I am interested in the history of civil rights efforts in America, and Taylor’s novels offer a window on Black family life in the south under segregation, before the protests and demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s. A moving storyteller, Taylor is able to balance subtle character development with truly gripping plots; and since her books are interconnected and tell the story of the Logan family over generations (from the late 1900s to the mid-twentieth century), I found myself deeply connected to the personalities Taylor created. You care about the experience of Cassie Logan. You care about her family’s history and her own growth into adulthood.
The central thematic focus of Taylor’s novels is the psychological experience of life under segregation. Across all of her novels characters grapple with the effects of the unwritten codes that enforce white supremacy in the south. Whether a character has to face the indignity of white prejudice in a store, a market, or on public transportation, Taylor offers the event in subtle, complex terms that uncover its massive effects both for the character’s understanding of race relations and for the character’s reckoning with the possibility of active response. And it is here that Taylor offers a transformational perspective for children’s literature. Too often in America young people learn only about the heroes of the civil rights movement, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. They learn very little about the everyday people who resisted oppression in ways that helped set the stage for the legislative and public shifts of the 1960s. By reaching back into the late nineteenth century, and centering on the 1930s in Mississippi, Taylor’s novels allow us to understand the longstanding commitments of Black Americans to social change. By understanding the experience of people under segregation – both the psychological effects of racism and the desire for active, engaged response – Taylor resists versions of the past that figure Black communities as passive and frame civil rights through hagiographies. Like Toni Morrison’s great novel depicting enslavement, Beloved, Taylor’s body of work offers a groundbreaking depiction of the interior experience of people living, thriving, and resisting under a regime of white supremacy.
Another main thematic focus in Taylor’s novels is the commitment of Black families to each other. Part of the disparagement of Black communities historically has involved the perpetuation of the falsehood that Black families are somehow less stable than white families, whether through the lie that Black fathers are absent or uninvolved, or that Black mothers are inattentive or unloving. Taylor’s novels counter those biases with depictions of the close, supportive networks of family support, with affectionate, responsive parental figures. The depictions of Black men are also profoundly moving and complex. Not only does the Logan family’s father offer courageous and dedicated support for his family, but uncles, cousins, brothers, and male friendships figure centrally to the series.
A third thematic innovation in the Logan series is the relationship of the Black family to the natural world. Black people have historically been imagined through figures of labor on the land, images reaching back into enslavement and across the sharecropping and rural wage labor of the twentieth century. What we discover in the Logan books is a range of engagements with the environment. The land is the family’s sustenance and stability, a claim for the importance of Black ownership to economic success. But the land also includes woods as well as fields, and those woods evoke the longstanding love the family has shared across generations. In the first novel in the series, young Cassie hears the woods whisper to her and feels a deep connection to nature. It is revolutionary to assert a Black child’s sense of comfort and pleasure in nature, a form of imaginative resistance to biases that would attach blackness to rural labor alone, or imagine trees as tools of racial violence in lynching. For Taylor’s novels, the woods are an expression of the family’s love, its survival, and a sense of joy that is deeply political.
What impresses me the most about Taylor’s approach to describing child agency is that she allows children to understand the systems that create inequity. For example, in her Newbery Award winning novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Cassie’s mother, a schoolteacher, recognizes that the books she is asked to teach are deeply biased, and she supplements the material in school with her own knowledge. This is an actual practice that Black schoolteachers in the 1920s and 1930s deployed to counter racist schoolbooks: they wrote and produced Black history plays and stories and talked to the children in their classrooms about injustice. We see Taylor modeling a critical, interrogative stance about the information that Black children are asked to accept; this questioning position is key to Black children’s engagement with racist structures and practices. Children in her novels also take action when they are faced with racist young people, but what Taylor reveals is that under segregation that action often had to be surreptitious. Black children today need both that questioning stance about systems of power and the ability to confront racism in its daily incarnations.
Roll of Thunder appeared in 1976 following the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States. Even though it represented an earlier historical era, many of the issues it contained resonated with the contemporary political context. For instance, the novel describes the children’s struggle with the busses that transport white children to school, and we remember that the 1970s witnessed white resistance to the bussing of children of color into white schools. The novel also contains a visceral depiction of a victim of racial violence, Mr. Berry, who had been burned by racists. As an anti-racist novel, Roll of Thunder does not lie to children about the effects of white violence and hatred. Its honest, direct revelation of the effects of white supremacy is absolutely indebted to the Black Arts Movement and reflects the courageous narrative perspective of that moment.
Focusing a narrative of racial injustice on a child’s perspective can be revelatory. First, it rebuts the cultural resistance to imagining Black children as innocent, since (as Robin Bernstein and others have argued) white childhood has been attached to notions of purity and social value in ways that Black childhood has not. To set a narrative through the eyes of a Black child, then, immediately announces that point of view as crucial, worthy of attention. If we think about Roll of Thunder, Taylor’s most famous book, the implications of setting that story through Cassie’s perspective values Cassie as a child — respecting her relationship to her parents, uncle, siblings, and grandmother, her frustrations at school, her friendships and thoughtful reflections. As a child too she becomes increasingly aware of the racist codes of the south, and the effects of racism on the Black community. As she learns about the unwritten rules and tangible results of racism, the readership also becomes aware and can thus reflect on the lived experience of segregation rather than viewing it as a historical object. We must also remember that Roll of Thunder differs from some other African American children’s texts of the 1970s because it was issued by a mainstream publisher and had an implicit multiracial audience. Black children, then, may not have been awakened by Cassie’s experience of discrimination at the Wallace store, run by malevolent white people, but may have found much to identify with in her experience, as might have children from other racialized communities. White child readers may have experienced that sense of awakening to racism by walking through the narrative with Cassie. That identification with Cassie and desire to protect her innocence is predicated on seeing her as inhabiting the category of child, a move that is disruptive to cultural scripts that imagine black girls as sexualized and black boys as unruly men.
Another result of placing a child at the center of stories of prejudice is that she can operate as a kind of witness. Unlike classic white children’s literature that often sets children off into their own green space or fantasy land, Roll of Thunder and texts from Black authors claim childhood as central to a community that relies upon each other for emotional sustenance. The first site of witness, then, is to convey the truth about the beauty and complexity of the Black family. But Cassie is also part of the larger community, and is surrounded by people across the novel. She becomes a witness to the atrocities the community experiences (as in the violence suffered by Mr. Berry), the experience of psychological threat (as with the fear of night riders), and the deadly betrayals of white individuals (as with her troubled friend, T.J., who is blamed for murder). Through Cassie, the possibilities of child as witness come into relief.
Finally, because Cassie is enmeshed within her community, she can offer a perspective on activism that engages its complexity. Readers might come to Cassie’s story with the idea that if they were in her shoes, they would react in direct confrontation with racism. Cassie herself experiences that desire frequently, and endures humiliation when she can’t be direct, as when she is forced off the sidewalk and must apologize to a white child. She learns the value of strategic engagement, even with the girl who humiliated her, and most importantly, she witnesses the possibility of collective response to racism through the community’s boycott of the Wallace store. Because the child is enmeshed in her family and community, she understands the possibilities that come through collective action. In many ways, this community mobilization within Roll of Thunder evokes the boycotts of segregated spaces during the civil rights era. Cassie, as a child, leads the reader through the complications of resisting racism; as a Black child, she uncovers the necessity of community for social change.
If we look at the scope of Taylor’s depiction – from her first novel, Song of the Trees (1975) to the recent All the Days Past, All the Days to Come (2020) – we see an expansive family history unfold before us. Knowing that Taylor built these stories from her own family’s experience, we can witness the loving respect Taylor offers to the Logan family saga and understand the centrality of the oral tradition to Black communities and authors. In addition to the emphasis on honesty, comfort, and humor that we find in the early novels’ depictions of the family (especially when Cassie is younger), we also get a sense of the complications of family life in texts like The Road to Memphis (1990), which depicts Cassie as a teenager who, like many young people, pushes against restraints that seek to confine her, some of which come from her family’s gendered expectations for her behavior. The Logan family, like all families, isn’t perfect, but love is its grounding. By depicting an expansive family across generations, Taylor also uses particular family figures to excavate the range of responses to racism, as in Uncle Hammer’s urgent impulse to action as contrasted with more strategic responses from Cassie’s parents, and to interrogate issues vital within Black communities, as in the colorism and risky social relations of a light-skinned cousin, Suzella, in Let the Circle be Unbroken (1981). Family is a consistent, loving, generative presence in Cassie’s life. We understand that Taylor created these novels to represent both her own particular history, but in doing so she tells the larger story of Black America.
One of the masterly accomplishments of the series is its panoramic perspective on Black life in Mississippi. As I’ve mentioned, the stories narrated through Cassie’s point of view balance the deep affection and sustenance she draws from her family with the dangers that come in relationship to white people and white social, judicial, and economic structures. Because we love this family, those dangers become even more intense and threatening. But those texts that step outside of Cassie’s point of view are also quite effective in offering a cinematic view of race relations across history. For instance, The Land (2001) steps back into Cassie’s family history by telling the story of her grandfather, Paul-Edward, and his securing of the property that sustains the Logans; The Well: David’s Story (1995), depicts crises in the childhood of Cassie’s father; and Mississippi Bridge (1990) focuses on a scene of Black people being forced off of a bus (including Cassie’s grandmother) through a white friend of the family, Jeremy Simms, who describes the disaster that comes when a bridge collapses under the bus. All of these stories, along with the substantial novels of Cassie’s experience, depict in affecting detail the solace of family and the racial tensions the family negotiates.
Copyright, Katharine Capshaw, 2020
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