Theresa Franks celebrated winning her college scholarship by
leaving small-town Texas behind. But at twenty-four,
unexpectedly a mother, she limps home to the petty gossip,
her babysitting mother, and a job with the paper. Male
students do not risk the dreaded pregnancy trap, and the
efforts of women to escape are derided by locals. "Just
like all the other girls in this town," sneers the garage
attendant, who barely finished high school.
In WHITE TRASH the quality of the writing stands out from
the first page. Like Harper Lee immortalizing her home
town, the good and the bad, Alexandra Allred vividly
describes the people of Granby, white trash or not. Some of
my favorite descriptions include..."There was no telling if
they were ever good girls, but boredom and the disease of
little expectation had rotted them both to where all one
could expect was when the next would be expecting." "She
was the Paris Hilton of Granby. Talk about trash." Among
the female characters, I particularly delighted in police
officers Wolfe and Fox; a white woman and a Mexican woman
partnered and enjoying each other's company.
Casting aspersions on the entire community, assuring us
that most of the young people are dumb as dirt, Thia
somehow never explains why birth control hadn't entered her
own head; nor why it isn't present in a town where kids get
pregnant at seventeen. But it's the callous, unthinking
racism that sends Thia over the edge. When a black man is
killed at his own graduation party, and the town's ugliness
comes out into the open.
I loved the fainting goats all over the main street, and I
sympathized with a wife taking yet another battering from a
mean husband. Small-town Texas life is certainly not dull.
Thia does her job, adores her baby, and endures her mother's
attempts to fix her up with men. And by doing her job as a
reporter, she puts herself in harm's way - someone in the
town has too much to hide.
Alexandra Allred, also author of Damaged Goods, is an
assured writer who showed me a side of America I didn't want
to see, and kept my attention throughout. WHITE TRASH
deserves to be read as a social commentary, a crime story,
and a story of how you can, indeed, come home again.
It all started when someone called an African American
toddler "cute little niglet." White Trash was created in
tribute to this unknown child. It has a hilarious cast and
shocking storyline based on real people and true events in
a small rural town in Texas. When Thia Franks returns to
her home of Granby, Texas, the very place to which she'd
vowed never to return, Granby's worst and best elements
force the new single mother to face both her past and her
destiny. At first, it seems that nothing has changed:
Chester Kennedy's goats continue to run rampant through the
town, Officer Tina Wolfe stands accused of racial profiling
the growing Hispanic community, Thia's gun–wielding
neighbor believes a squirrel has it in for her, and the
town's local newspaper owner prints only what she believes
the citizens should know. But when a young black
man—an upstanding and popular citizen of the small,
east–central Texas town—is brutally murdered,
everything changes. Everyone is being watched. Everyone is
being judged.
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