White Lilacs is the story of Rose Lee and her family in the year 1921. Rose Lee and her family live in Freedomtown,
a small suburb of Dillon, Texas. The people of Dillon (who are all white) decide Freedomtown would be better as a city
park than as a home for African American families. A vote is held and the people of Freedomtown are forced to move -
receiving very low prices for their houses, land and businesses. In a matter of a few months, Freedomtown desolves as
its community of people are forced to move out of state or to another suburb of Dillon.
White Lilacs has a simplicity about the story - the setting and the characters seem so real and tangible, like
people you might meet anytime. The Jefferson family and their friends are hard working, honest people. Meyer's
prose builds upon itself, adding detail after detail "until readers nearly breathe the humid floral scents and hear the languid
voices so carelessly spelling destruction for a whole way of life" (Codell 1993).
There are subtle ironies in the book that convey to young readers what the time was like: Rose Lee's white friend
Catherine Jane Bell worries about dresses and cutting her hair in a bob while Rose Lee worries about losing her house;
Catherine Jane Bell's father is a Ku Klux Klan member; Rose Lee herself and some members of her family work for the Bell family;
the fact that Rose Lee overhears people at the Bell Family dinner parties dicussing how to bet dissolve Freedomtown. . . All
of these details convey the inconsistency of the time - African Americans were supposedly free and equal but in real life
they were anything but. Mr. Bell employs African Americans to serve in his household yet he marches with the Klan by
night.
Meyer uses the setting to convey so much about the time. From the Garden of Eden created by Rose Lee's grandfather
to the church, family homes, barbershop, church, Funeral Parlor and Sun-Up Cafe of Freedomtown. The town is alive, active
and caring. Seeing it disassembled at the whim of white townsfolk seems all the more unjust. The story Meyer created
is based on a real incident in the town of Denton, Texas. Though all the characters are fictional, Meyer truly brings
to life what it must have been like to live in the real Freedomtown (really called Quakertown) in the 1920's.
Rose Lee isn't without her own way of coping: a budding artists, she sets out to draw every building and aspect
of the town, upon the recommendation of a white teacher, friend and supporter. The drawings become an important record
for herself and others in the town, as she is even invited inside people's houses or requested to draw certain things.
White Lilacs is similar in story to Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, though both are different enough
to compliment each other as companion pieces in a unit of study.
Meyer, Carolyn. White Lilacs. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.
