April 12, 2010

• Interlude

  Whatever I read, whenever I read, I learn.  If I don’t feel as though I am learning – either in my heart or my head – I throw the book on the floor and pick up another from the tumble down stack in my living room or the one beside my bed or the one in the bathroom, or the one I just moved to set the dinner table.  Most of the time I read fiction.  Often I read poetry.  Every once in a while I pick up a work or two of non-fiction.  This past week was one of those whiles and I am so glad it was.

   

  I came of age in the sixties.  I remember vividly the assassinations of a President, a candidate and a civil rights leader.  I remember the deaths of children and students and soldiers.  I remember lives celebrated and sacrifices made in the causes of justice and peace and equality.  It’s remarkable how much I have forgotten. 

   

  In 1965 I was fifteen years old.  I lived in a time where people couldn’t vote because they were the wrong color.  I remember one beautiful sunlit afternoon on the farm where I was raised, lying in a field of clover with my cousin.  She was younger than I and there we were, lying in the sun, warm, toasting ourselves like marshmallows.  I said to her, “Does it seem silly to you that we are toasting ourselves brown when a group of people can’t vote because they are brown?”  I don’t remember her answer but we talked of things like that, trying to sort out the illogical world of adults and deciding which parts we would embrace and which we would throw away like so much detritus.  That day was brought back to me quite vividly this weekend when I read Marching for Freedom by Elizabeth Partridge.  The subtitle is important here:  “Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary.”  I don’t know that I knew there were many, many children on that march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, many younger than I at the time.  Partridge writes, “The first time Joanne Blackmon was arrested, she was just ten years old.”  Aside from being a helluva first sentence and pulling the reader into the center of the story, I was suddenly reminded of how very young we were and how unafraid.  Populated with photographs of that historic time and in language that is clear and moving this beautiful book takes me back to a time when “Just Do It!” married “Yes, we can!” and the world changed.  As Katherine Patterson said when she announced that Marching for Freedom was the winner in School Library Journal’s Battle of the Books:  “…Marching for Freedom stirred my soul in a way few books have.”

   

  Those of us who grew up in the sixties are fairly certain that we invented history and are even more certain that we were the only kids who changed the world.  I’m fairly certain we’re wrong about that but leave us out illusions now that we are approaching the age of front porches, rocking chairs, memories, and inflated stories of a time gone by.  Still, books have a way of reminding us that we weren’t the only folks who stood for justice.  Some people sat for justice, which was even more important.  Everybody knows about Rosa Parks.  She sat for justice. That delicate looking, hard-as-nails, tender seamstress refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and changed the lives for black citizens in the segregated South forever.  However, what many of us don’t know, is that nine months earlier, on March 2, 1955, another young girl took the same position Ms. Parks took and refused to be moved from her seat on the bus, declaring over and over again, “It’s my constitutional right!”  In his book Claudette Colvin: Twice toward Justice, Phillip Hoose introduces us to the intelligent, sixteen year old Claudette Colvin who simply refused to accept the way she was treated, didn’t understand why the adults were willing to “go along to get along,” and refused to accept that the United State Constitution didn’t mean her when it said, “All men are created equal.”  Pairing archival photographs with stirring language, Hoose does a brilliant job of setting the tone of the times and demonstrating what the Jim Crow laws looked and felt like.  Telling a story that is forgotten if not unknown, Hoose deservedly won the National Book Award for bringing the life of Claudette Colvin into the hands of readers of all ages.

   

  And so it goes.

  • 12:32 pm
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