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The Dogwoods Danced: Coming of age in 1960s Alabama

It's 1963. George Wallace, the new governor of Alabama, has declared "Segregation forever!"Simon Klein and his family, Jews from St. Paul, Minnesota, have moved to the small town of Picketville, Alabama, where Simon must finish his senior year of high school. He 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, a Black girl. They have much in common. Sitting together on her porch swing, they talk about the Civil Rights movement, literature, the looming Vietnam War, and, of course, Alabama football. Eventually, they realize that they are romantically drawn to each other but keep their relationship a secret, until both of them have had enough of the town's social restrictions and take the risk of putting their romance on public display, to Simon's mother's delight, but to the angry epithets of so many others. 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 he now looks back on with fond memories, as it was a life-changing period in his life.ExcerptStanding in the line before the box office, I couldn't stop myself from looking across the way, to where the Blacks were, confused about why they used a separate entrance. Tony must have noticed this and said to me, “Is this the way it is up north?”“No,” I said, “it's not like this.”“They mix with us?” he asked. This was such a peculiar way of speaking that I hadn't understood him. He tilted his head, “them, over there, with us, in the same line?”“Yes,” I said.“Get used to the way it is down here,” he said. It was at about that time that Cecilia caught my attention. She was wearing a calico print dress, her hair was in that bu

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