Synopses & Reviews
Jessie Bollier often played his fife to earn a few pennies down by the New Orleans docks. One afternoon a sailor asked him to pipe a tune, and that evening Jessie was kidnapped and dumped aboard The Moonlight, a slave ship, where a hateful duty awaited him. He was to play music so the slaves could "dance" to keep their muscles strong, their bodies profitable. Jessie was sickened by the thought of taking part in the business of trading rum and tobacco for blacks and then selling the ones who survived the frightful sea voyage from Africa. But to the men of the ship a "slave dancer" was necessary to ensure their share of the profit. They did not heed the horrors that every day grew more vivid, more inescapable to Jessie. Yet , even after four months of fear, calculated torture, and hazardous sailing with a degraded crew, Jessie was to face a final horror that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Synopsis
Jessie Bollier often played his fife to earn a few pennies down by the New Orleans docks. One afternoon a sailor asked him to pipe a tune, and that evening Jessie was kidnapped and dumped aboard The Moonlight, a slave ship, where a hateful duty awaited him. He was to play music so the slaves could "dance" to keep their muscles strong, their bodies profitable. Jessie was sickened by the thought of taking part in the business of trading rum and tobacco for blacks and then selling the ones who survived the frightful sea voyage from Africa. But to the men of the ship a "slave dancer" was necessary to ensure their share of the profit. They did not heed the horrors that every day grew more vivid, more inescapable to Jessie. Yet , even after four months of fear, calculated torture, and hazardous sailing with a degraded crew, Jessie was to face a final horror that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Author Q&A
"I was born in New York City in 1923. When I was eight, I moved to a Cuban plantation and stayed for two years. Before and after Cuba, I seldom lived anyplace longer than a year or so.
"In Cuba, I went to a one-room school with eight other students who ranged in age from six to fourteen. I attended nine schools before I was twelve, by which time I had discovered that public libraries embodies freedom, solace, and truth. Stories took me to other places. There was no television then, of course. Reading was everything to me. Wherever I went--except Cuba--there was a library. Even though my schools changed, I'd always find a library.
"When I was a young child, I was most influenced by my grandmother and her stories of her life in Spain. Some of her tales were comic, and some were tales of dread. What I recall most about her stories, told to me in fragments over the years I lived with her, was an underlying sorrowful tone, a puzzled mourning for the past. I also lived in the home of a minister in Upstate New York. He was the great person of my childhood. He taught me to read.
"I always wanted to write, ever since childhood. But I didn't start writing until I started a job teaching troubled children. Before teaching, I worked in a wide variety of jobs. At sixteen, I was reading books for Warner Brothers, including Spanish novels. I also was a salesgirl, a model, a worker in a rivet-sorting shop, and lastly a lathe operator at the Bethlehem Steel during World War II. I wrote my first adult novel, entitled Poor George, while I was living in Greece with my family. My first children's book, Maurice's Room, quickly followed.
"As I sit at my typewriter, working, there are moments when I feel I cannot write another word, when the sheer difficulty of discovering what I mean to say and how to say it is so daunting that I want to stop forever. I haven't' yet stopped. I stay in my chair, pen in hand, yellow-lined pad on the desk next to the machine, doodling or writing down fragments of sentences, hoping some unifying principle will, like a net, draw them together. On the whole, most wiring is the questions one asks oneself. What has happened to me? Does it have meaning? It's a peculiar process. One of the nicest things about writing is that you make yourself laugh. You don't have to wait for a comedian to come along!"
author fun facts
Born: April 22, in New York City
Education: A one-room school in Cuba, 3 years at Columbia University
Currently lives: Brooklyn, New York
Previous jobs: Teacher, journalist
Favorite hobbies: playing piano
Inspiration for writing: The "idea" for a story, more often that not, is something discovered by the reader while the writer continues to try to explain to herself where it came from! I am impelled toward writing by love stories, by the demands of my own imagination. I have been especially interested in writing about children as they encounter the daily surprises of life, frequent periods of loneliness, the inexplicability of events and the feelings they evoke.