16 October 2002 HUSH by Jacqueline Woodson, Putnam, January 2002

"Some nights she is afraid her father will never come home. That he will never again walk through the door, take off his hat and his badge, unfasten his holster and place it beside everything else on the table in the mud room. She reads the papers. She knows that cops get killed all the time. Even at her own school she's heard kids say they hate cops. People who don't know her dad's one and people who do, too."

Then everything falls apart. Now her name is Evie. It used to be Toswiah. But that was before. Before the shooting. Before they had to leave:

"If one of my old classmates shows a group picture around, someone might ask Who's that? And the classmate will answer That was Toswiah. She just disappeared one day. Weird, huh?"

The disappearance is the result of her father, the only African-American cop in his precinct in Denver, witnessing the shooting of an unarmed black boy by two white cops and feeling compelled to "break the Blue Wall of Silence" by testifying against them. The resulting threats to Toswiah's/Evie's family hurls them far away, to a new identity and a new life in an unfriendly city, far from their lovely home in suburban Denver.

"Yesterday, I saw a girl who looked like a girl I used to know in Denver, and I got so scared and happy all at the same time that my head felt like it was going to lift straight off my shoulders. As she got closer, I wanted to scream her name. I wanted to say It's me, Toswiah Green! Then the girl got closer and I realized it wasn't who I thought it was. She smiled and I smiled back. That was all. Two strangers being nice. She probably didn't remember it an hour later. But I did."

HUSH, which is one of the heavyweight contenders for the next Coretta Scott King Medal, has just been designated as a finalist for the National Book Award. The book is about and told from the point of view of Toswiah/Evie, and shows the disintegration of her family after their abrupt relocation. But at the core of the story is the reality of what has happened: the ingrained prejudice of those white officers leads to their fear of a child, a black child who could very well have been Toswiah, causing them to shoot first and think later. While they've always (supposedly) been cops first and black or white second, her dad has had to silently endure the jokes around the station house--not aimed at him, but merely at those of the race of which he is part.

HUSH is a tragic tale of what can happen when underlying prejudice exists. Apply it to any current world conflict. Until we teach equality and tolerance to our children through our own behavior, both at home and at school, we will continue to see the sort of results that are present in this story.

Young adults who read HUSH may well grow up a little more likely to think before they shoot...their mouths off.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com