- First and foremost, this:
That would be Kadir Nelson’s tribute to the Schomburg Library in NYC. A couple things to note about it. First, in an amazing bit of research you can see that he includes both the old Schomburg Library (now overrun with ivy) and the new Schomburg together at the bottom. Second, the inclusion of Langston Hughes front and center is particularly clever since Langston is practically the first thing a person sees when they enter the building. Or rather, Langston’s words which are embedded in the very floor. I do miss the Schomburg. This brought all that back.
- In all the talks we’ve heard from people about A FINE DESSERT and A BIRTHDAY CAKE FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON, I sometimes feel like we haven’t heard enough from the teachers about how they teach topics like slavery. That’s why posts like Monica Edinger’s In the Classroom: Teaching About Slavery are so important. If you read no other link today, read this one.
- This one’s for the librarians. Want to know all the different rates publishers charge libraries for ebooks? A handy dandy chart explains all.
- Travis Jonker knew not what he hath wrought when he posted about The Most Annoying Board Book Ever. I know precisely what book he’s talking about (as does anyone else who has encountered it). I never get rid of books, as my household will attest, but THAT book I gave away with a flourish when I moved. I wasn’t going to use precious box space cluttering it up with that monstrosity. One of the buttons that’s supposed to sound like snoring actually sounds like Darth Vader. And believe you me, you do NOT want the unsettling feeling that Vader is lurking around your house.
Speaking of radio, have you guys all heard James Kennedy (of 90-Second Newbery and The Order of Odd Fish fame) on Matthew Winner’s Let’s Get Busy podcast? If you listen to no other interview on that show (and I include my own when I say that) listen to this one. The two guys basically hit it out of the park right at the start when James mentions the plethora of The Call stories as they relate to ALA Award committees. The dog church bit . . . seriously, you just have to listen. And not just because an Oakland newspaper said of James that, “Between his wardrobe choices and excited mannerisms, he had the familiar air of Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in the Harry Potter film adaptations, only he was not a braggart.” I always think of him as more a Xenophilius Lovegood type, but maybe that’s just the Rhys Ifans talking.
- Man. I gotta apologize. Somebody somewhere alerted me to the Booktoss piece Say It With Me: Intersectionality and I’ve forgotten who they are. Mea culpa. In any case, this is a great piece of writing. From Beyonce at the Superbowl to Ben Hatke’s Little Robot. Not an easy connection, but Laura Jimenez manages it. Kudos.
- I think I failed to post this before, but Mike Lewis did a killer rundown of the CTTCB’s Social Media Institute in his piece Exiting the Echo Chamber. I am, however, a little jealous at the title. Wish I’d thought of it myself.
- Why, yes. I would like to attend a Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. However did you know? But quick question: When did Wendell Minor illustrate the series? It makes me happy but I want to see that work.
- Things I’m Surprised More Publishers Don’t Do With Their Backlist: This. I guess it helps if you have a big recognizable name, but still. Now can we PLEASE discuss doing this with William’s Doll? You want money? I have money. (Fun Fact: I don’t have money – I just want to see it brought into the 21st century)
Pooh and friends pre-2008
Though it contains an image of the original Winnie-the-Pooh toys that has to be more than eight years old (Donnell Library!), the Huffington Post article Christopher Robin Was Real, And Other Facts About Winnie-The-Pooh’s Author has some nice items in it. Particularly point #2. H.G. Wells? Really?
- Here’s another one for the librarians. Booksellers too, as it happens. According to a recent Nielsen Report, Social Omnivores And Book Placement Majorly Influence Children’s Book Buyership. No surprises there. What is surprising is that when it comes to selecting books, “The shelf has more influence than the promotional table, window display, bargain bin, etc. combined by a very wide margin.”. Yep. Your displays may look all kinds of pretty, but nothing beats good old fashioned shelving when it comes to checkouts/sales. Who knew? Thanks to Carl Schwanke for the link.
- Word I Don’t Use Enough: Ostrobogulous. Disagree on peril of defining it (though this may help). Thanks to Phil Nel for the link.
- “Where are the children’s books that celebrate working-class values and voices?” is not a question being asked by many folks here in America. It is, however, being asked in The Guardian by Elen Caldecott. And it is a question I would very much like us to start answering over here as well.
Alison Morris, currently working as the Senior Director of Collection Development & Merchandising at First Book, is the cleverest crafty person I know. Years ago she showed me how to make F&Gs into birdhouses. Now she’s making classic children’s characters into marble magnets.
Want to make your own? Instructions can be found here. Cheers, Alison!
#32 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor (1976)
56 points
This series took me to a time and place so different from my reality. It opened my eyes and made me think. – Martha Sherod
As with all my polls, there is often a shocking derth of authors of color. However, there was never any doubt in my mind that Mildred Taylor’s classic novel would make the list somewhere. I was pleased as punch to see it crest the Top 50 to rest at #32. This is certainly one of the best novels in the whole of children’s literature, as many a child and adult can attest.
The synopsis from B&N reads, “Set in a small town in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this powerful, moving novel deals with issues of prejudice, courage, and self-respect. It is the story of one family’s struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. It is also the story of Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to her family. The racial tension and harrowing events experienced by young Cassie, her family, and her neighbors cause Cassie to grow up and discover the reality of her environment.”
In 100 Best Books for Children Anita Silvey tells of Taylor’s saga in this way: “Mildred Taylor had unsuccessfully tried to reconstruct her family history, and then she heard about a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Booksl After attempting to write a piece using the voice of her father, she shifted the storytelling to a young girl, Cassie Logan, four days before the contest deadline. That shift and the resulting book, Song of the Trees, won the contest for Taylor. On the way home from the award ceremony, Taylor heard from her father and uncle the story of a black boy who had broken into a store and how he was saved from lynching. Taylor began to tell that saga, one that she thought might make an adult book. It turned out to be a book many children’s literature critics consider the most important historical novel in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
Much of the book is based in reality. In fact, to keep her land, the land discussed so often in her books, Ms. Taylor eventually “sold the typewriter on which she had written Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.”
Silvey says too that “the novel has become the most popular children’s book written by a black writer, selling close to 3 million copies in paperback.”
In Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Children’s Book, author Ann Martin credits this book as the one that meant the most to her. She says, “I was exposed to, and distinctly remember, many classic picture books. But the most moving children’s book I’ve ever read was one I encountered as an adult, Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I read it for the first time around 1980, and then I was struck by the story itself, by its messages. Rereading it twenty-five years later, I was able to look at it with a writer’s eye, and I was struck anew.”
In the Slate article Great Kids’ Books About Financial Ruin, a passage is dedicated to this particular book. In it, Slate argues that, “it wasn’t until the recession of the late 1970s that there was a strong resurgence in stories about economic woes,” and, “The book’s message to kids of the ’70s was: If you think the Great Depression was just about a bunch of old white men losing their shirt
My library is hosting a book fair this week, so Middle Grade books are on my brain in a big way! Here are some newly discovered titles paired with old favorites.
Historical Gems:
Jennifer Arena at Random House (psst…she’s such a lovely fellow bookworm.) introduced me to CROW by Barbara Wright. The narrator, 11-year-old Moses, brings us into his turn of the century world. In 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, the legacy of Jim Crow is alive and well. One generation from slavery, a thriving black community struggles to maintain hard-won liberty, and Moses’ family is caught up in a firestorm of prejudice and hate. You’ll fall in love with the authentic voice and realistic characters.
CROW is an excellent companion to ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY by Mildred B. Taylor. Set in the 1930′s, the novel chronicles the Logan family’s fight to hold onto inherited land and personal dignity. This Newbery winner is a storm of its own, a thunderclap of fierce, emotional storytelling.
Books with Heart:
WONDER, by RJ Palacio, is a tremendous debut, a novel that coaxes out grins even as it wrings out tears. Auggie, the fifth grade protagonist is different–his face is so badly deformed, he spends much of his preschool years hiding under a toy astronaut helmet. When he starts attending school for the first time, he makes enemies and friends, enduring the worst kind of taunts and enjoying the best kinds of friendships.
WONDER is Auggie’s story, but it’s also ours. The novel captures the dual nature of childhood, both how cruel and how tender we can be with one another. It’s about the wounds we inflict and the scars we carry, all the things that teach us to do things differently the next time.
WONDER pairs *wonderfully* with FREAK THE MIGHTY by Rodman Philbrick. Philbrick’s singular voice breathes life into an unforgettable story. Max and Kevin are two different types of young outcasts, a hulking loner and disabled genius, who forge an incredible, life-altering bond–a friendship that carries them through adventure and heartbreak.
Magical Reads:
Happenstance brings this last pair-up. I had the good fortune to meet Meaghan Finnerty, a Sterling rep, at ALA Midwinter. When I asked her to recommend a book, she pressed HORTEN’S MIRACULOUS MECHANISMS (by Lissa Evans) into my hands
Mildred Taylor’s ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY has always been a favorite – I’ve read it, and its 2 sequels, over and over. But I only just recently learned that there is a prequel, THE LAND, that has been sitting there, unread by me, all along. No longer.
THE LAND is excellent in all the ways that ROLL OF THUNDER and LET THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN are excellent (I think THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS is very good, but not quite on par with the prior two). Great, complex characters, engrossing story, and most impressively, a really deep exploration of slavery, racism, and how people, black and white, deal with injustice in a realistic way (which Elizabeth wrote an excellent post about a while back). THE LAND is the story of Cassie Logan’s grandfather Paul Edward. Its set during Reconstruction, and Paul Edward is the son of a man and one of his former slaves. The exploration of his relationships with his father and his white brothers is pretty impressive in that it manages to very realistically humanize the white characters without in any way excusing their racism, or ignoring the reality of their place in the post-slavery power structure, and the power imbalances in their relationships with black people. As in Taylor’s other books, the way the characters, white and black, respond to and live within their racist society, is varied, nuanced, and believable.
What struck me most, though, was that reading THE LAND felt like finally hearing the full story of something you kind of know about and have often heard in bits and pieces, but now are getting all the gaps filled in, all the bits of information you just sort of know put in order and strung together. Which is an incredible testament to the world Mildred Taylor built in this series of books – its common to talk about world-building in fantasy books, where authors have to construct a full and consistent reality, but I think its a different kind of impressive to so fully construct a “real” world, one which is historically accurate, but has characters and places rich enough in detail, with personal histories so full, that reading more about them feels like hearing your grandma tell stories about when she was growing up, where a lot of it you didn’t really know, but it all sort of feels familiar anyway. I can’t recall another book where I felt that sensation of familiarity so strongly.
And actually, reading Taylor’s books again set me off on a civil rights history kick in my reading – and so I will mention, although its, you know, not on the topic of this blog, that LETTERS FROM MISSISSIPPI, edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in civil rights history.
Posted in Land, The, Race and Racism, Taylor, Mildred, Why I love it
Hey, everyone, we have a comment from a friend over at the Guys Read blog regarding the Evil Bunny Lagomorph video:
Wow, now that video was weird. I agree with you, that had HUGE teeth.
Funny though....
Rick Ze Dragon
Guys Read
Thanks, Rick. You're right about those teeth. I would keep watching my back, Bill. You never know when it would sneak up on you "with sharp, nasty teeth!"
I also wanted to let you know that I have updated the list of books we've talked about. Check it out under the links on the left-hand side of the page. The list can be printed, so print one and impress your friends, parents, teachers, media specialists, and librarians.
Speaking of books, here are some I've liked that relate to Black History Month. Yes, I know that February is almost over but I thought that I'd make a contribution now and apologize for bieng so late. But the real reason is that I get very busy here; sometimes so busy that I don't have time to read chapter books!! Imagine that--too busy in a library to read! That's like working for Domino's and never getting to taste the pizza! (I worked for Domino's once and always made sure I got some pizza!!!) I don't mind, though, because I'm busy helping kids find things they need and that's a good feeling. Anyway, I said all that to let you know that I was trying to read this book for Black History Month but never found time until the last couple of days.
It's
Uncle Shamus by James Duffy. (No picture available) The setting is Shanty Town, a row of run-down shacks on a dirt road. Akers Johnson has lived in one of those shacks with his mom ever since his dad ran off. It's not much of a life--his shoes fall apart and there's no money for new ones. Every night they have canned soup and beans for supper. Then one day an old blind black man moves into one of those shacks. He used to live there more than thirty years ago--so why would anyone want to come back there? And he seems to have plenty of money--where did it come from? Why does he hire Akers to show him around town and why is he so curious to know exactly where everything is? The author doles out just enough information about his mysterious past to made you keep reading. Then you really want to keep going after you find out the whole story and get involved in the plans Shamus has for Akers. I will tell you this much--one of the keys to the story was that "if a black man came walking by...[he] didn't even see him." The story is good and you'll learn about friendship and the importance of doing the right thing, even if it's 35 years later. If you don't, you could end up to be like Buddy Dupois.
Here is another good book for Black History Month:
Pappy's Handkerchief by Devin Scillian.
It's a picture book, sure, but some picture books are meant for older readers. Besides, this book is part of the Tales of Young Americans series, which are not written for little kids. This story is fictional but based on a true historical event--the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1899. Young Moses and his family run an outdoor fish stand in Baltimore in 1899. It's March, the weather is freezing, and they aren't selling enough to make a living. One of their friends reads them a newspaper article which says that the government will give land free in the Oklahoma Territory to anyone who will farm it for five years. Everyone wonders if the government would give free land to black people, but the newspaper says it's for anyone. So it's worth a try. The trouble is, they have to be there by April 22. To do that, they've got to get the money to buy a wagon and then make the long journey to Oklahoma from Baltimore. Once they get there, they find hundreds of other people lined up to race out and claim land. Will the family be able to get to an area fast enough? Then their wagon crahses down a gully and Moses's father breaks his leg. Was the long journey for nothing? You will hardly stand the suspence as you read to find out. This is a terrific book that you'll really enjoy!!
Here are some others. I won't discuss them at length because it would take all day but, believe me, these are all powerful books full of people, places, and scenes that you won't ever forget. I've read them all and they've been among the best I've ever come across.
King Mitchell; illustrated by James Ramsome
Very great picture books meant, once again, for older readers. I talked about them on the December 18, 2007 post.
Some of you may have read this before; it shows up on a lot of school lists--and with good reason!!! This story of an African-American family trying to get through hard times and discrimination in rural Mississippi during the 1930's is one that will hit your heart and gut. I've read it twice and never got bored either time.
Another one of the best books I've ever read. An African-American family in Flint, Michigan in 1963 finds that the older brother is starting to hang out with a bad crowd. The father decides that the best thing to do is take the family to spend the summer with the aunt who lives in the country outside Birmingham, Alabama. They are caught in a famous historical incedent that changes not only thier lives, but the whole United States. It's funny, it's moving, it's one you've got to read!
Well, let me apologize again for taking so long to get this posted, but then, these books are good any time of year. Besides, some things that are highlighted for a month should be celebrated all year, right?
Carl
Speaking of radio, have you guys all heard James Kennedy (of 90-Second Newbery and The Order of Odd Fish fame) on Matthew Winner’s Let’s Get Busy podcast? If you listen to no other interview on that show (and I include my own when I say that) listen to this one. The two guys basically hit it out of the park right at the start when James mentions the plethora of The Call stories as they relate to ALA Award committees. The dog church bit . . . seriously, you just have to listen. And not just because an Oakland newspaper said of James that, “Between his wardrobe choices and excited mannerisms, he had the familiar air of Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in the Harry Potter film adaptations, only he was not a braggart.” I always think of him as more a Xenophilius Lovegood type, but maybe that’s just the Rhys Ifans talking.
Thanks for mentioning my post. I’m going to do a follow-up post soon with specifics about how the actual sessions have been going. Just to show how incredibly observant we need to be when doing this with kids, to never assume, to find ways to check in, and so forth.
Here’s one example (and sorry for the length of this). As part of a lesson that featured a look at Bunce Island (a fort off the coast of Sierra Leone where enslaved rice farmers were especially desired to bring to Charleston) I showed the children a primary source image of an ad for a sale (http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php?categorynum=6&categoryName=&theRecord=71&recordCount=75) that states “”To be sold. . . a cargo of ninety-four prime, healthy Negroes”; men, women, and children from Sierra Leone.” I heard gasps and discovered it was because of the word “Negroes.” It was then I realized some had not encountered the word before, some thought it was the n-word they’d vaguely heard about.
And so yesterday I followed up, discussing where the word came from (Spanish and Portuguese — one student who speaks Spanish knew this immediately), read excerpts from speeches of famous folk over the years containing the word (from Wade Hudson’s excellent Powerful Words), we talked about what it means to define people by words this way, and more. At one point we were discussing other words for white and a child whispered something that I couldn’t hear and the child who knew Spanish next to him laughed. I took him aside later and at first he was reluctant to tell me what he had said. Finally he whispered to me, “Blanco.” I told him that was a good word to have said, not a bad one at all. And then I spoke to the little girl who had laughed, wanting to be sure to validate her response too. Her laughter had been one of surprise and nothing more. All was fine, but it made me realize yet again that I need to pay such close attention, check in regularly, and follow-up anytime I sense confusion. (Btw, I have a fairly diverse class, so kids of all ethnicities and backgrounds are engaging with this, each in their own way.)
I am always uncomfortable with aged lists. As I scrolled down the Brightly list I was struck by the fact that the vast majority, but not all, were books that my children read and enjoyed at much younger ages.
You will note, then, that there was a huge range in reading levels there. Picture books as well as chapter books like Charlotte’s Web. That’s what I like about the list. It’s for kids of all reading levels but with age appropriate content.
It’s always a treat to get mentioned on Fuse #8 — but it’s a double treat when my ramblings make it into the headline. Thanks, Betsy! (And thanks to Mr. Winner for having me on his podcast!)
Thanks, James. It is, upon retrospect, an odd little title. Hopefully folks understand that it comes from your interview.
The Daily Image with the marble magnets has a pattern below it that makes me think of Sophie Blackall’s work. The pattern is the same one used in Finding Winnie.