After her family with Native American roots moves to a segregated rural town in Georgia, ten-year-old Lena Hopkins wishes for a better life. She disagrees with her younger brother’s exploration of the forbidden swamp and deep ditches for treasure. She especially objects to his imitation of older boys’ cussing and rude behaviors. Lena, wants to be a scientist in a world that does not educate females and has little regard for the poor. The kids attend a tiny county school lacking sufficient teachers, books, and ambition. Lena struggles with asthma, segregation, history, and crime in a town whose residents refuse to accept diverse military families. Lena starts to believe that moving to Georgia was a mistake. Still, she is determined to save her new friends. The children cope with vandals, prejudiced town folk and a polio pandemic that leads to a chain of events changing their lives. In this juvenile novel, a military family moves to a rural Georgian town where the children seek friends, fight discrimination, and help others with kindness and respect.
During what came to be called the Great Depression, families struggled to make ends meet. In 1933 at the depth of the Depression, sixteen million peopleone-third of the labor forcewere unemployed. In January 1934, while sixteen years old, I was a sophomore, a liberal arts major, at Alexander Hamilton High School on Albany Avenue and the corner of Bergin Street. My mother worked in Commercial Credit at National City Bank, 55 Wall Street, Manhattan. I walked both going to school as well as returning regardless of the weather; ten cents would have been the round-trip fare in the Bergin Street trolley car. Id rather have spent the nickels for licorice drops.
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