Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship and Freedom

Tingle, Tim, and Jeanne Rorex Bridges. Crossing Bok Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship & Freedom. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos, 2006. Print.

When Martha Tom crosses the forbidden river, she happens to come upon a forbidden church in the woods as she picked berries for her mother. When Little Mo is told to take her back to the river, he hesitates worried he will be caught by the slave owner and will be punished. After arriving to the river, Martha Tom shows Little Mo how to cross. Every week Martha Tom crossed the river, until crisis hits Little Mo’s family and they have to make a decision to cross the river forever or not.

Illustrator Bridges provides the reader simplistic shades of browns, deep reds, blacks and whites. The illustrations represent the culture through the clothing of slavery and the Indians, the architecture displays the shacks teh slaves took shelter in, as well as the master’s plantation home. The lines of the characters features, clothing, and landscape are thin, while bold lines convey the characters hair. The skin color between the character varies between the African Americans and the Indians, from soft caramel browns to deeper chocolate, both displaying deep black hair of either curls or straight and wavy.

Tingle provides the reader a story of suspense and hope as Martha Tom goes beyond the boundaries of her tribe, while Little Mo leaves the plantation with the worry of being caught. Tingle displays a forever lasting friendship and demonstrates how helping others can lead to freedom to a better life of survival. He provides the reader with a sense of history and the dangers slaves faced when families were separated, sold, forces to leave and forbidden to meet for worship.  

Reviews 

Booklist

*Starred Review* Gr. 2-4. In a picture book that highlights rarely discussed intersections between Native Americans in the South and African Americans in bondage, a noted Choctaw storyteller and Cherokee artist join forces with stirring results. Set "in the days before the War Between the States, in the days before the Trail of Tears," and told in the lulling rhythms of oral history, the tale opens with a Mississippi Choctaw girl who strays across the Bok Chitto River into the world of Southern plantations, where she befriends a slave boy and his family. When trouble comes, the desperate runaways flee to freedom, helped by their own fierce desire (which renders them invisible to their pursuers) and by the Choctaws' secret route across the river. In her first paintings for a picture book, Bridges conveys the humanity and resilience of both peoples in forceful acrylics, frequently centering on dignified figures standing erect before moody landscapes. Sophisticated endnotes about Choctaw history and storytelling traditions don't clarify whether Tingle's tale is original or retold, but this oversight won't affect the story's powerful impact on young readers, especially when presented alongside existing slave-escape fantasies such as Virginia Hamiltons's The People Could Fly (2004) and Julius Lester's The Old African (2005). Jennifer Mattson

School Library Journal

Grade 2-6–Dramatic, quiet, and warming, this is a story of friendship across cultures in 1800s Mississippi. While searching for blackberries, Martha Tom, a young Choctaw, breaks her village's rules against crossing the Bok Chitto. She meets and becomes friends with the slaves on the plantation on the other side of the river, and later helps a family escape across it to freedom when they hear that the mother is to be sold. Tingle is a performing storyteller, and his text has the rhythm and grace of that oral tradition. It will be easily and effectively read aloud. The paintings are dark and solemn, and the artist has done a wonderful job of depicting all of the characters as individuals, with many of them looking out of the page right at readers. The layout is well designed for groups as the images are large and easily seen from a distance. There is a note on modern Choctaw culture, and one on the development of this particular work. This is a lovely story, beautifully illustrated, though the ending requires a somewhat large leap of the imagination.–Cris Riedel, Ellis B. Hyde Elementary School, Dansville, NY

Teachers can use this book to discuss traditions, folklore, and different cultures. Younger students can compare and contrast the characters and ways of life from each side of the river using a Venn diagram. They can practice identifying problem and solution within a story.

I did enjoy this book, especially the suspense behind Little Mo and his family escaping to the river. I liked how the colors and the illustrations were simplistic, but bold in a sense that it embraced the time period of the story. The landscape was detailed and very ideal of what it would look like. The story presented a era in history that students will study, but not really read stories about. This would be a great introduction or ending to a unit. Students could take what they learned from the unit on slavery and create their own story that uses the same themes as this story.