Separated by 30 years but has that much changed…..
Yesterday, i finished Whistling Past the Graveyard, the 48th book that I have read this year! Three more to go to reach my goal of 51! I finished the 47th book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol a few days prior and as I thought about the books, I began to see similarities between the books. The big dissimilarity is that Whistling Past the Graveyard is a novel and Amazing Grace is nonfiction. The other is that Whistling Past the Graveyard is set in 1963 Mississippi and the children whose lives Jonathan Kozol writes about live in New York City in some of the poorest neighborhoods in our nation. But they both deal with the lives of black Americans. One happens at the time that black Americans were gaining their civil rights and dealing with overcoming deep-seated prejudices and a part of our nation that was being dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century. While the other views the lives of children in 1993 NYC who may now have those rights but are still fighting for equal treatment in a highly segregated New York.
Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall is a coming of age story featuring a lovable nine-year old Starla Claudette, who in 1963 runs away from her strict grandmother’s home. She is hell-bent on getting to Nashville to reunite with her mother Lulu who left her and her daddy, when Starla was three to go to Nashville and become a star! Not long after she starts her trek she accepts a ride from a black women Eula. Eula is traveling with a white baby she took from the steps of a church. As the trip continues, both Starla and Eula’s lives are changed forever, as they struggle to survive and Starla learns about the prejudices of our nation first hands as she watches her new friends struggle to gain their civil rights.
Bestselling author Karen White writes this about the book….
“Like Harper Lee’ To Kill a Mockingbird and Katheriyn Stockett’s The Help …… A COMING-OF-AGE STORY AS WELL AS A LUMINOUS PORTRAIT OF COURAGE AND THE BONDS OF FRIENDSHIP….Susan Crandall evokes 1963 Mississippi and its struggles with a deft hand.”
It is a wonderful story with two well-developed characters who you can certainly root for! I really, really enjoyed it!
A couple of my thoughts concerning the connections between the two books. The one glaring connection is that even though we have made great strides in the last 50 plus years, we still have a long way to go and in some ways we haven’t gone very far at all. The Mott Havens and Hunts Point neighborhoods of New York City are all that different from the Bottomlands of Mississippi. While black folks live in those areas of towns in Mississippi that flood, the black communities in New York get waste incinerators!!
Throughout Whistling Past the Graveyard, Eula and the other black women in the book’s strength comes from their religious beliefs and those same beliefs keep many of the mothers and grandmothers in the black communities of New York City strong!! And it is those strong women like Eula and Miss Cyrena in Whistling Past the Graveyard and Mrs. Washington and others in Kozol’s book that keep their families together and moving forward.
As I read Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace I couldn’t stop thinking that the book should be required reading for every Congressman in the United States and then maybe then they would see that every cut they make to the budget or hurdle the place in front of the poor people in this country hurts the children most of all. And realize what they are doing to the future of our country!
So to wrap it up I highly recommend both Whistling Past the Graveyard and Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. Both will make you think about the status of race relations in our country and that in the end ….. Black Lives Matter!!
