Today, it is my pleasure to present the 2011 Coretta Scott King Author Award winner. In addition, it also received a Newbery Honor this year, and I actually have to agree that it deserved the double recognition. The book is recommended for grades 4 through 7. I will go farther and say that is definitely a book for girls. The heroine is 11-year-old Delphine and she is followed by younger sisters Vonetta, 9, and Fern, 7. The setting is the summer of 1968, Oakland, California. The sisters get their first opportunity to see Black Panther rallies up close. Previously, they were only exposed to the protests via the news and tempered with their grandmother’s own beliefs.
Delphine’s last memory of her mother, Cecile was when she was four. Cecile nursed baby Fern, placed her in her crib and walked out on them. Big Ma, their father’s mother, moved up to New York from Alabama to take care of the girls. And everything they know about their mother, including why she left them all, is colored by Big Ma’s dislike of Cecile. Why did Cecile leave? Because the girls’ father wouldn’t let her name the new baby.
Seven years later, the sisters are on a plane to Oakland to visit their mother for 28 long days. It is against Big Ma’s best judgment. She doesn’t believe Cecile deserves the chance to see the children she left behind. But their father stands firm that the girls should know who their mother is.
Delphine is given money for special adventures like trips to Disney Land, San Francisco, and Hollywood. She is also given special instructions. She is to take good care of her younger sisters. As the eldest, she is responsible for them and she has been taught well. And they are to represent the Negro race in the best manner possible. Don’t bring shame upon Negros by bringing too much negative attention to them. Not an easy thing when they represent nearly half of the Negros on the plane and are young siblings besides.
What the girls find in Oakland is NOT a mother, but that doesn’t really surprise Delphine. Cecile is more of a secret agent in disguise. She wears men’s trousers, enormous sunglasses, a scarf and a hat on an untamed afro. The woman doesn’t even own a hot comb! And her friends are Black Panthers who call her Sister Nzila.
Cecile’s wish is for the girls to stay out of her way, out of her business, and out of her kitchen. She prefers the girls to get their breakfast at the summer camp run by the Black Panthers, stay for the activities, play in the park until dark, and buy their dinner at Mean Lady Ming’s Chinese Takeout around the corner. EVERYDAY for 28 days.
And so begins the girls’ education in the rhetoric of the Black Panthers. “Power to the People” and “We are citizens, and we demand respect.” And it is opposite to the way they have been raised by Big Ma.
How is Delphine supposed to take good care of her siblings under these conditions? She cannot even cook them a decent home-cooked meal without access to the forbidden kitchen.
It is not necessary that I cry for a book to be considered good in my opinion. But I did cry. And it is the reason that I cried that made this a remarkable book for me. I became Delphine so easily. The author made it possible for me to identify with a young, motherless, black girl. Delphine wants what so many of us want – recognition, respect, affirmation. And Delphine went above and beyond the call of duty. She held so much more responsibility than I ever had to as a child.
She didn’t get all of the answers to her questions, but she received some and from the source. It was refreshing enough that I could cry. Not a lot, but just enough.
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