Overground Railroad by Lesa Cline-Ransome

Graham also lends his voice to Daddy, and adds the seemingly insignificant, yet memorable, train stop announcements of the conductor. Dion Graham richly characterizes excerpts from Frederick Douglass' life that are interspersed throughout the tale, sharing the similarities between the Underground and Overground Railroad experiences. Narrator Shayna Small brings personality and credibility to Ruth Ellen as she gives voice to the story of the family's flight and all the stops along the way. Traveling by train to New York aboard the Silver Meteor, Ruth Ellen relates her journey in verse, describing the sights and sounds, emotions and aspirations of her family as they make their way north and realize their hopes for a different life-one of possibilities yet to be experienced.

Paneled endpapers depicting Black people migrating North via foot, train, bus, and car are particularly effective.įrom the March/April 2020 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.STARRED REVIEWAward-winning author Lesa Cline-Ransome shares for young readers the Great Migration experience of one family, as told through the eyes of their daughter.

Warm browns, greens, and golds predominate a spread showing the family’s necessarily clandestine departure glows with the striking pink of a predawn sky. And like the boy in the book / we all running from / and running to / at the same time.” Ransome does an admirable job of setting mood as well as establishing time and place. Ruth Ellen and her parents sit in the uncomfortably overcrowded “colored car” until Baltimore, at which point they can legally sit where they want (having passed the line “that divides black from white / south from north / wrong from right”) still, they aren’t made welcome by white passengers, whose eyes say “keep moving” whose hands covering empty seats say “not here.” Ruth Ellen is reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on the train, and Cline-Ransome generalizes the details of Douglass’s own escape to emphasize the similarities in the two situations: “jobs / education / freedom / are waiting…for us. Cline-Ransome’s lyrical verse and Ransome’s lush, full-bleed mixed-media illustrations illuminate their journey, punctuated by the conductor’s announcements of station stops. “No more working someone else’s land,” says Mama. But we took the train north.” In 1939, as part of the Great Migration, young Ruth Ellen and her parents leave North Carolina, their extended family, and the oppression of the sharecropping system (explained in an author’s note) behind and board the Silver Meteor, destination New York City.

Overground Railroad by Lesa Cline-Ransome