Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, originally by Mildred D. Taylor, was originally published
in 1976.
It won the Newberry Medal in 1977.
It is part of the Logan family saga, which are, I would say, autobiographical books.
Yeah, I'd say they're autobiographical books that tell the story of Taylor's family.
And yeah, that's about it for now.
I'm going to go ahead and launch straight into my discussion of this book, which, well,
actually, I'll go back.
At the end of the book, there was a note from Taylor herself that said that some people
think that her book is not politically correct.
She talks about the fact that people want to, different people, I think from different sides,
want to censor or limit the exposure that her book, or this book and other books, have
in schools.
And I guess, you know, and two children as well.
Interesting.
So yeah, supposedly, I was confused previously.
Let me give you some more information about the book.
So it says, in 1933, nine-year-old Cassie Logan lives in rural Mississippi with her
three brothers, Stacey, Christopher John, and little man.
Unlike most black families during this time, the Logan family owns the land on which they
reside.
It originally belonged to a white plantation owner, Harlan Granger, who sold it to cover
his taxes during reconstruction.
So the book is kind of a mishmash.
There's a lot of things going on.
These kids interact in a very adult world, and they actually start facing racism, or
at least Cassie, who's nine at the time, starts facing racism.
I don't know if her brother, Stacey, is already well acquainted with it and understands what's
going on.
But her family, because of the difference between them and other black families who
are sharecropping, they have been able to insulate their children, to some extent the
mother and father, have insulated the children, to some extent, from out and out racism, and
they don't quite understand all the dynamics.
And Cassie learns about those dynamics and the fact that white people think they're better
than them.
Some of them will, just because they're black.
And it's very interesting.
So I guess I had to understand this as the fourth book in the series, but I guess I was
wrong according to the Wikipedia article.
This is what it says.
The novel is the first book in the Logan family saga, which includes four sequels, Let the
Circle Be Unbroken, The Road to Memphis, The Gold Cadillac, and All the Days Past, All
the Days to Come, and three prequels, The Land, The Well or David's Story, and A Song
of the Trees, as well as two novellas, Mississippi Bridge and The Friendship.
In the book, Taylor explores struggles of African Americans in the 1930s Mississippi
through the perspective of nine-year-old Cassie Logan.
As I was saying, the novel contains several themes, including Jim Crow segregation, black
land ownership, sharecropping, the Great Depression, and lynching.
And I'm going to say the importance of gun ownership and self-defense and black anti-military
attitudes, anti-government attitudes to some extent as well.
I'm going to say the importance of gun ownership and self-defense as well.
Supposedly this book has controversy because of the use of the N-word in it.
I felt it was appropriate.
I don't quite know how I'm going to talk about this book.
The way I've been talking about all these different books varies as I go on.
And I'm giving each one its own fortress fiction treatment as it deserves, because they're
all kind of different and unique books.
So, let me slow down a bit.
I'm actually really excited to talk about this book.
And I'm going to go ahead and give you the 60-second spoiler thing.
I don't know.
It's not a 60-second spoiler.
It's just 60 seconds.
This book is good.
It's a definite recommend.
I believe, I firmly believe it not demands, it deserves a place in the fortress fiction.
I think this is good.
Like, first of all, and I'll clarify this from now on, this was entertaining.
This is not message fiction or it's not message fiction to the exclusion of telling a good
story.
It is a story first.
It tells the story of this family.
And it's super interesting in the outro and the note at the end by Taylor, she mentioned
that sometimes people laugh, sometimes people cried, sometimes it was terrifying, and sometimes
it was a joy to relive her family's history in this oral storytelling, oral, you know,
oral transmission of storytelling that they did, that they was preserved for, I don't
know, sounds like 100 years from the great granddaddy's day all the way down to her day,
these stories being told.
And I can see why they told these stories because these stories are going to help children
to grow and to learn and to develop and to become who they need to be.
So that being said, I'm going to go ahead and talk about this.
I talked about the N-word.
I talked about the kind of politically correct thing, and I brought up black gun ownership,
which is an interesting topic, but I'm not going to dwell on it.
Also, like the militancy and the anti-war, anti-government kind of policy.
Some of that more political stuff is things that I have enjoyed talking about in the past
in my adult life, but it doesn't really germane to the discussion of the book right now.
I'm not talking about politics or black America specifically.
I'm talking about this as a book.
And again, as I said earlier, this is an entertaining book.
It is a good story, and I don't want to ruin that story or turn people away from it by
using it for my own political agenda.
So I'm not going to do that.
I'm just going to say I firmly believe that more books should be written like this, reflecting
different perspectives and different people so that we can all benefit from sharing with
each other, even if you never get to talk to somebody who was born in the South as a
slave or the child of a former slave who experienced all these different things, especially as
time goes on.
If these memories and these stories aren't preserved, they will be lost to time.
And while the general human principle of slavery is wrong, and so is institutionalized racism
that keeps people down or allows one group to oppress and commit crimes against another
group and get away with it legally.
Those things are obviously morally wrong, or to some people, it's not obvious.
And there are a lot of things that, from my perspective, and again, this is partly my
morality based on my worldview, my perspective on God, and also my political understanding.
There are certain things that are just moral and they can be reasoned, they can be understood,
they can be applied to all sorts of situations to which I would say, yeah, you can't do
this.
This is immoral.
You can do this.
This is moral.
And while I definitely think that works and that definitely works for me, I know not all
people share that perspective.
And I think that's a sad thing overall, but I have at least have my principles to guide
me and I don't need specific examples.
I don't need to relive horrors in order to see, oh yeah, this would be bad to do.
It would be bad to oppress people in this way or take away people's rights in this way
because this anecdotal, you know, anecdotally, I have learned that it's wrong and bad.
It's just my principles tell me that it's wrong and bad.
But at least for children, you know, it's good to introduce them to these things through
stories and through stories, they can learn the principles and they can apply those principles
to other things.
They could say, hey, the form of discrimination that Cassie and her family are treated with,
I see a parallel to it over here.
And I don't like seeing it over here because it was wrong for Cassie and her family.
We mistreated that way.
And therefore, you know, therefore I'm able to use my reasoning and observe that it's
also wrong for these people over here who might look opposite of them to be oppressed
or mistreated in this way and have everybody be OK with that, both socially and legally.
So anyway, getting back into the meat of this end of the story, it's a good story.
It's kind of a fun adventure story because it's obviously fun adventure story, but it
does tell small anecdotes.
It shares bits and pieces of the story.
I don't know if it takes place, maybe it takes place over the course of a year, approximately
nine months to a year, a school year, perhaps, because it does.
And there is stuff mentioned about like the crops and the cotton yield and everything
that the Logan family has on their land, which they, you know, they farm themselves and they
also hire on like a tenant farmer kind of guy to help them with on their two hundred
acres or so that they have.
I think it's two hundred, not two thousand, but the number two thousand sticks in my mind
for some reason.
It was the original, the white man who was the slave owner who had the two thousand acres
and he ended up selling it off piecemeal.
And the Logan family owns two hundred acres worth of what he used to own.
I think that's the deal.
Anyway, that doesn't matter.
But also the timeline of it isn't one hundred percent pertinent.
There's starting of the school year, which is about August.
And then there's inflection point around Christmas.
And then there's another inflection point somewhere nearing harvest time, I think.
But it's not I'm not 100 percent sure.
I'm going to say that the thing I one of the things I liked most or appreciated most about
this is that because the story is being told from the respective of this little girl, Cassie,
you get to see lots of different sides of things.
You get to see her interacting with her siblings in a very close way.
You get to see her.
You see things happening in school in an interesting way.
And I don't know if it's because of the times, 1930s or if it was because they were poor
or if it's because that's how things were done in Mississippi.
I guess it's a state, right?
Anyway, yeah, it's the same.
There's this really interesting incident in the beginning of the book where Cassie and
her brother, little man, are in class together.
It's like a mixed classroom that has like a canvas divider in it, and it's not separated
on whites or blacks or, you know, colored versus non-colored or white.
I don't know how you would say that.
It's not separated on that.
It's separated kind of by grade level, even though they're they're semi joined with each
other.
But it was interesting because in it, you get to see that the children were allowed
to be whipped by their teachers at the time.
The corporal punishment was part of the school system, the public school system or the, you
know, anyway, the public, the government school system and the teacher who their mother, the
Logan's Mrs. Logan, she's a teacher as well.
And the teacher who ends up whipping, I think both are kids, right?
Little man and Cassie got whipped, I believe.
She ends up going and telling about it to Mrs. Logan.
And the reason that that happens is because little man is horrified by the fact that in
his book, it basically documents that what the county that they live in has done is that
over the years, the books have passed from student to student to student.
And there's a chronological log of that in the book, in the front of the book.
And it spells out the fact that it makes it very easy to observe the pattern that over
time as the books deteriorate in quality.
And I think it's over like a course of 20 years or so.
They got so bad that they stopped giving those books to white students and they started giving
them to colored or black students.
And little man can read even though he's four years old, he's a first grader, I guess he's
five years old, he's a first grader.
And he's horrified by this fact and it makes him very upset.
He doesn't want the book because he doesn't want the scraps.
And honestly, I'll be honest, I'll get a little more political for just a minute.
While that anecdote very well may be true, especially because there is a pride and self-respect
present in the Logan family that comes across, which I appreciate and I think is good and
noble and honorable.
It first surprised me because it sounded like one of those things that people make up on
Facebook or Twitter or whatever, where they say, oh, my four year old came over to me
and said this, can you believe that?
And it's like, yeah, your kid didn't say that.
You said that.
And you pretended that your kid said that.
So I'm not going to question Taylor's family who told the story, but it just it felt like
that to me a little bit.
I had to let go.
I had to let go and think, OK, well, you know, obviously I wasn't there.
This is from, you know, oral history handed down within a family.
So who am I to question that?
And it's part of the story.
But as the story went on, it became more clear, like what was being done and how things were
going and the fact that these children had been shielded from out and out racism so they
didn't fully understand the discrimination that they faced.
And then it made more sense to me.
It was still it still worked, regardless of whether or not I was dubious about that part
being factual.
But within the rest of the story, like everything else feels very real.
Everything else feels very much like it did happen historically.
And I think that's I think that's good.
The rest of it feels authentic.
So there's that little bit of inauthenticity or potential inauthenticity that I felt.
And I didn't let that really bother me.
I rolled along with it because I thought, well, OK, there's got to be a reason for this.
And I can understand why this would be here like this.
And also, I don't know, who am I to say, like I said, it didn't happen.
So let me just go with this.
And I'm really glad that I didn't let that negatively affect me and that I rolled with
it because the rest of the book is very worthwhile and it was very interesting.
And like I said, I really appreciate everything that happened in there.
It all felt very real.
It felt very real.
It felt very threatening, very ominous.
And the children like so much of the book is told from the children's perspective.
It's really from Kathy's perspective specifically, but it has a very mature.
A very mature way about it where like you don't really get into people's heads.
It's not that that's intrinsically mature.
What I'm trying to say is it feels like a kid recounting their encounters of the world
accurately, but not necessarily understanding what everything that they're repeating back
to you means like Cassie doesn't quite get the significance of it.
And you're not given that significance in the narration.
It doesn't berate you.
It doesn't force you to look at things a certain way.
It just because it's a book and you're following along with the narrative narrative, it just
forces you to look.
It gives you the opportunity to see this world through her eyes and experience it.
And it was sad and scary, intense.
And it was a very interesting experience.
Like I said, I do believe this belongs in the halls of the fortress fiction.
I do believe this is foundational.
It's a fundamental thing for somebody to read so that you don't miss out on this experience
because it's important to know it and to feel it to and to know that it's wrong and to feel
motivated to work and fight against this sort of thing.
This sort of discrimination based on immutable qualities.
So that was good.
That was very good.
And something to add to the fact that the book was so authentic and so real is the fact
that there are not every black character, not every black person in the book is a wonderful
virtuous hero and not every white person in the book is a evil white devil.
For lack of a better term, or is a villain, I should say.
That's a better way to counter that, to balance that, you know, those dueling perspectives
out.
And there's a little boy, I believe his name is Jeremy, and he belongs to a bad family,
a bad white family who is doing lots of bad stuff and who was involved in who the older
brothers are actually involved in committing crimes later and getting one of the bad black
characters to fall in with them.
Now this kid's 12 or 13 years old.
These boys are 15, 18, 17, 18, something like that.
Years old, the white boys that are older than him and they who lead him astray.
But this kid is like I felt I almost felt a little bit badly for how I was perceiving
this kid and he felt like he was much older to me.
And that kind of justified it to me.
Like I'm not seeing him.
I'm hearing this book and I'm, you know, reading through it and I'm not seeing pictures of
these kids.
So Cassie, I didn't realize she was nine until later on.
I thought she was a little older.
It wasn't until I found out that like, oh, you know, this 12 year old girl couldn't do
this and this nine year old girl could me that I realized that she was nine years old.
I thought, well, this girl's young.
So no wonder she's been shielded and protected from some of these more severe negative things
in the world in reality and her reality at that time.
But it also made me think, oh yeah, I mean, she's this old, her brother's 12 and their
friend, a little bit of friend, their friend, enemy.
I'm not sure.
He's only 12 years old as well.
TJ and TJ Avery.
And at first I went, I went from feeling very unsympathetic towards TJ to then understanding
a little bit more kind of when the age was cemented in for me, what like some of what
TJ's problem was and why he was acting the way he acts and not that his behavior, his
very bad behavior is justified or excused, but I can understand better where he's coming
from.
And that's, that's the interesting thing is the book presents you with people who are
acting very badly.
And then sometimes there's an opportunity.
Sometimes the characters just react to that and they can react either poorly or well,
depending on the circumstances, or the book will present to you a person doing bad things
and it'll help to contextualize what they're doing for good and for ill.
So TJ is not the best kid and I would say he's lacking guidance and he needs guidance and
help.
His father and a mother or no, his mother's dead.
I believe in his father's like sickly and for whatever reason, TJ decides to act in
a way contrary to how his mother would want and how his father wants him to.
And I don't know, his mother is still alive, but he's so big and strong that even when
she whoops him, it doesn't help.
And his father is so sickly that when he tries to discipline his son verbally or talk to
him, he falls into a coughing fit and he can't do it.
So for whatever reason, TJ, who I believe is an only child, he kind of runs wild and
he presents a lot of problems.
He has a lot of negative traits.
He's yeah, he has a lot of negative traits and he is almost like a, even though he's
supposed to be based on a real character, he's almost like a caricature of what a racist
white person would say a black person is, which is pretty interesting because Taylor
is writing these family stories as a black woman, sharing these things and just giving
fair treatment and writing TJ is a bad kid, even though he's one of her people, so to
speak.
And she's not affording him the protection of the collective.
She's saying, Hey, this guy was bad and he did these bad things.
And maybe he wasn't all that bad and he didn't deserve everything that happened to him.
But it's kind of understandable how this happened.
He became estranged from some of his friends because of his negative behavior.
And then he fell in with a bad crowd with these two white boys whose family had done
heinous things and were criminal and all deserve severe punishment.
And I don't know if they ever saw justice for what they did.
And it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't because that was the environment at the time.
And that's sad.
And it's sad to know that TJ did get an undeserved punishment and then get perhaps some deserved
punishment as well.
But the fact that these boys escaped without any punishment of any sort is that's criminal.
That's injustice.
That's not justice being carried out.
And that's very sad.
And things like that, I don't think should be sugar coated because we should face those
hard truths so that we can be hurt by them and be made angry by them and try to fight
them because they're wrong and they need to be corrected.
And it's just not proper.
On the other hand, a lot of the other whites in the book are bad people.
They have gradations of negativity and of how they treat the Logan family poorly.
And I mean, there is not just poor treatment.
There's also like violent attacks, there's burnings, there's shootings, there's lots
of different things that happen.
But there are some good white characters.
There's an old lawyer, I can't remember his name.
There's a little boy, Jeremy, who's related to that family.
And the little boy wants to be friends with the Logan kids and he kind of walks to school
with them as much as he can.
And he calls himself their friend.
He gives them gifts and he's kind to them and things like that.
And then his sister is a jerk and his dad's bad and his older brothers are rotten as well.
So that's kind of interesting.
But then the lawyer, he knows the family well.
He's lived there for a long time and he does his best to help them.
In fact, he makes something really good happen in the end, which is great.
But I don't want to spoil it for you because I want you to read the book.
But I want to shift gears now and talk about the Logan family themselves.
And I was mentioning that the Logan family has a lot of honor and a lot of pride.
And I think dignity and respectfulness are really the things that I want to say the Logan
family has and traits that they exhibit because they do.
And I think that's wonderful.
This is a very interesting distinction.
So for whatever reason, there is a time when black families were very strong and there's
an illustration of a strong black family in this book, which not all the families were
strong.
Like I said, with TJ, his mother and father had problems with him and he was kind of a
bad kid doing not great things.
And it's kind of hard for me to tell why he was such a bad kid.
What went wrong with him?
Maybe he was exposed to more racism from white people and maybe things were kind of lacking
in the family at home.
And the confluence of those things and the way he took those things broke him in such
a way where he was bad as a result of those things versus the Logan family is coming from
a different position, kind of like a more advanced or higher or I'm not going to say
privileged, but like a more steady, they have like a stronger base and like a more sturdy
foundation under them than let's say the Avery's did, that's TJ's family.
And so when their medal was tested, they performed better and had better outcomes because they
were stronger and more able to cope with what happened.
Doesn't lessen the evil, the severity, the disgustingness of anything that they faced.
It's just sometimes people break well and sometimes people break bad.
And that's how it is.
There's a great analogy that I won't use, but just basically sometimes hardship breaks
people and sometimes hardship is a crucible that turns somebody into gold or into a diamond
or however you want to phrase that.
So it's just while adversity does improve a person, adversity also sometimes crushes
a person, which I guess that's the last I'll save it.
But I'm just going to say Paul Logan because I don't remember his name because the kids
are mostly referring to him as daddy or pa or not pa, but dad.
So I don't remember.
And that's the thing.
The book is so much from the kid perspective that it's like, this is ma, this is big ma,
this is dad, this is uncle hammer.
It's just a very kid's perspective.
So I don't remember all the parents names because it's mostly the kids that you're in
and around.
But my point is there is a large emphasis on kind of like, there's an interesting perspective
that's shared from the parents, which is basically it is wrong for white people to mistreat us,
but it is a fact that they will mistreat us.
And it is a weakness on their part that they feel that because they can mistreat us and
get away with it legally and kind of culturally or societally, from a cultural perspective
and a legal perspective, they can get away with being awful to us and they can even get
away with crimes that they will do that because that's what makes them feel better.
And it's related to when slavery was the law of the land and how people justified slavery
and how they use Christianity to do that and Bible and how they taught Christianity to
us blacks in order to be able to do that.
And it's just a very interesting conversation.
And yet there's not a victimization attitude.
The Logans don't act like they are victims.
The Logans act like they are people who are dealing with a very tough situation and they
seek to act and live honorably and with respect and to give respect and get respect.
And they treat each other kindly.
And there's a lot of cohesion in their family that you don't see echoed in many of the other
families, the white family and the black family that you get a glimpse of.
They actively don't like each other and the Logan children are shocked to learn that you
can, that you're allowed to, that it's possible to not like your brother and sister.
And I think that speaks volumes to the family values that the Logans instilled in their
children.
I'm sure the extended family being there, having Big Ma there and the parents having
a good relationship, I'm sure was helpful to that.
And it's remarkable that this is the case for these people.
And it's observable within the story that being such a strong family is probably what
kept them together and what got them through all of these hardships.
And it's remarkable and inspiring that people who came from such hurt and came from such
negativity, could be able to rise above those challenges and do something better and make
themselves something better.
And yeah, I just, it's remarkable and it's inspiring and touching and I really like that.
So a wonderful part of their story.
And without the conflict inherent in facing the racism, it's not like they couldn't have
risen to those heights and made those accomplishments.
But I really like that and I really appreciate that the discrimination and the racism and
the fact that that was all in Sconson Law doesn't take away.
It's not an excuse for the family.
It's just another reason basically for them to be their best selves and to do the best
they can and to keep working and fighting, living for a better tomorrow and to build
something for themselves, which is really beautiful.
Being that we are pretty much at the end of this episode of Fortress Fiction, I want to
go ahead and open up to the comments and see if anybody has questions or comments about
this book and if not, I do have one more thing I want to add, one other thought I had, and
then I want to tell you about Mildred D. Taylor's other books so that you can check them out
if you want to after having heard me commend this one.
So the last point that I wanted to bring up is that there's a contrast between TJ, I can't
remember his last name right now, the young boy who ended up getting into a lot of trouble.
Of course, I explained my complicated feelings about him already.
I do feel like he's a victim of the manipulation of the two white boys who are older than him
who got him to do all sorts of nasty things, but he was open to that and I don't think
Stacey for example would have done those things and I'm not quite sure why they were so different,
but more than Stacey Logan being different from TJ, Paul Logan who was born as a slave
was very different from TJ.
He was strengthened by the hardship that he went through and TJ wasn't and I think that's
something important to consider.
Paul Logan didn't come out and become a criminal.
He didn't mistreat his fellow, his fellow blacks, his fellow former slaves.
He didn't treat them in an underhanded way.
He was respectful and kind and he built a strong family that has deep roots that enable
it to weather the storms of racism and discrimination and just the general hardship of life versus
something went wrong with TJ where he isn't the kind of person who can weather those storms.
And it's just, I think it's very significant to point out that TJ was born free under discrimination,
never had to work as a slave.
Paul Logan was born as a slave or became a slave, lived that life for so long.
He was discriminated against.
It was ensconced in law, but not only was he discriminated against, but he didn't have
freedom and TJ, and he got his freedom and he lived as a free man after that.
And TJ, something was different in him as a person where he wasn't born as a slave,
but he enslaved himself to this pair of white brothers to do their criminal activities.
And he ultimately ended up within the criminal justice system being arrested and taken away.
And again, I don't know his fate because it's not in this book, maybe in others, maybe something
that is explored down the line.
Because the story continued in the Logan family saga, but it's just to me really interesting,
really interesting the difference between them, the mindset, the outcomes for them.
And I'm not discounting, I'm not trying to discount anything.
I'm just focusing in on that point to say, isn't that interesting?
And isn't that something to think about?
Now as far as Mildred DiCattilio's other books, here is a brief list of them.
And here they are.
So Song of the Tree, these are not necessarily, no, these are given in sequential order.
These stories, these books go from 1975 all the way to 2020, which is very interesting.
Here they are real quick.
Song of the Trees, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The Gold
Cadillac, The Friendship, Mississippi Bridge, The Road to Memphis, The Well, David's Story,
which is about the father, the father of the children in this story.
I couldn't remember his name, but it's David, the land, and then all the days past, all
the days to come.
So yeah, I mean, this book was good.
And I would imagine she gets better as she goes on.
The more she's writing, the better she's becoming.
And I definitely would encourage you to check out her other books and let me know what you
think of them.
I hope you enjoyed that.
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Until next time, be well.
This is MJ signing out.
This has been a Story Over Everything production.