Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry follows Cassie Logan during her fourth grade school year, starting in the fall of 1933. The book is set in a small farming community in Mississippi; one independent family farm and three former plantations turned into sharecropping estates share a tenuous peace during a time of great upheaval. While the story is written about children for children, Cassie and her three siblings have to deal with very adult problems that their family cannot fully protect them from no matter how hard they try.
The event that sets the story in motion happen before the book begins, when night riders pour kerosene on a man and his two nephews, then set them on fire, because one of them reportedly flirted with a white woman. The instigators of the act were the owners of the Wallace store, where young people have started going to dance, drink, and behave inappropriately. Their actions are a source of amusement and derision for the white sharecroppers of the community who are not much better off than they are. The (white) school bus driver frequently tries to run over the Logan children as they are walking to and from school, because he and his passengers find it amusing. The black children’s school cannot afford a bus or new textbooks. There is a strict segregation between white and black here, in the schools and the churches, for who goes over the one lane bridge first, and who gets served first at the store. Blurring the edges by becoming friends with members of the opposing race or expecting equal treatment is not deemed acceptable in this community.
The Logan family has it better than most because they own their farm. The land used to belong to a family named Granger, and they want it back, but the land is part of the Logans and they will not give it up for anything. The mother teaches at the school and the father works for the railroad to help pay the mortgage and make ends meet. Most families aren’t so lucky no matter what their race is. Cotton doesn’t sell for as much anymore, and the sharecroppers are constantly in debt because the landlords keep their tenants that way. The sharecroppers have to borrow money for seed, for tools, for rent, and when the crop comes in hope that it is enough to pay off the debts that they incurred that year. But of course the landlord doesn’t want the people to thrive, he wants them to continue to languish and be under his control.
This is how things were in the South, with the landlords trying to cling to their glory days, before the Civil War was lost and their former livelihood with it. The Logans try to convince their neighbors to not shop at the Wallace store anymore, but the Wallaces pay one of the landlords—the Grangers again—rent (because the store is on Granger land), and each of the landlords is the one guaranteeing the farmers’ credit; everyone involved has a reciprocal interest. If someone tries to rock the boat, the landowners take it as a personal offense. When the Logans find another financial backer for the farmers and start delivering supplies to them from a nearby town, the landlords apply pressure wherever they can, and they have their fingers in a lot of places. The Grangers convince the bank to call the Logan’s mortgage due, two of the landowners tell the sharecroppers that the percentage they are going to withhold has gone up, the Wallaces attack the supply wagon, all of these action are immoral, if not illegal.
This is the main storyline, the underlying one from start to finish, which takes a rather unexpected direction with T.J. Avery. He gets Mrs. Logan fired because she has failed him for cheating on a test. He starts hanging out with two white young adults who use him as the fall guy when they rob a store in Strawberry. Lastly, Mr. Logan chooses to save T.J.’s life by setting a fourth of his crops on fire so the community will pull back together when they have to put it out or risk the destruction of their entire community.
I have to wonder what this book is supposed to be teaching children. First the children sabotage the school bus by digging a trench in the middle of the road during a rain storm, but this action is echoed in the pyromania that their father displays during the thunderstorm. While shopping in Strawberry, Cassie is understandably upset when the storekeeper does not serve T.J. after an hour because he keeps helping the white customers instead, but then she throws a fit and causes even more trouble when she runs into Lillian Jean. I’m not saying that Lillian’s father had any right to throw Cassie in the street, but she equally does not have the right to take revenge on the daughter by damaging her books or blackmailing her.
Everyone, on both sides of the issue, is behaving badly. Even the schoolteachers and parents treat their children with disrespect and complete unfairness, punishing them when they actually try to do the right thing, and never aware or capable of taking action when their children are doing the wrong ones. The pouring rain cannot wash their sins away, and I somehow doubt that the fire has left them any more chance of new growth in the future. This story is incomplete, it starts in the middle and ends in the middle, and though we are given the necessary background to understand, we have no idea what will happen in their future, in their ultimate ends. I am still left wondering: is this story meant to show us to not behave badly? I rather think that it is unapologeticly saying that this is how things were, and there is blood on everyone’s hands.
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