Illustrated by Philippe Lardy. Houghton Mifflin; 48 pages; history; ages 12 and up; ISBN: 0-618-39752-3.
As Marilyn Nelson explains in the foreword to her book-length poem,
A Wreath for Emmett Till is a heroic crown of sonnets, "a sequence of fifteen interlinked sonnets, in which the last one is made up of the first lines of the preceding fourteen." Till, a 14-year-old Chicago boy, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 when he was kidnapped and murdered by two white men for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Till's mother held an open-casket funeral so the public could see how her child was mutilated by these men, who were charged with the murder but ultimately acquitted after a trial by all-white jury. Nevertheless, the battle for civil rights in the Deep South had begun.
Nelson's words pack a punch, particularly in this segment of one particular sonnet:
This country we love has a Janus face:
One mouth speaks with forked tongue, the other reads
the Constitution. My country, 'tis of both
thy nightmare history and thy grand dream,
thy centuries of good and evil deeds,
I sing ...
Tweens who stick with
A Wreath for Emmett Till through Nelson's various twists and turns of phrase will be rewarded with an experience that bears comparison to a fiery gospel sermon delivered by a preacher whose heart is filled with equal parts rage and forgiveness. (Lardy's artwork is pretty, but the pen is mightier than the brush here.) Not easily forgotten.
For further reading, check out Chris Crowe's Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case (2003).
No comments:
Post a Comment