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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Newberg Public Library | J AWARDS HAMILTON 1986 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | JNF 398.2 HAMILTON | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"The well-known author retells 24 black American folk tales in sure storytelling voice- animal tales, supernatural tales, fanciful and cautionary tales, and slave tales of freedom. All are beautifully readable. With the added attraction of 40 wonderfully expressive paintings by the Dillons, this collection should be snapped up."--(starred) School Library Journal.
This book has been selected as a Common Core State Standards text Exemplar (Grade 6-8, Stories) in Appendix B.
Author Notes
Virginia Hamilton was born March 12, 1934. She received a scholarship to Antioch College, and then transferred to the Ohio State University in Columbus, where she majored in literature and creative writing. She also studied fiction writing at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Her first children's book, Zeely, was published in 1967 and won the Nancy Bloch Award. During her lifetime, she wrote over 40 books including The People Could Fly, The Planet of Junior Brown, Bluish, Cousins, the Dies Drear Chronicles, Time Pieces, Bruh Rabbit and the Tar Baby Girl, and Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny. She was the first African American woman to win the Newbery Award, for M. C. Higgins, the Great. She has won numerous awards including three Newbery Honors, three Coretta Scott King Awards, an Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award. She was also the first children's author to receive a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1995.
She died from breast cancer on February 19, 2002 at the age of 67.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-7 The well-known author here retells 24 black American folk tales in sure storytelling voice. In four groupings she presents seven animal tales (including a tar-baby variant); six fanciful ones (including ``Wiley, His Mama, and the Hairy Man'' and a tale of which Harper's Gunniwulf Dutton, 1967 is a variant); five supernatural tales (including variants of the Tailypo, John and the Deviland a wild cautionary tale, ``Little Eight John''); and finally, six slave tales of freedom, closing with the moving title story. Depending on the sources, some of the tales use a modified dialect for flavor; one told with quite a few words of Gullah dialect has a glossary. All are beautifully readable. The book has a bibliography, and comments follow each tale, including one personal note of a family account involving one of her grandfathers. Two other collections of black folk tales, Courlander's Terrapin's Pot of Sense (Holt, 1957; o.p.) and Faulkner's The Days When the Animals Talked (Follett, 1977; o.p.) are both out of print. With the added attraction of 40 bordered full- and half-page illustrations by the Dillonswonderfully expressive paintings reproduced in black and whitethis collection should be snapped up. Ruth M. McConnell, San Antonio Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Three winners of multiple honors have created this incomparable book. The Dillons illustrate Hamilton's 24 stories with marvelous pictures alive with the spirit of each: sly humor, mystery, pathos and, most powerfully, the human need for freedom. In the author's introduction and notes, we find information on black history, on the original slave storytellers``voices from the past''that include her own ancestors. The stories are given full effect by Hamilton's use of colloquial language, evoking the artless entertainer relating the exploits of ``Bruh Rabbit'' and other animal tricksters. The reader's emotional response, however, is to the artists' depictions and the author's narrative in ``The People Could Fly.'' They are the slaves from Gulla who, according to legend, escape the master's abuse one day. ``They rose on the air. Say they flew away to Free-dom.'' (All ages). (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
This title story from the late Virginia Hamilton's brilliant collection of American black folktales The People Could Fly is now reissued as a stand-alone picture book, handsomely illustrated in full color. The Dillons, who also illustrated the original collection, fill the book with powerful images. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
"They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin up on a gate." Hamilton's The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985) won a Coretta Scott King Award, and the Dillons here reissue its heartbreaking title story with gorgeous, all-new, full-color paintings. Legend has it that some people in Africa could fly, but when they were shipped to America as slaves, they shed their black, shiny wings (reflected as feathers on the glossy black endpapers). When a mother and her baby are brutally whipped in the cotton fields, an old slave resurrects his magic and helps her and others fly away, free as birds, leaving the non-magical slaves behind to tell the tale. Like the story, the paintings are both hopeful and somber, and the slaves are as graceful and softly luminous as the slave owners are stiff, pinched, and cruel. A dreamy, powerful picture-book tribute to both Hamilton and the generations-old story. (editor's note, author's note) (Picture book. 9-12) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gr. 3-9. The stirring title story in the late Virginia Hamilton's 1985 collection of American black folktales is an unforgettable slave escape fantasy, retold here in terse, lyrical prose that stays true to the oral tradition Hamilton knew from her family and her scholarly research. Leo and Diane Dillons' illustrations for the collection were in black and white, but the art here is beautiful full color, in the style of the cover of the collection. The large paintings are magic realism at its finest, with clear portraits showing individuals and the enduring connections between them. The images depict mass cruelty close up, but the faces of the characters Hamilton names are always distinct, even in the packed hold of the slave ships, when those who could fly lost their wings. Laboring in the cotton field, Sarah and her baby are whipped by the overseer. When elderly Toby helps them escape, the rhythmic paintings dramatize people flying to freedom, joining hands together in the sky. Each one is an individual, exquisitely (and differently) dressed in traditional African garb, an inspiration to those left behind, who had only their imaginations to set them free. A final portrait shows Hamilton in kente cloth smiling above a loving family at home. This special picture-book story will be told and retold everywhere. --Hazel Rochman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. ix |
| He Lion, Bruh Bear, and Bruh Rabbit, And Other Animal Tales | p. 3 |
| He Lion, Bruh Bear, and Bruh Rabbit | p. 5 |
| Doc Rabbit, Bruh Fox, and Tar Baby | p. 13 |
| Tappin, the Land Turtle | p. 20 |
| Bruh Alligator and Bruh Deer | p. 26 |
| Bruh Lizard and Bruh Rabbit | p. 31 |
| Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble | p. 35 |
| Wolf and Birds and the Fish-Horse | p. 43 |
| The Beautiful Girl of the Moon Tower, And Other Tales of the Real, Extravagant, and Fanciful | p. 51 |
| The Beautiful Girl of the Moon Tower | p. 53 |
| A Wolf and Little Daughter | p. 60 |
| Manuel Had a Riddle | p. 65 |
| Papa John's Tall Tale | p. 76 |
| The Two Johns | p. 81 |
| Wiley, His Mama, and the Hairy Man | p. 90 |
| John and the Devil's Daughter, And Other Tales of the Supernatural | p. 105 |
| John and the Devil's Daughter | p. 107 |
| The Peculiar Such Thing | p. 116 |
| Little Eight John | p. 121 |
| Jack and the Devil | p. 126 |
| Better Wait Till Martin Comes | p. 133 |
| Carrying the Running-Aways, And Other Slave Tales of Freedom | p. 139 |
| Carrying the Running-Aways | p. 141 |
| How Nehemiah Got Free | p. 147 |
| The Talking Cooter | p. 151 |
| The Riddle Tale of Freedom | p. 156 |
| The Most Useful Slave | p. 160 |
| The People Could Fly | p. 166 |
| Bibliography | p. 175 |