Starred Review ALA Booklist (Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 CDT 1997)

Starred Review With quiet restraint, Tillage tells of growing up black in the Jim Crow South, the son of North Carolina sharecroppers. His voice is direct, the words are simple. There is no rhetoric, no commentary, no bitterness, just the facts of his personal story set against the segregation of the time. At home, there were his supportive religious family and no political resistance ("It was all part of survival"). Outside, there were inferior schools, separate entrances, the back of the bus, constant harassment, the terror of the Klan. The boy saw his father chased by drunk white kids in a car and run over, twice, and nothing done about the murder. Then came the 1950s, and Tillage joined the civil rights movement and marched past police and firemen and dogs and Klansmen: "But we kept on and on." Now he is a custodian at a Baltimore school, where he tells his story at assembly as part of the curriculum. In an afterword, Roth explains how she taped Tillage's account and edited it with his participation. There is none of the rambling of oral history. The small book is barely 100 pages long, including Roth's black-and-white collage illustrations between chapters. This quiet drama will move readers of all ages (including adult literacy students) and may encourage them to record their own family stories. (Reviewed October 1, 1997)

Starred Review for Publishers Weekly

In this riveting autobiography, Baltimore janitor Leon Walter Tillage reflects on his life with all the vitality of a storyteller gathering his audience around him. He recalls his childhood as an African American sharecropper's son in 1940s North Carolina: """"Once you got on a farm you could work a lifetime and never get out of debt."""" His mother made soup with """"pot likker,"""" the liquid left over from cooking collard greens for the Johnsons (the white owners of the farm they worked). His job in the tobacco field was to walk behind his father's plow with a stick and flip up the tobacco; """"the dirt would smother it, you see."""" Each afternoon Leon walked home from school with his friends, and often the white kids' bus would stop so they could throw stones: """"So what you would do when they were throwing stones at you, you would start screaming and hollering and begging. They liked that...."""" These episodes have an unusual immediacy because the book is edited from recorded interviews conducted by Roth, whose daughter heard Tillage at a school assembly; oral histories have a way of stripping away the sentiment and going straight for the moments that are etched forever in the teller's memories. Tillage's words describe a time, only a few short decades back, when Klansmen and Jim Crow laws ruled the South. But he also tells of marching for his rights and of his own triumphs: """"There were bad times, but you know, there were rejoicing times, too."""" Roth's (Martha and the Dragon) dramatic black-and-white collages pay homage to the power of Leon's story, a tale that does more in its gentle way to expose the horrors of racism than most works of fiction ever could. Ages 8-up. (Oct.)

Horn Book (Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1997)

Born in 1936, the second of nine children, Leon Tillage grew up in a black sharecropping family on a farm outside Raleigh, North Carolina. The incidents described in his moving personal narrative are transcribed from taped oral testimony; centering as they do on the intersections between his life and the surrounding white community, they bring fresh outrage to an all-too-familiar story.

Kirkus Reviews

Tillage, a black custodian in a Baltimore private school, reminisces about his childhood as a sharecropper's son in the South, and his youth as a civil-rights protester. <p> Tillage, a black custodian in a Baltimore private school, reminisces about his childhood as a sharecropper's son in the South, and his youth as a civil-rights protester. He explains the mechanics of sharecropping and segregation, tells of his mistreatment and his father's murder at the hands of white teenagers out to have some fun,'' and relates his experiences with police dogs, fire hoses, and jail while following Martin Luther King's ideas of nonviolent protest. Tillage matter-of-factly recounts horrific events, using spare language that is laced with remarkable wisdom, compassion, and optimism. Such gentleness only gives his story more power, as he drives home the harder realities of his childhood. Although the collage illustrations are interesting, they are too moody and remote for the human spirit behind the words, and readers will regret Roth's decision--especially in light of the boy smiling so brightly on the cover--thateven one photo would be too many for Leon Walter Tillage's words.'' (Memoir. 8-14)</p> "

School Library Journal

Gr 4 Up--This is one man's story, but one that was shared by thousands of African Americans across the United States before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Tillage describes the trials of sharecropping; trying to get an education in an inferior school; and walking a long distance to school while watching a bus full of white children pass him by. The author witnessed the murder of his father when a group of drunken white teenagers ran over the man. What price do you place on a human life? The father of the driver gave Mrs. Tillage 100 dollars and told his son to apologize. He never did. There was never any legal action taken. The events are succinctly and honestly expressed in the author's first-person account. Roth's monochromatic collage art, placed before the beginning of each chapter, documents the sparseness of Tillage's life and its boundaries: home, church, school, work, and the balcony at the movie theater. The last story, "Marching," explains the role of many groups of southerners, representing a number of ethnic groups who supported and helped the marchers. The afterword and note about the genesis of the book are important addenda.--Marie Wright, University Library, Indianapolis, IN