(3) K-3 Illustrated by Rod Brown. The author recalls her father telling the story of how her famous grandfather, the singer Paul Robeson (1898–1976), "stopped a war." In 1938, his singing for the soldiers on the front lines of Teruel temporarily halted the Spanish Civil War ("The battlefield grew silent. No shots were fired"). The story's humanity is underscored with paintings by a sure hand.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(2) 4-6 Illustrated by Rod Brown. This collection begins with a man in a cotton field and ends with three newly free African Americans in Canada. Shange's poems are filled with a sense of urgency; most of the paintings are dark, and Brown effectively uses dabs of white to convey a sense of danger (moonlight reflected off the shirt of a runaway, making him visible to trackers, for example).

Reviewer: Kathleen T. Horning | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2012

(4) 4-6 Illustrated by Rod Brown. Eighteen varied poems, including "Booker T. Washington School, 1941" and "Heah Y'all Come" ("now the children run freely / toward each other / knowin no fears of the other") provide impressions of the U.S. civil rights movement. The accompanying paintings range from uplifting (e.g., protest marchers, arms linked) to unflinching in their depiction of violence against African Americans.

Reviewer: Nell Beram

(3) 4-6 The plight of Africans from capture to auction to freedom is told in expressive paintings and a powerful, thought-provoking text. An introduction explains how Lester wrote the text as a personal response to Brown's paintings and that he found himself addressing the reader, "begging, pleading, imploring you not to be passive, but to invest soul and imagine yourself in the images." A list of paintings is appended.

Reviewer: The Horn Book, Inc.