FORGED: When Sugar Taste Like Salt

Slavery was wrong but it was not against the law. It was legal for over four hundred years in America. Segregation was wrong but it was not against the law; it was legal for a time in America as separate but equal. It is still practiced to some extend today. This goes unchallenged in West Monroe, Louisiana, a small rural racist town in the early 1960's, until one young lady who had envisioned, she would be "the first" forged her parents' signatures on a freedom of choice form to attend an all-white school to become the first black REBEL. In Forged: When Suar Taste Like Salt the reader learns how to deal without redemption or absolution when so much is deserved. There is no solution. The novel does not offer one. What it does is it tells a true coming of age story of a young precocious Negro girl testing the boundaries living in Jim Crow society and challenging the separate but equal laws in a most unimaginable way. Born into a large family with strong ties and religious values Jacqueline Snowden is the first to admit there is nothing exceptional about her growing up in segregated West Monroe, Louisiana mainly because nothing exceptional is expected of her. She cuts her teeth navigating her educational misadventures from first to ninth grade in segregated schools where she is supported by a community of colorful characters that enrich her sheltered life, so much so she doesn't even realize she is poor. Jacqueline is protected from a world she did not create yet she is conscious that something is wrong. Jacqeline is acutely aware that even though she is young, she is being internally called on a mission for change. At fourteen years of age, she takes it upon herself to forge her parents' names on a government sanctioned paper that thrust her into a world of desegregating one of the most racist high schools in northeastern Louisiana. This is a school which proudly supports the Civil War era, separatist culture. The school's song is "Dixie." Their school's mascot is Johnny Reb in full Confederate uniform. Jacqueline decision upsets her family and isolated her in a way that it jeopardizes her chances of graduating from high school, her mother's dream for all of her children. FORGED: WHEN SUGAR TASTE LIKE SALT is an autobiography that shines light on themes such as: civil rights, racial equality, family values, gender equality, sexual education, mental health, educational equality, and friendship, and positive self identity.