Mildred Taylor's Story of Cassie Logan: A Search for Law and Justice in a Racist Society

Mildred Taylor's rich chronicle about an African American family in rural Mississippi during the years 1933-41 is narrated by the main character, Cassie Logan. The story she tells is not only about the adventures of her childhood and adolescence, not only about the deep bonds she has with her family, but also about the injustices a white, racist, and lawless society inflicts on the Logans and their neighbors. Although they are citizens in a nation that is framed by one of the most important legal documents in Western civilization, the Constitution of the United States, black Americans find themselves in Taylor's chronicle constituted in an unjust system of local laws and customs. It is not surprising, therefore, that as a child the intelligent and inquisitive Cassie is already quite aware of the binary injustice/justice. The first term of the binary is privileged in her life experience; it is the second, justice, that she yearns for.

The young reader of Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976), Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), and The Road to Memphis (1990) will most likely focus on the adventures and relationships of Cassie Logan in rural Mississippi during the Depression and the years leading up to America's entry into World War II. It becomes quite clear, however, that these years also reveal Cassie's ongoing education in and growing consciousness of the liberating power of just laws. Moreover, Taylor treats law and justice and their opposites in a manner that is quite sophisticated, even technical on occasion. We can even say that her three narratives are novels of education in the need for law and justice. Although Taylor's story offers the literary critic a full range of interpretive opportunities, I shall limit my discussion to the significance of the theme of law and justice in Cassie's development.

It is a theme that is unusual in children's literature. Most often the law, especially in fairy tales, is expressed through irrational or tyrannical rules imposed upon the hero by persons in authority. The hero's trial, then, consists often of impossible hardships and tasks to fulfill these rules. The mysteries of adult law and legal systems may also befuddle the child hero who, like Alice in Wonderland, finds herself or himself in an absurd world. We may well conclude that children's literature tends to depict law in a preconscious, even dreamlike sense. Taylor's chronicle, however, shows us characters who are conscious of the value of American law as a heritage of an age of reason. Although the titles Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Let the Circle Be Unbroken are prayerful imperatives that reflect the religious heritage of African Americans—the first asking for vertical divine intervention, the second for the continued connectedness on the horizontal level of human experience—the novels do not invoke or appeal to divine law, but place the responsibility for justice on laws made by humans.

The relationship between law and literature is profound. The patterns of tragic narratives usually are generated by the violation of a law that must be righted; the patterns of comic narration begin most often with an unjust and irrational law that the comic hero transforms or transcends through liberation. The topic of law and literature also received much critical attention beginning in the 1980s, perhaps because so many former literature majors became lawyers. Not only do law journals frequently publish essays on the relevance of literature and literary theory to the law, but book-length studies have been devoted to this topic. James Boyd White's Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (1985) and Richard Posner's Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (1988) are two such representative studies. White argues that "the law is an art of persuasion that creates the objects of its persuasion, for it constitutes both the community and the culture it commends" (35). Thus law is a text made by humans, a narrative whose writer is a maker...