A couple of years ago, a child in my class checked this book out and asked me to read it to the class. At the end of the day, I asked the child to bring me the book and I read it as a read aloud. Never have I had a book that prompted so much discussion.
The story follows a young African American child who misses the innocence of safety, love, and the friendliness of her father's powerful, life changing friends.
My favorite line of the book is, "our doors opened like our daddy's arms held us safe & loved".
What a change our world has gone through! I'm sure if you talk to your grandparents, great-grandparents they will tell you the same thing. They miss the way the world once was. There was no terror threats looming over our heads, there were no rising gas prices that were keeping people home, the world was a safer place.
Mood Indigo:
it hasn't always been this way
ellington was not a street
robeson no mere memory
du bois walked up my father's stairs
hummed some tune over me
sleeping in the company of men
who changed the world
it wasn't always like this
why ray barretto used to be a side-man
& dizzy's hair was not always grey
i remember i was there
i listened in the company of men
politics as necessary as collards
music even in our dreams
our house was filled with all kinda folks
our windows were not cement or steel
our doors opened like our daddy's arms
held us safe & loved
children growing in the company of men
old southern men & young slick ones
sonny til was not a boy
the clovers no -rag-tag orphans
our crooners/we belonged to a whole new world
nkruman was no foreginer
virgil akins was not the only fighter
it hasn't always been this way
ellington was not just a street
What does this story mean to you?
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