Leaving Gee's Bend (review)
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Life in 1932 rural Alabama is no picnic for African-American sharecroppers, such as the family of ten-year-old Ludelphia Bennett, who are trying to scrape by on their tiny farm in Gee's Bend. Ludelphia doesn't seem to mind her meager surroundings as long as she can sew quilts with her mother, but when Mama falls ill with pneumonia, Ludelphia leaves the only place she has ever known to retrieve lifesaving medicine from a town nearly forty miles away, confronting prejudice and superstition along the way. Based on real people and events, the story rings true with its quiet sense of place, and Ludelphia's narration echoes the tradition of storytelling in quiltmaking, a nod to the famous Gee's Bend quilting history. While most of the secondary characters are fairly simple, Ludelphia's voice carries the reader through a treacherous landscape with determined vibrancy, adding a dash of adventure and mischief to an otherwise harrowing tale. The conclusion is at once happy and realistic—the family knows that even with Mama's recovery and supplies from the Red Cross, the winter will still be hard—making this an enjoyable piece of fiction about an undertreated aspect of American history.
