"Alice is the 4th-grade teacher at the Arrow Catcher Elementary School [in Mississippi] and she yearns to teach her pupils things worth learning. She believes the best way to do it is with field trips. The first trip of the 1955 school year is to the bedside of the 4th graders' terminally burned classmate, Glenn Gregg. (Glenn got in the way of a gasoline fire he set to burn up his despicable daddy.) the final field trip is to the courthouse where Alice and her 4th grade class attend the murder trial of Glenn Gregg's despicable daddy, Solon, and his employer, Lord Montberclair, whose wife's beauty was what inspired a black teenager's reckless compliment ('Hubba, hubba'). In between those two educational forays, Nordan takes the reader on a field trip of his own - along the crooked paths of righteous racism and violence that lead to the courthouse gallery where the reader joins Alice and the 4th graders to witness the 1950's American Southern ethic at work. Soft heart turned 'bleeding heart,' it is Alice in whom the germ of guilt recognition grows, matures, and bears fruit to pass on to future generations of white Southerners."
004818 
Price: 12.25 USD