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
*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.
