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by William H. Armstrong. 1970 Newbury Award winner. It was made into a movie in 1972 and redone by Disney in 2003.

This is a classic story that I first read in Jr. High. I was in a mixed suburban school near Cleveland Ohio. The story is set in the American south in the 1930s and tells about a black sharecropper family's tragic struggle for survival in the face of intensely cruel racism and violence. I remember thinking that is was very far away and outside of the norms for our lives. I wonder now if the white teacher and the other students in my class, both black and white felt that way too.

Thinking about it now I realize that it wasn't that long ago. The boy in the story could be still living today. In the seventies, when it was written and when I read it he most certainly was. The students sitting in English class with me could have had relatives living in the south. The boy in the story is not far in age from my parents. My classmates' parents and grandparents might have lived that life. My own family was from New England so I felt no connection to the South, but that isn't very realistic. White racism dominates our country north, south, east and west. Being from New England doesn't distance my family from the acquisition and control over the wealth sharecroppers built, maintained and were denied.

The biting cruelty and evil of a society where a man could be taken from his family and forced to work hard labor with no pay for six years until he is disabled and sent to walk home in disgrace or die on the road for stealing a ham to feed his family is deeply disturbing to me today. When the sheriff turned around in the wagon and shot Sounder, the family's hunting dog, as he was taking the father and head of the household away in chains he surely knew what he was doing to that mother and her children. He was stripping them of their most important and legitimate means of earning a living. Let alone what he did to the boy's father, and to the dog. I can't even begin to speak about the pain of his mother's life.

When I read the reviews about this book online today they mostly put it in the past, as a historical novel about the old South. I don't see it as that far away anymore. Don't we have a growing prison population that is disproportionately African American? Haven't my own sons lost their biological families for mostly economic reasons? I have two adopted African American sons. Their biological grandparents and extended families may have lived that life. It's still with us today. Does anyone else feel this?

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by Yoko Kawashawa Watkins. Yoko is 11 and living in northern Korea at the end of World War II. She is Japanese and her father works in Manchuria, just over the border in China. Yoko and her mother and sister are forced to flee their home when Korean forces begin to take control from the Japanese. They have many harrowing adventures and escape murder, rape and starvation on a daily basis for over a year. Finally Yoko and her sister make a new life for themselves at home in Japan and are joined by their older brother.

This story was exciting to read but full of pain and anguish. It wore on me because I read it all in one sitting during my son's nap time on Saturday afternoon. It is almost too horrible a story to believe, but it is true and Yoko is a real person.

I lived in the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang for two years teaching English. There were quite a few Koreans living in China at the time and there was a visible legacy of Russian influence as well. We saw Russian architecture and bought Russian bread when we visited the big city of Harbin. Our school liaison was a Chinese-Korean man whose family had been living there since WW II. He enjoyed taking us to Korean restaurants. He was embarrassed to admit that many Chinese people thought Koreans were dirty and disgusting enough to eat dogs. One of the Americans I was teaching with could speak fluent Korean and he delighted in talking with her in his native language. I think he felt mistreated and disrespected many times. I witnessed the racism and animosity felt between ethnic Han Chinese, other Chinese minorities, Koreans and Japanese. The feelings toward the Japanese, who had occupied the area just forty years previously, were thinly veiled animosity and disdain. I knew people whose family members had been imprisoned, beaten, tortured, raped and murdered by the Japanese army. Many white Americans may not not aware of it, but these groups have a long and painful history of racism and abuse.

It is really interesting to me to read this story from the perspective of a Japanese girl who was living in Korea. Just before the story starts she is in a position of wealth and privilege, being a member of the occupying elite. The story tells what happens to the women in the families of the powerful men on the losing side of the war as they are fleeing refugees. I can't help but try to imagine what it would be like if America comes to that position and I am one of the women fleeing with my children, trying to stay alive after being so comfortable and privileged for so long.

Anyone else read this book? If you have connections to Korea, China or Japan it makes it really fascinating and I would love to chat with you about it. If you are reading it with your children or students I'd love to hear what they think.

More links:
Study guide
Sample student essay
Parents Choice award
Discussion Questions

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by Conrad Richter. Ballantine Books, 1953. I think I read this in Jr. High but I didn't remember it at all. I have recently read criticism of the use of the term "squaw" and reference to scalping on the American Indians in Children's Literature Blog by Debbie Reese. Those terms are all through the book and now that I doubt their authenticity that bothered me a lot. The story is of a young man named True Son. He was taken captive by Delaware Indians when he was only four years old. He was adopted and became a beloved family member of his Native American family. When he is 14 a treaty is signed forcing his Indian father to send him back to his European American family. True Son is heart-broken. He hates life in the white settlement. He eventually makes his way back to his Indian home but the heartbreak doesn't end there.

This story moved me on a number of levels. The injustice of colonial take over of Indian land, the racism and violence inherent in the clash of cultures, and the issues of adoption and biological families competing for True Son's loyalty all touch me. I would love to be part of a discussion with young people reading this book for the first time, to hear their take on all these issues.

For Mother Reader's 48 Hour book challenge: I read this book on Saturday, covering all 120 pages in 3 and half hours. I read another book later in the day, which I will blog about next chance I get. My boys are stirring again so I will have to end this here and come back later.

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Stories of Africa and America. Edited by Jane Kurtz. Greenwillow Books, 2004.

This lovely collection of short stories and poems is divided into sections; Africa, Americans in Africa, and Africans in America. Switching across perspective and oceans gives a dramatic contrast that continues the cross cultural themes of many of the stories. The poems are written in voices full of passion and wonder. I want to quote from one of them by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah:

an african american

...open your ears
my children
and listen to this griot
talk of history
being made
i wanna tell you this story
of my life

the blood which flows
through the left side of my body
is the mississippi river
every day i wake it croons
"lift every voice and sing"
the anthem of the american negro

the blood which flows
through the right side of my body
is the nile river
every day i rise it screams out loud
"africa, oh africa, cry freedom
for all your children"...

This is part of the central section of this poem telling of life lived on two continents. I wish I could link to the whole poem, but I couldn't find it on line. Danquah came to America at the age of six. Read about her other writings here.

Jane Kurtz, the editor of the collection, grew up in Ethiopia. Her family arrived in East Africa when she was just two years old. Her parents worked for the Presbyterian Church. Her family came back to the States when she was seven, when she was in eighth grade, and again when she went to college. She says in the introduction to this collection that she often felt lost between cultures. She never knew how to answer the American questions about what it was like to live in Africa, and in Africa she didn't know how to answer the questions about America. As an adult she found her way through this by writing. She has written over 20 books for children and adults. Visit her web site and read her biography, information about school visits and the Ethiopian Books for Children Foundation.

I noticed Cynsations had a link to Ethiopia Reads book drive in the past week, She interviewed Kurtz back in September and you can read it here. In it she explains how this collection came together and how important she thinks it is for everyone to share in the experiences of struggle, celebration and beauty that come with living with the cultures of Africa and America. I am very impressed with her courage and determination to share her stories.

This collection is full of short stories and poems written by Africans and Americans living between and across the cultures. The range of experience is amazing and the variety of voices is rich and stimulating. I am spending the weekend reading one story after another whenever I can grab a quiet moment. It is bringing back memories of my first college room mate who grew up in Ethiopia with missionary parents as well as the Ethiopian families I knew living in the city twenty years ago.

There are newly published authors here as well as established names. Each piece draws me in and I delight in the sounds, flavors, and sensations half a world away. Whether you know Africa yourself or have no experience at all this book will capture your imagination take you there. It's written with older children and young adults in mind. Many of the protagonists are young people themselves. This collection would be a rich addition to a family or classroom collection. I can see these stories sparking discussion and inspiring student writing around the themes of memoirs and cross cultural experiences.

The Friday Poetry round up is at HipWriterMama today. Go take a look!

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by Jane Kurtz, pictures by Rachel Isadora. Greenwillow Books, 2005.

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Somehow growing up I got the feeling that there was something racist, and therefore shameful, about the Brer Rabbit stories. Maybe it was the way black people are portrayed in The Song of the South. Maybe I heard friends scorning the southern black dialect written into the Tales of Uncle Remus by Joel Chandler Harris. In any case, I have avoided them for most of my life. What treasures I have been missing!

I have been reading Julius Lester's How Many Spots Does A Leopard Have? to my first graders and we love it. The children are on the edge of their seats. The language is beautiful and clever. Every story sparks discussion.

Since I am looking for a new author study to carry the kindergarten through to the end of the year I decided to look into Lester's Tales of Uncle Remus. I learned from reading Augusta Baker's introduction to The Adventures of Brer Rabbit that the stories had been told to her by her mother, who had heard them from her mother. Ms. Baker is the former Coordinator of Children's Services of the New York Public Library and Storyteller-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina. She says,

"It wasn't until several years later, in college, that I learned about the importance of these stories as true American folklore. Dr. Harold Thompson, a leading American folklorist, gave a lecture on people from the West Coast of Africa who had been captured and sold as slaves. Some were settled in the southern states where they took stories from home about a hare - Wakaima - and adapted them to their new surroundings. Wakaima became Brer Rabbit and the clay man became the Tar Baby."

She says she tried reading Harris' books several times, but never could get past the dialect which was like a foreign language to her.

"Despite the drawbacks in Harris’s text, I still loved the stories and appreciated Brer Rabbit as a cultural hero and a significant part of my heritage. However, I was telling the stories less and less often because of the dialect.... How could I represent our African Background and the relationship between Africa and black America to primary grades? How could I show the fusion of the different African cultures and the cultures existing in American and the West Indies?"

When she first reads Lester's The Knee-High Man and Other Tales in 1972 she found them to be "black folktales told perfectly." Lester went on to publish four volumes of Brer Rabbit tales, as well as many other books for children.

Lester gives a history of the Uncle Remus stories in his forward to The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. He gives the background of the stories coming from West African folktales. He says,

“Uncle Remus became a stereotype, and therefore negative, not because of inaccuracies in Harris’s characterization, but because he was used as a symbol of slavery and a retrospective justification for it… If there is one aspect of the Uncle Remus stories with which one could seriously disagree, it is the social setting in which the tales are told. Uncle Remus, and sometimes other blacks, tell the stories to an audience of one – a little white boy, the son of the plantation owner. While such a setting added to the appeal and accessibility of the tales for whites, it leaves the reader with no sense of the important role the tales played in black life. The telling of black folktales, and indeed tales of all cultures, was a social even bringing together adults and children. That folktales are now considered primarily stories for children is an indication of our society’s spiritual impoverishment. Traditionally, tales were told by adults to adults. If the children were quiet, they might be allowed to listen. Clearly, black folktales were not created and told for the entertainment of little white children, as the Uncle Remus tales would lead one to believe.”

Lester goes on to explain what adaptations he has made in telling the tales, and what important elements he has retained.

To give you a taste of my new found delight here is a link to some of Lester’s tales online. The first three I read this morning and just about spit my coffee across the library they are so funny. If you haven’t read any of Lester’s folktales you are in for a treat!

I believe a whole new window has opened for me on the folklore of America. I am so delighted to have the summer ahead of me that includes a front porch, lazy afternoons when the baby will be sleeping while the preschooler is in the mood to hear stories, and a bookstore gift certificate that will start me on my plan to acquire a stack of Lester’s Uncle Remus books. All we need is some lemonade and a porch swing…

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Kiri Davis is in second place now! Did you know you can vote once a day, every day? Go over there and see her film A Girl Like Me and vote or vote again! She is up for a scholarship from CosmoGirl. Spread the word - she is talented and smart and made an amazing film.

I blogged about Kiri Davis before; she made a film showing how young children are sensitized to good/bad images of race. She repeated the Clark doll study from the 60s to see if young children would prefer white baby dolls over dark skinned ones. Sure enough, white and black kids said the white dolls were more beautiful, better and smarter than the black dolls. It is heartbreaking to watch this film. We need to work on this people!

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