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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Sheridan Public Library | J Grey (Wiles) | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
John Henry swims better than anyone I know.
He crawls like a catfish,
blows bubbles like a swamp monster,
but he doesn't swim in the town pool with me.
He's not allowed.
Joe and John Henry are a lot alike. They both like shooting marbles, they both want to be firemen, and they both love to swim.
But there's one important way they're different: Joe is white and John Henry is black and in the South in 1964, that means John Henry isn't allowed to do everything his best friend is.
Then a law is passed that forbids segregation and opens the town pool to everyone. Joe and John Henry are so excited they race each other there...only to discover that it takes more than a new law to change people's hearts.
This stirring account of the "Freedom Summer" that followed the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 powerfully and poignantly captures two boys' experience with racism and their friendship that defies it.
Author Notes
Deborah Wiles was born in Alabama and grew up in an Air Force family, moving many times but digging deep roots into the Mississippi soil of her extended family. She still travels "down South" today from her longtime home in Frederick, Maryland, where she lives with her family and works as a freelance writer. She also teaches writing and oral history workshops--sharing with children how all history is really biography, and how every person's story is important. Freedom Summer is her first book.
Jerome Lagarrigue was born and grew up in Paris, France, in a family of artists. Mr. Lagarrigue is the illustrator of Freedom Summer as well as My Man Blue by Nikki Grimes, and his work has also appeared in the New Yorker and on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he teaches drawing and painting at Parsons School of Design and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Set in Mississippi during the summer of 1964, this affecting debut book about two boys-one white, the other African-American-underscores the bittersweet aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act," wrote PW. Ages 4-8. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Primary) Set in the South in 1964, this story powerfully conveys the experience of racial prejudice by focusing on two particular boys and their real-live-boy feelings and behavior. Joe's friendship with John Henry, the son of his family's black maid, is defined by the rules of segregation under which they live. ""John Henry swims better than anybody I know...but he doesn't swim in the town pool with me. He's not allowed."" Joe, who is white, is uncomfortable with the rules but accepts them, buying ice pops for them both, for instance, because his friend isn't allowed inside the general store. Then the announcement that a new law has been passed, and that everything-including the town swimming pool-will be open to everyone now, regardless of color, brings the situation to a head. The author presents the boys' excitement with such immediacy-""'I'm gonna swim in the town pool!' [John Henry] hollers. 'Is it deep?' 'REAL deep,' I tell him.... 'Let's be the first ones there'""-that when next morning they find the pool being filled with tar to avoid the enforced integration, their subsequent disappointment is palpable. It's also galvanizing. As Joe's ""head starts to pop with new ideas"" (""I want to go to the Dairy Dip with John Henry...I want to go to the picture show, buy popcorn, and watch the movie together""), John Henry decides to go into the previously forbidden store and buy his own ice pop (with his own nickel, thank you), and he and his friend join arms and go in together. The text, though concise, is full of nuance; the repetition of the phrase ""he's not allowed"" lets readers reach their own conclusions about injustice. Jerome Lagarrigue's oil paintings shimmer with the heat of the South in summer as they portray the boys' activities; they are most effective when capturing emotion, especially in a close-up portrait of John Henry after he's been denied the pleasure-and the right-of swimming in the town pool. He's sohurt his face looks bruised. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Wiles draws on memories of her childhood summers in Mississippi in her first picture book, a slice-of-life story about Joe, a Caucasian boy, and his best friend, John Henry, an African-American boy whose mother works as a housekeeper for Joes family. The setting is the Deep South in the summer of 1964, the period called Freedom Summer for its wide-ranging social changes following passage of the Civil Rights Act. Joe and John Henry have spent all their summers together, working around the rampant prejudice of the era and maintaining their friendship even though they cant swim in the public pool together or walk into the local store to buy a pair of ice pops. When the new law takes effect, the boys race together to the public pool only to find it being filled in with asphalt by city workers. John Henrys hurt and shame ring true in the text, but Joes precocious understanding of the situation outstrips his age. (I want to see this town with John Henrys eyes.) An authors note at the beginning of the book describes her experiences and the atmosphere in her own hometown during this era, when some white business owners preferred to close down rather than open their doors to African-Americans. Younger children will need this background explanation to understand the storys underlying layers of meaning, or the filling-in of the swimming pool will seem like a mindless bureaucratic blunder rather than concrete prejudice in action. Teachers and parents could use this book as a quiet but powerful introduction to the prejudice experienced by many Americans, and of course the book is a natural to pair with the story of another, more-famous John Henry. Vibrant full-page paintings by talented French-born artist Lagarrigue capture both the palpable heat of southern summer days and the warmth of the boys friendship. (Picture book. 6-12)
Booklist Review
Ages 5^-8. "John Henry Waddell is my best friend," begins the narrator of this story, set during a summer of desegregation in the South. John Henry is black and the narrator is white, so the boys swim together at the creek, rather than at the whites-only town pool, and the narrator buys the ice-cream at the segregated store. When new laws mandate that the pool, and everything else, must desegregate, the boys rejoice, until the town fills the pool with tar in protest and the narrator tries to see this town, "through John Henry's eyes." The boy's voice, presented in punchy, almost poetic sentences, feels overly romanticized, even contrived in places. It's the illustrations that stun. In vibrantly colored, broad strokes, Lagarrigue, who illustrated Nikki Grimes' My Man Blue (1999), paints riveting portraits of the boys, particularly of John Henry, that greatly increase the story's emotional power. Beautiful work by an illustrator to watch. --Gillian Engberg