08 September 2003 THE CRYING ROCKS by Janet Taylor Lisle, Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, October 2003, ISBN 0-689-03014-2

" 'So tell me about these Indians who were supposedly around here,' she says, as if she's never heard of Indians before. Which is laughable. Half the names of places in Rhode Island are Native American. There are statues of Indians in the parks and plaques that tell where this treaty was signed or that attack happened. Everyone has heard of the Indians, they just don't think about them that much. Indians are ancient history here, like three hundred years ago or more."

"One little, two little, three little Indians

Four little, five little, six little Indians

Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians

Ten little Indian boys."

I was a little kid on Long Island back in an era when in circle time songs you'd as easily count ten little Indians as you would count six little ducks or ten green and speckled frogs.

A few years further on, in the mid 1960s, I chose "The Indian Tribes of Paumanok" (a Native American name for Long Island) as the topic for a social studies report. And while this raised my 10 year-old state of consciousness a few notches, I still had a heck of a time envisioning the booming suburbs where I lived as having been a vast woodland sheltering those peoples.

In contrast, thirteen year old Joelle, the main character in THE CRYING ROCKS, has such an ability and inclination. In fact, she can sometimes imagine someone from the distant past following her. Joelle, who was adopted at five by "Aunt" Mary Louise and "Uncle" Vernon, has that hunger to know about her own roots. In sharp contrast to her "heavy and earthbound" adoptive parents, Joelle is such a tall and striking seventh grader that a group of little neighborhood girls worships her from a distance, imagines her to be royalty, and emulates her style. But it is clear to the reader that something awful must have happened to Joelle as a young child, since she cannot remember the mysterious and unspoken circumstances in which she came to be discovered at the railroad depot of the northwestern Rhode Island community where she has since lived.

" 'Back in the woods there's a place where they used to meet. A high council place. There are trails, too. You can tell they're old Indian paths because of how deep they're worn down. It would take hundreds of years of feet to wear down a path like that.'

" 'Hundreds of years of feet?' she says. 'Give me a break.'

" 'A thousand years, even. Some artifacts are that old and more. What's amazing is how their culture got wiped out when the white man came. Fifty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the Narragansetts were all gone, thirty or forty-thousand people who lived right around here.'

" 'What happened?' Joelle asked in spite of herself.

" Carlos stares at her. 'Disease, first, then they were killed off. The last few were sold into slavery down in the West Indies. It's one of those histories people don't like to remember.'

" 'But you do?'

" 'I'm part Indian.'

" 'Really?'

"Carlos stands up straighter and looks at her defiantly, as if she might have a problem with this. She registers again his gray eyes, his brown hair, his long thin face. " 'You don't look--'

" 'Just a small part,' Carlos says quickly. 'Like about one sixteenth or something.' "

The innocent and tentative relationship that develops between Carlos and Joelle--that of close friends whom the reader imagines/hopes will later become boyfriend and girlfriend--is impeccably drawn. Sometimes as if a pair of bumper cars, sometimes utterly in tune, the connection between these two kids who are finding themselves winds its way through the tension of the story to an absolutely fun and joyous scene where the two are dueling each other with quotes from their research.

THE CRYING ROCKS asks hard questions about the values and behavior of the Europeans who came to America as well as that of the Narragansetts who were there when the ships arrived. The author skillfully ties these questions to treatment of arguably "less fortunate" groups in twenty-first century society. Janet Taylor Lisle has an ability for crafting a story that is taut and powerful while maintaining the limits which allow for this story to be used in middle school classrooms. THE CRYING ROCKS will find a home in those classrooms and is a tale that will surely have readers thinking and asking about their own roots.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com