1977: ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY by Mildred D. Taylor
“Little Man, would you come on? You keep it up and you’re gonna make us late.”
First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife for her patience. She taught this novel to her students for about ten years, and as I was reading it in the evenings, she had to endure my saying extremely obvious things about the book like "I don't know man I think this T.J. fella seems like a real bad seed" or "wow they sure like talking about The Land". I would say that I was doing this 70% to annoy her. Not 100% to annoy her, but a clear majority of my intent.
A large part of the reason why this behavior would be annoying is that legendary 1977 Newbery medalist Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry is, by design, an extremely direct and un-subtle novel. For many young readers, this is the very first exposure they will get to post-Reconstruction Jim Crow violent white supremacy. I don't think any reasonable young reader can walk away from the novel asking "so what was that supposed to be about, anyways?" This one is on countless middle school Language Arts curricula as The Racism Novel, and at one point the protagonist's mother sits the protagonist down and explains to her what racism is:
“Well, after a while, slavery became so profitable to people who had slaves and even to those who didn’t that most folks decided to believe that black people really weren’t people like everybody else. And when the Civil War was fought and Mama Rachel and Papa Luke and all the other slaves were freed, people continued to think that way. Even the Northerners who fought the war didn’t really see us equal to white people. So now, even though seventy years have passed since slavery, most white people still think of us as they did then—that we’re not as good as they are—and people like Mr. Simms hold on to that belief harder than some other folks because they have little else to hold on to. For him to believe that he is better than we are makes him think that he’s important, simply because he’s white.”
This is what most of Roll Of Thunder is. There's some symbolism and imagery and whatever, but when it needs to get the message across, the book will just sit you down and tell you what racism is, in the most direct terms possible - yeah it's because white people want to feel important and also it helps them make money - as though you are a child. I'm fine with that, because most people reading the book would be literal children, and it's not like racism would be an easy concept for children to understand on their first try.
So we are, as with many Newbery medalists, viewing a heavy subject through the eyes of a child. Many Newbery medalists will use that eyes-of-a-child bit to ease the pain of the thing you're looking at, like you're using special glasses to watch an eclipse. But Mildred Taylor wants to burn your eyes out, and she’s good enough to do it even if you're well out of middle school. Oh hey speaking of eyes.
Even if you don’t know the name Jane Elliott, you probably heard of the lesson she taught in her third-grade Iowa classroom one day in 1968. There was a BBC documentary about it, and Elliott has since spent her career developing a detailed pedagogy on how to teach the history of American prejudice, based on her experience with this lesson. Elliott, very famously, split her third graders into two groups based on their eye color. The brown-eyed kids got all of the privileges in the world, the blue-eyed kids were told that they were inferior to the brown-eyed kids, that they had no real future, that they weren’t good enough to learn anything, certainly not at the same level as the brown-eyed kids. The intention was to show her students what racism looked like in practice; Elliott put the lesson together the day after Martin Luther King was killed. She was stunned that the students immediately internalized the qualities she said they had, qualities which she had made up on the spot. The brown-eye/blue-eye exercise is still used today to teach grade school students what racism looks like in practice - my sister did this in grade school - and to show children how easy it is to internalize hatred if it’s all you hear all of the time.
But that’s not what I want to talk about, I want to talk about a different thing Elliott did decades later, in 2001, when she did the same exercise with a group of college students, captured in her documentary “The Angry Eye”. I watched this as part of a college course and I was shocked, because think about what’s happening here. Again, Elliott is doing a nearly identical exercise as her 1968 third-grade lesson, which was internationally famous and captured in a BBC documentary by 1970, now being performed 30 years later, on people who were more mature and emotionally developed. Same exercise! She tells them at the beginning what she’s doing! She tells them this is an act! They know it’s an act! They are going into the lesson knowing that the woman in front of them is acting in order to make a point about prejudice! They know that she’s not really racist, and is in fact one of the most famous educators in the country when it comes to anti-racist pedagogy! They know that every single thing she’s about to say about them is something that she doesn’t actually mean! And guess what happens anyway! Yeah, dude, they break! They’re crying! They’re miserable! They’re furious!
This is still striking to me, that the college students were so affected by fake prejudice after being told that they were about to get a dose of fake prejudice. But there are two things to keep in mind. First, Elliott is extremely good at pretending to be racist, she was good at it in 1968 and she had several decades to get better at it. The other piece to remember is that virulent, hateful racism, accurately depicted, is that bad. It’s really that bad, so bad that when you are told it’s coming at you and you know it’s not real, the tidal wave of hatred can still knock you over.
Roll Of Thunder is not the story of how organized resistance was able to stop the deeply entrenched racism of 1930s Mississippi. There’s organized resistance, don’t get me wrong, but Roll Of Thunder is the story of how it doesn’t work.
One of the major plot points of the novel is when the Logan family - at the center of this story and nine other books by Mildred D. Taylor - organizes the other Black sharecroppers into a boycott of the local Klansman-owned general store. The white Wallace family owns the store, and they also tried to burn one of the sharecroppers alive, so it’s time to get organized, and it’s time to squeeze the Wallaces in a way that they’re going to feel:
“Everybody from Smellings Creek to Strawberry knows it was them but what do we do about it? We line their pockets with our few pennies and send our children up to their store to learn things they’ve got no business learning. The older children are drinking regularly there now, even though they don’t have any money to pay, and the Wallaces are simply adding the liquor charges to the family bill…just more money for them as they ruin our young people. As I see it the least we can do is stop shopping there. It may not be real justice, but it’ll hurt them and we’ll have done something."
The boycott does, indeed, hurt the Wallaces, and the Logan family and the sharecropper neighbors have all done something. This is it, this is nonviolent resistance, this is how the good guys win. Except they don't win. Because the Wallaces pull some strings with the landowners to pull lines of credit that the Black shoppers depend on, and then they ride out at night in their Klan robes to indirectly threaten the Black families, and then they start threatening the Black families directly, and then they start trying to lynch people. This is how it worked. People like the Logans tried to resist being suffocated by all of the hatred, and in response, the bigots squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and when they couldn’t squeeze anymore, they turned to murder. That’s what the system was. The Logans - and the people in the real world in this time and place - did good and noble things to try and protect each other and keep their dignity, and then they lost anyway, because they did the good and noble things within a system set up so that they would lose every single time without exception. They did not overcome. So in Roll Of Thunder, the boycott gets broken, the land gets razed, and a kid will end up executed for a crime that nobody thinks he actually committed.
This was my first time reading the novel1. I guess, deep down, I probably knew this was how it was going to end. Most stories of 1930s Mississippi did not end happily in real life, and this fictional story doesn't either. And what I felt, reading the book and knowing going in that there was going to be some pretty awful racism at its center and in fact having the concept of "awful racism" explained to me very didactically in a key passage of the book, was fury. Fury that the wrong people kept winning, fury that the Logans got shut out with every change in their plan, every new thing they tried to keep themselves and their friends going. Fury that no matter what we try to do to make it better, the system will set it so we automatically lose every time.
I don’t think the lesson of Roll Of Thunder is really "the good guys will lose every time", although I would assume that Mildred D. Taylor wanted her readers to know that the good guys would lose a lot more often than we’d want them to. I think the lesson is closer to something that we see in the first chapter of the novel. It’s a very famous passage - I even knew about this scene and I had never read the book before, although, again, I live with a junior high teacher - in which protagonist Cassie Logan, at her shitty segregated school, gets her textbook, which is of course beat up and falling apart. She looks at the inside front cover, and finds the county label which tells her that this book spent years in the white schools before getting shipped off to the “nigra” schools after it got beat up enough to be considered unacceptable for white students. Cassie gets in trouble for her open resentment at getting the white kids’ leftovers, but when she’s reported to her mom - who is also a teacher at the same school - her mom takes Cassie’s side. Cassie’s mom is so pissed off about it, in fact, that she resolves to go through all of the textbooks and glue paper over the county labels so that Cassie and her classmates don’t have to have this reminder in their face every day. This baffles Cassie’s teacher:
"“Well, I just think you’re spoiling those children, Mary. They’ve got to learn how things are sometime.” “Maybe so,” said Mama, “but that doesn’t mean they have to accept them… and maybe we don’t either.”"
Know how things are, but do not accept them. Get comfortable in your fury. You’re going to need it once the land starts burning.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 2003 medalist, Crispin: The Cross Of Lead by Avi.
The Racism Book in my junior high was the nonfiction Warriors Don’t Cry instead of this.