A Wreath for Emmett Till–by Marilyn Nelson

Nelson, Marilyn.  A Wreath for Emmett Till. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.

Emmett Till was only fourteen in 1955, a friendly kid from Chicago on a trip down south to meet his relatives.  He was probably like you in many ways.  You may even have committed his crime yourself: whistling at a pretty girl.  But where you might have gotten a cross look or a joking slap for your trouble, Emmett became the victim of one of the most notorious lynchings in American history.

“Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood,
my heartwood has been scarred for fifty years
by what I heard, with hundreds of green ears.
That jackal laughter.  Two hundred years I stood
listening to small struggles to find food,
to the songs of creature life, which disappears
and comes again, to the music of the spheres.
Two hundred years of deaths I understood.
Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
shivering the deep silence of the stars.
A running boy, five men in close pursuit.
One dark, five pale faces in the moonlight.
Noise, silence, back-slaps.  One match, five cigars.
Emmett Till’s name still catches in the throat.”

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy–by Gary D. Schmidt

Schmidt, Gary D.  Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.  New York: Clarion Books, 2004.

“Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for fifteen minutes shy of six hours.  He had dipped his hand in its waves and licked the salt from his fingers.  He had smelled the sharp resin of the pines.  He had heard the low rhythm of the bells on the buoys that balanced on the ridges of the sea.  He had seen the fine clapboard parsonage beside the church where he was to live, and the small house set a ways beyond it that puzzled him some.  Turner Buckminster had lived in Phippsburg, Maine, for almost six whole hours.  He didn’t know how much longer he could stand it.” (p. 1)

In some places, being the son of a minister is no big deal.  Phippsburg, Maine, is not one of them.  Everybody is constantly scrutinizing Turner to see if he is upright enough, moral enough, brave enough, polite enough, and even whether his shirt is starched-white enough.  So far, he is a miserable failure.

And things only get worse after those first six hours.  Within two days of his arrival in Phippsburg, he has become the laughingstock of the whole town for his failure at playing baseball, been teased mercilessly as a coward for not jumping off a huge cliff into the ocean, and gotten caught skipping rocks across water that just happened to bump into somebody’s old fence.  Before he can blink, he is sentenced to spend his summer reading and playing organ for a repulsive old woman who yells at him, helps spread the rumors about him, looks and smells funny, and is absolutely obsessed with her own death and making sure her last words will be written down.  He’d just as soon die.

But then he meets Lizzie, an island girl who can row a boat, play baseball like nothing else, dig clams, and speak to whales.  And that changes everything forever.