Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor is a difficult, beautiful, sad and wonderful novel. Set in pre-civil rights era Mississippi, it follows the story of a black family as they navigate the waters of second class citizenry. The Logan family is different from many of the share cropping families around them. They own the property that their family farms. This fact gives them the strength to question the atrocities of everyday life. Cassie, the narrator and only girl of the family, struggles to reconcile the things that her mother tells her about who she is and what the whites in her community tell her.
Reading this with the boys has been great. It has opened their minds to a terrible world of which they know nothing. It has given me so many opportunities to tell them about the fallenness of the world that we live in. We have also spoken of the privilege that we have simply because we are white. Pastor John spoke on racial reconciliation on Sunday (as he does every MLK weekend) and it was another good chance to come back to these topics with the kids. When the the "N" word came up for the first time in the book, I stopped and had to tell the boys about this terrible word. This is why we homeschool. I want to be the one to walk my kids into the darkness of our world. I want to be next to them the first time that they see things that make them cry and make them angry and make them question. I won't always be there, but it is a wonderful thing to be with them at first.
If you're looking for a book to read to expose your kids to issues of racism, segregation and a past that was not so long ago and that has huge modern ramifications, then I highly recommend this novel.
