White Water (review)

In a story based on the author’s experiences, a young boy in the Jim Crow South joins his grandma on a trip into town on a hot summer day. Disappointed by the warm and dirty water at the “Colored” fountain, Michael decides that the water at the “Whites Only” fountain must be “pure and icy cold, like mountain water,” and he’s seized with the desire to experience this wonderful forbidden drink. To achieve his goal, he fakes sick one day and takes the trip into town by himself to make a lightning-fast slurp attack on the Whites Only fountain—whereupon he discovers that the water there is just as nasty as at the other fountain and that it’s the same pipe bringing water to both. Bandy and Stein effectively portray the milieu with simple details, conveying the daily reality of segregation—where you can wave to the white boy at the front of the bus but not sit with him—in a way that matter-of-factly brings home both its irrationality and its absurd complexity. Though the ending’s grand expansion is a little sudden (“And from that day on, I wouldn’t let anything stand in my way”), it’s believable that such an event could be a turning point in understanding the value of questioning limits. While the people are sometimes awkwardly posed, watercolor and gouache illustrations touched with ink lines capably capture the bleaching heat of a small-town summer and the flowered dresses and blunt-nosed buses of the era; line drawings overlaid against the reality depict Michael’s imagined images, sometimes a little confusingly, sometimes to dramatic effect. This will be an accessible and personal way to open discussion about some recent history that contemporary kids often find hard to imagine.