BOUNTIFUL RED ACRES by Eileen Heyes: A Review, Author Interview and Giveaway

 It is my pleasure to introduce Bountiful Red Acres by my North Carolina friend, Eileen Heyes. Written for third-eighth graders, it details a year in the life of two families one Black and one White in Surry County, as they move from season to season in 1900. The book is beautifully illustrated by Dare Coulter and is a welcome North Carolina resource published in 2023. All illustrations are used with permission of the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

This is the story of an ordinary year in the lives of two ordinary families, raising crops, rearing children, building community. (p.5)

INTRODUCTIONS

The book opens with touching introductions by descendants of both the Sawyers and Hauser families. Mary Hauser and Janie Hauser Morgan wrote: "Reading about the Sawyerses and Hausers as neighbors and community members brings beautiful new texture to the lives we imagined when we visited Shoals and depth to our understanding of North Carolina's Piedmont...lives are both deeply intertwined yet separate, bound by the rhythms of the same seasons, and also made starkly different by the legacy of slavery." 

Jerry Ward, a Sawyers descendant wrote, "I am excited and thankful that my family lived their lives so that, even after the passing of more than a century, they and the Hauser family are still touching lives today."

Eileen writes in her prologue, "What's so special about this community, Shoals Township? Well, nothing. "And that's the point. All across the Piedmont at the turn of the twentieth century, many rural communities were a lot like Shoals."

Each season includes information about the annual activities that comprise normal life. The book shows how Blacks and whites lived

separately and yet their lives were intertwined in work and play. Each season has a sidebar with details about daily life that might be unfamiliar to students. 

REVIEW

Winter

In the cold months of winter,...rural families work as hard as ever. 

A squirrel hunting party sets off on January 1, 1900.

Today's young readers might be aware of hunting, preserving food, chopping wood, or quilting, 

Neighbors quilting together.

but I wonder how many have thought about a different chore--harvesting ice. Along with other neighbors, Adam Sawyers and his sons helped hack and haul six feet square blocks of ice to the Hauser's icehouse. Everyone who worked received a share of the ice when they needed it during the hot summer. 

The sidebar for Winter describes how ice was made from the dammed creek and stored in a cellar-like hole that is lined with straw and insulated with sawdust.

SPRING

The windows were opened wide to let in fresh air and the school year was over. Children were free to help on the farm--indoors and out. They were needed to help with spring cleaning, cooking, and harrowing and planting fields. 

Although this was a hopeful time of year with flowers budding, it also brought sadness to the Sawyers family. Annually on Good Friday, Mr. Sawyers took his son Preston to the Hauser family graveyard to tend to the graves of his four baby sons. Along the way, Mr. Sawyers explained that the township didn't have an African-American graveyard. So, they turned to their friends, the Hausers who made room for his sons.

Mr. Sawyers at the cemetery.

The sidebar for Spring discusses segregation and some of the economic effects on Blacks.

Summer

Fruits were ripe and plentiful on both the Sawyers' and Hauser's farms. Plums, apples, and blackberries were picked, dried, and preserved for the cooler months.  Children helped with the weeding, cutting lumber, picking off tobacco worms, and feeding the livestock. It took a lot of work to keep hungry families fed and functioning.

The sidebar for Summer is about the once-every-decade census. Nathanael Boydon visited all the families in Shoals and often stayed for dinner. When he didn't get around to visit every family, he filled in the forms anyway. No one bothered to correct him. 

FALL

 

Harvesting honey was a huge task that involved lots of time and several pairs of hands. Even the drained beeswax was used and made into candles. The Shoals farm families were busy harvesting, canning, and making just about everything from apples that you can imagine. Nothing went to waste. Even the corn husks were put to use--as dolls or in the privy or stuffed into bed ticks.

The children returned to school in November. The African-American children went to a one-room schoolhouse where Dalton Sawyers taught 21 children in all six grades. Since the White school burned down a year earlier, they were schooled in groups in private homes.

The sidebar from Fall talks about common modes of transportation. Although Thomas Hauser owned a surrey, most folks got around by walking. 

The book ends with a return to winter and an epilogue in which the author shares how the two farms eventually became the Horne Creek Living Historical Farm. Admission is free--so buckle up the kids and experience life on a working farm in 1900.

INTERVIEW

CAROL: How did you end up writing this book?  Did you approach the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources with the idea or did they come to you? Did they set the parameters of the book? 

EILEEN: The book that became Bountiful Red Acres had a kind of complicated, twisty history. I'll spare you several years of backstory on that. I was hired to write the story on recommendation from my dear friend, author-illustrator Anne Runyon. By that time the folks at DNCR had decided what they wanted was a book about the Sawyers and Hauser families, who lived on what is now a State Historic Site called Horne Creek Living Historical Farm. It's a beautiful site, in Surry County, south of Pilot Mountain State Park. 

The only parameters my editors gave me were that my story should have a narrative structure and a child's point of view. Then, in consultation with the site manager at the farm, Lisa Turney, I settled on telling the story of the year 1900 from the POVs of 10-year-old Preston Sawyers and 12-year-old Robert Hauser -- perfect ages for a book aimed at 4th-grade readers.

 

CAROL: Since its publication, have you heard if teachers are using it in classrooms? Perhaps as part of NC studies?

EILEEN: I know of at least one teacher who plans on using it in her classroom at Durham's R.N. Harris Elementary. Also, Rodney Dawson, an Education and interpretation Specialist with the N.C. African American Heritage Commission has been promoting my book as a resource for teachers. And I've been delighted to see the Sawyers and Hauser descendants embracing my book. One Hauser descendant bought copies to donate to all the schools in Surry County, plus more to distribute among his family members.

What I hope students and teachers will get out of this book is a glimpse of the "missing middle" in our history. When we study history, we tend to focus on heroes and achievers, or we study conflicts and victims. But we give a lot less attention to ordinary people and how they lived, how they kept moving through every day, year after year and kept the world turning. This is who the Sawyerses and Hausers were -- a Black family and a white family who had adjacent farms in a time when law and custom kept Blacks and whites apart in many aspects of life. Here in their ordinary farming community of Shoals, the Sawyerses and Hausers were friends. Despite the pervasive racial and economic inequalities, these two families farmed successfully, they made sure their children got an education, they lived with dignity and they just plain carried on.

CAROL: Please speak about the research process. What was fun and joyful, what was difficult (and maybe?) depressing or discouraging?  How long did you research before you started writing?

EILEEN: Research for this project was easier than for most nonfiction because most of what I needed was in the files at Horne Creek Farm. Back in the 1980s and '90s, when the farm was being prepared as a State Historic Site, other researchers had searched out the histories of the community, the property, and the two families. Site Manager Lisa Turney was my guide through those existing resources. Another really helpful source was a newspaper called The Progressive Farmer out of Winston, N.C., which is digitized in the Library of Congress's "Chronicling America" collection. Great online resource for anyone wanting to re-create American history!

The research, outlining, drafting, and writing unfolded over several years, for a variety of reasons. It was an unusually leisurely project.

The most fun part for me was visiting the farm, which of course I had to do in each season to portray the changing sights, sounds, and fragrances of the farm in the course of a year. Spending time on site helped me sort through the mountain of information and pick out the details I wanted to use, the specific facts that would bring the story to life for young readers. I set out to hit a target length of 4,000-6,000 words but ended up at more like 7,600 words because there were just so darn many interesting details to include -- and my editors agreed, it all needed to be there. 

I'd also like to say, I love the way artist Dare Coulter brought her own insights to the story. As you know, an author has no input on how a book is illustrated. I had seen Dare's work and was thrilled to learn that she would be on the project. Sure enough, her art added a whole different dimension to the story. And big credit to Sheilah Barrett Carroll, the book's designer and editor, who pulled everything together into a cohesive whole. I am grateful for the privilege of working with both of these talented women!

GIVEAWAY

If you're interested in winning this unique book, please leave me a comment by August 29. If you prefer, you can always email me. If you are new to my blog or are from North Carolina, I'll put your name in twice; just let me know in the comments. 

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Congratulations to Gail Hurlburt who won The Pie That Molly Grew and to JoLynn Worden and Kathy Dykstra who won copies of Disconnected.

Don't forget to check out other great MG books on Greg Pattridge's Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday blog.

EVICTED! The Struggle for the Right to Vote: A Middle Grade Picture Book Review, A Giveaway, PLUS MORE!

Every once in a while you read a book and feel the passion that the author brings to the topic. That is the way EVICTED! (Calkins Creek, 2022) struck me. This upper-level narrative nonfiction will be a welcome addition to classrooms when studying African American history and civil rights.  I have featured both the author, Alice Faye Duncan, and the illustrator, Charly Palmer, in previous posts. Click here for a review of Alice Faye's book, A Song for Gwendolyn Brooks, and click here for Charly's illustrations in The Teachers March!

REVIEW

EVICTED! opens with a not-to-be-missed page of Acknowledgments. Ms. Duncan writes, "In 2006, Ernest Withers gifted me a photography book about the Tent City Movement. His images demanded that I write about this history for young people."

Here is one of the pictures from that album:

Now you know exactly why Ms. Duncan interviewed farmers and activists in order to bring this story to life. 

EVICTED! is bookended by the life of James Junior Jamerson.  The narrative begins with Prologue to Freedom. "This is the story of a battle, a boy, and his broken-hearted blues." Following this introduction, the reader meets the people who were important in the story of Tent City. Charly Palmer's illustrations begin the story. 

Each page is a different vignette telling what led up to the creation of Tent City and what happened afterward. Here are some highlights from those events.

• In 1959 there were no black jurors to serve in the trial of a Black man wrongfully accused of murder. Farmer John McFerren realized that justice was in the ballot box--and Blacks needed to register to vote. 
• After Harpman Jameson came home from serving in WWII and wasn't allowed to vote he said, "'A man and woman don't have no country if they don't have no vote.""
• In 1959 "Entire families were forced out their homes when Black parents registered to vote in Fayette County."
• In 1960 Mary and Earlie B. Williams were the first family to move into a tent on Papa Towles' land. As more Blacks registered to vote, more were evicted from their homes. "Tent City" was named by TV broadcasters and national newspapers.

"Their hiding place was a cross of unmerited suffering."

https://www.memphis.edu/tentcity/moving-shacks-tents.php

• In 1962 after John Doar of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit to block white landowners from evicting Black sharecroppers, the landowners finally agreed to stop evictions. 
• In 1964 Black voters cast their ballots while white locals stuffed the ballot boxes with illegal votes. In spite of that, the work for equality pushed forward. 
• In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. "Black Americans voted in record numbers and won political seats."

James Junior is a grandfather now. "He says the past is the present, and it is urgent they [his grandchildren] understand, 'Every life is a battlefield and freedom is a golden prize.'"

The Epilogue concludes with, 

Despite his young age, James Junior served the freedom struggle with conquering faith and courage. He accepted the charge to rise and change history for good.  

Today--it is your turn.

                    Now is your time. 

Back matter includes photographs, a detailed timeline, resource guide, and bibliography. 

Viola McFerren talks about sharecropping and living in Tent City. 

ON A PERSONAL NOTE

I am drawn to this book for many reasons. When I set out to write Half-Truths I wanted to write a book that explored what led up to the civil rights period in my "own backyard"--Charlotte, NC. (Early on Harold Underdown pointed out that this was only the historical setting of my novel--not the book itself. That is another story.) In a graphic manner, EVICTED! uncovers an important part of what led up to the civil rights movement in Alice Faye's own "backyard." As a writer, I'm drawn to narrative nonfiction and enjoy learning how other authors master this genre. 

MINI-AUTHOR INTERVIEW

CAROL: Since you grew up in Memphis not far from Fayette County, were you aware of Tent City as a child or teenager?    

 

ALICE FAYE: Nope.  Not at all. Ironically, I visited Fayette County often as a child because my Great Uncle Buck and Great Aunt Boots lived in the community. They were former sharecroppers and both were dead by 1979 when I was in middle school. So, Tent City was not a discussion that I ever had with them. I was not astute enough at that time to broach such a conversation. I regret that today. Wisdom comes slowly. 

 

CAROL: How did you decide on the written format of narrative plus free verse poetry? 

 

ALICE FAYE: For children, I think that tragic and painful histories are shared best in the form of poetry and music. Poetry like blues music is optimism in the face of adversity. 

 

CAROL: Was that combination your vision from the beginning? 

 

ALICE FAYE: The combination of poetry with prose was my vision. It is a form that I originated for myself in 2018 when I wrote MEMPHIS, MARTIN AND THE MOUNTAINTOP.  I will use this form again in my new book, CORETTA'S JOURNEY--THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CORETTA SCOTT KING (Calkins Creek/ September 2023). 

GIVEAWAY

Alice Faye is the author expert in the fall issue of Talking Story on Voting Rights. She also provided a classroom activity. Leave one comment here and you'll be entered once to win EVICTED! Leave a second comment through the newsletter and you'll be entered a second time. To subscribe to the newsletter, click here. Educators and librarians automatically have their name entered twice. PLEASE LEAVE YOUR NAME AND EMAIL ADDRESS IF YOU ARE NEW TO MY BLOG. If you prefer, you can email me. Giveaway ends October 8. U.S. addresses only. 

Congratulations to Terri Michels who won the four-book set of Jalen's Big City Life.

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Click on over to Greg Pattridge's awesome Always in the Middle blog post on Monday for a new list of great MG books.