These Heathens

An elderly Doris Steele opens the novel by addressing decades of rumors that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., fathered her child during a scandalous affair in 1960. She states flatly that Reverend King was not the father, that "the father was nobody," and that she must tell the whole story to set the record straight.

Doris takes the reader back to Millen, a small rural Georgia town of about 3,500 people. At 15, her mother, Babe, fell ill, forcing Doris to quit school and run the household for her father, J.D., and her two younger brothers. By 17, she has stopped dreaming of returning to school. Her days begin before dawn with cooking, cleaning, and laundry. In her few quiet minutes each morning, she writes turns of phrase in small notebooks, a habit encouraged by Mrs. Lucas, her former English teacher. One morning, an eccentric neighbor named Mrs. Haley places a hand on Doris's stomach and claims to feel life. Doris realizes she is pregnant. Though she fears God's punishment, she decides she must end the pregnancy.

She turns to Mrs. Lucas, the person she trusts most, who agrees to help and arranges for Doris to see a doctor through her old friend Sylvia Broussard, a wealthy woman in Collier Heights, a Black suburb of Atlanta. Mrs. Broussard has offered to pay. The appointment is the following morning, so they leave immediately. Doris writes a vague note for her parents and tells her best friend, Lena, swearing her to secrecy. They take the train from Augusta to Atlanta.

Mrs. Broussard's sprawling home, filled with art depicting Black life and shelves of books, overwhelms Doris. Mrs. Broussard, a light-skinned woman, greets them warmly but unsettles Doris with a colorist remark. She argues that children owe nothing to parents who chose to bring them into existence. The shock deepens when Mrs. Broussard reveals she believes in God only "in a way" and that Mrs. Lucas does not believe at all. In private, Mrs. Lucas tells Doris she believes in the possibility of a higher power but not the punishing God of Doris's upbringing, and asks whether it is ever acceptable to be selfish. Doris cannot answer.

That evening, Coretta Scott King and her famous cousin, the singer Julia Avery, drop by. As the women reminisce about their college years at Spelman, a historically Black women's college, Doris observes Julia trace a fingertip along Mrs. Lucas's neck in a gesture of unmistakable intimacy. Doris feels shaken but decides Mrs. Lucas remains the person she trusts most. Meanwhile, Dexter Porter, Mrs. Broussard's step-nephew and a Morehouse College student, climbs through the bedroom window; he was expelled after pawning family jewelry for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization. He invites Doris to the SNCC conference the next day.

The next morning, the doctor delays the appointment. Doris accompanies Dexter to the conference, where she observes a nonviolence training workshop and meets young women activists frustrated that men lead sessions despite women doing most of the organizing. She meets armed Black men who guard civil rights protesters, including Erik, a young man from Mississippi who explains that nonviolent demonstrators survive only because armed men stand nearby. Doris is drawn to him. Back at Mrs. Broussard's, while Mrs. Lucas is out, Mrs. Broussard reveals that when Mrs. Lucas's husband Robert died, the two women became sexually involved during the week of the funeral. Mrs. Lucas then cut off all contact until calling about Doris's abortion.

Mrs. Lucas takes Doris to lunch at Julia Avery's hotel suite. Julia tells Doris about a voice inside her that always asked, "What else?" When Julia scribbles a phrase on an envelope, the habit reminds Doris of her own writing, and she feels a sudden kinship. Julia asks for help with a lyric, and Doris offers: "You forgot me like a song from last summer." Julia says she may use it. Afterward, Doris tells Mrs. Lucas she feels she will burst if she cannot choose something for herself. Mrs. Lucas replies that the most important shift has already happened: Doris has begun to believe her life could be different.

Mrs. Broussard then reveals the doctor has canceled entirely. That afternoon, Doris accompanies Erik to stand armed guard at the home of a Black family threatened by the Klan for trying to register to vote. Later, at Erik's apartment, they stumble upon a secret meeting between representatives of the Nation of Islam, a Black separatist organization, and Ku Klux Klan members. The Klansmen ask the Muslims to help locate and kill Reverend King; the Muslim leader refuses. When pregnancy nausea forces Doris out of hiding, both sides draw guns before the situation is calmed.

That evening, Mrs. Broussard hosts a party attended by mostly queer Black women, including Julia and Carlton Locke of the Licorice Theater Company, a touring Black theater troupe. Doris secures a job as personal maid to Pauli McDaniel, the company's star. Later, she witnesses Mrs. Lucas and Julia kissing passionately. On the sleeping porch, Julia advises Doris to keep choosing, even when she cannot know if her life will be different.

At the SNCC conference reception, Doris bumps into Reverend King at the buffet table. He flirts with her briefly before Mrs. King arrives. Doris tells Reverend King what she witnessed at the secret meeting. Afterward, Mrs. King tells Doris she envies her husband's ability to give his life to a cause, observing that women's lives already belong to everyone else and are never truly their own. Her words crystallize what Doris has been unable to articulate: The pregnancy feels like God forcing her into more obligations before she can claim anything for herself. Doris confesses she is pregnant and does not want to be. Mrs. King quietly gives her the phone number of a trusted midwife, Miss Mitchell, instructing Doris never to mention Mrs. King's involvement.

The next morning, Doris learns the Licorice job has fallen through after Pauli punched Carlton Locke and was fired. Devastated, she sees no point in the abortion without a path forward. Mrs. Lucas delivers the novel's central argument: Doris does not need a reason for an abortion. She can have one simply because she wants one. Almost nothing in the world belongs to a colored girl, but her desires are hers, and she need not justify them. Doris affirms that an abortion is what she wants. Miss Mitchell, a granny midwife, performs a dilation and curettage at her small house outside Atlanta. The pain is severe but brief.

Back in Millen, Doris never tells her parents what happened. She picks tobacco part-time and sits armed guard on Mrs. Haley's porch after the neighbor receives Klan threats for trying to register to vote. Mrs. Lucas moves back to Atlanta. Julia sends Doris a record featuring her contributed lyric, and Dexter writes from Paris enclosing money for a plane ticket.

Narrating from old age, Doris reveals that the story mutated over the decades into rumors of an affair with Reverend King. Reporters approached her in 1973 after Roe v. Wade, in 1980, and in 1992 after Planned Parenthood v. Casey, each time with increasingly distorted versions. Doris reflects that what truly changed her was not Atlanta but the decision to have an abortion, knowing that what God wanted for her was not what she wanted for herself, and that what she wanted mattered more. She has written many songs, traveled widely, and chosen her own loves, never feeling small, but "so big."