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

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"As in many a battle before it and since, both sides declared victory. But no woman would have called it a victory."

Curled up in a grey naugahyde seat at the boarding gate in Nashville, I awaited my connecting flight to this year's International Reading Association Convention and joyfully inhaled the first of the fall's heavyweight contenders for the Newbery medal--Richard Peck's THE RIVER BETWEEN US.

"...How many years can a mountain exist,
Before it's washed to the sea?..."
--Bob Dylan

THE RIVER BETWEEN US--How appropriate a title for a tale of race relations. And how appropriate a story for me to immerse myself in, a day after presenting the following depressing news article to our classes last Friday:

By ELLIOTT MINOR, Associated Press Writer
"Gerica McCrary said she cried when she heard about the decision to hold a separate white-only prom only a year after she helped bring black and white students together in her rural high school's first integrated prom.
Many white students at Taylor County High School, in the small town of Butler, said they plan to attend next week's mixed prom, but a small number of whites said they also wanted a private party. Juniors are charged with planning the prom each year and last year they decided to have just one dance--the first integrated prom in 31 years in the rural Georgia county about 80 miles south of Atlanta. Until then, parents and students organized separate proms for whites and blacks after school officials stopped sponsoring dances, in part because they wanted to avoid problems arising from interracial dating. After school integration, separate proms were common in the rural South. Taylor County was among the last to cling to the practice. Erin Posey, a white senior, said the entire junior class joined together in hosting last year's prom, but this year's junior class wasn't as unified. 'I think a lot of seniors were disappointed," she said. "Now we have to choose between two groups of friends.'... "

So--prophetically in terms of this book--what I asked our students was who among them thought that they'd be permitted to go to the whites-only prom. What if they were just a shade darker than their classmates? What if they looked white but people knew they had a black grandparent or great-grandparent. Several popular, off-white students grinned--they knew they wouldn't make the cut.

When will that river of fear and hatred that continues to divide so many of us finally dry up? In my continued naiveté, I keep expecting year after year, decade after decade, that we'll finally get past such petty fears as "interracial dating" and focus our attention on more pressing concerns that truly threaten the future of humanity on Earth. But thanks to parents in places like Butler, Georgia who continue to encourage and condone such behaviors as segregated proms, and thanks to the commercial news media's portrayal of African Americans (See Bowling for Columbine for that discussion.), and thanks those parents in other parts of America who think equality is going too far if it suddenly involves their daughters' dating partners, we can be assured that some members of one more generation will come of age and bring up their children to believe the same ignorant, stereotypical crap as Trent Lott (and Rick Santorum).

End of sermon, back to THE RIVER BETWEEN US:

"My dad was what they called a self-made man. Though he'd succeeded in St. Louis, he'd come from a little town called Grand Tower on the other side of the Mississippi River down low in Illinois.
"All I knew of Dad's people was that they'd lived through the Civil War. Imagine an age when there were still people around who'd seen U.S. Grant with their own eyes, and men who'd voted for Lincoln. People you could reach out and touch."

This book contains a story within a story. The outer shell is the tale told by fifteen-year-old Howard Leland Hutchings who, in 1916, gets to travel 100 miles with his father in a Model T touring car to visit the father's ancestral home in Southern Illinois and meet his paternal grandparents, as well as his paternal great-aunt and great-uncle who also reside there.

The story within Howard's story is the coming of age of those now-ancient relatives. Tilly, Howard's grandmother, takes us back to their adolescence in that muddy little hamlet on the Mississippi River. We meet Tilly's little sister, Cass, who was having frequent and unnerving visions of the past and of the future. Tilly also has a twin brother, Noah, who was chaffing at the bit to join the Union Army at the same time that many of the other boys in the neighborhood were heading off to join the Rebels. Before Noah does head off to war, the real action begins when the steamboat Rob Roy pulls into the dock one day, just before the blockade is dropped in place over the lower Mississippi:

" 'Port's open!' someone called back. 'Business as usual. Still shippin' cotton. But we was boarded and searched at Cairo.'
"We drank it all in and turned over every word. Then lo and behold, two figures were coming down the plank. Will I ever forget the first sight of them? Two figures, backlit by the boat, come down to us by lantern light.
"A young lady was in the lead, in ballooning crinolines. Heavens, I'd never seen such skirts--rustling taffeta stretched wide over hoops. Her top part was encased in a cut-plush cape, with tassels. And her bonnet. My stars, I pushed people aside to get a look at it. A bonnet too dark to make out except for the ice-blue satin it was lined with, and a whole corsage of artificial violets planted inside next to her face. An enormous satin bow tied beneath her chin.
"And then her face, framed with long dark curls beside the violets. Her eyes were large and darkly fringed. Her Cupid's bow of a mouth too dark to be as nature intended. She must be from New Orleans. No town between here and there could have produced her...
"She turned back to the young woman beside her. I saw this other one only in silhouette at first. She was narrower, darker, shrouded in a long, plain cloak. In place of a bonnet or a traveling hat, her head was tied up in a bandanna. It was of some fine silken material, and the tails of the knot were artfully arraigned. Her hands were full of various boxes and reticules."

Tilly's mom rents a room to these two unusual characters, the fun commences, and the rumors start flying. The story is frequently charming in that Richard Peck manner, although it can be seen as a bit of a departure from the largely comedic books that the Margaret Edwards Award-winning author has written lately (including the Newbery Medal-winning A YEAR DOWN YONDER). There are several mysteries to keep us turning the pages, and a couple of big surprises by the end.

"...Black muddy river
Roll on forever
I don't care how deep or wide
If you got another side.."
--Grateful Dead

I don't know many people who would pass up the chance to read a new Richard Peck story--especially one that's as refreshing as cannonballing off a boulder into a good swimming hole on a hot summer day. You can bet that this book will make a big splash with readers.

And if that old river isn't ready to dry up yet, you can also bet that getting THE RIVER BETWEEN US into the hands of students will inspire some more of them to listen to their consciences and swim upstream, against those dark, treacherous currents of ignorance and fear.

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