Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Nourishing breakfast. Nourishing book.

Author: Mildred D. Taylor

Category: Growing up, I was aware that this book existed. But when I was younger, I avoided reading it because I thought it would be too intense. So I didn’t read it until about three years ago. This is the second time I’ve read it.

My thoughts: It’s a crying shame that I didn’t read it as a child. It’s a wonderful book. Recently, I was talking to one of our interns at work, who had just read To Kill a Mockingbird. She said that found that it was hard to read, because of what happens to Tom Robinson. I told her not to avoid reading things just because they are difficult. I wish someone had told me that years ago, so I would have read this book…and several others. The “difficult” stories are some of the best and most important ones. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is set in 1933 in rural Mississippi. The story is narrated by Cassie Logan, a nine-year-old who lives with her parents, grandmother, and three brothers (Stacey, Christopher-John, and Little Man) on their own land. This makes them different from the other black families in the area, most of whom sharecrop. Because it’s 1933 in Mississippi, life is not easy for or kind to the Logans. Cassie and her three brothers walk to school each day because their school has no buses, and they are splashed with dirt and mud by the bus driver who drives the school bus for the white kids, who taunt the Logans from the school bus windows (my stepfather reported something similar happening to him on the way to school in rural Mississippi, some three decades after this story was set). In this environment, men in a neighboring town were burned alive by whites who accused one of flirting with a white woman, and night riders strike terror in the hearts of Cassie and her family. Cassie learns the hard way the deeply ingrained codes of behavior that she must adhere to—for her own safety and survival. However…her family owns four hundred acres of their own land. And this is what gives them pride and self-esteem in the midst of a very harsh reality.

This book has interesting secondary characters. One is Uncle Hammer, Cassie’s outspoken uncle, a World War I veteran who lives in Chicago (no doubt part of the Great Migration, like in The Warmth of Other Suns). Another character is Jeremy Simms, a white boy who wants to be friends with Cassie’s brother Stacey. Jeremy never rides the school bus, preferring to walk with the Logans on their way to school. Also, there is T.J. Avery, Stacey’s trickster, up-to-no-good friend. T.J. is sort of a foil to Stacey—T.J.’s family sharecrops, thus are entrapped in this cruel cycle of debt, and there’s an undercurrent of envy to his relationship with Stacey, whose family is a little better off than T.J’s. Unfortunately, T.J. meets a cruel fate by placing value in the wrong things.

One reason I like this book because it reflects some of the experiences of my family. I remember my mother telling me that at her school books were those that the white schools discarded—like those of Cassie, and all students at her school. I think it took reading this book for me to understand the importance, to a generation of Americans who grew up on farms, of owning one’s own land. My grandfather, after years of first sharecropping, then renting farmland, finally bought his own plot of land in Arkansas in the 1960s. I can only imagine that purchasing that land made him feel (maybe for the first time) part of the American Dream.

And I was right about my first thoughts about Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry—this book is not a lighthearted reading experience. Meredith Taylor does not sugarcoat the harshness and cruelty of Cassie Logan’s world. But, like To Kill a Mockingbird, this is an important story.

P.S. The characters, especially Cassie’s grandmother Big Ma, remind me of Sharecropper by the late, great Elizabeth Catlett.

Image via The Art Institute of Chicago

Great passage (after Uncle Hammer gives Stacey a severe dressing down): Christopher-John, Little Man, and I exchanged apprehensive glances. I don’t know what they were thinking, but I for one was deciding right then and there not to do anything to rub Uncle Hammer the wrong way; I had no intention of ever facing a tongue-lashing like that. Papa’s bottom-warming whippings were quite enough for me, thank you.

Next up: The House of Mirth