12 February 2019 THE BELL RANG by James E. Ransome, Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum, January 2019, 40p., ISBN: 978-1-4424-2113-4

“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

A long way from my home, yeah, yeah.”

-- Richie Havens, “Freedom” (1969)

“Tuesday

The bell rings.

Daddy gathers wood.

Mama cooks.

We eat.

Mama hugs me.

Daddy’s rough hands

slide down my arms.

Ben waves

good-bye.

They walk to the fields

with big hoes

for chopping.

I skip to Miss Sarah Mae’s

with all the young’uns.”

By five or six, most kids these days have heard something about the history of slavery in America and can likely tell you that it involved white people owning black people. But it is one thing to define a concept and quite another to have a sense of what it might have felt like to be a slave.

Through the first-person narration of a little girl--the unnamed main character of THE BELL RANG--we are shown the life of her enslaved family over seven day’s time, and get a real sense of slavery. The bell that rings each day carries with it the authority of the master’s dictates and is practically a character in the story.

This may likely be the most memorable week of this young girl’s life because, on Wednesday, her beloved big brother Ben flees the plantation.

He runs away with two friends, who are recaptured and brought back to the plantation on Saturday. But Ben is apparently gone for good (or for bad).  Like his parents and sister, we never know whether he perished in the woods, got captured by some other owner, or made it to freedom.

What a cost of freedom that would be, to never again see your parents or your little sister! Like Ben, I have a little sister, too. She and I are close in age and grew up as close friends.  Thinking about our bond, I can imagine what a difficult sacrifice Ben or any slave had to make in order to make a break for freedom and how, with all of their might, the little girl and the community would be praying for his success.

The story of Ben’s unnamed little sister is dramatically illustrated with images of the girl with her family; with the stick doll Ben gives her on his last day there; with the other young’uns; with the white overseer; and down by the creek on Sunday, with the community, being preached to about freedom. The story concludes, on Monday morning, with a stunning illustration of the girl looking directly at us, the bell in the foreground, and a swallow-tailed bird partially flown off of the flyleaf.

THE BELL RANG is a notable 2019 title about which you will undoubtedly be hearing more, both for the quality of the text and the illustrations.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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