From: Alison Morris <alison>
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 16:39:44 -0400

I think one of the greatest benefits of a read-aloud can sometimes be the fact that a reader (often unknowingly) brings their own experiences to the text, thereby greatly enriching the read-aloud experience.

Case in point... My most distinct memory of being read to as a child is when my mother and I alternated reading chapters to one another from Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Having been raised in rural Tennessee during the 1940's and 1950's, my white mother grew up in a truly segregated South. She did have black childhood friends, but of course they didn't (couldn't) go to school with her. They were the children of her grandfather's sharecroppers. They were the children of the local maids or
"nurses." They sat in the balcony of the local movie theater. They were not granted the privileges that my mother enjoyed on a daily basis. And I'm using "they" to make the point that, yes, the African-Americans my mother knew and forged relationships with were generally regarded as little more than "them."

It wasn't until my mother cried her way through Mildred Taylor's masterpiece that I came to understand exactly how much guilt and sadness she carried with her from those pre-Civil Rights days. I had gone to inner city schools for my earliest years of schooling, been one of only two white children in my kindergarten class, and by that point (the summer after 3rd grade) knew only the experience of being in racially, ethnically, economically diverse classrooms.

Seeing my mother connect so meaningfully with the book we were reading together made me realize how different our childhoods had been and made me appreciate the concept of time passing, of society changing, of my mother having once been a child too, in a way that I'm not sure I had until that point in my life. Had I read Roll of Thunder... on my own, I might have gained some appreciation for the significance of the Civil Rights movement, but I'm not sure I would have understood, at that young age, how much entire generations (both black and white) had been affected by it. I'm not sure I would have looked at my classmates with an eye to the privileges that some of us had been granted and some of us were still (however underhandedly) being denied. I'm not sure I would have understood what it was like to exhaust a box of Kleenex while crying sympathy tears with the person reading to you. And I'm not sure I would have understood my mother quite as well, either.

While Mildred Taylor made characters and place come alive for me, my mother gave Mildred's story a context that made it infinitely more powerful and opened up channels of discussion that I've been exploring ever since. THIS, to me, is the true power of reading aloud -- of SHARING a reading experience with others -- that a reader may bring things to a reading that a listener might never have found on their own.

-- alison


Alison Morris Children's Book Buyer
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Received on Wed 04 Aug 2004 03:39:44 PM CDT