Articles The Gaede Bunch Neo-Nazi stage mom April Gaede and her singing twins are poised for stardom, of a sort By Susy Buchanan April Gaede wears a tweed suit the color of wheat, her light brown mullet neatly curled. Her twin daughters, Lynx and Lamb, are clad in matching powder-blue dresses with fuzzy collars, their blond hair in braids, impossibly cute and well aware of it. They stand and sing to a rapt crowd in shrill voices. If it weren't for the electric guitars on the stage behind them, the flag with the "life rune" symbol on it, and the white-power lyrics, they could be singing hymns in church. Instead, they are entertaining a room full of neo-Nazis. "Strike force! White survival. Strike force! Yeah," they sing, punctuating each "Strike force!" with miniature sieg heils. Some of the men in the audience return the salute, and when the girls finish, thunderous applause fills the room. Since joining the neo-Nazi National Alliance in 2001, Gaede and her girls have become prominent ambassadors of hate, thanks in no small part to Gaede's dogged determination to turn her 12-year-olds into racist pop stars. Gaede herself grew up on goat's milk and Third Reich footage in the foothills of Fresno (the family now lives in Bakersfield), the daughter of a rancher who branded horses with swastikas. A college dropout, she married a man she describes as a pot-smoking Icelandic pole-vaulter when she was 20, giving birth to Lynx and Lamb in 1993. The next year, Gaede rode a horse through the streets of her hometown wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boots, G-string, bunny tail, and a pair of bumper stickers slapped across her breasts as part of a contest at a local radio station. She was arrested for indecent exposure before a winner could be determined. Although Gaede's husband made for good "Aryan" breeding stock, she claims that their relationship turned violent, and they were divorced in 1996. Her one regret, she says now, is "the many years that I lost in which I could have produced four to six more children with that ideal eugenic quality that [Lynx and Lamb] possess." Since joining the Alliance, Gaede has occupied herself posting advice on Internet forums under the screen name Odin's Shieldmaiden and writing about parenting, Yule, and mad cow disease for the group's National Vanguard magazine. She looks a little like Martha Stewart when she smiles, and fancies herself a white-power version of the domestic goddess, the kind of woman who rides "into battle in armor cutting the heads off my enemies but home in time to make a tasty dinner for my man." But April Gaede is not content to sit at home forging bronze swastika cookie cutters or trying to make sure her laundry detergent isn't kosher like that of the other homemakers she corresponds with. Instead, the neo-Nazi stage mom focuses on forging her daughters into über-Olsen twins and preparing for celebrity as the girls develop. "I mean what young red blooded American boy isn't going to find two blonde twins, sixteen years old, singing about white pride and pride in your race ... very appealing?" she asks. And don't worry, fellows — these girls are no feminists. Home-schooled, they're taught to "realize that their main duty is to raise lots of White children" and other lessons their mom culls from 1950s textbooks she picks up at second-hand stores. Things are going well for the Gaede bunch. In the last year, the girls, known to their music fans as "Prussian Blue," made their first movie (a campy horror film called "Darkwalker" in which they play "creepy twins"), granted interviews to national and international publications, and launched their own Web site. They have performed at Alliance and Holocaust-denial events, county fairs, open mike nights and folk festivals. Although Gaede's parenting style and her twins' dubious musical talents have brought criticism in white supremacist forums and even spawned an unkind blog (www.prussianbluesucks.info), Gaede's supporters refuse to let a few out-of-tune instruments and off-key harmonies deter their dreams of glory. Alliance member Rich Lindstrom is a believer. He predicts the Gaede twins will "capture the imagination of young boys and girls all across the world. The impact could be huge and their influence will encourage 'copycats' ... creating an entire genre of pro-White music. ... I'm hanging on the edge of my seat with anticipation."

Hello, White People! Prussian Blue Look to the Future by Jesse Pearson Is there anything cuter than two identical twin twelve-year-old girls who have a band together? How about if they dress in matching plaid skirts—that ups the cuteness quotient, right? And what if they perform folky versions of classic racist songs by bands like Skrewdriver and Rahowa? Whoa! Now we are heading into the cute danger zone. And the best part of it all? These girls have the talent to back it all up. They sing like angels, harmonize like only siblings can, and are more adept at their chosen instruments than most one-hit-wonder crap. "Disco punk," you say? "New wave of necro metal?" Those are passing fancies. Prussian Blue are doing nothing short of trying to change the course of humanity. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Lynx and Lamb, the girls of Prussian Blue. VICE: Hi girls. So, who plays what? Lynx: I play violin and sing. Lamb: And I play the guitar and sing. We've been playing for two years now. Your set is a mix of covers by white-power bands, some traditional fare, and some originals. How do you determine a song that you would like to cover? Usually our friends suggest songs that they'd like to hear us sing. We choose ones that we like and that can easily be changed to acoustic. And they have to be songs that have meaning to us and our listeners and have a good message for White youngsters. "The Snow Fell" is such a classic Skrewdriver song. How do you take something by a band that used traditional rock instrumentation and adapt it to the instruments that you play? Well, we just play it, only using an acoustic guitar instead of an electric. Lynx figures out where to put in the violin parts. We do stuff until it sounds good. Sometimes we need to change the melody of the song a bit, like we did on our rendition of "The Snow Fell." What sort of gigs do you generally play? I know that you played the Folk the System 2004 festival, which was sponsored by the National Alliance, but do you also play in any local establishments or at county fairs? Sure, we just finished playing at a local county fair. We also play at open mic nights and Renaissance fairs. We play a lot of National Alliance events, like meetings and conferences, as well as other events like a recent IHR (Institute of Historical Review) conference. If you play to a crowd that's mixed in terms of political views, are there certain songs that might not make it into the set? We do play a slightly different set when we play a mainstream venue than we do when we play in front of racially conscious people. Do you feel the need to tone down your politics when playing for certain crowds? It's not that we're embarrassed about our message or our songs that are more obviously pro-white, it's that we know that if certain people complained about the content of our songs (like if we use the term "Aryan"), we might not be allowed to play again at that venue. What do you think is the most important social issue facing the white race right now? Do you have any songs that address this issue? Not having enough white babies born to replace ourselves and generally not having good-quality white people being born. It seems like smart white girls who have good eugenics are more interested in making money in a career or partying than getting married and having a family. And yes, we are working on some new songs about this issue. Please tell me the significance of the name Prussian Blue. Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth. What are the plans for the near future of Prussian Blue? Are you going to make a record soon? Resistance Records will be selling our new CD, Fragment of the Future—the title is from a Colin Jordan [Britain's leading race dissident] quote. It should be out by the end of the year. If you want something now, Resistance is also selling a DVD called Gathering of the Gods that was filmed last year in Perris, California. It has us singing a lot of our songs, but we have improved a lot since then! What are some of your favorite groups, either current or past? We really like Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Green Day, AC/DC, and Alison Krauss. For racial groups we like Final War, CutThroat, Saga, Max Resist, Youngland, Brutal Attack, and of course Skrewdriver. But our all-time favorite is Barney the purple dinosaur!

Minor Threat

Lamb and Lynx Gaede are like a lot of 13-year-old girls. Except that they love Hitler and sing songs glorifying white supremacy. Aaron Gell confronts ethnic cleansing’s hottest act, Prussian Blue.

It’s that eerie combination of darkness and light, of goofy innocence and twisted menace, that makes Prussian Blue like a scary clown, which might explain why the sparkly eighth graders have been transformed into internationally recognized spokeskids for hate.

The morning after the Primetime debut, the Gaedes' phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Grandpa Bill had gotten a taste of fame himself not long before (for taking a chain saw to a tree near his property that was drawing crowds due to its resemblance to the Virgin Mary), but that was nothing compared with what the girls had stirred up. "The call-waiting was like beep-beep-beep," April reports. "Every single news thing that you’ve ever heard of called us." Dr. Phil’s people left a message, she says. And Paula Zahn’s. Newsweek. Good Morning America. Elle Girl. The Los Angeles Times. The booker for Maury even sent flowers, as though the Gaedes would really fall for something like that. April ignored them all, planning to lie low for a while. She relented only for Teen People (the girls begged her), especially after, she says, someone at the magazine offered to do an "as told to" piece that April could see before it went to press.

"Primetime mainstreamed us!" April marvels. "I don’t think a white-pride band has ever gotten this kind of media attention before. I mean, these two girls have become some of the most powerful people in white nationalism."

The news wasn’t all good, however. April’s ex-husband Kris Richard Lingelser was soon enjoying a bit of limelight, too, telling Inside Edition he was planning to sue for custody of his daughters. Then the Teen People story was killed after the terms of the offer were reported in the press.

Still, e-mail to the Prussian Blue Web site was running three-quarters positive, April estimates. The really nice letters got printed out and put in a binder, Lamb says, "so if we ever get bummed out because someone says, ‘I wish you would die,’ there’s some positive stuff to look at."

Several weeks before the Primetime segment aired, I arrived in Bakersfield, California, where April and the girls then lived, to watch Prussian Blue perform at the nearby Kern County Fair. April had sneaked her daughters onto the bill without revealing their political affiliations. "The kids’ songs will be enjoyed by all types and races, with no knowledge they are listening to some Skrewdriver," she said, referring to the '80s British neo-Nazi band. "We did this last year, and it was kind of funny to see everyone listening to the girls’ message and the confused looks on some of their faces."

Though they seem like a matching set to the untrained eye, the girls—who like to append a diminutive -ie to their names—are actually fraternal twins. "Lynx tends to be more of the girlie-girlie glamour girl," April tells me, "and Lamb is more the sporty rock ’n’ roller." They are in the first bud of womanhood—pretty and blond, with braces on their teeth, a layer of baby fat softening their features. They can toggle in an instant between giggling maniacally at some secret joke and moping around the house, sighing in boredom.

Mostly, however, the new standard-bearers for the white race are just big doofuses, in that cross-eyed way that only 13-year-olds, swimming in hormones and anxious about growing up, can be. They like Avril Lavigne and the Killers and playing with their 15-month-old half sister, Dresden. Another current pastime is swapping lines from Napoleon Dynamite: "What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?" April asks, to which the girls reply in unison, "Whatever I feel like I want to do—gosh!"

Typical kids, for the most part—except for the odd visit from the FBI, which showed up recently looking for copies of mash notes the girls had received from Matthew Hale, the former self-proclaimed pontifex maximus of the World Church of the Creator (now serving a forty-year prison sentence for soliciting the murder of a federal judge). That, and the fact that they would really like it if white people could have their very own nation (the Pacific Northwest would be awesome), free from the degenerate and corrupting influence of Jews, blacks, and other "muds," the neat catchall applied to basically everyone else. They live in fear that rampant race mixing will put blue-eyed blonds on the endangered-species list within a few generations. And if it takes a race war to preserve their people and make, say, Portland, Oregon, a whiter shade of pale, well, let’s get it on. This fantasy is a leitmotif of their songs. On "Victory Day," from Prussian Blue’s debut record, Fragment of the Future, the girls apply their tremulous voices to a heartfelt ode to "a great war, a bloody but holy day." When I ask Lamb about the song, she says, "Um... well, that was a cover of Rahowa," referring to a defunct Canadian white-power band whose name stood for Racial Holy War. How does she interpret it? She knits her brow. "I think, you know, if there was a war between the races," she says tentatively, "hopefully everybody will get their own little space. And that’s basically what we want, you know? So we don’t have to live with the other groups."

How would they feel about a race war? "I don’t really know," Lynx says dreamily.

"I think I would be glad," Lamb says.

"Not about the war," Lynx interjects, and Lamb quickly revises her answer.

In any event, neither one will be strapping on an assault rifle anytime soon. "I’m a girl!" Lamb says with a honking laugh. "I think the boys should be fighting and the girls stay home!"

"And make babies!" Lynx puts in.

The Gaede family is planning to quit California—or "Mexifornia," as they like to call it—for good. They are busily packing for the trip, which will take them somewhere "with lots of snow," April says, although she prefers not to get too specific.

April has mixed feelings about the move. "I’d like to stay here, because it’s a very fertile area for recruiting and enlightening other whites," she says. "But I don’t want my kids to have to live here."

Bakersfield is changing. Sometimes you call a government office and you can’t understand the accent of the person who answers the phone, April complains. And the grocery stores are going downhill. "They cater to certain foods I guess Hispanics want. Like, I guess Mexicans eat cactuses. And they’ll be selling those candles with paintings on the side? It’s like a Third World marketplace."

The more pressing issue, however, is what has happened on their block. Not long ago, a Mexican family moved in. "The other day, they were washing their car right out on the street," April fumes. "They sit in their garage with the garage door wide open, just drinking beer. Just watch: You come back here in five years, the whole block will be mestizo."

Later, I drive around the subdivision, but I don’t see any open garage doors or beer drinking. Every house is dead quiet and looks exactly the same.

The origins of Prussian Blue date from a 2001 National Alliance event in Sacramento called Eurofest. There the girls met William Pierce, who ran the group, long the nation’s foremost neo-Nazi organization. Pierce, who died in 2002, was also the pseudonymous author of The Turner Diaries, a notorious work of speculative-race-war fiction that reputedly inspired Timothy McVeigh and Bob Mathews, another legendary Alliance member, whose terrorist splinter group, the Order, bombed a Boise, Idaho, synagogue and murdered Denver talk-show host Alan Berg. At Eurofest the twins sang an a cappella rendition of Brutal Attack’s "Ocean of Warriors" (Men and women of valor / Willing to die to reach Valhalla...). Recognizing in these two dirndl-clad moppets a PR dream come true, Pierce suggested that they record a CD for the National Alliance’s label, Resistance Records. "He was very sweet," Lynx recalls.

Recruiting backup musicians proved difficult, though, so April concluded that the girls would need to learn to play instruments. Lamb chose the guitar, Lynx the violin. After practicing for a year or so, they booked studio time and recorded Fragment of the Future. The album includes a cover of "Panzerlied," an old Wehrmacht battle hymn (featuring a rhythm track of marching jackboots), and "The Lamb Near the Lane," a folksy collaboration between Lamb and convicted Order thug David Lane, who, sentenced to 190 years on charges of racketeering and civil rights violations back in ’85, wrote the lyrics through letters exchanged between the two.

The musical quality of Prussian Blue’s debut record generated some debate on white-nationalist message boards. The vocals are often flat and rhythm-challenged. One lengthy thread explored whether promotional shots of the girls in short skirts constituted kiddie porn; another writer found the idea of adolescent girls singing a song called "I Will Bleed for You" to a mostly adult male audience "seriously wrong" (even if it is a cover). Overall though, it’s an oddly arresting disc, and to my horror, I actually found myself unable to stop humming some of the tunes.

One of them, "Sacrifice," is Lamb’s baby. She wrote the music and the words, which pay homage to her personal heroes, including Bob Mathews and Rudolph Hess. "Black people have their heroes, and we have our heroes," Lamb explains, while admitting that maybe Matthews and the Order made a few mistakes (his death in a 1984 shoot-out with the FBI being one of the biggies).

As for Hess, the Gaedes see him, along with the rest of the Third Reich, as horribly misunderstood. "People want to depict everything that happened in World War II Germany as marching around killing Jews," April says. "They don’t want to understand how the whole ideology of National Socialism is really a beautiful thing. I mean, it really is."

The Gaedes don’t really believe all those stories about the Holocaust. See, it’s not that the Nazis were consumed with pathological hatred for Jews. They simply decided that "genetically, those were not the people they wanted mixing in with the German people," April explains. "They wanted Germany for the Germans." (To say nothing of Poland, France, Belgium, etc.)

Concentration camps? Sure, but only because the Jews were working against the interests of the state, just like what the American government did to the Japanese and is doing now to Muslims. "I don’t deny that Jewish people died and were rounded up and put into camps," she elaborates. "But I don’t think it’s as drastic as they say." Gas chambers? April and the girls aren’t buying it. As it happens, the name Prussian Blue refers to a chemical residue that Holocaust deniers claim should have been detected in greater concentrations on the walls of the gas chambers if all those rumors of Zyklon B were true.

"I’m sure the Germans killed a lot of people," April concedes. "But Stalin killed a lot of people, and the U.S. government killed a lot of people, too. Look, the lies concerning Adolf Hitler have become so bizarre. But think about it: He was a human being. Even if you believed in the Final Solution, he’d still be a human being. The man’s been vilified."

I point out that Jews have been vilified, too. Hitler, Jews—we’re all human, right? Well, no. "It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?" she replies. "I mean, they’ve been kicked out of every country in Europe. The history of the persecution—or prosecution—of the Jews didn’t start with Adolf Hitler. Now, why do you think that is?"

At this, Dresden, an adorable and good-natured child with a crown of wispy golden hair, totters over and gives me a big smile. "Did you know anti-Semitism is a disease?" April asks, smiling briefly before her face hardens. "Yeah," she continues, "you catch it from Jews."

I’m Jewish myself—a fact April has already informed me she "kind of figured, from your nose"—but I manage a grin.

"Oh, my back just popped!" Lamb exclaims. "My God, did you hear that?"

April Gaede joined the National Alliance in 2001, just before the group was plunged into chaos with the July 2002 death of William Pierce. Erich Gliebe, the president of Resistance Records and a former professional boxer who’d been billed as "the Aryan Barbarian," took the reins of the organization, but his management quickly came under attack, and April eventually became one of his fiercest detractors. One sore point involved the publication of a "really low-quality calendar," she says, called "Girls of Resistance," featuring a number of models who weren’t Alliance members, but strippers. "These gals weren’t even that good-looking," April fumes. "And it just brought up the whole stereotype of white trash."

To many members, Erich’s new wife, a former Playboy model and exotic dancer named Erika Snyder, became a symbol of the National Alliance’s decline. It wasn’t just the stripping that bothered people but also the fact that she’d done it for black men as well as whites. Talk of a coup began brewing. Just before a long-planned leadership conference, at which April intended to call for Gliebe’s resignation, he canceled the meeting. "We didn’t know what she was planning," Gliebe says in a phone interview. "We knew there were some troublemakers in the organization. Sometimes you have to thin the herd."

Ousted from the group, April and a number of other former members quickly created a rival organization, called the National Vanguard, after the Alliance’s magazine. They also seized control of the publication’s Web site. The result has been an orgy of gossip mongering and Internet flaming. In addition, Gliebe and April are now involved in a contractual dispute over Prussian Blue. The girls’ deal guaranteed them $1 for every CD pressed, and so far, April says, they’ve only been paid for 1,000 discs. Suspecting that Gliebe wasn’t reporting accurate sales figures, April took the master recordings and pressed more copies of the record herself, a move that has led Gliebe to consider legal action. Not that he thinks there’s much money at stake.

"Prussian Blue is more or less a novelty thing," he says. "They’re cute and everything, and they have some talent, but that’s not the music to win over white males." Gliebe insists the organization is stronger now that it has let go of some dead weight. "When you’re in fringe politics, you tend to attract a lot of, I don’t know, misfits, people with problems, and they latch onto the movement as a source of strength," he explains.

Snyder agrees. "A lot of people get into racism for the wrong reasons," she says.

"To be a white nationalist," April tells me, "you have to be a very independent-thinking type of person. You don’t do it because ‘Hey, this will be great! I’ll have my job at risk, and people will threaten to kill me! Gee, what fun!’ "

The girls have already felt the sting of that rejection. "There are people we think are our friends, and when they find out what we believe, they’re like, ‘Ewwww,’ " Lynx explains.

Homeschooled through the sixth grade, Lamb and Lynx enrolled at a local public school, Beardsley Junior High, last year. After a brief adjustment period, they joined the ranks of the "popular, snotty girls," says former classmate Elizabeth Belsky, a brainiac type whose musical tastes run more toward show tunes than German war anthems. By her reckoning, the girls have "had a lot of boyfriends"; she recalls quite a bit of hands-in-back-pockets action. "They had everyone in that school wrapped around their fingers."

Word of the twins’ band eventually got around, although the nuances of their songs eluded most kids. While the majority of students were enthusiastic about knowing bona fide celebrities, Belsky thought that they were "weird babes" and Googled them. "I was like, ‘Oh, my God...’ " recalls Belsky, whose experience with Nazis up to that point was limited to seeing The Producers.

At first she kept the information to herself. Summer came, and Lamb and Lynx withdrew from Beardsley to resume homeschooling, in anticipation of the move. But when Belsky saw a flyer promoting their show at the Kern County Fair in September that described the band as a "variety act," she dashed off a letter of protest to the local paper, The Bakersfield Californian. "I didn’t think it would be right for a white-nationalist band to play for people who had no idea what they’d be listening to," she says. "Whatever they stand for, it’s certainly not variety."

After the paper assigned a story on the subject, the fair’s chief executive, Bill Blair, cut the girls from the bill "for the safety of the performers," he explained.

As word of the cancellation buzzed through Beardsley, the twins’ supporters targeted Belsky, who says she was "assaulted with a volleyball twice, called names, and screamed at." The girls’ biggest defender? "The mulatto girl stood up for us!" Lamb says, but according to Belsky the girl didn’t know they were racists. Before long the storm blew over, though, and Belsky was recently elected secretary of the student council.

Lamb and Lynx clamber out of April’s minivan and carry their gear into a local recording studio to work on their new album. It’s late September. Lynx is wearing a T-shirt that says NOBODY’S PERFECT...BUT ME!, and Lamb is in her tracksuit, the one that says BABY GIRL 88 PRO. Mom found it at a local store and thought it would make a fun present, because the number 88 is code for "Heil Hitler" (H being the eighth letter of the alphabet). April has asked me not to reveal the name of the studio—the last time they recorded, she says, the engineer got death threats. "It’s unbelievable to me how intolerant these people are," she says.

Lamb and Lynx are determined to kick it up a notch. "We’re getting away from that folkie sound, hoping to appeal more to kids," Lamb says, snacking on Red Bull and Cheetos. "It’s more pop punk." To that end, Lynx recently put aside the violin to concentrate on the bass, but it’s clear that Lamb, who writes most of the songs, is the driving force behind Prussian Blue.

Lanny Ray, Lamb’s guitar teacher, is here to play lead guitar. A shaggy session-man, Ray has worked with such legendary bluesmen as Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Reed, and T-Bone Walker, and once recorded with James Brown. I ask what he makes of Prussian Blue’s politics. "Hey, man, whatever works for them," he says. "I just play."

A few minutes later, perched on a stool behind a big plate of glass, Ray effortlessly lays down a bluesy track for "The Stranger," a vaguely heavy-metal number based on one of Rudyard Kipling’s more racially charged poems. April nods enthusiastically, seemingly oblivious to the irony of livening up the girls’ racist message with a sound appropriated from African-Americans. The girls’ musical chops have improved considerably, and they now have name recognition that many bands would envy. But Prussian Blue would still seem to present a bit of a marketing challenge. Then again, as April points out, the Sex Pistols were vilified in their day, too, and now they’re considered a seminal band.

Lamb takes her place in front of the microphone to lay down a vocal track. "Ugh, indigestion," she says, taking a minute to recover. Soon the feeling passes, and in one clean take she records her vocal for "Hey Hey," a catchy wad of bubblegum about an unnamed boy. "My, my, by and by / Tell me your name and don’t be shy," she sings. "Oh, oh, what do you know? / You like me, too, and you let it show..."

Afterward I note that the song doesn’t seem to have any racist or anti-Semitic overtones whatsoever. "Nope!" Lamb says cheerfully. "Not unless you play it backward."

April doesn’t expect a fair shake from the mainstream press. Jews are disproportionately represented in the media, she says. But all publicity is good publicity. Anything to wake whites up from their "lemminglike" daze.

I have to wonder if she’s right. What if Prussian Blue does become the new Sex Pistols? Years from now, will I reread this story in my apartment in Tel Aviv (where April helpfully suggests I might like to live) and wish I’d never come to Bakersfield?

Perhaps. But a homeschool essay by Lynx gives me a shred of hope. Not long ago, April had the girls read parts of The Canterbury Tales and assigned them to write their own modern versions. Lamb’s is set in a New York City subway and features a character named Carry Wallberg that might have sprung right out of the pages of Der Stürmer: "He smelled strongly of BO. His nose was overly large... and his suit was an ugly brown covered in ketchup stains..."

But Lynx’s story carries no obvious trace of bigotry. One of her pilgrims is a supermodel named Helena who finds herself stuck in an elevator in Manhattan and, as a way of passing the time, spins a yarn for her fellow passengers. It’s the tale of a princess who longs to marry a commoner, against her parents’ wishes. In the end, she wins their approval and marries the boy, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Standard fairy-tale stuff, really, but here it’s tempting to read something more into the story: a secret wish on Lynx’s part that her parents will someday put aside their prejudices, if only out of love for her.

Lynx doesn’t really agree with my interpretation. She points out that the king and queen in the story actually do approve in the end, so obviously it has nothing to do with her mom, who never would. April, too, thinks my reading is a stretch. She has no doubt that her daughters will marry genetically appropriate Aryan men and have plenty of beautiful white babies. Mothers just know these things.

Still, as Erich Gliebe points out, only time will tell: "You don’t know where the girls are going to be when they turn 18," he says. "People change."