Black Star

At the end of The Door of No Return, the first book in Kwame Alexander’s ambitious verse novel trilogy, I imagined its hero, Kofi, wrenched from Africa on a slave ship, would find himself next in the middle of the American Civil War. I was wrong. Book two, Black Star, springs forward two generations to the 1920s. Kofi is now Nana Kofi, the patriarch of an extended African American family living in small Virginia town across the tracks, or, in this case, over the bridge, from the white part of town. The narrator of the new book is Kofi’s granddaughter, Charley. Those readers who are interested in what happened to Kofi after the end of the first book, will have to wait until well into the new book to find out, as his memories appear, partly in response to Charley’s prompting. While Kofi looks back, Charley has her eyes set on becoming a baseball star.  Already, there are two strikes against her: she is black and, of course, a girl. But her sister Gwen brings her a gift that she bought in a thrift shop, a battered leather catcher’s mitt that may have once belonged to a woman who played in a Negro baseball league in Philadelphia. For Charley, a determined, studious, and questioning girl, this is a vindication. Alexander’s novel continues to trace the thread of African American history from one continent to another and incidentally introduces us to two significant figures from twentieth century America: the agitator Marcus Garvey, and the educator Mary McLeod Bethune (look out, too, for references to Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson). Marcus Garvey’s plans for African American emigration back to Africa feed Kofi’s dream of a return to his childhood home and justifies the suitcase he has ready by the door. And a visit from Bethune to the local Colored Women’s Club at the Baptist Church gives Charley a source of direct example of black female determination and achievement. The story is, in part, an education for both Charley and the reader in the patterns of racial violence in the segregated South, from the etiquette of exclusion and deference to the white-sheeted beatings and murder in the night that can be sparked by something as apparently innocent as a child’s baseball game. But there is much more to this expertly crafted free verse novel. Once more, Kwame Alexander uses ‘the lens of sports’ to bring friendship, family, and community into warm focus and to show how these have sustained African Americans in the worst of times and how they might be an inspiration to all his readers now and in the future.