Have No Shame

For eighteen years, Alison Tillman has known only the rhythms of Forrest Town, Arkansas: her mother's Blue Bonnet meetings, her father's endless work on the family farm, and the rigid line separating white and Black life in the segregated South.

In the winter of 1967, only months before she is to marry her high school sweetheart, Alison discovers the body of a Black man in the river, and the sight forces her to truly see the oppression and hatred she has spent her life looking away from.

When a quiet friendship with Jackson Johns, a young Black soldier newly home from Vietnam and working her family's land, deepens into something forbidden and dangerous, Alison is caught between the future everyone expects of her and the path her heart is drawn toward.

Set against the violence and prejudice of the civil rights era, the novel follows a young woman's awakening as she measures the life she was raised to accept against the one she quietly begins to want. It is a coming-of-age story about conscience, courage, and the cost of loving across the lines a community refuses to cross.