two hundred public words 21/30

[maeve66]

Next up, one of the best historical YAF authors I know -- she reminds me of Laurence Yep, in fact, partly because it's her interest in her own family history and its intersection with American history that motivates her writing. I very much like that motivation.

The first Mildred D. Taylor novel I read was definitely Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and again, I don't remember exactly how old I was when I read it. I was probably eleven or so, and had already had several years of family indoctrination (and then, elementary school indoctrination) about the Civil Rights Movement and black history in the United States. Thus, the subject and details of this book were not a revelation to me -- but, as with Yep, again, the characters were, because like some of my favorite authors (Yep, Cynthia Voigt, Kathryn Lasky, K. M. Peyton, Peter Dickinson) they were round, instead of flat. They had flaws and nuance and critical faculties and were opinionated. In fiction, apparently, I like people who argue with me. Maybe sometimes in real life, too.

Cassie Logan is the main character in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, and she is memorable. She's sassy verging on bitchy, she's bossy, she's loyal to her family, but she doesn't suffer fools gladly, not even within her family. And she's very aware of her situation and the world she lives in, which is 1930s Mississippi. The Logan family (based largely on Taylor's own uncles, aunts, and grandparents) is an anomaly in Mississippi in the 1930s, in that they own their own land. Cassie's grandfather, born in slavery, bought it in the 1880s, and that story is told in the complicated and fraught novel The Land, which is the most recent thing Taylor has written, I believe.

In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Cassie's father must leave the family and go to work along the Natchez trace, as a timber worker -- it's not specified whether he is a lumberjack or (more likely) a steel driver, one of the men on the gang that lays track for the miles and miles of spur lines of RR, which is how the lumber companies reached into the Piney Woods to fell trees and get them to sawmills. While he's gone, the constant -- environmentally constant -- racial tensions rise in the community, and a stupid young friend of the family gets caught up in a stupid crime and is threatened with lynching. There are many, many subplots, some of which shed an interesting light on pre Brown V. BoE schooling in the South, but local black families' reaction to gouging white storeowners and the threat of a lynching are the focus, by the end. The book does an excellent job showing how the CRM was prefigured on a daily basis by people actually living in the communities which later became famous in the 1950s and 1960s. And the protagonists are the people whose struggle will free themselves -- all of Taylor's books are fantastic for that alone, that she permits no easy white alliances. There *are* sympathetic whites, but they are very minor characters and they are not viewed as simple heroes.

There is a series of full length novels about the Logan family -- Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The Road to Memphis, and the prequel, The Land... but there are also short stories published individually in slightly (not much) simpler language, meant for kids whose reading abilities would be daunted by novels the length of the others. Plus, these are focused retellings of family stories. They are a record of race relations in the 20th century, and they are not simple and happy, either. A few of them feature a white boy whose family are typical poor white racists, but who, himself, tries again and again to befriend the Logan children -- who is beaten for this, by his brothers and father. Even Jeremy Simms is not treated as a hero, and his overtures to friendship are not welcomed, ultimately. Taylor's books are not simple to read, but they are very rewarding. The short stories include: The Well (about the Logan well being poisoned by the Simms, IIRC); Mississippi Bridge, which is kind of horrifying and moving, about a flash flood; The Friendship, which is the underside of the stock story of older-black-adult-befriends-innocent-young-white-kid; The Gold Cadillac, which is about what happens when a black man rises above his station in consumerist terms... hm... Song of the Trees, which is about the Logan family defending their land by any means necessary. That may be it. Let me check Wikipedia or Amazon. Ha -- *I* was more complete than Wikipedia, and for the first time in my life, I have edited a Wikipedia page.

Comments

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

We have a copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry somewhere in the house. It was my mother's, actually--she used to do freelance work when I was a kid, and she spent some time writing educational guides about various books to be used in schools. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was one of them. She never really showed the guides to me, though, so I don't have a good idea of what she actually put in them. It sounds interesting, though, so I might have to see if I can find it now.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

That's so funny. I own a teacher's guide for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. I wonder if it's your mother's? Who did she write for? This, I am pretty sure, is for the Teacher's Curriculum Institute, which is a quite excellent source of curriculum material, located in Palo Alto, CA. They've moved on from teaching guides like those, though, to actually publishing textbooks, having seen the way the wind was blowing -- e.g. boxed curricula, not teacher-cobbles-together-interesting-units. I liked doing the latter, but it is Very Frowned Upon, these days.

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

I *think* she worked for Troll, or at least that's what she always called it. We're nowhere near California, but she worked from home and mailed her stuff in so I think the company could have been based anywhere.