24 May 2005 NAUGHTS & CROSSES by Malorie Blackman, Simon & Schuster, June 2005, ISBN: 1-4169-0016-0

"Meggie turned back to watch the children. Life was so simple for them. Their biggest worry was what they'd get for their birthdays. Their biggest grumble was the time they had to go to bed. Maybe things would be different for them...Better. Meggie forced herself to believe that things would be better for the children, otherwise what was the point of it all?"

NAUGHTS & CROSSES is a tale of two young, star-crossed lovers amidst the oppression, despair, and violence of institutionally entrenched prejudice and the resultant racial strife. The story so frequently and effectively evokes memories of the historic Civil Rights movements in the US and elsewhere that it compelled me to create and steadily maintain images in my head of the story's characters. The need to do so stems from the fact that in the contemporary alternative reality of NAUGHTS & CROSSES it is the Crosses (the Blacks) who are the dominant race, and the Naughts (the Whites) who suffer on a daily basis and whose contributions to history have been completely and effectively obliterated by the dominant race's textbook writers and the teachers who then employ those textbooks.

The story is told in alternating passages by the young Naught/male Callum McGregor and the young Cross/female Sephy Hadley, and it is Callum who complains to himself after a bitter confrontation with his history teacher:

"Centuries ago, Crosses had moved across northern and eastern Pangaea from the south, acquiring along the way the know-how to make the guns and weapons that made everyone else bow down to them. But that didn't mean that what they did was right. We naughts had been their slaves for so long, and even though slavery had been formally abolished over half a century ago, I didn't see that we were much better off. We were only just beginning to be let into their schools. The number of naughts in positions of authority in the country could be counted in the fingers of one hand--without including the thumb! It wasn't right. It wasn't fair!"

Callum spent his childhood growing up alongside Sephy because his mother had been employed as nursemaid to the privileged Cross girl and her elder sister. The story begins three years after Callum's mother is arbitrarily fired by her longtime employer (Sephy's alcoholic mother), and Callum is about to become one of the first four Naughts ("Blankers" is the offensive alternate term used by many of the crosses.) permitted to enroll in Sephy's school under a government edict stemming from international pressure. And, as with such real historic episodes as the Little Rock Nine, the handful of Naughts at the school are made to pay for daring to enroll:

"I smiled. 'That Band-Aid's a bit noticeable.'

" 'They don't sell pink Band-Aids. Only dark brown ones.' "

The opening scene (involving a first kiss) at the secret meeting place on the beach to which the pair returns again and again throughout the story, creates the aura of innocence surrounding the two teenagers that is repeatedly and horribly shattered by the mores, vicious prejudices, and retaliatory attacks of their utterly divided black and white society.

Some may suggest that the contemporary portrayal of intensity and divisiveness in NAUGHTS & CROSSES is not realistic in the twenty-first century. Hmm. Once we get past electing our first African-American President, I'll consider agreeing with such sentiments.

P.S. Matthew Henson died the same week I was born in March 1955.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

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