Book Description

Summary As the Lily Among the Thorns, simply put, is about an eleven year old girl, Leigh Anne Bohannon, who, although born in the deep south in the state of Mississippi with its age-old code of southern honor and etiquette, thinks with a mind of her own. She is a nonconformist, in her own words, a “rebel”. To put it bluntly this southern girl was “born with balls”. She has a “rare and treasured mind”; she has her own opinions, having little regard as to the whims of society as she sees it, or of “proper southern etiquette”. She becomes best friends with a little black girl, Jenny Pearl Reynolds, who is exactly the same age as she. The first part of the book (of a little over three hundred pages) sets the scenario in Mississippi in nineteen hundred and sixty three, gives a description of Leigh Anne’s world, the world of the deep south, as well as an introduction to her gentle and hard working family, “Daddy Bo” her father, a wise and gentle man who uses humor as he teaches his family the hard lessons of life, Lillian, her Atlanta, Georgia born, college educated mother, “Grandmother”, who is constantly relating bloody handed down accounts of the Civil War, Monica, Leigh Anne’s beautiful sixteen year old sister who is a dainty, lady-like carbon copy of Lillian, but without the kindness or gentleness, Ben Ray, the younger Bohannon son, Leigh Anne’s uncle, a tobacco chewing “good ole boy” who takes over the book with his “ruggedly cute” personality. Leigh Anne meets Jenny Pearl at an old country store, Martins, and they, as soon as they realize they have the exact same birthday, become “friends forever”. The reader, as well as Leigh Anne, gets to know the Reynolds family, Gentle Reynolds, Jenny’s father, who received his name from his disposition, Lottie Mae, the mother, who gave birth to her only child in her middle years, her “change of life” baby, Jenny Pearl, whom the parents “dote” on. Jenny Pearl’s parents regale Leigh Anne and the reader with “colored stories” and of Negro life in the Deep South, past and present. As the Lily Among the Thorns is real and believable and opens the readers mind and heart as he too lives life through a southern white family and also through a southern black family. The reader is thinking and even speaking in the southern “redneck” vernacular, black and white. As the book unravels, it soon reveals that the Deep South is on the brink of desegregation. The formally slow moving, slow talking world is suddenly “stirred up like a hornet’s nest”, as its beloved world is intruded upon by a fast moving, fast changing world that is in direct opposition to “the old south”. Students in Leigh Anne’s school learn this “unheard of Yankee notion” and the book records the clashing of these two worlds as the students try to “inhale” the idea that desegregation is snowballing their way and the reader sees the reverberating chaos of these two worlds. The Ku Klux Klan plays a pivotal part in this new world, as does Leigh Anne and Jenny Pearl and they are eventually entangled in the murderous mess of both worlds! Leigh Anne, and eventually Jenny Pearl, lives to go “ramblin’“ or adventurin’“. The girls antagonize or “spook” the Ku Klux Klan into burning crosses in both their yards. But, whoa! First Leigh Anne and eventually her black buddy, Jenny, contend with an enemy, an ever present enemy in the form of a flabby, yellow-eyed sixteen year old low-life, John Marshall Davis. He torments Leigh Anne and Jenny Pearl at any and every opportunity. The shy black girl as well as the confrontational white girl are afraid of him, and who wouldn’t be afraid of ignorance and cruelty in the crassest form? But Leigh Anne eventually stands up to her tormentor and this verbal battle becomes physical and culminates into an actual life threatening beating, thus bringing to pass the first climax of the book. As the girls travel the highway of life, their “adventurin’“ leads to “sneakin’ up” on an actual clandesti