"Look Out There Cassie Girl. All That Belongs to You"
Written: Mar 19 '07
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Unforgettable characters. Written from the heart.
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is an unforgettable story of an African-American family in the depression era south. It is an incredibly emotional journey that everyone should travel.
|
|
|
| briankrakow's Full Review: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry |
The 1930's were not a very good time for African-Americans, particularly in the south. There wasn't even a hint of equality. The law looked the other way whenever a black person was lynched, but anytime a white person was murdered or claimed rape, an African-American suspect would be lucky if they were arrested. In fact, a key scene late in Mildred Taylor's amazing novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the reader is rooting for someone to be taken to jail, because the alternative is much worse. The Logan family is deeply affected by this racism throughout Mildred Taylor's story, but the amazing thing about this book is how their positive attitude and unending love for one another stand strong through the worst of times.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is told through the eyes of Cassie Logan, a 9 year old African-American girl living in a rural 1933 Mississippi town. Her family is actually better off than most black families at the time. The Logans own 400 acres of land, although half of it is on mortgage, which they work hard to pay off. Cassie's father works on the railroad and is thus not home very often. Her mother is a schoolteacher by day and works the land at night. Back at home, Cassie's grandmother (known as Big Ma) takes care of the house and also works in the field.
In the 1930s south, there is no school bus to come get Cassie or her three brothers (Stacey, Christopher-John, and Little Man), so they make a one hour walk to get to their school, trying to dodge the sadistic school bus driver who likes to splash them with mud. A one-hour trek seems remarkable in a day when most kids wouldn't want to walk 10 minutes. Also notable is how excited the kids are when they actually receive textbooks, a rare event at their segregated school. Moments like these make you realize how much you've taken for granted in life.
Cassie is written as a very resourceful girl. Early on in the book, there is an amusing series of adventures as they try to figure out how to deal with the school bus that constantly splashes them. Their idea to enact revenge is very clever, but also dangerous. I love how Taylor is able to capture both the fun of their plan and the potential moral consequences. Later on, a white racist girl named Lillian Jean humiliates Cassie. At first outraged by this, she gets some sound advice from her father and works up a brilliant plan to exact revenge.
You can see where Cassie gets this. The Logan family is remarkable for their strong spirit and they instill this in their children. In the midst of blunt racism, they know they can't complain, but just have to stick together and forge ahead. When Cassie's mother comes up with a plan to get people to stop shopping at a store owned by a racist local family, she sticks by it even when danger comes their way. And this is the first example of how important land is in this story. The Logan's own their land, unlike most African-Americans who are sharecropping. The other families are threatened by their landowners to stop the boycott. No such threat can be made against the Logans. And in the end, in another brilliant idea by Cassie's father, the land ends up saving someone's life.
We've all heard about the pervasive racism in the post-Civil War south. Generally we read about it in history books or in lectures that cover all the basic facts. We know about the back of the restaurant and the separate drinking fountains. We know about segregation and sharecropping. We also know about the barbaric practice of lynching. But what we don't get is the actual human affect it had on individual people. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is incredibly affecting because we see this happening to characters that we've come to love. We feel every racist attack against the Logans because Taylor has written about them so intimately that we feel we're a part of their family. The result is an incredibly emotional experience that I've rarely felt reading a book before.
While the Logans are a fictional family, the story is obviously very dear to Taylor's heart. Much of it, as she mentions in the foreword, come from stories her father told her. In every sentence you can sense not only the anger and pain of the time period, but also the pride and love that can come with a strong family that sticks together. The title of this book comes from a song that Taylor used to sing to her father. It perfectly captures the essence of the Logan family's resilient strength:
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 'round.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
briankrakow
|
|
Member: Larry McGillicuddy
Location: Atlanta, GA
Reviews written: 114
Trusted by: 59 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.