Sunday, May 6, 2007

Bull Run Written By: Paul Fleischman and Illustrated By: David Frampton


Fleischman, P. (1993). Bull Run. HarperCollins.

This book is a fictional collection of stories from sixteen characters that have some connection to the Civil War battle of Bull Run. Reminiscent of his crafting of chapters in Seedfolks, Fleischman writes each chapter to be one person’s point of view. In contrast to how in Seedfolks he had each person’s story told only within one exclusive chapter, in Bull Run, the chapters are shorter, but the characters resurface to give another point of view chapter in the book several times. Fleischman’s illustrator for this book is David Frampton, and he uses wood cuts to make primitive, folk art quality black block ink prints that have symbols of some sort that represent the character along with the person’s initials included in the block. The woodcut picture accompanies the character’s name as a header to each story chapter, which helped me to keep up with who was talking. Fleischman also writes down the character names in the back along with the page numbers of their chapters so to help those who plan to do some oral telling of it, such as in readers’ theater. (Fleischman knows the teacher’s terms for this. I’m impressed!) The end pages of this hardback version are slightly cream and parchment like, giving an echo of the maps on them as being on old charts. The maps zero in from the East Coast, to the Eastern Theater in the upper portion of Virginia where Bull Run occurred (in Northern Virginia,) to strategic maps in the back end pages which show the lines of action in the morning and how they progressed into the afternoon.

Lives are intertwined in some regard throughout the book, some more than others. Characters are from the North and the South, are women and men, young and old, free and slaves. This grouping is very diverse, which makes this book so powerful to read, and to use as a much more dimensional, engaging teaching tool than reading any flat North vs. South statements about the Civil War. There was no cut and dry way a Northerner was, nor a Southerner. Within those warring sides existed many shades of gray. I think that this book would be an excellent teaching tool and springboard for discussion, because accounts of people, whether real or realistically fictionalized, bring the human aspect forward in the history. Humans naturally seek to make human connections, and that’s what made this story of the Civil War so much more approachable to me than I thought it would be.

Instead of going in depth on all sixteen characters, I instead wanted to draw out some of the subtle ways Fleischman writes about some of the interactions I observed as a reader. One that particularly caught my attention early in the book was on page 2, when Colonel Oliver Brattle living near Fort Sumter in Charleston, noticed the what was to him an odd reaction by the African Americans standing outside when everyone was observing, which was that they were “similarly glum-suspiciously so.” Then the Colonel ended saying that as he looked at one of his servants and “the slimmest of smiles fled his lips, like a snake disappearing down a hole.” The hope of freedom and walking away from his oppressive life must have been brought to the forefront of the servant’s mind as a reality.

I chuckled at the comparison one character named Shem Shuggs made: “Mr. Bee hated Yankees the way a broom hates dirt…” I admired the way Fleischman used language creatively when he was describing train cars departing with soldiers aboard: “The cars moved, drawing taut and then snapping dozens of parting conversations.” In the age of photography’s birth, hand illustrations were still the most prevalent way of depicting and sharing images, and one such artist for a newspaper, James Dacy, describes after seeing a skirmish between soldiers: “I burned to put upon paper the faces of the taunting traitors and the fallen heroes, took up a pencil, tried to draw-but couldn’t. My hands were shaking, with fury.” The perspective of Gideon Adams was of particular interest, as he was a light skinned African American who self-elected to fight on the side of the South. To hear his point of view as a fly on the wall where he heard and saw unacceptable treatment and opinions of people like him was heartbreaking.

Although the book could have included much more blood and gore, it does have some bits and pieces which act as glimpses into a major part of the realities of the war. The mentioning of some scary scenes act as just enough to make it a required part of the story playing out in your head, but there is not so much where your stomach completely turns or to grossly distract you from the core of the story, which is the behavioral interactions of the characters. This book does have a few terms in here which I would consider strong (mild curses) and that needs to be considered as a teacher how to deal with that as a part of the text. The stories are powerful and paint a vivid, emotionally charged portrait of how war affects people.

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