Caldecott Honor artist Bryan Collier (Dave the Potter) brilliantly reimagines a poem by Langston Hughes as a train ride through history, witnessed by an African American Pullman porter.
Fragments of stars, patches of stripes float on the endpapers. A train sweeps through a cotton field: "I, too, sing America." Readers then meet the narrator, a Pullman porter peering through the porthole window of the train's galley kitchen: "I am the darker brother." Stars and stripes create a veil over his soulful eyes, his pressed uniform and cap. Three other African American men prepare the food in that galley kitchen. Collage artwork incorporates photos of criss-crossed pie crust, vegetables and freshly baked rolls. Despite his service to wealthy white passengers in plush surroundings, the narrator "laugh[s] and eat[s] well,/ And grow[s] strong." Here Collier suggest a fortifying of the intellect, as the man collects discarded magazines and books. These he scatters along the train's path. Collier depicts the pages fluttering through the sky, landing in cotton fields, and later, along subway tracks that connect the city blocks of Hughes's native Harlem. The images end with a modern boy, his face full of hope, peering between the ghosted stripes of the American flag: "I, too, am America."
The exceptional visual imagery echoes the legendary train trip taken by an 18-year-old Langston Hughes to see his estranged father--the trip that inspired his "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" ("My soul grows deep like the rivers"). Collier, too, chronicles a journey from past to present, of hope and healing. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness