Synopsis
Lee and Adeline (aka Sunshine or just plain ‘Shine’) take you back in time to the Sixties in the South. Colored Seated in the Rear weaves back and forth between their perspectives over one of the most tumultuous and divisive decades, not just in their lives but in world history, marked by the civil rights movement, antiwar demonstrations, political assassinations, and the Beatles.
Lee recollects tales of their Little Rascals-style playhouse in the woods, playing with Adeline and other black children. She recalls working in the tobacco barns and cotton fields together, recounting how no one would believe they used tobacco carts with no wheels. Adeline reminds Lee that things were much worse than tobacco drags. Her family had no running water, nor plumbing, and she had to work long, hot days in the fields rather than go to school. However, Adeline’s faith, singing, and sense of humor is clearly what pulled her through as her stories read like a female version of Huckleberry Finn. She recounts story after story of their humorous escapades like dressing Lee to be a black girl so they could sit together in the black balcony at the movie theater and playing hooky from school for a day of fishing at the river to feed Adeline’s family.
Lee begins to see that while she was proud her family took care of Adeline’s and other tenant’s families, the situation was humiliating to them. She learns what sharecropping truly meant from Adeline’s (Shine’s) point of view. Lee sees things now that she could not back then.
Lee and Adeline pepper their narratives with music as well as historical events of the Sixties such as Martin Luther King’s marches, Kennedy’s assassination, and landing on the moon. As Lee concentrates on the advances of science and medicine, young Shine is more concerned about the racial riots and what is happening to move her race forward. When they reconnect fifty years later, Adeline is still angry about her past and her family’s slavery. Hoping to ease her pain, Lee tells Adeline she has discovered most of her own white ancestors were also indentured servants. Lee offers to do research for Adeline and digs back several generations in Ancestry.com, discovering both have Cherokee Indian ancestors. By a stroke of luck, Lee happens to read Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon and figures out what happened to Adeline’s grandfather who Adeline thought abandoned the family. What Lee discovers is horrifying and may be worse than slavery, and she must decide if telling her will make Adeline angrier or ruin their friendship. #Southern #farmlife #Sixties #Blackhistory #blackhistoricalfiction #littlerascals #Segregation #civilrights #southerncharm #cotton #tobacco #thosewerethedays #sharecropping #ancestry #friendship #neverforget #negrospirituals #60smusic #schooldays
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