Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

That’s Newberys for my Newbery project, by the way.  I just finished To Be a Slave, an honor book from 1969, and I’m feeling of two minds about it. The premise is fascinating; the author used excerpts from actual slave narratives (most of them a paragraph or two long) and, adding some narration of his own to bind it together, wrote a book about what it was like to be a slave.  (Hence, you know, the title.)  There are some chilling bits in here, make no mistake.  My biggest issue was reading it as an adult; it would be a great book for a child just starting to think about the idea of slavery, but at 34, I read

“The prayer meetings, the parties, and the holidays did not make being a slave pleasurable. Nothing could do that…”

and I thought–well, DUH.  There was a noticeable portion of similar commentary, geared very simply toward a younger audience.  I also didn’t quite love the tone of the summation, but that’s probably because I read it in 2014.  It was published in 1968 by a black man who spent his teenage years in the pre-civil rights south; given the timing, he was probably doing an admirable job of keeping his anger in check.  I respect that. I have a tendency to feel slightly defensive in such situations, I suppose, because my ancestors weren’t owning slaves.  They were emigrating from Europe and being driven across the plains by a government that didn’t particularly want them.  Will I start a firestorm of controversy if I say that I feel a great and terrible grief at the thought of slavery, and the Holocaust, and the Cultural Revolution, and any other instance of unbearable oppression, but I don’t feel that I should feel a personal racial guilt because I am white?

Anyway.  Like I said, it’s a great book for kids.  It has fascinating material for adults as well, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that the tone works best for kids.

112 left to go.