The Legend of Buddy Bush

January 26, 2004
With a plot that recalls To Kill a Mockingbird
, Moses (So They Burned the Black Churches
) blends the historical Buddy Bush, the stories about him that her grandmother told her plus her own imagination to paint a realistic picture of 1947 North Carolina. Narrator Pattie Mae Sheals, 12, lives with her extended family in what used to be a slave-owner's house and is now, ironically, called the slave house. It seems that most of her family does slave for the whites—picking tobacco or cotton. Pattie Mae wishes she could go north to Harlem, where her older brother and sister live, and where her informally adopted uncle Buddy returned from five years earlier with a fancy Cadillac—and an unwillingness to accommodate humiliations at the hands of white people. Taking Pattie Mae to the movies in town one night, Buddy fails to step aside for a white woman, who retaliates by accusing him of rape, charges that quickly land Buddy in jail and in imminent peril of a lynching. While Moses doesn't always secure the nuts and bolts of her storytelling (Just how has Buddy earned enough money to buy a Cadillac? Why has he traded his newfound way of living to resume residence in the slave house in the backward South?), she more than compensates by conveying the intimacy of Pattie Mae's large family. The author illuminates both the petty and grave injustices of their daily lives; she presents them in a way that allows the audience to react for themselves. Ages 12-up.

February 15, 2004
Gr 6-9-In rural Rich Square, NC, the 1947 arrest, trial, escape, and eventual acquittal of African-American Buddy Bush rocked a community and sparked international interest. This fictionalized account is narrated by Pattie Mae, Buddy's 12-year-old niece, a perceptive "ease dropper" who discovers the depths of prejudice and the strength of family. The child adores Uncle Buddy, who has unexpectedly returned home from Harlem. Waiting one evening with his niece for his girlfriend to get off work, Buddy has a brief sidewalk encounter with a white woman who later accuses him of attempted rape. Although Pattie Mae witnesses the whole incident and knows that he is innocent, the efforts of her grandparents and single mother to bail him out of jail are futile. When seven armed Ku Klux Klansmen unlock his cell, planning to exercise their own brand of justice, Buddy escapes into the swamp where the white men fear to follow and heads north into legend. Pattie Mae's coming-of-age story re-creates the racial segregation and tension of a small Southern community, demonstrates the loyalty of family, and exposes the heartbreak of injustice. The child's voice is candid, reflective, humorous, dialectic, and full of colloquialisms and superstitions. Her family and neighbors are well-drawn, idiosyncratic characters bound together by their distrust of the white community. Readers will discover universal truths about fairness, dignity, and compassion, and gain an understanding of the older generation as Pattie Mae realizes that home is where the heart is.-Gerry Larson, Durham School of the Arts, NC

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2004
Gr 6-9-In rural Rich Square, NC, the 1947 arrest, trial, escape, and eventual acquittal of African-American Buddy Bush rocked a community and sparked international interest. This fictionalized account is narrated by Pattie Mae, Buddy's 12-year-old niece, a perceptive "ease dropper" who discovers the depths of prejudice and the strength of family. The child adores Uncle Buddy, who has unexpectedly returned home from Harlem. Waiting one evening with his niece for his girlfriend to get off work, Buddy has a brief sidewalk encounter with a white woman who later accuses him of attempted rape. Although Pattie Mae witnesses the whole incident and knows that he is innocent, the efforts of her grandparents and single mother to bail him out of jail are futile. When seven armed Ku Klux Klansmen unlock his cell, planning to exercise their own brand of justice, Buddy escapes into the swamp where the white men fear to follow and heads north into legend. Pattie Mae's coming-of-age story re-creates the racial segregation and tension of a small Southern community, demonstrates the loyalty of family, and exposes the heartbreak of injustice. The child's voice is candid, reflective, humorous, dialectic, and full of colloquialisms and superstitions. Her family and neighbors are well-drawn, idiosyncratic characters bound together by their distrust of the white community. Readers will discover universal truths about fairness, dignity, and compassion, and gain an understanding of the older generation as Pattie Mae realizes that home is where the heart is.-Gerry Larson, Durham School of the Arts, NC

Copyright 2004 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.