by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 04, 2010

Janice N. Harrington is a poet - and she's also a fun storyteller. She's traveled the country performing professional storytelling for schools and festivals, according to the book's jacket. But she grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and based her first book on her own childhood experience of moving North with her family in the middle of the 1960s. There's even a map on the inside back cover, which traces their route through seven states.

The book uses her playful storytelling skills - but also her poetry.

"I don't want to go," I tell Big Mama.
But Going-North Day hurries to our door
like it's tired of our slowpokey ways."

The book uses a poet's free-form typesetting, so Harrington's descriptions are split over several lines, making their every-day details seem somehow more personal and significant. And the fuzzy watercolor drawings let Harrington's text carry the story, as she describes the sad goodbyes from their family - "uncles, aunts, cousins too" - and the reluctance of the little-girl narrator to leave behind her home.

"I wish my toes were roots.
I'd grow into a pin oak and never go away.
Would they let me stay if I were a tree?"

The poetry compresses the story into intense bursts. ("Car loaded, everything packed, goodbyes said. We're almost ready.") The girl gives Big Mama one last hug, and the station wagon pulls away, "banana bright, rolling, rolling down a red dirt hill."  And soon they've left Alabama far behind.

The tires on the road beat a rhythmic sound, like they're repeating the phrase "good luck" over and over again... They wonder what the children will be like at their new school up north. They eat a tasty lunch. Their mother prays that they won't run out of gas.

The illustrations (by Jerome Lagarrigue) are effective but understated. There's one colorful  watercolor of a Mississippi cotton field that's almost feels like an impressionist painting, with bright pink clouds streaks for the clouds in the sky, and bright yellows and greens in the distance that look like a Van Gogh. It gives the story a realism, which is crucial for its author's message. Today Harrington is the head of children's services for the public library in Champaign. But she makes clear that what she's preserving her is an authentic memory from the 1960s

Gas gauge getting low, getting low.
Can't stop just anywhere.
Only the Negro stations,
only the Negro stores...
Will we make it?
Will this place serve Negroes?
Gas gauge says
almost gone
almost gone.

As they find a friendly gas station - and the children get candy - the little girl narrator muses matter-of-factly that "Maybe the North will be better."

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