Mildred D Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the 1977 Newbery winner about the 1930s black Mississippi Logan family through the eyes of the narrator, nine-year-old Cassie Logan. Cassie and her bothers, Stacey (12), Christopher-John (7), and Little Man (6) are not sharecroppers, but their grandmother (Big Ma) owns land that her sons work (and work for to pay the taxes). The rest of their community is primarily sharecroppers, a difficult enterprise at anytime in the Jim Crow South, but made even more so during the Depression. Through small daily experiences of racism from segregated schools and the white kids’ bus splashing mud on the Logan family as they walked to school all the way to lynchings and burnings, the Logans work to both protect their family and their farm, as well as to stand up to injustice and give hope to their sharecropping neighbors of a better life.
What I liked. I think Cassie is such an amazing window into the world of Depression era Jim Crow South sharecropping. I think in the over 40 years since it has been published, it has become standard late elementary early middle school reading because it is so effective at bringing the reader into that particular world. Cassie is very spunky and outspoken, and her coming of age is so painful and allows the reader to experience that discomfort and injustice in ways that are real. When she gets overlooked by a store keeper, or knocked down by the white girl Lilian Jean, it makes the reader feel so angry on her behalf, the absolute unfairness of being mistreated. But then when her Uncle David wants to make retribution on her behalf, which could result in his death if not more of the families, you as a reader become aware of just how complex and difficult these issues were for families like the Logans.
What was interesting & What it teaches me as a writer. One thing I was so impressed by was the structure of this book dipping in and out of the world of children and into the world of adult problems, allowing the two to intermingle. The story opens with the white bus constantly drenching the children with mud and dust. The Logan children secretly resist by digging a trench that causes the bus to get stuck. They are so caught up in their world that when a lynching happens that night, the kids worry it is caused by their actions toward the bus. Taylor allows the kids to be kids, with kid problems and then to have those bleed into the world of adults and adult problems, keeping the audience firmly in the experience of 9 year old Cassie. It’s something that I think JK Rowling does, dipping in and out of Hogwarts school rivalries (Malfoy, teachers, house cups and points) and the big world of Voldemort and the war with the Death Eaters as well.
Similarity to other Newbery winners. Out of the last four Newberies winning books, this is the third to deal directly with the African American experience (The other two were Paula Fox’s 1974 The Slave Dancer and Virginia Hamilton’s 1975 M. C. Higgins, the Great) Before 1974, it was largely limited to the books based on real early modern slaves: Amos Fortune, and Juan de Pareja. With the exception of Sounder (1970), about post-reconstruction south. So Roll of Thunder is definitely part of a trend to more directly address race in American children’s books.
I happened to read The Hate U Give, a very popular 2017 YA book by Angie Thomas, immediately before reading Roll of Thunder, and the similarities and differences between the two were so striking.
First the differences: The Hate U Give is a contemporary YA novel with a lot of language. (Like a lot, a lot, a lot of swearing. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.) Starr is 16 and witnesses the death of a black friend at the hands of a white police officer in an urban community. While Roll of Thunder is written in 1977 about the 1930s and is a Middle Grade Novel. And as a middle grade novel it has a younger protagonist (Cassie is 9 and her older brother Stacey is 12) and very little graphic violence or language. While the book ends with their disgraced family friend TJ being spared a lynching, his future prospects are very grim.)
Second the similarities: Both center around a young black girl discovering injustice as window for readers into racial injustice. Both Cassie and Starr are very well educated and have families that value education and have educated mothers (Cassie’s mother is a teacher while Starr’s mother is a nurse) and fathers who work hard with less education (Cassiae’s father is a farmer and works the railroad while Starr’s father runs a store). They both have a number of older and younger brothers, a strong grandmother, and an uncle who is central to the story. Both end with a fire that destroys their own property and stops mob violence. Both have the wrongful treatment (death or near death) of a teenage black boy from a good family who had recently begun to run with a rough crowd. Both have community stores as essential to the life of their communities. Both paint the use of alcohol (and drugs and gangs in the case of The Hate U Give) as stealing the chances for teenagers to live a good life. Both have a kind and sympathetic white male character (the lawyer to Cassie’s family and Starr’s boyfriend Chris) but their white female peer (Lillian Jean in Roll of Thunder and Hailey Grant in The Hate U Give) are some of the most cruel points of racism that the main characters experience (and neither white girl is much redeemed or reformed when confronted by the protagonists). Both have the owning of property as something essential to their family’s honor and connecting them to the community.
Reading these books back to back most sharply drew my attention to how police shootings and lynchings were portrayed so similarly in these books: flinging the protagonists into facing racial injustice on a personal and corporate scale.
Have you read Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry? What are your favorite books that helped you connect to reality of injustice?
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