BookDragon Blog

For Patsy, literacy began “as a joke.” On the Davis Plantation in South Carolina in the 1860s, Mistress Davis’ niece Annie told her aunt, “‘We are only playing at school … Patsy isn’t learning anything. She is the dunce, [brother] Charles is the smart pupil, and I am the teacher.’” But Patsy silently soaked in every lesson, knowing all the while that reading and writing for slaves was illegal.

In 1865, as the Civil War ends, Annie and Charles leave the Davis Plantation, and – again in jest – gift Patsy a blank book, ink, and pen, “‘You must write all your beautiful thoughts in this book while we are gone,’” the siblings announce, before they laugh themselves to tears. Patsy, of course, will get the last word. Literally.

Patsy is 12 when she gains her freedom. Many of the Davis Plantation slaves initially remain as laborers, doing their same jobs but at least earning meager wages. Patsy’s limp and her stuttering make her painfully shy, but she is perceptive and tenacious beyond her years. In the first months of Reconstruction, Patsy diligently records the rapid changes all around, from the evolving relationships between master and former slaves, to the ongoing departures of the men and women who have been the only family she has ever known. She watches with great distress as a mother arrives to claim the child from whom she was forcibly separated, only to have the child shockingly reject her to stay with her Mistress. Patsy dreams of a mother of her own. A Yankee soldier’s promise of a teacher for a plantation school keeps hope alive for Patsy as she remains so unsure of her future. But even when outside assurances come to nothing, Patsy manages to mature from shy orphan into someone she was always meant to be.

Almost two decades old, I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly became Joyce Hansen’s third Coretta Scott King Honor Book in 1998; she’s received four such Honors thus far. A teacher most of her life, now retired, Hansen explores through Patsy a historical period rarely available in children’s fiction; I’m hard-pressed to think of another Reconstruction title for younger readers (any suggestions most welcome). Her teacherly insights also provide richly detailed back matter, including extensive historical notes, period photos and etchings, maps, and other resources.

Hansen’s explanation of the genesis of her historical novel is both poignant and enlightening as she shares how researching a nonfiction Reconstruction title led her to the diary of a South Carolina woman. “‘She described a servant girl, a former slave, named Ann. She wrote that Ann was ‘lame, solitary, very dull, slow, timid, and friendless.’” Hansen’s “‘fascination’” grew from there, as did a long list of questions for which she had no answers … at least until Patsy arrived on the page, and “‘took on a life of her own and answered all those questions I’d once had about Ann.’” Hansen’s details, she adds, are “‘based on the diaries, journals, oral histories, and narratives of people who lived through those tumultuous times.’”

Yes, indeed: truth always makes for the most effective fiction.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 1997