I read Bud, Not Buddy multiple times in school (I think at least twice in 4th grade, maybe once more in 5th) and loved it. This was during my “carrying around small objects” phase, when I was reading a lot of books about magic spellbooks and haunted jewels and other magic items, so Bud (not Buddy) carrying around his only worldly possessions in an old suitcase piqued my interest. Bud’s voice is also very unique; the story is told in first person, and he uses all the fun language you would expect from a precocious child. (My favorite phrases he uses repeatedly are “he could kiss my wrist” and “woop, zoop, sloop.”)
This was a book that was not only entertaining as a kid, but even more meaningful when reading it again as an adult. Bud has more self-preservation and determination than most adults (myself included) at 10 years old. He describes his emotions and how he makes sense of them in ways that are both innocent and wise at the same time. It really made me feel as though I was listening to a story told by a real 10-year-old, not an adult pretending to be someone that age.
As an example, Bud maintains a list of rules called “Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself.” These include specific tidbits of wisdom such as:
“If you’ve got to tell a lie, make sure it’s simple and easy to remember” (Rules and Things #3)
“When you make up your mind to do something, hurry up and do it, if you wait you might talk yourself out of what you wanted in the first place” (Rules and Things #328)
“When you wake up and don’t know for sure where you’re at and there’s a bunch of people standing around you, it’s best to pretend you’re still asleep until you can figure out what’s going on and what you should do” (Rules and Things #29)
You get the sense that Bud could get himself out of any bad situation he may find himself in — and there are many.
A brief summary (with spoilers)!
It’s 1936 in Michigan, and Bud is a 10-year-old Black orphan who has been sent to live with several foster families after his mother’s death. However, he is always returned to the orphanage after just a few days. When the story starts, Bud's latest foster family takes him home to live with them, but their biological son torments him by (among other things) sticking a Ticonderoga pencil up his nose while he’s sleeping. Bud finally punches the boy, but when the son plays the victim to his parents, they decide to take Bud back to the orphanage the next day. They lock him in their garden shed for the night, but after he disturbs a hornet nest, he escapes and decides to run away (but not without first getting even on the boy by making him wet the bed with the age-old warm water trick). Bud decides to set out to find who he believes is his real father — the musician Herman E. Calloway — which he deduced after seeing a flyer his mother brought home one day:
The paper was starting to wear out from me looking at it so much but I liked checking to see if there was anything I hadn’t noticed before. It was like something was telling me there was a message for me on this flyer but I didn’t have the decoder ring to read what it was.
Across the top of the flyer writ in big black letters were the words Limited Engagement … Underneath that in big letters again it said, “HERMAN E. CALLOWAY and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!!
… then in the middle of the flyer was a blurry picture of the man I have a real good suspicion about. I’ve never met him, but I have a pretty good feeling that this guy must be my father.
… I remember Momma bringing this flyer with her when she came from working one day, I remember because she got very upset when she put it on the supper table and kept looking at it and picking it up and putting it back and moving it around. I was only six then and couldn’t understand why this one got her so upset, she kept four others like it in her dressing table, but this one really got her jumpy.
Along the way, Bud ends up in a series of what I would call purposeful misadventures: He spends some time at a library he used to visit with his mother, attempts to train-hop after spending a night in a Hooverville, becomes the temporary “son” of a family in order to receive a free meal at the city mission, and even hitchhikes across the state with a stranger. He finally reaches Herman E. Calloway, but the man turns out to be grumpy, mean, and much older than he expected.
Despite Herman's cold demeanor, the other band members Bud meets are kind to him while figuring out what to do about his sudden appearance and unbelievable claim. He becomes enamored with music after hearing the band play and finally feels at home with them — especially with Miss Thomas, the group's singer, who acts especially maternal toward Bud. After staying with them for a few days, Herman comes across some of Bud's belongings from his treasured suitcase and angrily claims he stole them. After the misunderstanding is cleared up, everyone soon realizes that Bud is actually Herman's grandson, but it’s news to everyone in the group that Bud's mother has died.
Bud attempts to comfort Herman while he grieves, which is a turning point in their relationship with each other. However, Bud wonders why Herman never visited or made the effort to see him and his mother before now:
“Bud,” [Miss Thomas] said, “Mr. C–excuse me, your granddad didn’t know anything about you. No one knew where your mother had gone.”
Mr. Jimmy said, “That’s right, son, she just up and run off one day. I mean we all knew Herman was hard on her, but it wasn’t like it was nothing personal, he was hard on everybody. I used to tell him all the time to slack off some on the girl, to go easy, but I can remember his exact words, he said ‘Easy-go don’t make the mare run. This is a hard world, especially for a Negro woman, there’s a hundred million folks out there of every shade and hue, both male and female, who are just dying to be harder on her than I ever could be. She’s got to be ready.’”
Miss Thomas explains that Herman was extremely proud of his daughter (“He used to crow about how his mother and father had been born slaves and how now it was only two generations later and the Calloways had come so far and worked so hard that [his daughter] was going to be a teacher”), but eventually the pressure from him was too much and she left. After some of the shock of her passing has worn off, the other band members gift Bud his own alto sax and give him a jazzy nickname, Sleepy LaBone. Near the end of the book, he realizes that he doesn’t need his special suitcase or the objects inside to remember his mother:
“I didn’t need those other things with me all of the time. I didn’t need them to remind me of Momma, I couldn’t think about her any more if there were a hundred hours in every day and a thousand days in every week. I couldn’t think of my momma any better than I already do.”
Something I noticed during this read was that the adults in the story sometimes tossed in commentary about the current times that Bud didn’t understand or concern himself with as a 10-year-old, but the reader could use that information to pick up on some historical context. For example, the man who picks Bud up from the side of the road mentions that being out after dark in this part of the country is dangerous, specifically for Black people:
“...Bud-not-Buddy, you don’t know how lucky you are I came through here, some of those Owosso folks used to have a sign hanging along here that said, and I’m going to clean up the language for you, it said, ‘To Our Negro Friends Who Are Passing Through, Kindly Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Rear End in Owosso!’”
Bud doesn’t react to this information and is much more concerned about securing the safety of his suitcase, but the reader would know this was in reference to sundown towns. But even when reading this at Bud's age, this detail wasn't lost on me, and I remember this scene coming to mind when learning more about the Jim Crow era in high school. Thinking now as an adult, this was a good way to introduce larger concepts like racial inequality to children without it being too intense or uncomfortable. It's not what the book is about, but it's not totally absent from it, either.
In fact, the entire story could be seen as a commentary on the aftermath of slavery in the early 20th century. Herman, understanding that the world was still going to treat his daughter unfairly because of both her gender and race, tried to give her a leg up on fighting discrimination when she became an adult, which included an education and a career path already decided for her. However, because it wasn’t what she wanted for herself as an individual, she went off on her own and raised Bud instead — maybe even choosing to be the parent to Bud that she didn’t have in Herman instead of carrying the full weight of her race’s legacy on her shoulders.
What I gleaned from their relationship was this: True freedom on an individual level is giving others you care about the permission to make their own choices, whether they’re shooting for the stars or just want to be someone who provides a loving, supportive home for their child.
All in all, the author really knocked it out of the park with making Bud feel like a very real child trying to figure out how the world works, a little at a time, and his distinctive voice was by far my favorite aspect of the book. 10/10, absolutely Recommendable.
It's been one year since Newbery & Chai "debuted," and... 0 views over the last seven days, and I'm also woefully behind on reviews. (Nevertheless, I persist.)
Caddie Woodlawn was a delightful little book I finished across two or three days. I grew up with the Little House on the Prairie books, so it was like getting to experience reading those stories again for the first time. I’m happy to say it breaks the streak of books I didn’t enjoy very much.
The book is based on the author’s grandmother’s life in Wisconsin at the end of the 19th century. While reading it, I was reminded (in pleasant ways) of Anne of Green Gables, which is the de facto book about a spirited young girl who gets into some tricky situations as she grows up. Caddie’s father chose to bring her up her alongside her brothers instead of letting her mother raise her as a typical girl in the household, so Caddie's not afraid to get dirty or take risks.
Most notably in terms of plot, she single-handedly prevents bloodshed between the nearby Native American tribe and the white settlers in the area. (I don’t quite buy this as the true account of what happened to the author’s grandmother, but it was an exciting part nonetheless.)
I’d say that the overarching plot thread is that Caddie learns some new information about her father’s past in England (no spoilers here) that could lead to the family uprooting their cozy life in the U.S., but that's only expanded upon in one chapter in the beginning and maybe two near the end. (On an unrelated note, the family dog also somehow makes his way from Boston all the way back to Wisconsin ((!!!)) on foot after being taken by one of Caddie’s uncles for a season.)
Regardless of believability — because I don’t want to act like an old man for two posts in a row, plus whether it's a true account or not isn't really the point — it was an easy, entertaining read. I’m noticing a trend in some books written in the earlier part of the 20th century: They are much more likely to have chapters that are relatively self-contained and don’t contribute much to an overall plot thread. I’m guessing the authors that wrote those types of books came up with the setting and characters first and then put them in a handful of tricky situations to write about, not the other way around.
As an example of what I mean, I'm thinking of the Hunger Games series, in which it feels like many facets of Katniss' personality are just reactions to direct plot-related events. For example, she's resourceful and is able to survive during the Games because she lives in a poor District, she discovers she needs comfort from Peeta and gets closer to him only as a result of participating in the first Games, and she feels so strongly for her sister that she volunteers as tribute in her place because she's taken on the role of a mother to her because her mom was unable to care for them after her husband's death. There seems to be a direct event mentioned in the book that explains or relates to every individual aspect of her personality.
Instead, with Anne Shirley, her personality is the force that influences the plot. She accidentally dyes her hair green because she hates her red hair; she doesn't falsely admit to losing Marilla's special brooch just to get out of punishment because she is strong-willed, etc. If Anne weren't already these things, the actions in the chapter wouldn't have taken place.
In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and our previously reviewed Thimble Summer (published in 1938), chapters were more or less just giving information on the characters and their families or contributing to a one-off plot line, similar to someone telling a story from their life during a long car ride or right before bedtime. I really like this style of storytelling because it feels lighter and more whimsical. It’s the YouTube short or Instagram reel of early to mid-1900s children’s literature, yet neither vapid nor pointless — its length caters to developing attention spans; it's usually filled with lovable characters who always have good intentions, even if their actions backfire; and serves as a vessel for morality and life lessons (because those are always good, right?).
There’s just something comforting and relaxing about reading a story that is more a like a collection of cozy anecdotes than a fast-paced Hunger Games-style book that gives you whiplash from the plot’s urgency. Think Chicken Soup for the Soul, but with children riding horses and raising turkeys.
The author based the book entirely on stories her grandmother told her about her youth, which would have been self-contained by nature. This makes sense, as the contents of our lives don't have easily identifiable rising action or neatly packaged exposition. In a storytelling class I'm currently taking, I'm finding it difficult to even construct a real narrative around something as vague as “I had a horrible first date once” or “I went on a strange camping trip." Even so, just describing one thing after the other (in this case, Caddie taking apart a clock) is enticing enough to make us want to hear more, just like putting one foot in front of the other:
“It was more of a task than she had supposed. But Father's tools were there on the shelf, and she found a screwdriver of just the right size she needed. The back came off, revealing the wheels and springs. Caddie knew enough about clocks to see what was the matter. The circuit rider had wound his clock too tightly, and in some way the spring had caught so that it could not unwind as it should have done. Caddie looked it over carefully. Then she began to loosen the screws which held it in place. She had to loosen several before she found the right ones. Time slipped away unheeded, she was so deeply absorbed in her work. Her cheeks were flushed and her face, bent low over her works, was contained by her dangling curls.”
As an example from a similar book, Anne of Green Gables had the chapter about the missing brooch, the chapter about breaking her chalkboard over Gilbert’s head, and the chapter about Diana accidentally getting drunk on raspberry cordial, but all of those were isolated incidents that felt more like a serialized story that came out piece by piece in a magazine than a cohesive novel. The events in the chapters all give insight into the kind of character Anne is (honest, hotheaded, and a little foolish in each of those tales, respectively), but taking one out or mixing up the order wouldn’t change much of anything about the book itself. It's just pleasant to learn more about someone, and isn't that a big part of why we read fiction in the first place?
...I spent a lovely August afternoon a few weeks ago writing a very different type of blog, but the iPad Tumblr app decided it wouldn't save the hundreds of words I'd added after this point. Still, I think my ~thesis~ has come to an end.
I read this in one sitting at a Barnes & Noble without purchasing it, and now I’m at a different Barnes & Noble using the store copy to write this post. (My thriftiness knows no bounds.) But it was only 89 pages in fairly large text, so there was no real reason to purchase it, in my eyes; 45 minutes with it was enough.
And because of that, I think some ~analysis~ mixed with a longer plot summary is probably enough to close the book, as it were, on this read. Despite the length, it did hold some interesting points that I now see merited it being the winner for 1987, though I didn’t quite see it while reading it the first time.
The Whipping Boy is a short tale about a young prince and a poor boy who are being brought up together in the king’s castle. Jemmy, the poor orphan, was formerly living on the streets before he was chosen to be the “whipping boy” of the badly behaved prince, who can’t receive corporal punishment because of his royal status. Instead, Jemmy is whipped in his place every time the prince misbehaves, which is frequently. Despite this, Jemmy never makes a sound during the whippings to deprive “Prince Brat” the satisfaction of hearing him in pain.
Because Jemmy is always around the prince, he learns how to read, write, and do math from the royal tutor while the prince doesn’t pay attention to any of the lessons. When the prince decides to run away one night (“Boy! Tumble out of bed. I need a manservant”), he takes Jemmy with him. Three pages later, they’re caught by two robbers, Hold-Your-Nose Billy and Cutwater. The duo realize they have the runaway prince based on his clothing, but the prince won’t keep his mouth shut and thinks that by ordering the thieves to let them go, they will obey. However, they soon come to the conclusion that Jemmy is the real prince who is just wearing rags to trick them because he’s the only one out of the two who can actually read and write.
The robbers’ plan is to hold “the prince” for ransom, so they get Jemmy to write a ransom letter to “the King’s Most Sacred Majesty,” his “papa.” Jemmy knows those in the castle will know something is amiss once they see that “your most obedient son, Prince Horace” wrote the note, as everyone knows the prince has no education. However, the actual prince basically foils every smart attempt Jemmy uses to either get the robbers to let them go because of his pride and selfishness. For example, Jemmy gets the robbers to consider sending the ransom message with “his whipping boy” back to the castle as a way to let the real prince run free, but the prince, “without showing the slightest concern for Jemmy’s fate,” is so stubborn that he says he won’t go back unless it’s on his own terms.
Jemmy suspects that he himself is now also a target by the king, as it’s possible others could believe he’s in on the scheme. He seems to accept without question that no one would believe his side of the story on how the kidnapping really happened: “It’s me that’s in the soup. I’ll catch it for your mischief in running away. And I’ll catch it again when the tutor claps eyes on the handwriting. He’ll say, ‘Jemmy! This is Jemmy trying to line his own pockets.’ Your pa’ll scrag me with his bare hands!’” The prince, used to getting his way in everything, immediately says he’ll protect Jemmy from any royal punishment with “sudden generosity,” but Jemmy doesn’t believe it.
I think this is a really great example of the difference between the two loci of control: the prince believes he has the power to control both the world around him and his fate (an internal locus of control), but Jemmy is already accepting that regardless of the truth, he has no control over what happens to him (an external locus of control). We normally associate an internal locus of control as being healthier (“be the change you wish to see in the world,” etc.), but it’s Jemmy’s consideration of all the different ways this situation could be interpreted by others that allows him to outwit the robbers while also saving his own skin.
After quickly ratting out Jemmy’s second escape attempt, Jemmy gets so fed up with trying to stick his neck out for the prince with no reward that he dismisses himself as whipping boy and says the prince can find his way back himself. The prince, however, seemingly has no concept of real consequences and sees what’s happened so far with the kidnapping as wildly entertaining (“This is the best time I ever had!”). Jemmy learns that the prince acts up so much because he wants attention from his father. The prince also seems envious when Jemmy talks about the friends he used to have when living on the streets, as he has no one his age aside from Jemmy in the castle.
I don’t quite buy this as redeeming qualities or factors that make the prince out to be a redeemable character. He has no idea of the true nature of the world, full of unfairness and pain (at least in medieval times). However, when the prince is finally whipped, Jemmy begs him to cry out. He’d “dreamed” of seeing the prince get whipped, but when it actually happens in these circumstances, Jemmy doesn’t find any satisfaction in it. (Maybe it’s Jemmy’s own treatment of the prince changing throughout the book that really sells the prince character as being redeemable — not the prince’s actual actions.)
Another scene struck me as I was going through this short read. The two children run into one of Jemmy’s street friends, who reaches out to shake the prince’s hand:
Smudge put out his hand to shake.
Jemmy caught Prince Brat's momentary confusion. "He never shakes hands."
"Of course I do," said the prince with a quick grin. He took Smudge's hand. "Glad to shake your hand, Smudge."
"Likewise."
And Jemmy dragged the prince away. Smudge had committed a terrible offense: no one was allowed to shake hands with the prince.
"Why did you do that?"
"Because I've never shaken hands before."
"He could be hung for less!"
The prince was staring at his hand. "It felt friendly... trusting. I may introduce the practice at court when I become king."
If we look at the two boys as being representative of the two loci of control, the prince is both a positive and negative example of the internal version. His ignorance of consequences and belief that he has more power than he actually does out in the real world causes the two boys much strife in the beginning, but upon experiencing something that goes against the way he was brought up (like receiving a friendly handshake instead of being treated as untouchable and feeling lonely or ignored as a result), he immediately thinks to exert his power and implement that practice among other royals, thereby disrupting the circumstances that allowed him to become so spoiled in the first place. The prince’s character may be irredeemable in a lot of ways, but it’s not hard to see him as an unwitting victim of the very things that have made him so unlikeable in the first place.
…and, of course, the boys get their revenge on the two robbers and avoid being kidnapped and return to the castle as changed, more mature people — the prince much more so than Jemmy, as you may have suspected, despite not being the main character of this story.
…aaaaaaand now this review has taken longer to type than it did to read the entire book in the first place. I approached this read wondering about the quality of the other contenders if this tiny book was the one that actually won, but it had surprising depth and made me think about things in different ways (which is more than I can say for some of the other Newbery winners so far).
My name is Abby, and I'm on a quest to read every single winner of the Newbery Medal since the award's inception in 1921. Follow along as I revisit childhood favorites and discover new ones (as well as the occasional disappointment; it happens) and share my takeaways and thoughts on each book.
You can find the Google Doc that's tracking my progress (as well as rating information at a glance) here, and you can view this blog's entire post archive here. You can also find plot info on each award winner here.
This was a short book, so I’ll (hopefully) keep this a short review. I enjoyed it a lot (much, much more than the author’s previous book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) but you’ll have to skip to the end for my rating. (Fun fact: E. L. Konigsburg is one of only a handful of authors to win the Newbery Medal twice.)
What I especially liked about this book was that it did a good job communicating that the decisions you might think are relatively unimportant can be very nuanced and meaningful to others in the smallest ways. The story begins with a pretty long explanation of how a teacher came to choose four particular sixth graders to be on the school’s academic team. It then explores the backgrounds of the students in question and how they’re all connected to one another while they’re participating in an important Academic Bowl.
It’s a Breakfast Club-type story in that kids who wouldn’t normally be close are brought together and maintain a bond that extends beyond their social lives at school:
The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn’t know that she didn’t know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do. … They called themselves The Souls. They told Mrs. Olinski that they were The Souls long before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls.
It also had a bit of a Slumdog Millionaire-esque feel because as each question is asked at the competition, the book breaks into personal stories told in first person that explain why each character knows the answer to the question — Noah answers a question about calligraphy, Nadia answers a question about seaweed, and so on. One of the stories introduces the new (weird) kid at school, Julian, who is responsible for starting The Souls: he slips secret notes to the three other kids and invites them to a tea party at his new house, where his father is starting a bed and breakfast. They begin to meet regularly:
Something in Sillington House gave me permission to do things I had never done before. Never even thought of doing. Something there triggered the unfolding of those parts that had been incubating. … I told jokes I had never told before. I asked questions I had never asked before.
Outside of the tea parties, no one speaks to or acts like they’re friends with one another. However, the only part of the book I didn’t like involved them coming together at the end to prevent Nadia’s dog, Ginger, from being drugged during a school stage production of Annie so some other kid’s dog could take her place. It was pretty gross: “…laxatives and tranquilizers and those four little legs will buckle, and those little bowels won’t hold…”
… Did they really need the laxatives? On top of the sedatives? (Really?)
But I’ll end on a bit of a less gross, more bittersweet note: I resonated with this small passage after rereading it for this blog post in ways I didn’t when encountering it for the first time just a few months ago. The team has [spoiler, as you may have guessed] just won the Academic Bowl:
Mrs. Olinski felt a strange sense of loss. … She drove for miles worrying about it. Finally, almost involuntarily, she said out loud, “Win some, lose some.” She glanced at Mr. Singh and laughed. “Why did I say that?”
Mr. Singh replied, “Because it is how you feel at this moment, Mrs. Olinski.”
“I am happy that we won, Mr. Singh, But I don’t understand why I feel a sense of loss. This is not like my accident when my loss was overwhelming. Why, after this wonderful victory, do I feel that something is missing?”
“Because something is.” Miles hummed past before his voice floated back to her. “For many months now, you have been in a state of perpetual preparation and excitement. Each victory was a preparation for the next. You are missing future victories. … Now you must put down anchor, look around, enjoy this port of call. Your stay will be brief. You must do it, Mrs. Olinski.”
Something-something about aging, the ephemeral nature of existence, the danger of losing yourself to the past, recognizing the present as always transient, each moment is fleeting, something-something… I already have too many gray hairs for this.
“Victories” isn’t exactly the word I would use when talking about this scene in a wider context, but comparing different points of your life to a ship coming in, staying a while, and inevitably setting sail once again for a different destination is a lovely, tranquil thought. The focus isn’t on the end of the stay, but always on each new beginning — on that first step off the gangplank, onto the sands of an unfamiliar shore...
This feels like a true 7, but because that number is still banned, I’ll go with 8/10, Recommendable.
I'll tell you how much I enjoyed this book: Despite having left my copy at home during a recent trip, I was so invested in the story that I found a free PDF online (don't try this at home, kids) and finished reading it on my phone across several coffee shop visits, completely ignoring the books I had actually planned to read.
I had intended to write about Moon Over Manifest first, but I think it's important that I talk about Crispin: The Cross of Lead before I get into that — they have somewhat similar plots in the sense that both main characters are concerned with finding out new things about their parents, but I really enjoyed one story and really disliked the other. So, join me as I try to explain why that might be through some long-winded explanations.
First, a four-paragraph summary (with spoilers, as usual):
The year is 1377, and a boy called only "Asta's son" just recently lost his mother due to illness. The two lived as very poor serfs who worked the land of the nobleman Lord Furnival, which is under the control of a steward while Furnival is off pillaging or whatever he's up to. One night, Asta's son is caught overhearing a conversation that he doesn't understand between the steward and another man, and for reasons he doesn't know, he is immediately declared a "wolf's head" by the steward, which means he could be killed on sight by anyone. He briefly finds refuge with the local priest, Father Quinel, who tells him that his real name is Crispin and gives him a lead cross with writing on it that belonged to Crispin's mother. The priest says he'll tell Crispin more about his father soon, but he is killed before Crispin can find out this information.
Crispin spends some time hiding and scavenging in the woods and avoiding the numerous people now looking for him, still unaware of what he's done to deserve this. He comes across a large man who goes by the name Bear one night, who declares himself Crispin's new master. Crispin unwillingly obeys, but he soon grows to love Bear, who is a traveling musician. He teaches Crispin how to play the flute and imparts some wisdom on abandoning the master/servant dogma that Crispin has lived his whole life by. Bear can read the writing on Crispin's cross but doesn't tell him what it says.
The pair travel to a town where Bear has some business to attend to, and Crispin overhears from the townspeople that Lord Furnival has died. The men looking for Crispin discover him there, but after he hides from them, they kidnap and torture Bear to try and get Crispin to reveal himself. Crispin finally finds out that the words on the cross say that he is Lord Furnival's son, and he deduces that the reason the steward sent everyone after him is because he's worried Crispin will try to now claim himself as heir to the lordship.
Crispin confronts the steward and says he doesn't want anything to do with being part of the nobility and just wants to leave the town with Bear in peace, which the steward initially agrees to. However, as they're leaving, he goes back on his word and tries to kill Crispin. The steward and Bear fight, which ends in the steward's death. Crispin leaves the cross, the only evidence he has of his birthright, on the body of the steward before they both leave the town to live out the rest of their lives.
There's something endlessly fascinating about the 14th century and even earlier times to me, which feels almost like prehistory in that we can only speculate what life was like for the average person. We have so much art and literature from the Renaissance, yet very little from before then (I remember only covering parts of Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which were both penned in the 1400s, before moving on to later time periods in my early British literature class). Exploring the Dark and Middle Ages — when religion dominated almost every aspect of someone's life to the point of cultural stagnation — feels as foreign and exciting as taking a peek at the bottom of the ocean.
I think that the most interesting aspect of the book was how religion colored every aspect of Crispin’s thoughts and interactions with others in a way that is so unlike modern times. Every single internal thought or sentence he spoke had some kind of religious flavor to it, with lots of “God willing” and “His will be done.” It’s hard to imagine a time in which life truly was like this, when religion was something you participated in every day and were constantly living as opposed to something you could practice on your own or just visit a building once a week to affirm, like 1/3 of all American Christian adults:
“Thus our lives never changed, but went round the rolling years beneath the starry vault of distant Heaven. Time was the great millstone, which ground us to dust like kernelled wheat. The Holy Church told us when we were in the alterations of the day, the year and in our daily toil. Birth and death alone gave distinction to our lives, as we made the journey between the darkness whence we had come to the darkness where we were fated to await Judgement Day. Then God's terrible gaze would fall on us and lift us to Heaven's bliss or throw us down to the everlasting flames of Hell.”
One professor I had for a religious studies course my junior year (may that department rest in peace as it no longer exists, thanks to WVU and E. Gordon Gee’s terrible financial management) was always emphasizing the idea that the fundamentals of eastern religion aren't so much about belief as they are what actions someone takes. And I don’t mean “action” as in making the conscious choice to treat thy neighbor as thyself or turn the other cheek; I don’t mean religious principles guiding actions in the real world, but rather that not every world religion emphasizes such a divide between the sacred (Heaven) and the worldly or profane (Earth). It's a world where "worship" can take any number of forms (e.g., the Kama Sutra). Conversely, separation between Heaven and Earth is a central tenet in western religions, in which God is perceived as residing somewhere else and not living among people in this world (to put it more simply, “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life,” as Jeff Mangum sings).
When hundreds of deities are understood to be on Earth among us and “everything is sacred” in eastern religions, what someone believes in and their lived experiences are tied together in inseparable ways. You wouldn’t ask someone whether they believe in gravity or not because someone’s personal relationship with contemplating and accepting gravity has no bearing on whether it’s actually experienced by them; gravity is a force that is central to the fabric of our universe and doesn’t hinge on the belief that it’s real, and every action you take is impacted by it. The concept of “having faith” in gravity is almost entirely irrelevant, whereas having faith is considered a central part of Christianity and has deeply influenced its history and practices.
This ties into Crispin’s belief about some people being destined to always be a servant to a “master.” His worldview was likely influenced by something called the “great chain of being,” which was a popular idea during the Middle Ages that provided a hierarchy for everything on Earth, down to minerals and plants. But though it’s never mentioned by name in the book, Bear is involved in the very beginnings of what would be the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was a rebellion against that very way of thinking. In fact, it’s why the two travel to the city where the men are looking for Crispin in the first place, and one character briefly mentioned, John Ball, was actually a real organizer of the revolt.
Bear, though proclaiming himself Crispin’s new "master" and playing into his view of the world to keep him from running away, actually tries to get him out of that mindset in a few different ways when they first begin traveling together.
“... Will you join me? I give you the freedom to choose.”
“You’re my master,” I said. “I have no choice.”
“Crispin, decide,” he barked.
I shook my head, “It’s not for me to do so.”
“Should not every man be a master of himself?” he asked.
“You made me call you master.”
His face grew redder than it normally was. “You’re a willful fool,” he bellowed. … “Crispin, as Jesus is my witness, churches, priests — they’re all unneeded. The only cross you need is the one in your heart.”
Greatly shocked, I didn’t know what to say.
“But,” he added, with a hard edge of anger, “if you so much as spoke my words in public, do you know what would happen to you? … You’d be burned alive.”
… what vexed me most was his saying that every man should be master of himself. If I knew anything it was that all men belonged to someone. Surely God Himself put us all in our places. Lord to rule and fight. Clergy to pray. All the rest — like me — were on earth to labor, to serve our masters and our God. Otherwise, it was as much to say stars could go their own way instead of being fixed to turn around our world.
Very clever. In short, this book was extremely interesting and I could probably talk about other parts of it for much longer and do a few more Wikipedia deep dives — Bear's tried-and-true "formula" for visiting a town and earning money from his singing and dancing by appealing to the local priest, the role of stewards versus lords in the Middle Ages, and even the small detail that Crispin had only tried meat once or twice in his entire life before meeting Bear — can you even imagine?
I’m going to be a bit more liberal in my rating today and give it a 10/10, Recommendable. Be prepared for a scathing (or rather, annoyed) Moon Over Manifest review coming soon.
Roll of thunder
Hear my cry
Over the water
Bye and bye
Ole man comin’
Down the line
Whip in hand to
Beat me down
But I ain’t
Gonna let him
Turn me around.
[Spoilers ahead]
What an important book — just as tense as The Slave Dancer in parts, but less horrifying and more insightful and entertaining... which I have some (not-so-groundbreaking) thoughts about. (These posts keep getting longer and longer, but forgive me; I was excited about this one.)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was always on the shelves in my elementary classrooms, but I was never interested enough to pick it up. I remember thinking that the book must be written in something like Shakespearean English, given the title. And I suppose this is kind of true, although not with ye olde English. The dialog spoken by the Logan family is written in African American Vernacular English while the narrative portion is in more traditional written English.
I appreciate this because it both gave insight into how Cassie and her family communicated with each other without code-switching and illustrated the idea that speaking "properly" is not indicative whatsoever of actual intelligence. Even today, in which it seems like any non-white person is automatically dismissed if they can't speak perfect English without a thick accent, I appreciated seeing phrases like, "You care what a lot of useless people say 'bout you you'll never get anywhere, 'cause there's a lotta folks don't want you to make it” spoken aloud by characters. The Logan family felt much, much more real than the Black characters in Slave Dancer, who were almost always talked about collectively as "the blacks" and as though they didn't have the mental capacity to communicate at all.
But before Analysis Brain takes over the rest of this post, let's go into the plot a bit:
The story is about the Logans, a Black family in the American South during the Jim Crow era. There has just been a lynching in the community, which leads Cassie on a roundabout journey during the school year to figure out the role she is supposed to hold in society as a Black girl. A lot of different relationships between the Black and white people in the community take place:
TJ, a friend of Cassie's brother Stacey, thinks he's a hotshot for hanging out with some older white boys and feels like this has elevated his social status, even though they're just toying with him as a joke. They end up getting him to commit a crime with them and pin it on him because they're aware of their privilege; it's ultimately their word against his.
Cassie's teacher embodies the "don't bite the hand that feeds" mentality. When Cassie is outraged after finding out that her class's textbooks used to belonged to white children and were only given to the Black school once they were torn up and worn out, her teacher punishes her and her younger brother for having a problem with it.
Jeremy, a boy from a prominent white family, likes to hang out with Stacey and walks in the mornings with the Logan family before they part ways to go to their separate schools, but Stacey rejects his friendship several times because he's suspicious of Jeremy's motives. In this case, a genuine offer of friendship is confused for being transactional, just from what he's seen of other interactions between Black and white folks.
In the end, tensions between Cassie's family and the Wallaces, the white family that orchestrated the first lynching, come to a head. TJ, who participated in a robbery with two of the Wallace sons that led to a white man's accidental death, is about to be lynched, but a sudden fire in the Logans' cotton fields leads to everyone helping to put out the flames. TJ escapes the situation with his life, but he still ends up going to jail for the crime. At the very end, Cassie realizes her father had set fire to his own field to cause a distraction that would end up affecting everyone in the community if they didn't all work together to stop it.
But my favorite part by far was the long con that Cassie pulls on a rude white girl, Lillian Jean. In short, LJ disrespects Cassie and asks her to call her "Miss" as a show of subservience, and when Cassie protests, Cassie's grandmother makes her apologize to both LJ and her father to avoid an even worse conflict, even though she's done nothing wrong. Cassie decides to take this apology to the extreme and pretends to be LJ's friend and "know her place": she carries her books for her, compliments her, brushes her hair, etc., as though she was LJ's personal servant. During this time, she learns all of LJ's most important schoolgirl secrets, including which boys she likes. After some time passes, Cassie suddenly drops the act and pushes LJ into the mud one morning, making her promise to not bother her again and threatening to reveal her secrets if she tells anyone what Cassie did.
The chapter ends with Lillian Jean seeming completely shocked, saying she truly thought Cassie was her friend during the entire act. I think this shows the true ignorance in the white perspective at the time: many religious leaders in the Bible-thumpin' South preached that whites were God's chosen people and Black people were always intended to serve others, so I doubt Lillian Jean even thought to view Cassie as a real person. To her, Cassie could only ever be an uneducated, opinionless servant — a background character without her own personality who only has value when serving white people. For Lillian Jean to confuse Cassie's act with true friendship shows how many assumptions she's making about Cassie's very personhood.
In this case, I don't think the book was trying to portray LJ as a serious aggressor; if anything, it shows that she's not really at fault at all by way of sheer ignorance. From what the rest of the book shows, Lillian Jean was just parroting her family's views when she saw Cassie acting as though she had value beyond what was socially expected of Black members of their community, so she belittled Cassie to put her back into the role she was "supposed" to fill. Of course, this mindset is still around today in different ways (e.g., the more modern "I don't care if you're gay, but don't shove it down my throat" mentality if a same-sex couple dares to hold hands or essentially do anything a straight couple would do in public), and maybe it always will be.
This is nothing new (High School Musical illustrated roughly the same thing through teen romance and dance numbers nearly 20 years ago), but: There's such a deep-seated need to show others where we feel they belong in relation to ourselves, and I think this largely reflects what we were shown and taught by others in our childhoods. Our egos are too fragile to be able to let go of the things that other people do and not feel a desire to "put them in their place" if we were shown all our lives that our own place is higher on the totem pole — but acting rudely because of ignorance isn't an acceptable excuse in the Internet Age.
One of the quotes I try to live by goes something like, "Your first thought is what society has told you to think; your second thought determines your character." We have more opportunities than ever before in history to inform and shape that second thought into something kind, respectful, and productive.
With The Slave Dancer, I felt nothing but disgust and a strong desire to put the book down (or even throw it in the trash) while reading Jesse's perspective of being an unwilling white participant in the transatlantic slave trade. The idea that the slaves in Slave Dancer did not have any dialog forced the focus onto the despicable actions of characters like Ben Stout, who tormented slaves for fun, and it was just tragedy after tragedy until the slaves all perished at the end of the book.
But when given only the perspective of the Black characters in Roll of Thunder, I couldn't put it down and read the whole thing across two days. Both stories depicted race-related violence and gave a good picture of what people are truly capable of when driven by a hatred of the "other," but I was much more willing and eager to root for the Logan family and read about their lives in their own words than play the part of the powerless observer like Jesse.
