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Willow's Secrets
In the starving years after the Civil War, a girl is born in the northern hills of Alabama. The mother dies, and the heart-broken grandmother gives the precious child to strangers to raise as their own. Rambunctious and inquisitive, the little girl wants to "know everything." Yet she finds herself surrounded by secrets. Who can she ask? Who can she tell?
246 pages, Paperback
Published September 21, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 14, 2020
We should all know Willow’s Secrets: Bermanzohn releases sequel to Indian Annie
Anne Pyburn Craig
BSP Reviewer
Looking only at the surface, history can seem like an alien land. But beneath the changing technologies and fashions, some things are always familiar. Family drama. Fear of the unknown. Love. In Willow’s Secrets, Sally Avery Bermanzohn’s heroine tells us a life story with a timeless resonance and relevance.
First of all, some things about the experience of being five or six years old haven’t changed and won’t. It’s the time of life when we first become consciously aware of the dynamics of our families and neighborhoods, when we place ourselves in a wider context as if unfolding a map that’s marked “You Are Here.” It’s when we start decoding the wider world and trying to figure out the inevitable blank spots on the map we’ve been handed.
Willow is a lively and curious-minded little girl growing up with her grampa and mama in the Alabama hills, in the rough and lean years that followed the Civil War. They’re farmers, working as a team with the next-door neighbors when it’s time to get the harvest in; sometimes there’s enough and sometimes there isn’t, but Willow’s world is a warm, safe place because her grownups are kind and wise.
Gradually she becomes aware that the wider world doesn’t always work that way. A grownup friend confides to her that he’s an Indian, telling her she needs to keep it secret. Her best friend Molly Henry, the slightly older girl next door, is the one who figures out how Willow -- who can never keep still -- can best be taught to read, which works like a charm. But when Grampa takes her on a supply run to the big town where the library is, Molly can’t come along, because the library is only for white people.
In a truly delicious irony, Grampa and Willow have borrowed the Henry family’s wagon to get to the big town in the first place. They have to, because newly-widowed Grampa is still recouping the family resources that he blew on a convincing floozy who ended up ripping them off.
“Whites only” is also what it really means when, at the groundbreaking for a new one-room schoolhouse, the “government man” announces that the school will be run in accordance with the laws of the state of Alabama. Being other than white is pretty much illegal. A schoolhouse needs to be built because Union forces burnt the old one to the ground ten years earlier; tensions still boil between those of differing sympathies, the same tensions that led to the killings of Mama’s husband and Grampa’s sixteen-year-old son.
Yet none of this -- not the gut wrenching tragedy the grownups have endured, not the pervasive bigotry and certainly not the incursion of the floozy -- is enough to make Willow’s childhood miserable or even close. Neither is the fact that she’s well aware that Mama Rose is not her birth mother. She is loved and learning to read and grow things and watching the polliwogs is what matters. “That war was a terrible thing,” Mama tells her. “But then you came along and made me very happy.”
So it’s through Willow’s clear eyes and fair mind that we see the news of the day unfolding. Her brother Thomas, away at school in Birmingham, comes home strange and grouchy -- well, he is 13 after all -- and spewing bigotry. Mama, Grampa and Molly help Willow sort it out, just as she sorts out the weirdness of a segregated school and the fact that only white men get to vote. None of it’s remotely right, and yet none of it is allowed to take either the point or the joy out of being alive. Some secrets, sadly, are matters of life and death and must be kept.
Willow’s fair minded narration lends an intimacy to the events of that time, as the lunacy that some like to pretend we’ve outgrown impacts her choices and the people she loves. She watches as Molly outgrows their tiny town of Pine Hill where she’s not allowed to go to school. She learns the story of her birth mother’s death at the hands of the KKK. She herself is sexually assaulted. Bad things happen to good people, but -- as has been true for thousands of years -- don’t define them.
Dr. Bermanzohn, a Rondout Valley resident, knows a bit about that. With her husband Paul, she lived through the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which KKK and American Nazis gunned down five people. Before and since, she has devoted her life’s work to helping humans understand one another. Her young adult novels, Indian Annie and Willow’s Secrets, are seamlessly part of that work.
Yet in dealing with such serious matters, she deftly avoids the pitfalls of either preaching or writing down to her audience. The world created in these tales is vivid and lovely; the people are nuanced and the tales themselves are lively, uplifting without a trace of smarm. Any parent or teacher who wants to help the next generation understand how the world -- and particularly these United States -- got to where we are now will find pure gold assistance in Annie and Willow’s stories. But do read them yourself before the kids get the pages schmeary, because like Indian Annie, Willow’s Secrets is first and foremost a really great read.
Anne Pyburn Craig
BSP Reviewer
Looking only at the surface, history can seem like an alien land. But beneath the changing technologies and fashions, some things are always familiar. Family drama. Fear of the unknown. Love. In Willow’s Secrets, Sally Avery Bermanzohn’s heroine tells us a life story with a timeless resonance and relevance.
First of all, some things about the experience of being five or six years old haven’t changed and won’t. It’s the time of life when we first become consciously aware of the dynamics of our families and neighborhoods, when we place ourselves in a wider context as if unfolding a map that’s marked “You Are Here.” It’s when we start decoding the wider world and trying to figure out the inevitable blank spots on the map we’ve been handed.
Willow is a lively and curious-minded little girl growing up with her grampa and mama in the Alabama hills, in the rough and lean years that followed the Civil War. They’re farmers, working as a team with the next-door neighbors when it’s time to get the harvest in; sometimes there’s enough and sometimes there isn’t, but Willow’s world is a warm, safe place because her grownups are kind and wise.
Gradually she becomes aware that the wider world doesn’t always work that way. A grownup friend confides to her that he’s an Indian, telling her she needs to keep it secret. Her best friend Molly Henry, the slightly older girl next door, is the one who figures out how Willow -- who can never keep still -- can best be taught to read, which works like a charm. But when Grampa takes her on a supply run to the big town where the library is, Molly can’t come along, because the library is only for white people.
In a truly delicious irony, Grampa and Willow have borrowed the Henry family’s wagon to get to the big town in the first place. They have to, because newly-widowed Grampa is still recouping the family resources that he blew on a convincing floozy who ended up ripping them off.
“Whites only” is also what it really means when, at the groundbreaking for a new one-room schoolhouse, the “government man” announces that the school will be run in accordance with the laws of the state of Alabama. Being other than white is pretty much illegal. A schoolhouse needs to be built because Union forces burnt the old one to the ground ten years earlier; tensions still boil between those of differing sympathies, the same tensions that led to the killings of Mama’s husband and Grampa’s sixteen-year-old son.
Yet none of this -- not the gut wrenching tragedy the grownups have endured, not the pervasive bigotry and certainly not the incursion of the floozy -- is enough to make Willow’s childhood miserable or even close. Neither is the fact that she’s well aware that Mama Rose is not her birth mother. She is loved and learning to read and grow things and watching the polliwogs is what matters. “That war was a terrible thing,” Mama tells her. “But then you came along and made me very happy.”
So it’s through Willow’s clear eyes and fair mind that we see the news of the day unfolding. Her brother Thomas, away at school in Birmingham, comes home strange and grouchy -- well, he is 13 after all -- and spewing bigotry. Mama, Grampa and Molly help Willow sort it out, just as she sorts out the weirdness of a segregated school and the fact that only white men get to vote. None of it’s remotely right, and yet none of it is allowed to take either the point or the joy out of being alive. Some secrets, sadly, are matters of life and death and must be kept.
Willow’s fair minded narration lends an intimacy to the events of that time, as the lunacy that some like to pretend we’ve outgrown impacts her choices and the people she loves. She watches as Molly outgrows their tiny town of Pine Hill where she’s not allowed to go to school. She learns the story of her birth mother’s death at the hands of the KKK. She herself is sexually assaulted. Bad things happen to good people, but -- as has been true for thousands of years -- don’t define them.
Dr. Bermanzohn, a Rondout Valley resident, knows a bit about that. With her husband Paul, she lived through the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which KKK and American Nazis gunned down five people. Before and since, she has devoted her life’s work to helping humans understand one another. Her young adult novels, Indian Annie and Willow’s Secrets, are seamlessly part of that work.
Yet in dealing with such serious matters, she deftly avoids the pitfalls of either preaching or writing down to her audience. The world created in these tales is vivid and lovely; the people are nuanced and the tales themselves are lively, uplifting without a trace of smarm. Any parent or teacher who wants to help the next generation understand how the world -- and particularly these United States -- got to where we are now will find pure gold assistance in Annie and Willow’s stories. But do read them yourself before the kids get the pages schmeary, because like Indian Annie, Willow’s Secrets is first and foremost a really great read.
March 3, 2020
I enjoyed following the lives of each character Such a real story It’s a story you can’t put down
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews