Back Home by Gloria Jean Pinkney with pictures by Jerry Pinkney

Back Home, by Gloria Jean Pinkney with pictures by Jerry Pinkney, is an excellent example of having roots and wings. According to the book jacket, Gloria Jean Pinkney grew up in North Carolina, which is the setting in Back Home. She says that her own experiences contributed to this particular book. Her husband is quite an acclaimed illustrator, and with good reason. The pictures in Back Home are extraordinary (Pinkney, 1992).

The book is about a little girl named Ernestine who goes to visit her birthplace and her aunt, uncle, and cousin who still live on Sandy Bottom in North Carolina. Her uncle picks her up at the train station, and after the drive home, she is almost immediately ridiculed by her cousin, Jack. Before she goes to sleep that night, she wishes that they would become friends. The entire family makes comments about her dresses and the fact that she is incapable of completing chores and having a good time simply because she is from the city. She slips into country life quickly, however, as she asks for overalls from her aunt. She gives them to Ernestine from her mama’s old trunk, and she sleeps in her mama’s room at night. She makes a fool of herself several times. She falls from a ladder, inspects her legs for “insect bites,” and falls off of a goat. She is reluctant to go home, but she knows that school is starting and she looks forward to visiting again next summer. Jack gives her a gift to take with her. In the pouch, she finds “hard corn,” and she realizes that Jack has just been aggravating her when he says that he is going to name his new kid Princess, and asks what she thinks about the idea. Since she suggested it, this part of the story shows the two joining forces. Finally, Ernestine visits the grave of her grandmother and learns even more about her heritage. Uncle June tells Ernestine that she looks just like her grandmother.

I liked the final picture in the book which shows the bedroom where Ernestine slept and she and her uncle driving away from the farm out the window. I also like that the illustrations are three-dimensional, complete with shading and detail, and that the entire story could be told from the pictures alone. I do not mean that the words are not important, for Gloria Pinkney does an excellent job at narrating the story and using dialogue that shows the differences and similarities in the two generations and in the demographic.

This little girl and her cousin Jack remind me of my aunt and my mother when my mother was a child. Mom was twenty years younger than my aunt, and my aunt moved to Dayton, Ohio when my mother was born to get a job. When she would come back home, she would say that it was such a culture shock, but she loved it. This is what I meant by the fact that people can have roots and wings. I loved to visit my aunt in the city. My mother stayed behind, on the farm, and though it isn’t a farm anymore, we still live in a very rural area in Eastern Kentucky. Children are curious creatures, and they love to experience new things.

Jerry Pinkney also illustrated The Talking Eggs by Robert San Souci, which won a Caldecott Honor, a Coretta Scott King Honor, and was considered an ALA Notable. He also illustrated The Patchwork Quilt by Valerie Flournoy, which won the Coretta Scott King Award, the Christopher Award, was an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice, an ALA Notable, and a Reading Rainbow selection, and finally, he illustrated More Tales of Uncle Remus, which was retold by Julius Lester and received five starred reviews and was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year and an ALA Notable (Pinkney, 1992). He has quite an impressive list of accomplishments.

At first, I didn’t think that I would like the book, but I did. I feared that the Pinkneys were going to portray these people as uneducated and unsophisticated, but this was far from the case. Actually, they did a great job explaining that people just know a lot about different things. I think that this book is a good example of being able to leave home and still appreciate it, and a lot can be learned by children who read this book because of the accents and cultural references, not to mention realizing the importance of their heritage.

References

Pinkney, G. (1992). Back home. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.