by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 07, 2010

Debby Atwell wanders through 100 years of American history in a children's book called "Pearl." She starts with a boy who remembers his grandfather's story about watching George Washington parading through New York on the day he was inaugurated. Washington had scooped up the young boy, and carried him along on his horse, making him feel like the luckiest person alive. "Father explained to me that everybody felt that way in those days because America was young and anything was possible..."

Atwood both wrote and illustrated this book, which gives her lots of chances to paint scenes suggestive of moments from America's history. After a painting of Washington's inauguration, there's a painting of a wagon train leaving for the west. There's a bright spring day while the family tends to its farm, and then a black locomotive as America heads into the Civil War. Her simple drawings are characterized as the folk-art style, according to the book's jacket, with bright colors but simple figures in heart-felt settings. And for each picture there's several paragraphs of text that explain the next stage in American history.

The narrator explains that she's the last of nine children on a farm. She lists out all the chores that her sister perform on the farm. But history always jumps back into the story, and sometimes it's a little heavy-handed. "There were no men around. You see, my father and brothers had all gone off to fight in the Civil War to free the slaves..."

And honestly, that raised a red flag for me, because Lincoln didn't free the slaves until after the war had begun. Historically the motive for many soldiers was simply keeping the union together and defending their homeland - though Atwell's story eventually returns to more familiar facts. "Abraham Lincoln was president back then," she writes. "He was a man with black hair and a black beard."

"We had a picture of him in the parlor."

This got me wondering when the photograph was invented - and when they became popular household decorations - but maybe Atwell means the family had an illustration of President Lincoln. But I resolved the tension by deciding that the text, like Atwell's illustrations, is a kind of "folk history" of America. It's a re-telling of the people's understanding of their history, in the form of a story for children. The narrator even marries a man named David - just like Atwood herself - and then honeymoons at Niagara Falls...

The family travels out west, Thomas Edison invents electricity, and they eventually buy an automobile and watch Orville Wright fly his airplane at Kitty Hawk. She lives through World War I, sees the arrival of the atomic bomb, and even hears preacher Martin Luther King. The story's timeline only makes sense if Pearl lives to be 100 years old. But in a folk history - with folk-art illustrations - everything eventually finds its way into the story....

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