These Heathens

I was a big fan of Mia McKenzie’s 2021 Skye Falling, so I was thrilled to come across her newest, These Heathens, (publication day June 15, 2025), on NetGalley!

Told from the perspective of Doris, a seventeen-year old pregnant Black girl in 1960 rural Georgia who had to leave school at fifteen to take care of her mother and younger brothers, we find out right away that Doris is pregnant and she is determined not to be. She is a churchgoer and obedient girl who loved school but doesn’t waste time pining for what she can’t have, but she knows deep down that she does not want to be pregnant. So she goes to see her former English teacher, Mrs. Lucas, to see if there’s any way she can help.

Mrs. Lucas sets up a plan where they will go to Atlanta, and a lifelong friend, Mrs. Broussard, will pay for it with a Black doctor she knows. So they set off on the train for the weekend to go get it done. Doris has never been to Atlanta, so she’s a little starstruck by Mrs. Broussard’s big house and the people she meets–a pregnant Coretta Scott King stops by when they get there, along with her fictional famous cousin, singer Julia Avery, who happens to have gone to Spelman at the same time as Mrs. Lucas and Mrs. Broussard.

So much is packed into this weekend–new boys for Doris to meet, along with going to a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Conference when the doctor is running late Saturday morning. She meets some bodyguards who are protecting people from the Klan, and overhears a meeting between the Klan and the Nation of Islam that she shouldn’t.

Plus, she saw something on Friday night between Mrs. Lucas and Julia Avery that makes her question everything she learned in church about relations between two women. And Mrs. Broussard is having a party on Saturday night, famous for Atlanta Black homosexuals since her husband is out of town. It also turns out that Mrs. Broussard didn’t actually know a doctor who could perform Doris’s abortion, so now she has to go back to Millen still pregnant and she doesn’t know how she can do that after all that she has seen this weekend. After a chance meeting with Dr. King himself, an unexpected person comes to her rescue.

I really enjoyed it and was amazed at how much McKenzie packed into such a short novel that occurs over a single weekend. Doris describes herself as “buxom,” in a positive way, so I will consider it fat-positive as well. I liked the weaving of real people in history into the fictional narrative, and was excited to read that the story is based on the life of McKenzie’s own grandmother. McKenzie is a great storyteller–she wove humor in liberally, to this story centering one Black girl’s decision to take charge of her own life, surrounded by the civil rights movement and circumstances that were not easy, while also including the stories of the queer people who have always existed.