The story behind: The Girl From the Red Rose Motel
By Susan Zurenda
The Girl From the Red Rose Motel tells a story in which two high school students from vastly different backgrounds who fall in love attempt to navigate complications readers might never imagine. Interwoven with the story of Hazel, an impoverished girl, and the affluent Sterling is the story of their English teacher, Angela Wilmore, as she confronts the multi-faceted challenges of the overloaded life that public high school teachers face every minute of their days, in and out of the classroom.
I taught for many years at a community college before I took a job at a local high school for the last decade of my career. The genesis for The Girl from the Red Rose Motel came out of my experiences at Spartanburg High School where I taught four classes of 12th grade AP English and a fifth class called Reading Strategies. My day consisted of polar opposites: extremely bright and typically privileged AP students working to get ahead with college credit earned in high school versus nearly illiterate teenagers, most from deprived backgrounds, trying to read well enough to pass the exit exam to graduate.
The wide disparity among my students and my desire to succeed in teaching both extremes was the inspiration for creating the characters of Sterling Lovell and Hazel Smalls, students from opposite socioeconomic backgrounds who meet when they are sent to in-school suspension and form an unlikely relationship. Sterling’s character is an amalgam inspired by a clique of eight very smart, troublemaker boys, most from affluent families, in my AP classes. They had acted out and terrorized their teachers from middle school forward. Although I did not consciously make the association when I was creating Hazel, I have since realized her character is reminiscent of a sweet, lovely but disadvantaged student named Rickeja, who in spite of her fourth grade reading level when she entered my Reading Strategies class, was determined to pass the exit exam for graduation. She succeeded.
One winter afternoon I gave a ride home to a student who had stayed after school to help me with a computer project and was stunned to learn he lived in a run-down motel. I was reluctant to let him out of the car, but he assured me that was his home. I later learned more about the circumstance of motels as residences for the homeless from a proactive guidance counselor who started a nonprofit organization to assist families living in motels in our city. I volunteered to help and served meals at Christmas time where I met and talked to people living in motels.
Hazel’s home in a dilapidated motel reflects similar living conditions for hundreds of families in my town, and hundreds of thousands throughout the country.
