Dear Willie Rudd

A woman sits in her rocking chair and recalls Willie Rudd, the black housekeeper who raised her fifty years earlier, and then the woman goes into her house and writes Willie a letter.

Grade 3 Up-Miss Elizabeth, a white woman, sits on the porch in her rocking chair and looks back 50 years to her childhood. She regrets how badly her family's black housekeeper, Willie Rudd, was treated and she imagines how different it could have been. The text is sentimental, and the narrator's adult voice lessens any child appeal the oil paintings might have. It seems as though this is an attempt to reduce guilt by rewriting history rather than by changing actions. Most young readers will not have the background information they need to understand the issues and history underlying the subtle story. This is better suited as an adult remembrance than as a picture book for young children.
Mary Rinato Berman, New York Public Library
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Moving, evocative and thought-provoking, Gray's ( Miss Tizzy ) work deals with an ambitious topic, the Jim Crow South. As she rocks on her twilit front porch, Miss Elizabeth, a middle-aged white woman, thinks wistfully of Willie Rudd, the black housekeeper of her childhood home, "now surely gone to heaven if anyone ever has." With quiet determination, she addresses the long-dead servant, writing to her "for my mother and for my grandmother and for me." The letter belatedly voices Miss Elizabeth's love for her and the wisdom she has gained in the 50 years since her girlhood. "I wish you could come to see me once again," she writes. "This time you would come in my front door . . . not my back door." Her wistful list continues ("We would go to the movies and sit together in the front row"). When she finishes, she ties the letter to a kite and releases it heavenward, then resumes rocking on her porch. With great subtlety Gray unfolds the story of a life--and of a country's shameful history. Fiore's richly textured, full-spread oil paintings in dusky hues capture both Miss Elizabeth's revisited childhood world and her contemplative mood as she rocks against the darkening sky. A beautiful and significant book. Ages 4-6.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.