To the Bone: Bone by Bone by Bone by Tony Johnston

Best known for her whimsical books for young readers, Tony Johnston has written a book aimed best at young adult readers, her 2007 novel, Bone by Bone by Bone. "I am haunted by my father," she says in her foreword, in explanation of why she wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about those "innocent-mean times" of the 1950's in the deep South.

Main character David Church is nine as the novel opens, a motherless and only child of Dr. Franklin Church who grows up in a house which has sheltered six generations. The kitchen door frame shows penciled heights and ages as far back as his great-grandmother, now nearly 100 years old, who tries to rule the household from her bed upstairs. David both reveres and fears his father, who installed a yellowed skeleton, scientifically labeled, beside his crib so that David could begin to follow him into a medical career from the cradle.

But even so, David is his own man. When he meets up with Malcolm Deeter, age 8, Negro and costumed in his mother's bedsheet for trick or treat, he sees in his sparkling eyes a kindred spirit. Dr. Church snatches the sheet off Malcolm's head and throws it in a trash can. "Jesus Christ, boy! You can't wear that! he shouts, dragging David away. "He can't be your friend. He's a n-----."

Despite his father's warning that he'd shoot any n----- who came in his house, it is "friendship at first sight" for David and Malcolm. They play together whenever they can escape adult eyes. They make a mud tar baby and play out the story, they dabble in the murky waters of Jesus Pond, tell ghost stories in the graveyard, invent a secret code, and discover a cave where, over a campfire meal of swiped hot dogs, they decide to become blood brothers. David even teaches the names of all the human bone he knows to Malcolm. Together at Miss Grace's, who doesn't seem to care if they are different colors, they earn shiny half-dollars doing chores and search surreptitiously for the severed arm of her Confederate great-granddaddy reputedly hidden somewhere in her house.

It is an outwardly idyllic boyhood, but David is unable to reconcile the two sides of his father--a doctor who gently bathes and consoles a dying patient with small talk about their own childhood games and a man who keeps a shotgun loaded with rock salt to shoot at any cat who violates his yard, a father who shares birthday banana splits and yet is involved with Klan doings in the countryside around. David is torn between love and hate for the father he can't understand. When his father turns a drunken old black handyman, called "the Mole Man," away at Christmas, David defies him by taking the man a plate of food. Then, during one of their now rare meetings, David and Malcolm discover the old man lynched, a dead mole crammed into his mouth and a sign, ONE LESS N-----, around his neck.

David knows he has to choose. It is his father's way or his own. David begins by deciding that he will not follow his father's orders to prepare for medical training. Then, on a Sunday, the day after his thirteenth birthday, a Klan Klavalcade of local men ends with the town's white drunk leading an attack on Malcolm. When David tries to shelter Malcolm inside the house, his father, true to his word, fires his shotgun at Malcolm just as David moves to shield him. David realizes that he will never know if his father thought the gun was loaded with rock salt or buckshot and knows that he will never really be his father's son again.

Bone by Bone by Bone received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Booklist and appeared on several lists of noted books for 2007. However, perhaps because of its honest portrayal of brutality, the authentic language of the time, and perhaps the knowledge that its readership would be limited by these factors, it did not win any major awards. For the right readers, however, this book, although like Huckleberry Finn a work of fiction, stands as an eyewitness account of its time which deserves to be read, discussed, and remembered by those who did not grow up in that time but live in its shadow.