The team behind And the Soldiers Sang delves deeply into another chapter of World War I with this beautiful, bittersweet tribute to the men nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters by the Germans "for their tenacity."
These 2,000 men were as talented with their instruments--playing jazz, blues and ragtime, led by "Big Jim" Reese Europe--as they were skilled on the battlefield. The exquisitely designed book traces their journey from recruitment in April 1916 through to Big Jim's tragic death in May 1919, and portrays the mood in the United States as latecomer to the Great War, and segregation in America and how it followed the soldiers overseas. The men are assigned to menial labor in France, yet perform music for the privileged. In March 1918, they're finally sent to fight, portrayed in Gary Kelley's gorgeous re-imagining of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830), with a valiant woman holding the French flag high as the Harlem Hellfighters race into battle.
In February 1919, the men played on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, to salute an Allied victory. But the night before they were to perform for a celebration honoring the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, Big Jim died at the hands of his drummer. Kelley portrays a lone Hellfighter in uniform and black mourning armband, holding a trombone. Lewis writes, "In black armbands, the Hellfighters/ marched last, their hushed instruments/ at their sides." This powerful image of the Harlem Hellfighters, so recently seen as vital contributors to the Allied victory, made mute in their sadness, all too accurately mirrors the men's experiences throughout the Great War. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness