Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"I love it. I love it. I love it.
How I love this place...I love it.
How I love this place...I love it.
How I love this happy place,
This healing place...I love it
How I love this peaceful place
This place with wings."
--I Love It

Joanne Rand opened the show in Cotati last night with I Love It, the song she refers to with a smile as "our" national anthem. The song's simple lyrics eventually split into three parts that, with audience participation, becoming sort of a round that weaves in and out. It's by far my favorite song of Joanne's, and I've spent more than a decade getting seriously blissed out everytime I'm lucky enough to hear her perform/lead it.

Joanne, who started singing as a kid on a Georgia mountaintop and ended up living out in the woods amidst us aging hippies, tree huggers, and radical feminists of Northern California, performs what has been dubbed "Psychedelic Folk Revival Music."

But, despite various songs about radiation on her windshield, saving salmon, and "earth my body, water my soul, air my breath, and fire my spirit," the reality is that Joanne Rand also spends a lot of time singing stories about family.

"My mama says that we are all connected
My papa says that we are each alone
My brother says that love is more important
Than the roaring of the road"
--The Roaring of the Road

In fact, one of her more recent CDs is titled Family History, and through its songs Joanne tell stories of where she came from; about the great aunt who became an actress in New York City; about her grandfather's old house that was demolished to make way for a five-lane highway; of old Auntie Maud who tried driving herself from Florida to California until she "got confused in Texas," and got stuck in an old-folks home for the rest of her life. "Don't forget your family, they are what becomes you," sings Joanne.

Back when Joanne's daughter Georgia was born, I gave her a copy of one of my all-time favorite picture books, David McPhail's MOLE MUSIC. Now Georgia has turned six and, as I went to bring a book for her to the show last night, it was easy to choose a great new one that Joanne and Georgia will to be able share and enjoy together.

"When Soonie's great-grandma was seven,
she was sold from the Virginia land to a plantation
in South Carolina without her ma or pa
but with some muslin her ma had given her.

"And two needles she
got from the big house--
and thread dyed bright red
with berries from
the chokecherry tree."

Illustrated by Hudson Talbott utilizing a variety of media woven through it, SHOW WAY is Jacqueline Woodson's story of her own maternal ancestors, their strengths, and their connectedness. Going back six generations, to her great-grandma Soonie's great-grandma, Woodson, with the help of Talbott, colorfully portrays the joy of marriages and new generations, the sorrow of forced separations during slave days, and the courage handed down from Jacqueline's ancestors who participated in the escape of slaves by sewing pieces of quilts that were actually "show ways," fabric maps that utilized symbols to show escapees the way to freedom. Even after slavery ended, Jacqueline's great-grandmother Soonie continued the tradition of sewing Show Ways. Two generations later, Woodson's own mother, Ann, and Ann's twin sister Caroline, each had a Show Way patch from their grandmother Soonie pinned in their dresses when, at age seven, they went "walking in a line to change the laws that kept black people and white people living separate."

Woodson makes It is clear that the true stories passed down through these succeeding generations have inspired her and helped provide a map for her own life's work.

"And when I was seven,
I didn't have to work in a field
or walk in any Freedom lines.
But I still read like Georgiana and wrote like Ann,
and when the words were slow in coming,
I sewed stars and moons and roads
into quilts and curtains and clothes because Mama said,
All the stuff that happened before you were born
is your own kind of Show Way.

"There's a road, girl,my mama said. There's a road."

Woodson's story doesn't end with herself. It continues on to her own child, Toshi Georgiana. Throughout the story, Hudson Talbott beautifully portrays generation after generation of children raised by their mothers up to the sky, where boundaries don't exist, where time continues without end, where the same moon and stars that guided the slaves still mark the path to freedom. And so we see Jacqueline Woodson holding up Toshi Georgiana in Brooklyn, New York to bathe in that same night sky that Joanne Rand's daughter Georgia gazes up at from her own home in the wilds of Humboldt County, California.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com