#newbery

A brief summary (with spoilers)!

It’s 1936 in Michigan, and Bud is a 10-year-old Black orphan who has been sent to live with several foster families after his mother’s death. However, he is always returned to the orphanage after just a few days. When the story starts, Bud's latest foster family takes him home to live with them, but their biological son torments him by (among other things) sticking a Ticonderoga pencil up his nose while he’s sleeping. Bud finally punches the boy, but when the son plays the victim to his parents, they decide to take Bud back to the orphanage the next day. They lock him in their garden shed for the night, but after he disturbs a hornet nest, he escapes and decides to run away (but not without first getting even on the boy by making him wet the bed with the age-old warm water trick). Bud decides to set out to find who he believes is his real father — the musician Herman E. Calloway — which he deduced after seeing a flyer his mother brought home one day:

The paper was starting to wear out from me looking at it so much but I liked checking to see if there was anything I hadn’t noticed before. It was like something was telling me there was a message for me on this flyer but I didn’t have the decoder ring to read what it was. Across the top of the flyer writ in big black letters were the words Limited Engagement … Underneath that in big letters again it said, “HERMAN E. CALLOWAY and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!! … then in the middle of the flyer was a blurry picture of the man I have a real good suspicion about. I’ve never met him, but I have a pretty good feeling that this guy must be my father. … I remember Momma bringing this flyer with her when she came from working one day, I remember because she got very upset when she put it on the supper table and kept looking at it and picking it up and putting it back and moving it around. I was only six then and couldn’t understand why this one got her so upset, she kept four others like it in her dressing table, but this one really got her jumpy.

Along the way, Bud ends up in a series of what I would call purposeful misadventures: He spends some time at a library he used to visit with his mother, attempts to train-hop after spending a night in a Hooverville, becomes the temporary “son” of a family in order to receive a free meal at the city mission, and even hitchhikes across the state with a stranger. He finally reaches Herman E. Calloway, but the man turns out to be grumpy, mean, and much older than he expected.

Despite Herman's cold demeanor, the other band members Bud meets are kind to him while figuring out what to do about his sudden appearance and unbelievable claim. He becomes enamored with music after hearing the band play and finally feels at home with them — especially with Miss Thomas, the group's singer, who acts especially maternal toward Bud. After staying with them for a few days, Herman comes across some of Bud's belongings from his treasured suitcase and angrily claims he stole them. After the misunderstanding is cleared up, everyone soon realizes that Bud is actually Herman's grandson, but it’s news to everyone in the group that Bud's mother has died.

Bud attempts to comfort Herman while he grieves, which is a turning point in their relationship with each other. However, Bud wonders why Herman never visited or made the effort to see him and his mother before now:

“Bud,” [Miss Thomas] said, “Mr. C–excuse me, your granddad didn’t know anything about you. No one knew where your mother had gone.” Mr. Jimmy said, “That’s right, son, she just up and run off one day. I mean we all knew Herman was hard on her, but it wasn’t like it was nothing personal, he was hard on everybody. I used to tell him all the time to slack off some on the girl, to go easy, but I can remember his exact words, he said ‘Easy-go don’t make the mare run. This is a hard world, especially for a Negro woman, there’s a hundred million folks out there of every shade and hue, both male and female, who are just dying to be harder on her than I ever could be. She’s got to be ready.’”

Miss Thomas explains that Herman was extremely proud of his daughter (“He used to crow about how his mother and father had been born slaves and how now it was only two generations later and the Calloways had come so far and worked so hard that [his daughter] was going to be a teacher”), but eventually the pressure from him was too much and she left. After some of the shock of her passing has worn off, the other band members gift Bud his own alto sax and give him a jazzy nickname, Sleepy LaBone. Near the end of the book, he realizes that he doesn’t need his special suitcase or the objects inside to remember his mother:

“I didn’t need those other things with me all of the time. I didn’t need them to remind me of Momma, I couldn’t think about her any more if there were a hundred hours in every day and a thousand days in every week. I couldn’t think of my momma any better than I already do.”

Something I noticed during this read was that the adults in the story sometimes tossed in commentary about the current times that Bud didn’t understand or concern himself with as a 10-year-old, but the reader could use that information to pick up on some historical context. For example, the man who picks Bud up from the side of the road mentions that being out after dark in this part of the country is dangerous, specifically for Black people:

“...Bud-not-Buddy, you don’t know how lucky you are I came through here, some of those Owosso folks used to have a sign hanging along here that said, and I’m going to clean up the language for you, it said, ‘To Our Negro Friends Who Are Passing Through, Kindly Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Rear End in Owosso!’”

Bud doesn’t react to this information and is much more concerned about securing the safety of his suitcase, but the reader would know this was in reference to sundown towns. But even when reading this at Bud's age, this detail wasn't lost on me, and I remember this scene coming to mind when learning more about the Jim Crow era in high school. Thinking now as an adult, this was a good way to introduce larger concepts like racial inequality to children without it being too intense or uncomfortable. It's not what the book is about, but it's not totally absent from it, either.

In fact, the entire story could be seen as a commentary on the aftermath of slavery in the early 20th century. Herman, understanding that the world was still going to treat his daughter unfairly because of both her gender and race, tried to give her a leg up on fighting discrimination when she became an adult, which included an education and a career path already decided for her. However, because it wasn’t what she wanted for herself as an individual, she went off on her own and raised Bud instead — maybe even choosing to be the parent to Bud that she didn’t have in Herman instead of carrying the full weight of her race’s legacy on her shoulders.

What I gleaned from their relationship was this: True freedom on an individual level is giving others you care about the permission to make their own choices, whether they’re shooting for the stars or just want to be someone who provides a loving, supportive home for their child.