Every summer, Mama, Sister, and Sarah Marie take the bus down south to visit Grandmama. The three of them sit in the back of the bus, because, as Mama says, it is the best seat. Later, on a walk into town, the girls don’t drink from the water fountain because Grandmama says she’ll make fresh lemon-mint iced tea when they get home. Throughout the summer, Aunt Maria teaches Sarah Marie how to read. Then Sarah Marie notices signs in town she hadn’t been able to read before, like the one on the bathroom door that says, “White Women” and another that says “Colored Women.” Sarah Marie faces a hard realization about the segregated South. But in the fall she reads about events happening in places like Clinton, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama. And by the next summer, when they go back to visit Grandmama, they all sit in the front of the bus.

BIO

Becky Birtha was born in Hampton, Virginia, in 1948, but has lived much of her adult life in the greater Philadelphia area. She identifies as being an African American, a lesbian, a feminist, an adoptive parent, and a Quaker. Birtha has published two collections of short stories, For Nights Like This One: Stories of Loving Women (1983) and Lovers’ Choice (1987); a book of verse, The Forbidden Poems (1991); and three children’s books, Grandmama’s Pride (2005), Lucky Beans (2010), and Far Apart, Close in Heart (2017).

Birtha attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls and holds a BS in Child Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has worked as a teacher, a librar-ian, and a representative for an adoption agency. Birtha has won numerous awards for her writing, including a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Coun-cil on the Arts, a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lambda Literary award. Her work tends to focus on relationships between women, mothering and children.

[P]  Albert Whitman & Company  /  November 01, 2016

 0.1" H x 8.3" L x 10.5" W (0.3 lbs) 32 pages

For ages 4 to 8