by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 04, 2010

Five years before her death, poet Sherley Anne Willliams created a remarkable children's book. It had been more than 17 years since she'd written a book of poems about workers in a cotton field, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Through the rest of her life, she'd told stories for her son Malcolm and his friends (and eventually, to her grandchildren, Malcolm Jr. and Jayvon). But in 1992, in one of her last books, Williams adopted her award-winning poems into a book for children.

"The rows of cotton stretch far as I can see."

In "Working Cotton, the hard life is described by a little girl, who's cold and tired when they first arrive at the field before the sun has even risen. "It's a long time to night," she says later - and the rhymes suggest so much about their life in the fields. There's not much of a story, but there's glimpses of the girl's family at work throughout the day, until the final anti-climactic ending. "The bus come when it's almost dark.

"Us all be tired."

There's a gorgeous illustration of a cotton plant on the title page, and it's the pictures in the book that make the story more vivid.  The illustrations were done in acrylic paints on Stonehenge white paper, according to a note at the front of the book, and it's obvious that a lot of care went into them. Carole Byard has won the Coretta Scott King award for his children's book illustrations - twice.  And it's one of her pictures that provides the book with one of its few moments of joy. (In the orange glow of the setting sun, the father is surprised to find a blossom growing among the cotton plants...)

Williams wrote a second children's book - "Girls Together" in 1994 - which described a friendship between five young girls living in the poor part of a city.  According to its book jacket, Williams herself grew up in "the projects" in Fresno. (And according to Wikipedia, both of Williams' parents had died by the time she was 16.) But she's turned her family's stories into a source of material.  

Her original book of poems, which was 84 pages long, included many more perspectives on the life of the struggling family. (For example, there was a poem called "Say Hello to John," that describes the surprise end to the mother's pregnancy.)  Williams was just 31 when the book was published, but it was hailed as a promising start by a least one review on its back cover. "Here is a craftswoman of chiselled strength, of total honesty, an orchestrator...

"[S]he has the language and idiom command of Bessie Smith, a literate humane singer."

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.