By Tim Lockette
Seven Stories Press, 2021
Paper: $18.95
Genre: Young Adult
Reviewed by Judy Sheppard
In this fast-moving, powerful novel about journalism, highly respected reporter Tim Lockette flawlessly channels a whip-smart, smart-mouthed 15-year-old Lisa Rives as she morphs from jester to reporter, from editor of a high school newspaper to witness to an execution. Tell It True is an apt title, calling up Emily Dickinson’s plea to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” and journalism’s burden to decide to tell it straight.
We all know, or have been, Lisa, professional purveyor of scorn, flippantly judgmental, prickly. All is vanity, she decides: the man-made Alabama lake she lives on, the popular kids’ glossy lives, her beautiful Alabama mother’s Southern Living-ready lifestyle. She becomes editor of the Beachview High School Bulletin as a favor for her only friend, Preethy, who draws cartoons for the paper but is otherwise a dreamy artist who draws only eyes, and as a joke. “What is more fake,” she muses, “than a high school newspaper?”
But she didn’t count on tough, hard-nosed Blandings (we never know her first name), the journalism teacher and newspaper advisor. At first meeting, she coolly refuses to be shocked when Lisa says the paper needs a catchier name—say, the Beachview Strangler? But the next day Blandings lowers the boom, telling a journalism class about her father, a Mississippi newspaperman during the civil rights era (presumably modeled on Hodding Carter Jr.). Perhaps Lisa isn’t up to this job, she tells her: “You don’t understand the power of the tool in your hands.” Lisa fumes until her father shows her stories about student journalists who broke stories that the “real” press missed. Lisa, for once, is humbled. “OK, sensei,” she tells Blandings.
Like this book, Lisa is intense and often dark. But her inner narrative (how did Lockette find this voice?) is so sharp, funny, and brave that you’re rapt. No authority figure is either safe from or equipped to handle this teenager’s dogged defiance. “Why are you doing this to me?” keens Principal Gordon when television vans descend on school grounds to interview Lisa, who’s become news herself for openly challenging Alabama’s capital punishment system and its attempt to define legitimate media. Her mother tells her frankly, “You might as well be in the news business. You won’t fit in anywhere else.” A prophecy quickly made true. When Lisa prints the political preferences of the candidates for student body president, chaos ensues, and it’s not the Republican or the Democrat the school turns its fury on. It’s the press, and particularly the female press. When even the most feminist girl in the school questions Lisa’s objectivity about the male candidate, Lisa’s shouted retort shames her. Silence falls. “Every girl in the school,” Lisa knows, “would know exactly what I meant.”
Undaunted, Lisa turns fiercely on her next story: the imminent execution of a Beachview High student who murdered two citizens years ago. She’s appalled by her pretty, image-conscious town’s preference to ignore it, and, like Willy Loman’s widow, believes that attention must be paid. But by whom? A high school paper is the only media left. Thus Lockette illustrates a terrifying fact of American life today: the death of local reporting. Don’t miss Lockette’s own moving cameos (in real life, he’s long been a thorn in the DOC’s side). He first appears as a voice on the phone that responds mildly when Lisa, rudely, scoffs that his paper is too small to influence the Alabama Department of Corrections. “There aren’t small stories or small papers,” he says. “Anybody can shake things up if they work hard enough.”
Lisa’s battle with the DOC to have the Bulletin and, by extension, herself recognized as the local press with its right to see the execution rings true. This is the DOC who, despite appalled comments from the Supreme Court, used experimental chemicals in an execution in January 2024. The state called it “textbook”; some witnesses called it barbaric. It comes down, as it always does, to the reporter to choose how much to tell. “Don’t you see?” the murdered girl’s sister asks Lisa wearily, explaining her steady crusade to keep her sibling’s suffering and memory alive. Yet even Blandings, who insists that Lisa not avert her gaze, has spoken in gentle Dickinsonian. “Just because we have a right to see it,” she says, “doesn’t mean there’s no point in taking care.”
Hard choices. Take solace in the image of small, valiant Lisa, clutching her notebook, staying on her feet no matter what ill winds the mighty summon. In a book marked by motifs of opened eyes and uncertain hearts, that’s the point.
Judy Sheppard is an associate professor emeritus from Auburn University’s journalism program. A long-time, award-winning newspaper and magazine reporter and a native Alabamian, she is completing a book, Prophets Without Honor: 20th-Century Alabama Journalists Fight for Alabama’s Soul, to be published by the University of Alabama Press.
