Yard War

Gr 4–6—It's the fall of 1964, just after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Trip Westbrook lives with his parents in Jackson, MI. They have a black maid, Willie Jane, who serves as a sort of second mother to Trip and his sisters. When Trip invites Willie Jane's son, Dee, to join in for a game of football in the front yard, he unwittingly sets off a chain reaction of bigotry and harassment. But it's when he tries to bring Dee to lunch at the all-white country club that the tightly knit community turns inside out. This is an unusual book. There is a solid coming-of-age story and there is some football, though the cover design may throw off some readers: students who come looking for typical sports fiction might be disappointed. While a pick-up game is the occasion for the events that drive the plot, the sport itself is a small fraction of the story. At times the action is intense. True to usage at the time, Kitchings's narrator refers to African Americans as "colored" and "Negroes." The use of a more offensive epithet is limited, but does occur repeatedly. The scenes in which Trip is persecuted by the ignorant Bethune brothers (and their hateful father) are compelling and cringe-inducing. Nonetheless, the racist violence, verbal and physical, is historically significant and amount to a stinging indictment of the hypocrisies of the culture.