Did you ever wish you could go back in history just to see how people looked, and talked, and dressed, what they ate, etc? This book is the next best thing to a time machine; it provides the reader with a first-class ticket to observe the community of Buxton, Ontario in the 1850s. Buxton was (and is) a real town that was founded by and for newly-freed slaves, most of whom escaped from their American slave owners. (The photo to the left is of a replica of the Freedom Bell, which was rung each time a newly escaped slave experienced their first day of freedom by seeking refuge in Buxton.)
The people of the community come alive through the eyes and voice of Elijah, who has the honor of being the first child born into freedom. (He also holds a more dubious and disgusting honor of "anointing" famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass after he jiggled baby Elijah a little too emphatically after a feeding.) Elijah has been pegged as being a "fragile" boy - one whose tears and fears are always a little too close to the surface. As Elijah faces the challenges of adolescence, we get a fascinating, a very funny, glimpse into what it must have been like to grow up in a warm, supportive, rural community.
Curtis enhances Elijah's voice with plenty of humor (my favorite story involved Elijah's overwhelming fear of snakes), but the humor stops and real drama begins as Elijah travels to the American side of the river in order to attempt to retrieve stolen money that was to be used to buy a community member's still-enslaved family. Elijah's exploration of a seemingly-abandoned barn - and what he finds inside it - is both heart-stopping and heart-rending.
Read the novel "Elijah of Buxton" for the humor, the drama, and also for a fascinating glimpse into a group of people in the process of overcoming the physical and mental barriers to freedom.
Rated FIVE out of FIVE stars.
Did you ever hear the allegory about a bunch of rats trying to escape from the bottom of a barrel? Instead of working together to solve their problem, like banding together to form a pyramid, they would all just keep pulling down any rat that tried to climb out of the barrel. Communities of us humans can act in much the same way - somehow punishing (bullying, making fun of, excluding) anyone who tries to rise above the group in some way. Junior Spirit feels the heavy weight of his community as he starts his freshman year in high school on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Junior is fully aware of the problems common on the reservation and in his family - rampant alcoholism, crushing poverty, and the lack of hope for a better life. Junior's spirit rises above the rest, however, when he eagerly opens his geometry book on the first day of school and sees that it is the same one used by his mother when she attended the class thirty years ago! Disgusted and angry by the lack of opportunities on the rez, he determines to attend the better white school despite the fact that he has no reliable transportation to travel the twenty-three miles it takes to get there. Complicating his plans is the fact that the reservation community now considers him a traitor for choosing to live in the white world. Will Junior survive the many strikes against him to "climb out of the barrel?"
