FICTION

Freedom's a-Callin Me

by Ntozake SHANGE
978-0-06133-741-3.
COPY ISBN
Gr 4—8—The team who created We Troubled the Waters (HarperCollins, 2009) now presents a series of poems and paintings that express the hope and frustration of enslaved people trying to navigate the Underground Railroad. Using dialect to convey a Southern cadence, Shange's poems communicate powerful emotions. Fear, resolve, anger, and hope all show up at various times. The book depicts a variety of experiences, from a slave who wants to escape, to a loved one who tries to convince him to stay; a man who changes his mind midway, to others who survive the journey. Along the way, the escapees meet white people who hurt or kill as well as those who help in large and small ways. These poems are a cry from the heart. They express the spirit that compelled people to take desperate measures to find freedom, people who viewed death as preferable to bondage. The expressive, impressionistic paintings capture attention with their bold strokes and vivid coloring. Generally indistinct faces and dramatically posed bodies command the eye. A few graphic images make this book best suited to upper elementary or older readers. This is an excellent resource to use with fictional titles such as Patricia Polacco's January's Sparrow (Philomel, 2009) or Christopher Paul Curtis's Elijah of Buxton (Scholastic, 2007).—Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst, St. Christopher's School, Richmond, VA
This collection begins with a man in a cotton field and ends with three newly free African Americans in Canada. Shange's poems are filled with a sense of urgency; most of the paintings are dark, and Brown effectively uses dabs of white to convey a sense of danger (moonlight reflected off the shirt of a runaway, making him visible to trackers, for example).
The poet and the painter who first paired their talents in 2009 with We Troubled the Waters return with another collection, this one centered on the experiences of slaves seeking freedom. The poems are arranged chronologically, beginning with a man in a cotton field, dreaming of freedom, and ending with three newly free African Americans in Canada posing for a photograph with white abolitionists. Along the way we see and hear several frightened but courageous runaways, always pursued by the trackers and their hound dogs, never sure whom to trust ("he look jus' like mastah / oh but he aint / mastah have him killed / a abolitionist"). Most of the paintings are necessarily dark, as the escapes took place at night, and Brown effectively uses dabs of white to convey a sense of danger -- moonlight reflected off the shirt of a runaway, making him visible to trackers, for example, or light coming through the floorboards under which a man is hiding. Shange's poems, too, are filled with a sense of urgency: "watch now / them trackers shootin at us again / stay low / stay low / ‘nearly there.'" She pays tribute, too, to those who did not make it in her most haunting poem, "The Sacrifice": "we comfort each other / weepin / contemplatin the torturous death of the other... / a peculiar grief on the way / to freedom." kathleen t. horning
Reviewed by Lucinda Snyder Whitehurst , Dec 01, 2011

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