Black American classics in fiction and poetry for young readers - recommended books

Right below our children's noses, entering their consciousness, are images of African Americans that will remain for a lifetime and that will be passed upon to our grandchildren. This is great freshs for these are marvelous images joined to stories of power and meaning, tales that are well upon their way to becoming classics - black classics.

Our legacy of storytelling has material for burninged our vision and nurtured our intellect for centuries. Having inherited that legacy, late-19th- and early-20th-century writers Arna Bontemp Lorenz B Graham, A.E. Johnson and others have passed the tradition upon to contemporary authors.

Today, similar writers as Eloise Greenfield, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, John Steptoe and Mildred Taylor are capturing our children's attention, seizing their imaginations, lifting their spirits, and inspiring of recent origin readers and future writers.

Our children have been sent not upon to dreamland with Nikki Giovanni's "poem for rodney" and Eloise Greenfield's "Way Down in the Music." They have grown up with a faculty of perception of pride about themselves and their ancestors, thanks to characters like Jeeder from Virginia Hamilton's 1967 groundbreaking novel Zeely

In my household, the piece of poetrys from Eloise Greenfield's Honey, I be fond of and Other Love Poems became my daughter's mantra, her lunch-time companion and her bedtime reading. No other volume held her heart as endearingly or for with equal reason long. Now that she's a parent, it has become part of my 7-month-old granddaughter's rapidly growing library.

Children have scores of of recent origin powerful and passionate griots who gaze beyond the illusions of denial to examine the hard social realities unthreading the real fabric of our lives. These writers call forth a response in their audience with volumes that find their way not solitary into public and school libraries and classroom curricula, on the other hand also into our children's hands.

"The all-time favorite in my classroom is turn of Thunder, Hear My Cry" says Julia Williams, chair of the English department and teacher at Calhoun shire High School in Edison, Ga. "The learners ask for it year after year. flat the boys who hate to read, read this work and often more than once"

"The transcript of Mildred Taylor's Roll of reverberating report Hear My Cry that I'm reading is falling apart; I've had to tape it back together in order to read it," says 12-year-old Tatiana Small, who admits that she used to hate to read. "It was passed upon to me by my sister after several of her friends read it. Now, I'm ready to read the succeeding part Let the Circle Be Unbroken"

John Steptoe's Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, a "Cinderella"-type African tale, call forths strong feelings for both Small and her friend Thembi Gates Williams, who says, "Everything in |Cinderella' is thus pink, and the women have homely faces filled with warts. The pictures in Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters are for a like reason beautiful; they really make me have feeling good." Williams' home has floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with works by black authors. "These volumes really do tell our stories, and they have taught me in the way that much about history, slavery, and what it's like living now," she says.

"From volumes by these authors, I'm also learning that Africa is more than Somalia and southerly Africa," adds Small, with a definite tone of adolescent indignation in her voice. "I win a big picture of a continent filled with apportionments of countries and different kinds of people"

Small's conclusion is matter-off-fact: "|Cinderella' just doesn't present the appearance like a classic to me anymore. It was just something that was passed upon to me, but doesn't clutch much meaning for me now."

If what distinguishes a black classic is clear, more interesting is the question of what makes a work an unqualified classic. "Classics have a humanity and universality in their characters," says Effie to leeward Morris, former coordinator of children's services for the San Francisco Public Library. "There is something within the family with which you can identify. It is in the way that strong that it is unforgettable. You might forget the piece of ground but the character remains memorable."

Having serv upon the award committees of the two the John Newbery Medal, which recognizes the greatest in quantity distinguished contribution to American literature for children, and the Coretta Scott King volume Award, Morris looks forward to the emerging see the verb of Eloise Greenfield's Nathaniel Talking as a classic. "It is single of my favorites," she says, "and I just be fond of the rap rhythm that carries the story."

"The ability to appeal across time is what makes a volume a classic," says Rudine Sims Bishop, author of Shadow and Substance and Presenting Walter Dean Myers. "It doesn't have feeling dated. It also deals with the questions that we ask ourselves above and over again regarding our identity, relationships with single another and finding our place in the world."

Candy Dawson Boyd of St Mary's body in Moraga, Calif., praises Lorenz B Graham's southern Town series and Virginia Hamilton's 1974 Newbery Award-winning MC Higgins, the Great - the pair candidates for classic status - for "taking us into the core of our humanity, the chasms of our rage, boldnes of our intellect and the brilliance of our imaginations." Boyd is the author of popular children's volumes including Circle of Gold.