Toning the Sweep, by Angela Johnson

I really enjoyed Toning the Sweep by Angela Johnson. The writing was so fresh, not flowery, and told the story of loss without getting melodramatic. I liked how Johnson didn't start by laying out the painful histories of the characters; instead, she let us get to know them naturally. We got the first impression of their personalities and then slowly were given more and more backstory from others and later information straight from them as they talked to the camera. I like how this didn't completely define the characters by the losses they've experienced. Instead, it was set up so those losses were clearly shown as parts of them but certainly not the whole. As the story progresses, the mother-daughter relationship grows, and it's hard to tell if the characters were changing or being revealed, or some combination of the two.
Part of this story that I thought was interesting was the need for ceremony and ritual. David talks about the ceremony of the powwow, and there's the toning the sweep to ring the grandfather to heaven. The fandango Ola and Roland danced also seemed like a ceremony; as Margaret says, "It's a celebration dance. A dance of life." I think it's true of all of us that we have ceremonies and rituals for all parts of life as our way of recognizing our beginning, transitioning, ending, continuing, etc...I automatically think of graduation ceremonies, funerals and wakes, picture taking at every first and last event, and...the dance of joy. This was something we did once in my family. We are definitely not dancers. However, we got some news about my dad getting a job her really wanted, and we all we uncontainable in our glee, so we got up and danced in circles all over the living room. I'd like to think that was a ritual, though it was spontaneous and never repeated. I think it sprang out of a desire to mark the moment, the transition, the shared feeling we had about the good news. Maybe that's really all any of our rituals come out of.

In teaching this book, I'd like to look into loss and ritual somehow. I could do some journaling, webquesting, and discussion activities that ask students to think about how they mark significant life events - what are their own rituals? I guess this feels a lot like our Dogsong ideas for students comparing their own coming of age to the inuit culture's.

I'd also like to have the students do a shift chart about the characters, so they can tangibly see the change that takes place in them. Students would describe characters when they first start reading, and do it again near the end of the book, so they can see the change.

One thing I don't want to leave unaddressed in this book is the racism that was part of Grandpa's death. Johnson describes mama as more angry at African Americans who were content with segregation than at the white people who had actually killed her father. I notice Johnson was also careful to not make racism the main focus of the book, and I'd like to explore her reasons for these two choices. I think it could make some good discussion, asking why she did this and also asking "who is worse - those who do evil or those who stand by and let it happen?" I think someone used that question in their Number the Stars unit ideas...if we had read that book earlier in the year in my hypothetical class, we could definitely provoke some discussion by drawing comparisons between the doers and stand-byers in both Nazi Germany, segregated America in the past, and elsewhere in history and in the present day. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of this in world events as well as everyday situations. History repeats itself, and we're not excluded.

(above: Joshua tree at Joshua Tree National Park, CA.)