"The Game Is Afoot!" Tru and Nelle by G. Neri

When Truman first spotted Nelle, he thought she was a boy. Barefoot and dressed in overalls with a boyish haircut, she perched on a stone wall that separated their rambling wood homes. He was trying to avoid her stare by pretending to read his book.

"Hey, you!" she said.

Truman gazed up from pages. He was sitting quietly on a wicker chair on the side porch of his cousins' house, dressed in a little white sailor suit. "Are you talking to me?" he said in a high wispy voice.

"Come here," she commanded.

Truman was taken aback. "You're a ...girl?"

Nelle stared back. Truman's high voice, white-blond hair, and sailor outfit had thrown her for a loop.

"You're a boy?" she asked, incredulous.

It's not a propitious meeting. Two misfit kids, self-possessed but lonely, are drawn to each other, and when Nelle spots the cover of Truman's book, The Adventure of the Dancing Men: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, she senses a kinship to this strange, bossy, but sissified boy. With some bragging about his days of tap-dancing on a Mississippi steamboat, he admits that he's been left by both parents with his elderly cousins, and despite herself, Nelle is intrigued. She takes possession of the book imperiously, promising to return it when she's "good 'n' done" with it.

And with that, a friendship is made. Nelle Harper introduces Truman to life in the small Alabama town, the bullies, the Court House, and her enticing treehouse, where the two bond over their love of Sherlock Holmes and conspire to solve mysteries of their own. Naturally, Tru has to be Sherlock, allowing Nelle to be his Watson, and neighbor Jennings (a.k.a, Big Boy) is assigned the role of Lestrade. Truman's cousin Sook even turns a couple of old baseball caps into a deerstalker hat, and they are ready for action. All they need is a case.

And a suitable mystery, a break-in at the local drugstore, soon presents itself. Nelle's suspicions fall on the local bully, Elliott, called Boss, and his sidekick Billy Eugene. And when Nelle discovers a slingshot contraption in a tree, rigged to fire rocks  through the store's plate glass windows, they have real evidence in hand. The slingshot has a curved shape carved into the handle--a snake, or perhaps the letter S. Nelle leans toward the snake as the clue, but Tru has another insight, their reclusive young neighbor, Sonny Boular.

The game is afoot!

Nelle and Tru's detecting lead them into late-night surveillance. Recruiting Sook's cook, Little Bit, for cover for their pretense of catching fireflies, they duck down in the tall grass when they hear a group of men assembling in the field.

Someone struck a match and lit a torch of some kind.

Truman's view was blocked by Little Bit, but he could see silhouettes of pointy heads. He saw the flames lick at the bottom of the sheets wrapped around the tree. The fire shot up the sheets and set the whole tree ablaze.

Only it wasn't a tree. It was a cross. And the men didn't have pointy heads; they were dressed in white robes and hoods with holes cut out for their eyes.

The Ku Klux Klan.

Young adult readers who know the the novel (or even the movie) may recognize the small town setting and the young Sherlock and Watson as the doppelgangers of the fictional Scout and Dill, the real Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee, two towering literary figures of the twentieth century whose childhood exploits led to the friendship which gave us To Kill a Mockingbird and whose shared passion for crime-solving led to Lee's uncredited but real collaboration on Capote's award-winning In Cold Blood.

That amazing happenstance of history makes for a new and delightfully fictionalized account of that friendship, G. Neri's Tru and Nelle (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), a novel with all the fun of the free-range childhood that Madisonville, Alabama, offered two brilliant but offbeat kids growing up together in the 1930s. Tru teases Nelle about her accent, calling her "Na-il Harpuh," and Nelle (Ellen, spelled backwards) gives the prissy Truman as good as she gets about his signature white suits, all in the easy style of kissin' cousins, in a portrayal of the early and epic pair of soul mates who were to cast a long shadow across the literary future. Savvy readers will recognize Atticus in Nelle's father "A.C." and Boo Radley in the mysterious "Sonny Boular." Readers who have yet to experience Harper Lee's landmark novel will find the re-told childhood adventures of Nelle and Tru both funny and poignant in their own right, perhaps steering them to read her Pulitzer-winning novel even before it is assigned to them in school.

"Tru and Nelle is a wonderfully imaginative re-creation of the childhoods of two great American writers, but even more, it is a novel that affirms the mysterious and glorious ways that friendship reaches across boundaries of all sorts to claim unexpected kinship." says two-time Newbery author, Gary D. Schmidt.

Split Half In Two: Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia

Can a bloodhound remember you from years back and smell you coming from a half a mile away? Caleb's welcome grew louder. Uncle Darnell winked at me as if to say, Girl, you were surely missed, and my heart clanged. I wanted to be with my grandmother and my great-grandmother more than anything. I wanted us all to be together. As many of us under one roof as could fit. I needed to know we weren't all falling apart.

Oldest sister of the three, Delphine feels like her family is coming apart, bit by bit. Her mother, Camille, is off being a black woman poet in Berkley with the Black Panthers. Her grandmother, Big Ma, moved back to Prattville, Alabama when her dad's outspoken women's lib new wife, "Mrs.," moved in, but now even  the outspoken Marva seems withdrawn and sick. Uncle Darnell, who came back from  Vietnam with a drug problem and swiped the girls' piggybank money  saved to see Michael Jackson, has gone back to Alabama in disgrace. And even though she and her sisters, Vonetta and Fern, have always finished each other's sentences, they, too, are splitting apart. Vonetta refuses to speak to their uncle, and here they are, forced to spend the summer under that same roof.

Delphine can't force herself to read her teacher's favorite book, Things Fall Apart, because even with its African setting, it seems way too close to home.

And despite the love she feels from Big Ma and great-grandmother Ma Charles, Delphine finds that at age twelve, she is more aware of the rifts back home and those strangely between Ma Charles and her half-sister Miss Trotter, who share a father, Slim Jim Trotter, whose rickety bridge to his two wives still connects and divides the warring sisters. Big Ma and Aunt Miss Trotter pick Vonetta, who has a flair for dramatic story-telling, to send insulting versions of family history back and forth across that bridge to each other. Delphine goes along quietly, spending a lot of time in her favorite pecan tree, except to stake out her own turf by refusing to iron Ma Charles' sheets with Argo starch and a pair of heavy flat irons older than both the warring sisters. Little Fern takes her own stand on refusing to eat any animals--Big Ma's chickens and ham and Great-Aunt Miss Trotter's venison barbeque. Except for her fifteen-year-old cousin JimmyTrotter, who finds it all very amusing, Delphine feels like her family is, in that apt Alabama phrase, split half-in-two, with herself left right in the middle.

But when Vonetta takes off down the road in a huff on JimmyTrotter's bike, a sudden tornado descends, ripping everyone's house in two but Ma Charles'. And Vonetta is missing, the bike found in two pieces, up a tree. The family that seemed hopelessly split comes together seamlessly. The girls' mother borrows plane fare and appears right away, Dad and Mrs., now clearly pregnant, make the long drive from Brooklyn, and Aunt Miss Trotter and JimmyTrotter move in to share whatever comfort they can give. It's as if Delphine sees her family's strong roots come together, holding them all strong as they fear for Vonetta. She sees the bond of parenthood between her own parents, she sees the stubborn bonds of family between Ma Charles and her proudly part-Indian half-sister, and then she has a glimpse of how those roots run even deeper into the community than she could have imagined.

The sheriff trudged up to the house. I knew who he was. I knew he wore a white sheet when he wasn't wearing his badge.

He tapped on the screen door and called out "'Phelia! You there? Mama? It's Davey Lee."

"Taranada"--that was exactly how he said it, with four syllables, "wasn't the worst, but it was bad enough to toss that Negro rag doll clear out of this lifetime. Better the truth than a fairy tale."

"We're not asking you for no fairy tale," Ma Charles said. "We're asking you to do what the sheriff's supposed to do. Find our lost child."

"Yes, Mama," the sheriff said.

"Just go find her, son. Go find her."

My great-grandmother called the Klan son.

Set in 1969 during the days of the moon landing, with humanity on two separate spheres as well, Rita Williams-Garcia's third book in her powerful trilogy, Gone Crazy in Alabama (Amistad, 2015) reveals the constancy of family despite the things that divide them. Like Slim-Jim Trotter's narrow bridge, they divide and connect, reforming themselves in each generation without falling away from their source. Williams-Garcia's choice of Delphine, the almost-thirteen oldest daughter, gives us a narrator who comes of age just in time to see the complexity and the glory of family revealed in this outstanding series. Written with down-home humor and characters, living and dead, so strong and real that they step right off the pages, and a theme that that binds it all together, these are novels not to be missed. With the earlier Coretta Scott King Award books, One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven this concluding novel tells a family story that is uniquely American and yet in many ways the story of us all.

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.