Teaching the Past – Kwame Alexander and Dare Coulter

Lynn: How do you tell the story of our history to children when that story is a painful one – a story of slavery, cruelty and oppression for example? How do you tell a story that makes us uncomfortable? That is a question being debated across our country. Some ask it because they don’t know how to go about it like the teacher in this new book. Some ask it because they don’t want to upset their children and some ask it because THEY are uncomfortable about our history and prefer to pretend it didn’t happen. This same question has been asked about teaching the Holocaust. the Japanese Internment and other horrors of human history.

An American Story (Little, Brown/2023) is author Kwame Alexander and illustrator Dare Coulter’s answer to that critical question. You teach it because young people deserve the truth. You teach it in the hope that these events will not occur again. You teach it because our past shapes our future and the whole past deserves our understanding in order to move forward with hope.

Alexander and Coulter tell the story using the framework of a teacher starting to tell the story of a happy prosperous people stolen in the night from their land, forced into the dark holds of ships to be sold. She falters in the telling but her young students remind her that, “You always tell us to speak the truth, Mrs. Simmons, even when it’s hard?”

Dare Coulter’s stunning illustrations depict the visual history of slavery, of people cruelly treated but keeping the force of the spirit and hope alive, a people suffering but surviving. Coulter painstakingly sculpted figures, some of water-based clay and some of polymer clay and photographed them. She also created paintings with acrylic and spray paint on wood panels and drawings with charcoal. The combined results are vivid, dynamic and extremely powerful. One jolting page-turn shows manacled wrists against a blue background and another offers the hopeful sign of young hands raised, eager to hear the telling of our history.

The combination of the lyrical text and the unflinching but remarkable illustrations is unforgettable. An Author’s Note and an Illustrator’s Note provide additional information on the creation of this brave and necessary book. Look for awards on this one.