Trapped Between the Lash and the Gun - Softcover

Arvella Whitmore's children's novels include The Bread Winner, an NCSS-CBC Notable Children's Book in the Field of Social Studies. She and her husband reside in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Grade 5-8-Determined not to move to an integrated suburb, 12-year-old Jordan Henning Scott plans to run away and live with his newfound gang friends, but the heirloom watch he steals from his grandfather to finance this venture transports him back in time. Finding himself in the old South, Jordan meets Uriah, a slave boy who takes him to the Henning plantation. Jordan is presumed to be a runaway slave, put to exhausting work picking cotton, and whipped when he collapses. After he tries to run away, he is sold to a slave trader and then bought by a sympathizer who gives him freedom papers and promises to send him to Canada if he will return to the Henning plantation and convince Uriah to leave. The master, who turns out to be Uriah's father, had recently brought the boy into the big house and given him his watch for safekeeping. When Jordan finds the watch again, he is returned to his own time. Left behind, Uriah takes the papers and Jordan's name to Canada and becomes Jordan's great-great-great-great-grandfather. Readers who can overlook awkward dialogue and an unlikely plot will be caught up in the boy's efforts to survive and appropriately appalled by the details of daily life. The premise of a modern eye looking at the grim realities of slavery was used more successfully, but for older readers, by Octavia Butler in Kindred (Beacon, 1988); Trapped, however, might intrigue readers looking for quick-moving historical fiction.
Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
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