Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books

Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding is a novel describing how a group of teenage boys stranded on a desert island try to create a society without adults. The group soon descends into savagery. Lula’s attempts to control the town offer a parallel to this adolescent, failed social experiment.

In this chapter, Lindsay’s mother, Beverly, bemoans Lula’s insidious influence over the citizens of Troy. Lula has been Beverly’s nemesis since high school. As the head of the school board, Beverly challenges Lula’s right to stir up controversy, but Lula has the support of the community. She frightens everyone into believing that the banned books will groom their children to become LGBTQ+. Since Beverly’s own daughter is a lesbian, she doesn’t want to draw undue attention to her family even though she recognizes Lula’s petty motives. She says, “Lula seemed dead set on using her time and energy to punish the world for ignoring her in the first place” (7).

101 Cakes to Bake for Your Family is a pastry book that could describe any number of similarly innocent cookbooks. It takes on a satiric meaning within the context of this chapter.

Wilma Jean Cummings, now 84, is annoyed with her six children. They’ve all begun treating her as if she were senile. Wilma is a former district attorney and criminal defense lawyer. She is sharp as a tack, but she also recognizes that she’s lost a sense of purpose in life. Her children are already squabbling over her possessions, and one has stolen an expensive painting from her wall. They are conspiring to have her declared mentally incompetent so that they can get their hands on her fortune. Wilma forms a bond with her cheeky great-granddaughter, Bella. Bella mentions that she picked up something from Lula’s library that Lindsey handed her. The dust jacket says that it is The Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette, but the contents are really A Girl’s Guide to the Revolution. It has inspired Bella to act out against the school’s restrictive dress code, which only applies to female students.

Wilma decides to act out too. She is known for the elaborate birthday cake she makes for her family every year. When she stumbles across an erotic cake book from Lula’s library, she and Bella conspire to prepare an eye-popping dessert. They construct an intricately designed, frosted replica of male genitalia that spurts whipped cream. At the cake’s unveiling, Wilma tells her goggle-eyed family that she has hired a lawyer to defend her against her greedy offspring. In the attorney’s presence, Wilma says, “Let me make something clear to my family, once and for all. I ain’t dead, I ain’t demented, and I want my goddamned picture back” (25).

There is no real book entitled Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe!. However, the title suggests an innocuous getaway romance that belongs in Lula’s library. The chapter that follows will describe a getaway of a different kind.

In this chapter, a real-life wife rebels against her neo-Nazi husband. Dawn Dugan has been well-trained to be a subservient spouse. She cleans the basement for her husband Nathan’s meetings with his Nazi group and then disappears out of earshot. Dawn is particularly unnerved by her husband’s young protégé, Logan Walsh: “She sensed something desperate about him. Like he was searching for something, but he didn’t know what. Whenever he looked at her, she could imagine him cutting her open to find it” (31).

Dawn’s husband frequently demeans her, and her only solace is her sweet-tempered son, Nate. By the time Nate becomes a teenager, Nathan initiates him into the secret meetings in the basement. The boy is encouraged to vandalize the home of a Jewish man who was once Dawn’s employer, and Mr. Stempel later shows Dawn a picture of the swastika painted on his door. His security camera caught Nate in the act. Dawn is mortified. When she confronts her son, he says that this was the price of his father’s approval.

A few days earlier, Dawn happened to take the Buffy Halliday book from Lula’s library. Inside, she found The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. The story enthralled her, and she was horrified to learn about Anne’s fate at the hands of the Nazis. Fearing that her husband is leading their son down the wrong path, Dawn makes a momentous decision. She takes all her husband’s Nazi memorabilia and stacks it outside on their front lawn so the entire town will know what Nathan Dugan has been doing. Then, Dawn and her son leave town for good, along with a copy of Anne Frank’s book.

Our Confederate Heroes isn’t a real book, but its title is closely linked to many volumes of Southern history that were written to perpetuate the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy. For one of Troy’s citizens, a new sort of hero emerges from the pages.

Delvin Crump is the local postman in Troy. He is Black and aware of the prejudice still lurking under the sunny exterior of the town. After delivering the mail for 20 years, he has seen the Nazi paraphernalia that Nathan Dugan collected. He is upset by the atmosphere permeating the country via the news networks: “Half the county was hooked on opioids or meth, but the big story was always crime 150 miles away in Atlanta and the perpetrators were always Black” (39).

Delvin is so demoralized by the behavior of his fellow citizens that he rarely goes out of the house anymore. Lula’s book ban only makes the situation worse. One day, he walks past the little library and notices Our Confederate Heroes. Incensed, he is determined to take the book out of circulation, but then he notices the real contents. Inside is a copy of Beloved. Delvin knows that somebody substituted it for a glorification of the Confederacy. The knowledge that not everyone in town is a narrow-minded bigot restores his faith in humanity.

The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (1995) by Ellen Fein advises women to use particular strategies to land the man of their dreams. When first published, it was criticized for being antifeminist and outdated. This chapter offers an unorthodox set of rules that lead to autonomy rather than dependence.

Crystal Moore is a grade-school teacher and the dutiful wife of Piggly Wiggly manager Russell. When her husband doesn’t come home one night, Crystal worries until she discovers that Russell is having an affair with one of his cashiers. As Crystal passes Lula’s library, she notices a copy of The Rules and feels that she needs a refresher course to keep her marriage alive. Inside, she finds a book entitled All Women Are Witches: Find Your Power and Put It to Use.

The contents intrigue Crystal. She goes into the woods to find some ingredients for a love spell, but the book advises her to set her intentions first. To her surprise, Crystal doesn’t know what she wants. Her time in the woods puts her in touch with her true feelings, and she has an epiphany: “Every patch of ground was a world of its own. Every life-form inside it was thriving, dying, or transforming. And all these years, she’d been trying so hard to keep things the same” (49-50). Once she gets back home, Crystal decides that she wants a divorce.

Chicken Soup for the Soul (1999) by Jack Canfield is a well-known inspirational title that offers encouraging aphorisms to its readers. The book hidden within its covers actually does offer consolation to a worried young man.

Elijah Wright is a high school football star who has a crush on Wanda’s great-granddaughter, Bella, the prom queen. He’s Black, and she’s white. This isn’t Elijah’s biggest problem, though. His older brother, Isaac, has just told the family that he’s gay. The boys’ parents, god-fearing Baptists, are beside themselves. Elijah fears that his brother will burn in hell. As he sits on a park bench waiting for Bella to jog by, he pretends to read the copy of Chicken Soup that he took from Lula’s library. Inside its dustjacket, he is shocked to find Rivals and Lovers, a book about a gay couple. Trying to understand his brother’s viewpoint, Elijah plows through the book but finds it boring rather than pornographic. He also doesn’t think that reading about gay lovers has groomed him to “become” gay. He still has a crush on Bella. When she finally breezes by and sees what he’s reading, she laughs when he confesses that he doesn’t feel gay at all: “‘Figured,’ Bella said. ‘Books don’t work that way’” (60).

It’s Never Too Late: Finding Health, Wealth, and Happiness in Middle Age is a fictional title the author created, but it relates to self-help books in the midlife crisis category. In this chapter, Lula seems the perfect example of a woman living by the advice in such a book.

Lula sees many people visiting her tiny library and congratulates herself on a job well done. She notes Elijah reading on a park bench across the street and approves of his choice even though she doesn’t approve of his older brother’s sexuality. When Delvin comes to deliver Lula’s mail, he offers to add a book to the collection, and she gives herself a pat on the back for inspiring this action. Lula is particularly proud that she has weakened the authority of the school board president (and her nemesis) Beverly Underwood.

Her dislike of Beverly began when they were in high school, and Lula wanted the last slot on the varsity cheerleading team. Beverly was the captain, and she denied Lula the spot after the latter told her some gossip about another girl, Darlene Cagle. Darlene had gotten drunk at a party and may have had sex with three boys that night. While Lula wanted to cast blame on Darlene, Beverly defended their fellow cheerleader and said, “You rely on your teammates to support you and to keep you safe. You know everything about them. You do not spy on each other. You do not tell tales. And you always have your sisters’ backs” (67). Beverly gave the last slot to Darlene, earning Lula’s hatred.

After Lula’s husband died and her twin children left town, she had nothing to occupy her time. When she randomly found a book with recipes for erotic cakes that someone left as a prank in the town library, she went on a personal crusade to clean up Troy. Lula thinks, “For the first time in her life, Lula had the power she deserved” (69).