Fences: The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson

That summer the fence that stretched through our town seemed bigger.

We lived on one side of it.

White people lived on the other.

And Mama said, "Don't climb over that fence when you play." She said it wasn't safe.

"Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost, but he was a crusty New England farmer worried about footloose cows, and even that solitary poet found that good neighbors can come together in their shared humanity.

And as all kids know, fences are made for climbing.

That summer, trying to be a good girl for her mama, Clover keeps to her side, sometimes a bit lonely for a playmate and always curious about the white family just moved into the white house on the other side of that fence.

But Annie is more daring than Clover, and she dares to climb and sit on the top rail, looking curiously as Clover plays in the yard of her yellow house. Early summer brings a string of rainy days, and Clover watches longingly as that girl plays outside in the rain and even splashes in the forbidden puddles.

When at last the sun returns, Clover feels brave enough to approach the fence where that girl is sitting.

I got close to the fence and that girl asked me my name.

We stood there smiling.

"It's nice up on this fence," said Annie. "A fence like this was made for climbing."

"My mama said I shouldn't go on the other side," I said.

"My mama says the same thing. But she never said anything about sitting on it."

Fence-sitting slowly turns into a tentative friendship as the summer warms up, and one fine day, when Clover's friends come over for a game of jump-rope, Annie feels brave enough to slip down on the other side and join the game, and after some fun together, all the girls take a rest on the top rail of that fence, and for the moment, that fence is just a fence made for climbing and sitting.

"Someday sombody's going to come along an knock this old fence down," Annie said.

"Yeah," I said. "Someday."

The multi-award winning Jacqueline Woodson's The Other Side (G.P. Putnam's Sons) returns in its tenth anniversary (2011) edition, as moving and meaningful as ever. Woodson's text is perfect, telling this iconic story so simply and well that it avoids didacticism, and E. B. White's watercolor paintings are so stunning that they practically tell the story without the need for words. Humans have long felt a fear and yet an attraction for the "other," and the combination of text and art reveal this truth of trans-fence-friendship found as well as it can be told.

Piece by Piece: Leaving Gee's Bend by Irene Latham

I mean to tell you, there ain't noplace in the world like Gee's Bend. It's like a little island sitting just about in the middle of the state of Alabama. Only instead of ocean water, it's caught up on three sides by a curve in the Alabama River. Ain't noplace in Gee's Bend you can't get to by setting one foot after another into that orange dirt that likes to settle between your toes. I reckon the hard part is how once you're in Gee's Bend, it ain't all that easy to get out.

Ten-year-old Ludelphia Bennett finds refuge from her monochromatic hard-working life in the tiny black community of Gee's Bend, Alabama, in 1932 by sewing any scraps of colored cloth she can get her hands on into quilt tops. But when her mother, already weakened from influenza comes down with pneumonia after giving birth to little Rose, Ludelphia believes that only Dr. Nelson across the river in Camden can save her life and their family's future.

But the river is way up and Joe's Ferry is abandoned when she arrives to cross. Ludelphia braves the current alone on the log raft ferry, but the cable breaks in the torrent and she is washed far downstream. Barely escaping the flood water with her life, Ludelphia is discovered hiding in her barn by the feared Mrs. Cobb, freshly widowed wife of the storekeeper to whom the Bennetts owe money they can't repay. Unhinged by the almost simultaneous sudden deaths of her husband and beloved niece, the old woman is alternately kind, giving Ludelphia breakfast and a ride to Camden, and threatening, waving her shotgun, calling her a witch, and promising that she's coming to Gee's Bend to take everything everyone has to pay off their debts to her husband. Ludelphia is treated kindly by Dr. and Mrs. Nelson, but the good doctor is too overworked to visit a patient with the then untreatable malady.

Now Ludelphia knows she has no choice but to return to Gee's Bend as quickly as she can to warn her family and neighbors to hide their livestock, tools, and seed stock from confiscation by the crazed Mrs. Cobb. With no ferry to speed her, the forty-mile walk around the river would take days, so in desperation Lu hides herself in one of the wagons in the shotgun-wielding Mrs. Cobb's caravan in the hopes that she can escape in time to warn everyone, not knowing whether her mother will be alive when she returns.

In a a suspenseful narrative, Irene Latham's Leaving Gee's Bend (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2010) creates a small world peopled with characters simultaneously ignorant and wise, kind and cruel, centered around the ten-year-old Ludelphia, who, although blind in one eye, sees things with more clarity than most. Lu is indeed an unusually perspicacious young heroine, but then so is Scout Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with whom she shares an intimate and ultimately complex view of race and human nature in the Jim Crow South. Latham portrays the raw harshness of rural black life unflinchingly, but her strongly-drawn characters, even the "not right in her mind" Mrs. Cobb, wo believes that the "witches" of Gee's Bend are the cause of her grief, never lose their humanity. Ludelphia herself manages to find color and order in her quilts, as throughout the experience she pieces together scraps of bright fabric, her mother's apron tie, the doctor's handkerchief, and her own feed-sack-cloth pocket, to build a hard-headed but meaningful pattern out of it all.

I started again with the needle. Mama always said you should live your life the same way you piece a quilt. That you was the one in charge of where you put the pieces. You was the one to determine how your story turns out.

Well, it seemed to me some of them pieces had a mind of their own.

Irene Latham weaves her story around the history of her native Alabama, especially the very real and now famous quilt makers of Gee's Bend, whose work exhibited in the Whitney Museum of Art in New York has been likened to that of modern masters such as Picasso. Although Ludelphia is a fictional character, she bears the name of one of the famed quilting families of Gee's Bend, and her story, like Scout's, should become a staple of Alabama--and American--historical fiction.