Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor

Text and Context

To better understand Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, it is necessary to be aware of the novel’s historical and social context. The reader’s perception of time and place is shaped by varied narrative techniques that encourage empathy and sympathy for the key characters. This story of survival and human resilience can only be fully appreciated by an evaluation of the relationship between text and context. An overview of the contextual background has been provided along with additional research links and study guide materials.

“From my father I learned to respect the past, to respect my own heritage and myself.” M.D.Taylor

SlaveryThe first African slaves arrived in the North American colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Slavery was legalised there in 1661 and quickly spread throughout other colonies, especially in the South, during the 17th and 18th centuries. The cotton gin, a machine which successfully separated the cotton from seed and other impurities was invented in 1793. This led to a boom in cotton production and helped the growth of the textile industry in England. Output increased in Georgia and South Carolina, and the cotton belt spread West to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and eventually to Texas. Tobacco, rice and sugar were other major crops. Increasingly, the wealth of the plantation owners in the South came to depend on slavery, as did the prosperity of the slave traders in Bristol and Liverpool.

Although the slave trade was officially abolished in 1807, the trade continued illegally in the following fifty year period. The ban actually increased their value and the highly contentious issue of slavery became the catalyst for the American Civil war (1861-65).

By this time, approximately four million slaves worked on Southern plantations growing cotton, sugar, tobacco and rice. Union victory resulted in their emancipation but in many ways their enslavement continued throughout the Reconstruction years (1865-77) through to the Civil Rights movement that emerged nearly a century later.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/

http://rollofthunder.wikispaces.com/Civil+War+Ends+-+Reconstruction

Post Civil-War SegregationPost 1865, the conditions of ex-slaves seemed little changed. Large numbers had moved North in an

effort to escape the poverty and economic ruin that followed the defeat of the South. The war had destroyed much of the agricultural land and property and the brief ‘Reconstruction’ period brought little sustained improvement. In 1877, Federal troops were withdrawn and the rights of the newly freed slaves were not longer supported or protected. It has been estimated that between 1865 and 1896 alone over 10,000 black men and women were lynched. Constitutional changes had abolished slavery and given full citizenship and the right to vote to black men (not

women), but they were contravened by segregation laws known as ‘Jim Crow’ were passed in Southern states.

There was separate housing, schools, churches, eating and drinking places, as well as separate public transport, sporting facilities, hospitals, prisons and orphanages, and even morgues and cemeteries. The facilities for blacks were vastly inferior to those for whites and conditions in the main were almost as bad as they had been under slavery. They did the worst and lowest paid jobs and the majority became farm tenants and share-croppers; a system little different to old slave plantations. Instead of wages, croppers would work for a planter in return for a share of the cotton crop at harvest time. They would be given some acres of land which they would regard as theirs, and the planter would provide housing, food, clothes, seed, and the tools needed to work the land.

This sharecropping cycle made the croppers dependent on the planter, who provided everything on credit which meant a perpetual cycle of debt, especially if harvests were poor. By the early 1930’s, there were over 8.5 million people caught in the system, of whom a third were black. Working from dawn till dusk, they lived in wretched wooden cabins without sanitation, electricity or clean water. Disease was widespread and there were few medical facilities. Large families meant more hands to tend the fields.

The Depression BBC: Wall Street Crash and the Depression

A prolonged economic depression began in America in the 1920s, becoming widespread by 1931 with unemployment as high as 13 million. It was accompanied by a terrible drought which made dustbowls of a huge area, forcing farmers off their land. The South was hit particularly hard with the price of cotton falling dramatically. The introduction of a new cultivator which could do the work of eight people and eight mules heightened the economic downturn. People were evicted from their homes and forced to live in shanty dwellings.

FSA/OWI Photography: Migrant Mother Photographs from the American Memory collection that show what life was like in the 1930s.

PBS documentary Surviving the Dust Bowl .

President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ brought in a raft of programs aimed at helping the worst hit. Relief in the form of food, money, clothing and work projects were introduced. New Deal Network

This comprehensive site has lots of information and images about life in the 1930s.

Blacks were usually the last to receive relief and the first to be cut off. Poverty was so widespread, that in desperation, whites and blacks actually joined together to form trade unions in an effort to get fairer wages and conditions. The landlords and race-hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan used brutal violence to break up the unions and terrorise their members. In 1936 one union organiser wrote: “While violence of one type or another has been continually poured upon the membership of the Union...it was in March 1935 that a ‘reign of terror’ ripped into the country like a hurricane. For two-and-a-months, violence raged through north-eastern Arkansas and in neighbouring states...Meetings were banned and broken up; members were falsely accused, arrested and jailed, convicted on trumped up charges and thrown into prison; relief was shut off; union members were evicted from the land by the hundreds’ homes were riddled with bullets from machine guns’[ churches were burned and school-houses stuffed with hay and floors removed; highways were patrolled night and day by armed vigilantes looking for the leaders; organisers were beaten, mobbed and murdered until the entire country was terrorized.”

The AuthorMildred Taylor dedicated her novel to her father, ‘To the memory of my beloved father who lived many adventures of the boy Stacey and who was in essence the man David.’

She was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1943. Taylor grew up in a household that told stories about her proud and dignified black ancestors, but she heard a very different version of history at school. She believe school history texts diminished the contributions of blacks and glossed over their poor treatment in history, so she wrote her stories in order to give a truer version of black families and their struggles. Even though the Logan’s, the family about which she mainly writes, did not exist, many of her books do come from true stories about her family. Taylor wanted to use her novels to emphasize the importance of black families who struggled before the Civil Rights Movement was even heard of. These families set the stage for people

like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., who would follow two decades later.

Taylor, herself, was born in the south, but her father moved her family to the north in the mid-1940’s because “he refused to allow her older sister Wilma and her to live as he has to live his, in a segregated, racist society that allowed no or little opportunity to blacks. Even though racism, then, as now was everywhere, at least the family would have better chances at jobs in the north. They made an annual visit to the south though, to visit their families. Taylor soon realized that she was expected to act-and was treated- differently in the south merely because of the colour of her skin. Taylor’s father thought it very important that she and her sister be aware of racial injustices, particularly prevalent in the south. Despite the discrimination in the south, Taylor looked forward to the annual trips. She remembered learning more about her family there, about the community, and the oral tradition of passing down stories of her ancestors.

In an interview, she explained her motivations in writing “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”.

“For as far back as I can remember my father taught me a history different from the one I learned in school. By the fireside in our Ohio home and in Mississippi, where I was born and where my father’s family had lived since the days of slavery, I had heard about our past. It was not an organized history beginning in a certain year, but one told through stories-stories about great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and others that stretched back through the years of slavery and beyond. It was a history of ordinary people, some brave, some not so brave, but basically people who had done nothing more spectacular than survive in a society designed for their destruction. Some of the stories my father had learned from his parents and grandparents as they had learned them from theirs; others he told first-hand, having been involved in the incidents himself. There was often humour in his stories, sometimes pathos, and frequently tragedy; but always the people were graced with a simple dignity that elevated them from the ordinary to the heroic.”

In “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry”, I wanted to show a different kind of Black world from the one so often seen. I wanted to show a family united in love and self-respect, and parents, strong and sensitive, attempting to guide their children successfully, without harming their spitits, through the hazardous maze of living in a discriminatory society.

I also wanted to show the Black person as heroic. School lessons had offered an indictment of slavery but also an indictment of the people who were enslaved-a peple who, according to the texts, were docile and childlike, accepting their fate without once attempting to free themselves. As the only Black child in an otherwise all-white class during my upper grade school years, I was acutely aware that that history did not measure up...I recognized that there was a terrible contradiction between what was in them and what I had learned at home.”

Textual ReferenceScholastic: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Roll_Of_Thunder/Roll_Of_Thunder_Hear_My_Cry01.html

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/civil-rights/

http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/thunder/

http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00001567.shtml

Watch unitedstreaming.com video in clips, called: Civil Rights: The Long Road to Recovery.