M. C. Higgins, the Great (review)

This prize-winning book by the author of The Planet of Junior Brown is a composite of rich interwoven themes, strengthened by vivid characterization and a deep sense of place.

M. C. Higgins is a thirteen-year-old boy who lives with his family on the slope of a mountain near the Ohio River. The mountain is called Sarah's Mountain after M. C's great-grandmother, who escaped from slavery and came to settle there. His family loves the mountain, but now their home is endangered by a sliding heap of subsoil abandoned by strip miners on the mountain top. M. C. has nightmares about this danger, but his father will not face it because nothing would cause him to leave the burial place of his ancestors.

Much of the story revolves around M. C's emotional tension as his love for the mountain conflicts with his belief that the family must leave its home. Further, his friendship with Ben Killburn is thwarted by his family's superstitious dread of the Killburns, whom they consider "witchy." In the end M. C. saves his home by building a wall to stem the onslaught of the threatening "spoil heap." The wall is made of dirt, reinforced by rusty fenders and other car parts and, finally, by the very burial stones of his ancestors, with their markings still visible. And it is an itinerant young girl who helps him to see the folly of the local superstitions and gives him a larger vision of the world. She tells him to "find out what there's to see. What there's to know, just to be knowing."

There is magic in this book. Virginia Hamilton's style is mesmerizing, a combination of such poetic expressions as the description of a sunrise as "a brilliant gash ripped across the summit of Hall Mountain" and of such quaint mountain expressions as the remark Banina, M. C's lovely mother, makes about the mountain. She says it "must be what Sunday people call God Almighty. . . . High enough for heaven and older than anybody ever lived."

The symbols this author uses are also unique. M. C's forty-foot steel pole, his prize for swimming the Ohio River (the feat which he thinks gives him the right to the title "M. C. Higgins, the Great"), is unusual and significant, but its purpose is not quite clear. When M. C. climbs the pole and makes it move in "a slow, sweeping arc," he seems to have visionary glimpses of the past: "As if past were present. . . . He sensed Sarah moving through undergrowth up the mountainside. . . . As if he were a ghost, waiting, and she, the living." Again, the pole seems to be the pivot around which the whole story turns. Banina calls it "the marker for all of the dead," and, indeed, the bones of the ancestors are actually buried around the pole. Finally, it is the gravestones themselves, encased in the wall, that seem to be the cement that connects the living present to the past.

It is impossible to do justice to this many-faceted book. The beauty of the writing, the poetic imagery, the characters, each unique yet completely believable, and the original themes all make the reading of this book an unforgettable experience, and mark Virginia Hamilton as one of the most important of today's writers for children.