by Moe Zilla

Created on: March 24, 2010

"Ox-Cart Man" is also a remarkable book, touching the lives of two extraordinary people and representing the lives of more. Its illustrator, Barbara Cooney, had already won a Caldecott Award in 1959 (for "Chanticleer and the Fox.") With this book twenty-one years later, she received a rare second Caldecott Award for Ox-Cart Man at the age of 63.  The year was 1980, and in four years the book's author would go on to be the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 to 1989 (according to Wikipedia). And in 2006, at the age of 78, Donald Hall was appointed by the Library of Congress to be their own Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.

But there's more lives behind the book's remarkable story. "My cousin...who has always lived around here, originally told me that story," Hall remembers on the book's jacket. "[A]nd it had been told to him when he was a boy, by an old man; and the old man told him that he had heard it when he was a boy from a still older man." As a poet Hall recognized that heritage as a great example of "the oral tradition."

Cooney's simple drawings create a folksy feeling - leaves falling in autumn around a man, an ox, and a cart, in front of a barn by a hill. The man packs his cart with wool - along with the mittens and shawl that his wife and daughter had made. There's candles, linen, shingles, and brooms - all made by the family which stands under the autumny trees - and they've also grown tasty foods like potatoes, apples, and maple sugar. Cooney draws rolling hills in the background - and a tree-covered valley filled with brilliant reds and yellows.

The man walks beside his cart, "over hills, through valleys, by streams past farms and villages." After 10 days he arrives at the market in Porstmouth, New Hampshire (as Cooney's drawings colorfully depict the post-colonial architecture). The man sells each item to its townspeople - the bag of wool, the shawl, the mittens, and the shingles. But then he sells the barrels that carried his apple - and the bag that held his potatoes...and his ox cart!

"Then he sold his ox, and kissed him good-bye on his nose."

What happens next, the reader wants to know. Hall delivers a perfect slice of American life - a humble entrepreneur who trades his way up. The man uses the money to buy a kettle, a carving knife, and an embroidery needle for his daughter. There's other useful items - plus peppermint candies for the family - but the man packs them all into a knapsack which he carries over his shoulder. And then he completes the 10-day walk back to his family.

"And that night the ox-cart man sat in front of his faire stitching new harness for the young ox in the barn..."

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