern history that erases the parts that white people find offensive. The ongoing pain of Black people, the novel presents, is immaterial to this vision. This emerges as another layer of white supremacist violence, one that privileges the comfort of white people over that of Black people, even when historical and modern-day crimes were committed against Black people.

“Tallulah was too emotional to register when Letty June added, It’s not about the fucking dollar and it never has been before leaving the building.”

Letty’s comment about Tallulah’s complaint that Letty wouldn’t let her owe a single dollar alludes to the long-term Aggregate Burdens of Racism, small and large. While Tallulah sees her request as minor and Letty as unreasonable for refusing it, Letty sees the history of white entitlement in Tallulah’s request. This is exacerbated by the knowledge that Tallulah has married into a family responsible for killing Letty’s husband. The local narrative privileges Tallulah, however, indicating how white perspectives are given precedence in white supremacist societies.

“‘I don’t know what to do,’ I cried. ‘What am I supposed to do, knowing this?’”

Though Avery spends much of the novel wanting to know more about her family, she finds the truth behind Ray’s death painful to bear, especially given her friendship with Jade. The novel suggests that while secrets are painful and burdensome, knowledge can sometimes be equally painful and burdensome. Even so, the novel frames the truth as something that must be told, so that family histories have context and Intergenerational Trauma and Privilege can be reconciled, at least in part.