There's A War On, You Know! Susan Marcus Bends the Rules by Jane Cutler

Dear Marv, I wrote,

You were right about baseball. I am the only Yankee fan in town. So I just do not bother with baseball. I have other stuff to worry about. One thing is trying to get rid of my New York accent before school starts. Another thing is Jim Crow. That is the name they give to laws they have to keep Negroes and white people separated from each other. Can you believe it? I would love to do something against old Jim Crow, but I don't know what. What could a kid do against laws like that, anyway?
And one more thing. I have an ugly haircut that I hope will grow out in time for school.

Please write back.

Still Your Best Friend, Susan

In 1942 there's a war on, and a lot of things have changed. There are air raid drills, and Joe DiMaggio has been drafted and won't be around if the Yankees play the Cardinals in the Worlds Series. And now Susan's dad has to take a job in St. Louis, where everyone is a Cards fan.

Susan knows that things will be different in Clayton, the small town just outside St. Louis where they move. But there are still young men away in the armed forces, still double-feature movies on Sunday night with her parents, and even a tiny "hole-in-the-wall" Chinese restaurant like they one they loved back in the Bronx. And there is a girl her age, Marlene with her bossy little sister Liz in her building who make friends with her right away and show her how to roller skate in the cool downstairs garage and introduce her to the town's swimming pool and its high dive.

But some things are very different. People talk differently and tell her they can't understand her New York accent. Marlene's grumpy grandmothers complain that she shouldn't play with Susan because she's a Jew, something she never heard back in the Bronx. And then she meets Loretta, a black girl who lives in the basement with her mother who is the building custodian, and when she wants to invite Loretta along to the pool, Susan's dad has to explain that Missouri has something called Jim Crow laws that mean that black and white people can't go to the same swimming pools, schools, movies, or even restaurants.

But as the steamy summer goes on and the girls share monopoly games, Kool Aid, skating, and Loretta's mother's homegrown tomato sandwiches, their friendship grows. Then Susan discovers that there is an interesting loophole in Missouri's Jim Crow laws. Public transportation is not segregated, and Susan comes up with an idea for an August adventure they all can share.

"What in the world can you be thinking, Miss Susan New York Marcus?" asks Marlene.

Maybe she can't change Missouri's Jim Crow laws, but Susan believes the friends can bend them a little. Her plan is that she and Marlene get on the midday bus to St. Louis, and Loretta will get on two stops later. They will all move to the wide seats around the back of the bus and see all the downtown St. Louis sights together.

We all got dressed up that day.

Cranky Liz would not keep up. Nobody was waiting at the stop where we had planned to be, so the driver just kept on going. Now what?

The girls take the next bus, wondering if Loretta noticed that they weren't on the first bus, but when the bus came to the stop, Loretta is there waiting.

"She waited," Marlene whispered.

"She broke the rules," I grumbled, smiling. "Maybe that is what they mean when they say 'rules are made to be broken.'" Marlene said.

"Marlene, did you just make that up?" I demanded.

"No, honest, it's a saying. I think it means you sometimes have to think for yourself, like Loretta did."

And when Susan leads the girls off the bus near her parents' favorite movie house and takes them to their favorite little Chinese restaurant, the girls are ready to try to bend one Jim Crow rule. But when they get there, they find something scary:

Half the window was smashed, and on it, in thick black paint, someone had written JAPS GO HOME! JAP TRAITOR was written in black paint on the sidewalk.

"Let's get out of here," said Marlene.

Loretta and Liz did not budge. Liz moved closer to the window and peered through it.

And the Chinese chef and his wife recognize Susan and motion them inside. "Not Jap! Chinese," he says, seating them together at one small table. Susan's plan to integrate a restaurant is a success. Take that, Jim Crow! she thinks. She breaks open her fortune cookie and reads the fortune inside.

"The future sleeps in the present."

Jane Cutler's Susan Marcus Bends the Rules (Holiday House, 2014) portrays the world of 1942 vividly, with the sounds of radio baseball games through open windows, fans whirring in the summer heat, the smells of warm tomatoes on the vine and bus exhaust and Chinese food that remind Susan of home, all combined with the different views of race and laws in World War II America--a time when there were many changes and many more soon to come. Cutler writes comfortably for middle elementary readers, portraying a child's world that is different in some ways but the same as today's children share in the most important ways, the ways of friendship and family and fairness. "Rebelling against discrimination is only part of this appealing story, but it’s the most memorable part. An enjoyable chapter book with great potential for discussion," says Booklist.

Paper Trail: Paperboy by Vince Vawter

I'm typing about the stabbing for a good reason.

I can't talk.

Not without stuttering.

The funny way I talk is not so much like fat pigs in cartoons. Sometimes I turn red in the face and lose my breath and get dizzy circles going around in my head.

Otherwise, life is not too bad in Memphis in the summer of 1959. It's hot, but it's baseball season, and throwing his fast ball and winning games doesn't involve talking. And his best friend Rat has given him his newspaper route while he's away at the family farm, so he's officially a substitute paperboy.

His parents, busy with their own lives, think it's a good idea, and he's not worried about throwing the paper to just the right place. He's good at that. He's worried about collecting from his customers every Friday night. What if he can't say the words?

He has another problem. His parents and their maid Mam have warned him to stay away from Ara T., the itinerant junk man who pushes his cart up the alleys nearby. But Ara T. is known as an ace knife sharpener, and the boy's knife is so dull that even Mam says it won't cut hot butter. A good newspaper boy needs a sharp knife to cut the twine around his daily bundle, so he takes a chance and asks Ara T. to sharpen it. And that is beginning to look like a very bad idea.

But there are two good things about collecting. One is the boozy but beautiful Mrs. Worthington, who gives him lemonade and calls him "Sweetie." The other is Mr. Spiro, a retired merchant sailor whose house is as stacked full of books as his brain is filled with information, calls him "Messenger," and gives him a piece of a dollar bill each week with one cryptic word inked along the side.

But when Ara T. steals the saved paper route money that he is supposed to share with Rat right out of his room, the boy has to tell someone. He tells Mam. Mam's face goes cold.

Mam untied her head in and jerked the window down so hard that the weights on the ropes banged inside the wall.

Mam untied her apron while she walked down the hall. It was the first time I had ever seen it not hanging in its place on the back of the pantry door. She may have been walking but I had to run to catch up with her.

Even more strange than where she put her apron was seeing her leave the house in her white uniform without her little round black hat.

I can't leave you here, Little Man. You get right on up to Mr. Rat's house and wait for me there.

I didn't move or say anything at first.

When I came to the corner to turn onto Rat's street, I saw Mam was almost to Ara T.'s alley. A new plan came to me.

Something important happened that summer of the paper route in Vince Vawter's 2014 Newbery-winning book, Paperboy (Delacorte Press, 2013), in which Little Man changes into a boy who can bravely say his name and stand up to defend someone who loves him. In spare prose, with unusual characters, Vawter's character begins to change from a anxious child to a young man who understands much more about the world around him, someone who also is beginning to understand himself, a seventh grader who can introduce himself out loud.

My... name... is Victor... Vollmer... the Third. I stutter... when... I talk ... but I... like ... words...anyway. I... also... like...to...play...baseball.

As Booklist writes, “The well-crafted characters, the hot Southern summer, and the coming-of-age events are reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird… This paper boy is a fighter and his hope fortifies and satisfies in equal measure.”

Working on the Chain Gang: Cy In Chains by David L. Dudley

A light but urgent touch on his shoulder woke him out of sad dreams. He flinched, but then he recognized Uncle Daniel's voice whispering in his ear.

Uncle Daniel put his hand on Cy's shoulder. "I know you boys got you a secret hideout somewhere not too far off. Ain't I right?"

How did Uncle Daniel know? Cy and Travis did have a place, down on the river, but they'd sworn a blood oath not to tell anyone.

"I's right, ain't I?" Uncle Daniel asked again.

"I bet if you go there, he follow you home like a little lost puppy. Please, Cy! Go and fetch him home!"

Yes, Travis would listen to him, but Cy felt uneasy. This was between Travis and his father. How many times had his own father said that the black man must never get in the middle of white folks' business? If he did, when everything was settled, somehow the black man was the one who ended up in trouble.

In a drunken rage, John Strong beats his horse for losing a race upon which he had wagered everything, and his twelve-year-old son Travis steals the horse out of the barn and hides him out in a place by the river. Thirteen-year-old Cy reluctantly goes to try to bring the younger boy home, but when Travis' father discovers them together and tries to beat them both, Travis jumps into the river and despite Cy's efforts to save him, drowns. That night Cy learns that he should have heeded his father's advice.

Cy was swimming to reach Travis, whose body kept floating away from him, just beyond his grasp. The force of rough hands woke him from his nightmare.

He looked up into Jeff Sconyer's eyes, and their gray emptiness frightened him. Cy tried to sit up, but two more hands forced him back. Burwell Sconyers. Cy struggled, but the brothers flipped him face-down and bound his hands.

"Quit, 'less you lookin' to die, which would be a shame after how hard you worked to save that sorry kid this morning," sneered Sconyers.

Cy in trussed and thrown into the back of a wagon and taken to Georgia, where he is sold to Cain, the boss of a chain gang of young boys clearing palmetto thickets, all supposedly serving sentences for minor offenses. Treatment is brutal, and the half-starved boys are chained as they work and as they sleep and whipped for any infraction.  After three years of brutal life under Cain and his overseers Stryker and Prescott, Cy has almost given up any hope of release.  When an epidemic of whooping cough spreads in the close quarters, Cy comes near death and several of the boys die.  As he recovers, Cy realizes that all of them will likely die there one way or another, and there is no way out except to plan an escape.

Fear was the master, not white men with whips, horses, bloodhounds, guns. Get past the fear, and Cy and the others could be free. Or die trying to be.

Life and death were hard in the post-Reconstruction South. Set in the 1890's, David L. Dudley's Cy in Chains(Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2013) is a grim narrative which may open the eyes of readers to the injustices of that world that came before the story of the civil rights movement that they know so well. Dudley spares few of the facts of life on a chain gang in a lawless time in this novel, which reveals brutality, caring, and ultimately great courage in an almost forgotten time. With searingly realistic detail and vivid and moving characterizations, for mature young adult readers this one will be a hard but memorable read.

Dudley's earlier books are The Bicycle Man and Caleb's Wars (see my review here).

Finding A Voice: The Lions of Little Rock by Kriistin Levine

I talk a lot. Just not out loud where anyone can hear. At least, I used to be that way. I guess I’ve learned it’s not enough to just think things. You have to say them, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand me, and how I’ve changed, I need to go back to 1958.

Kristin Levine’s historical novel takes place in the fall of 1958, in Little Rock. The Little Rock Nine have integrated Central High School in 1957-58, under Federal order and with the National Guard standing watch. But now the school year begins again, and Governor Faubus has closed all of the high schools in Little Rock, for public safety, he says.

Marlee is only in seventh grade, so her school will open as usual, but her big sister Judy, the one who always does the talking for her, is sent off to Pine Bluff to live with their grandmother to go to high school. Marlee can speak at home, but anywhere else, her shyness limits her to one-word answers and nods and shakes of the head. Even in math class, which she loves, she never volunteers an answer and if called on, can only stammer out a number in answer.

Then, a new girl, turns up in her class. Liz has a quick smile, a ready laugh, and no problem talking to anyone, and she quickly asks Marlee to pair with her on an oral report in history.

“You seem like a hard worker. At my old school, I was the one who
always ended up doing all the work,” Liz shrugged.

I knew what that was like. I’d worked with Sally on every project since third grade.

“Okay,” I said.

Liz seems fearless and yet friendly, and soon she persuades Marlee to promise to help present the oral report, promising her a book of math squares puzzles if she does. Gradually, Marlee finds it less of a struggle to get words and then sentences out, and she and Liz become best friends, meeting at the library and then at the zoo at their favorite place, the lion exhibit.

But then, Liz disappears suddenly from school. Sally triumphantly reports that Liz had been found out, discovered to be “passing” as white, and although Marlee is startled, she soon realizes that she misses her friend regardless of her race.

In her attempts to find a way to continue her friendship, Marlee gradually finds her voice, joining with her church school teacher in the WEC, the Women’s Education Committee, working for the re-opening of all Little Rock schools. Lines are quickly drawn among whites, and although her junior high principal dad quickly adds his name to the petitions to open the schools, her mother is too fearful of loss of her job and the threats of the segregationist majority.

As lines are quickly drawn between those who want their high schools open regardless of race and those who say never, Marlee begins to speak out and even draws her mother into the effort. Still shy, she finds the courage to locate her friend, who is working in the same organization with the Negro community, and although Liz’s pastor’s house is bombed and their parents forbid them to be together because of the danger, the two find ways to meet.

The shy, mute girl who just that summer was afraid to jump off the high dive suddenly finds herself hiding in the trunk of a car with sticks of dynamite belonging to a would-be bomber, and at last finds her full voice in helping prevent a race war in her own hometown.

Kristin Levine said she wanted to write a book about what came next, after 1957 and the Little Rock Nine, and Lester's first-person narrative details how Marlee and other citizens of Little Rock found their voices, the voices of reason and justice, in the year that followed.

“Talking,” I said. I’m going to try talking... to everyone.

And if I change, maybe other things will change, too. Maybe the schools will
reopen.”

“Maybe,” said Liz, laughing, and then it was time to hang up.

I knew my talking wouldn’t change all that. But I thought about what Daddy said, how things could be different in Little Rock, if only the right people could find their voice.

I wanted to be one of those people.

Just published in a new paperback edition, Levine’s The Lions of Little Rock (Penguin, 2012, 2013) brings a poignant new voice to the body of nonfiction and historical fiction dealing with the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Publishers Weekly writes, "Successfully weaving historical events with a dynamic personal narrative, Levine (The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had) offers a riveting, frequently tense portrait."