The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963

This historical fiction book, written by Christopher Paul Curtis, was a great! No wonder it received the Newberry Honor Award and the Coretta Scott King Award. It is told from the point of view of 10-year old Kenny Watson. His family consists of his mom, dad, little sister Joetta, and older brother Byron (who is thirteen and “officially a teenage juvenile delinquent”); Kenny describes their life in Flint, Michigan. His parents decide it is time to take the family to visit their grandmother in Alabama with the hopes of leaving Byron there for the summer so he can shape up. They make the trip, to the South, and the kids have some adventures. One morning Joetta goes to Sunday school at the church, and the family hears that a bomb has gone off there. Fearing her dead, they rush to the church. Kenny goes inside the church and thinks he sees her dead, so he runs home. At home, he finds that she is actually alive because she got hot during the service and went outside, somehow chasing Kenny home. The family goes back to Flint, where they all try to get over the horrible events in Alabama.

Despite its serious content, this book had some hilarious parts. Byron offered a lot of the comic material. For example, Byron gets his lips stuck to the car mirror because it is so cold outside, and his mother has to pry him off of the mirror. This part reminded me of the Christmas movie (I think it’s called “A Christmas Story”) where the little boy gets his tongue stuck to the flag pole. I have always wondered how his tongue was pried loose, and here I got to read about a similar situation. Byron seemed to be the epitome of adolescence in this book. I remember when I was 13 and thought everything my parents and younger sister did was uncool. Byron represents what a lot of kids are starting to go through when they read this book.

I felt like I really go to know the family in this book, which was vital to understanding how they must have felt at the end of the book when they believed Joetta was dead. Kenny seems so innocent sometimes, like when he was tricked to giving the mean kid part of the money he finds because the other kid told him he lost part of it. He seems so innocent and easily tricked, much like Cassie’s older brother in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; he was persuaded to give away his new coat and tricked, much like Kenny. In addition to great character development, Curtis encourages the readers to make personal connections to the characters so that they will feel more deeply the pain the family and community goes through at the end of the book. In his Epilogue, he talks about the loss the families of the girls who were killed in the church must have felt. He compares that feeling to how the reader felt when Joetta might have been dead and how they might feel about their siblings and families.

The one thing that bothers me about this book is that I’m not sure that younger readers will quite grasp what happens with the “Wool Pooh”, which is a story Byron makes up. The tries to scare the younger children by telling them that Winnie the Pooh’s cousin, Wool Pooh, lives in the lake and will snatch the children if they go there. Kenny goes anyway and is almost pulled to his death by the whirlpool, but Byron rescues him. He thinks he sees the Wool Pool, who he describes as having square toes both when he is fighting for his life in the water and when he goes into the church and thinks he sees Joetta dead. At that point, he runs back to his house to try to escape the Wool Pooh. Joetta says that she followed Kenny home after leaving the church, which is why she was not there when the bomb went off. Kenny thought he saw Joetta in the water with him when he was almost drowning. Clearly something is going on here, but I’m not even sure what it is. I might be underestimating kids’ cognitive abilities, but they could be a little bit confused here.