In segregated 1950s Nashville, a young African American girl braves a series of indignities and obstacles to get to one of the few integrated places in town: the public library.
Master storyteller Patricia C. McKissack transports us to the front porch--a place where lightning bugs flash, lemonade is poured, and tales about slickster-tricksters are an every-night treat for the whole family to enjoy.
Eleven-year-old Nellie Lee Love records in her diary the events of 1919, when her family moves from Tennessee to Chicago, hoping to leave the racism and hatred of the South behind.
In 1859 twelve-year-old Clotee, a house slave who must conceal the fact that she can read and write, records in her diary her experiences and her struggle to decide whether to escape to freedom.
After barn mice make a collar with a bell to warn them when Marmalade the cat is approaching, Smart Mouse must devise a way to safely put the collar on her in this retelling of a Aesop fable.
After her mother catches her in an untruth, Libby Sullivan promises never to lie again, but soon she must learn that it is not always kind to blurt out the whole truth either.
The daughter of a free Black man who worked as a blacksmith in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1800s recalls the stories from the Bible that her father shared with her, relating them to the experiences of African Americans.
A wily fox, notorious for stealing eggs, meets his match when he encounters a bold little girl in the woods who insists upon proof that he is a fox before she will be frightened.
A collection of ghost stories with African American themes, designed to be told during the Dark Thirty--the half hour before sunset--when ghosts seem all too believable.
Bessey and her mother bake cookies for Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah, and after cleaning up the kitchen, they distribute the treats to their neighbors.
A boy learns that the truth is often stretched on the Bayou Clapateaux, and gets the chance to tell his own version of a bayou tale when he goes fishing.