Back a couple of months ago in the summer, I decided I wanted to read something that might help me understand better the Black Lives Matter movement. I didn't want to buy a book (bookshelf space in this household is at a premium) and I've apparently let my library card expire (I didn't know they did that). I decided to go to the books we already have, since I knew we had a copy of Christopher Paul Curtis' Newberry Honor novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963. Just the title alone promised a story - through a child's perspective - of the famous Civil Rights events in Birmingham, specifically the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
I finished the book last night (yes, it took a long time - for some reason, I haven't done much reading during the pandemic 😞).I have to say, I feel like this book is something of a bait-and-switch because it really didn't live up to what the title led me to believe would be in the story.
The story is about the Watson family who live in Flint, Michigan, told through the eyes and voice of Kenny, a fourth-grader. Kenny has a strong family with a father, mother, an older brother and younger sister. Kenny's main problems in life are that he's often the object of bullying because he has a "lazy" eye and is really good at reading. His older brother, Byron, sometimes saves Kenny from the bullying and sometimes instigates it.
Byron is a key character in this story. He's the reason the Watsons decide to go to Birmingham in the first place. His parents are concerned that Byron is falling into the wrong crowd and bad behavior, so they decide to take him to Birmingham to live for the summer with Mrs. Watson's mother, Grandma Sands.
All of that sounds like a good set-up for a story that puts the Watsons in Birmingham as outside observers to the growing tension that culminates in the bombing. But that's not what happens in this book. (Spoiler alerts!) Instead, the first 3/4 of the story is about life in Flint and Kenny's problems with Byron and a friend who steals his toy dinosaurs. We're well past the halfway point in the story when the Watsons decide to go to Birmingham, and then we get a couple of chapters devoted to describing getting ready for the trip (including getting an Ultra-Glide record player for the car) and the trip itself.
Even after the Watsons finally get to Birmingham, there's only one little throwaway line about the racial tension. Kenny overhears the adults talking about white people and their hatred for blacks. Instead, the story talks about Kenny's experience of being in the South for the first time and how hot it seems to him. There's a chapter in which Kenny nearly drowns and has to be rescued by Byron, who is suddenly an entirely different person than he was in Flint (which seemed really out of character).
It isn't until the last two chapters that the ideas I expected to be at the forefront of the story come into play. Kenny is sitting in the yard on a Sunday morning when he (and everyone else in the neighborhood) hears a loud boom. They all go running to the church, and there is some good description of what Kenny saw, swirling smoke and little details like scattered hymnals. There's nothing too graphic, since this is a book for kids, after all.
That's where I think the book fails to meet its promise. There's only one small detail that hints at the effects of the violence - Kenny sees a man bringing out a little girl, and the man looks like he "had been painting with red, red paint." As an adult, I understand Curtis is describing blood, and maybe a child would pick up on that, too. I don't know. I don't want any kid to be traumatized from reading the story, but I really do think they need to understand the seriousness of what happened. We learn hard lessons by facing hard, ugly truths.
This book is NOT about the civil unrest or the black community in Birmingham in 1963. It's not really about the church bombing. The bombing is just something that enters into Kenny's life and seems no more or less traumatic to him than nearly drowning a few days before. His only connection to the bombing is that he thinks his younger sister is there (and I think it's sort of a cop-out what Curtis uses to explain why she wasn't...). The final chapter has Kenny suffering some PTSD from the events, but it feels a little forced to me. Again, Byron rescues him.
What this story IS about is that relationship between Kenny and Byron, and that's a good story. If we retitled the book to be something like "Daddy Cool and Me" ("Daddy Cool" was Byron's preferred nickname), I wouldn't be writing this post complaining. But I feel it's a little misleading to include the references to Birmingham and 1963 in the title when they are only peripheral to the overall plot.
Curtis has a really good author's note at the end that does address the civil rights issues. I just wish he had written the story to focus more on those issues. That would have been a great service to the canon of childrens' literature.
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