“It is not polite, and it is full of pain.”

Author Mildred Taylor grew up on her father’s stories of slavery and “of those who lived still not free.”

“I was outraged that one person would treat another person with such inhumanity and disrespect, and I grew from that outrage, determined to pass the stories on.”

Holding Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry unopened in my hand, I wondered if I really wanted to read it. Like, do I really want to be poked in the eye.

I decided to risk it.

Roll of Thunder is just one of her books about the Logan family and their Mississippi sharecropping community. Told through the eyes of nine-year-old Cassie Logan, we see a time and place where negroes seldom caught a break.

The Logans have a few advantages over their neighbors. Mama teaches school. Papa works the railroad in Louisiana, earning cash money to pay the taxes on their land. Their four hundred acres were once owned by the white overlord, Harlan Granger, and you can bet Harlan wants it back.

Whether it is white children, speeding by in their schoolbus, jeering at the on-foot Logans, or a white storekeeper who makes the pecking order plain when the Logans stop in for supplies, life is full of “inhumanity and disrespect.” What’s worse, when the downtrodden attempt to right the wrongs, consequences can be swift and cruel.

Then there’s their friend T.J., whose big talk stirs up trouble, wounding the Logans in a way they really can’t afford.

I rooted for this warm-hearted, hard-working family and came away with a little more understanding in my heart.

Photo credit: richard binhammer via Visual hunt / CC BY-NC