Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977) by Mildred D. Taylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977)

by Mildred D. Taylor

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

  Ran out of Audiobooks in Alabama about one Audiobook in, so it is on to Mississippi and Louisiana, where the pickings are almost but not quite as slim. The rule with Audiobooks in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is no chick lit and no YA titles- everything else, including actual children's books, of which this is one.  This is a good children's book, written before kids were wimps and parents were insane.  Back in the 1970's an African American author could use the n word in a children's book and win Awards, nowadays some libraries won't even carry this title for the same reason.

  Roll of Thunder was a genuinely effective children's book, like something out of the nineteenth century and filled with the unmitigated terror of the "Night Riders" on a community of African Americans in rural Mississippi.  The protagonists is the youngest daughter of a rare family of African American property owners- with the land now in the second generation of the family.  That already makes Mississippi different than Alabama, where some of the book's detail how it was impossible for African American families to even rent, let alone own land in swathes of Alabama.   

  Many times as I listened to this Audiobook I thought about the horror movies of Jordan Peele and the idea that the African American experience in much of America is, in fact, a real-life horror film.  You look at the central family in this book: Property owning farmers, no bad habits and their very existence is an affront to their white neighbors.  These people are literally not allowed to live.  It is a deeply Unamerican environment and I think there is a strong argument that it simply is not.