Twenty years ago they were doing a picture book biography of Satchel Paige and they haven’t stopped since. They’re not newbies by any stretch of the imagination. These guys have been making children’s books for years and years and years. Something happened to Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome. Dream until they arrive in New York City, “bright lights tall buildings shimmering against a sky bright as a hundred North Stars.” All the while they eat the food packed for them, listen to Ruth Ellen read from her book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and dream of the future. In the North they move to seats farther back in the train. On the train they get some seats for a journey that’s going to be long. Joining throngs of other people on the trains, going North. “We left in secret before Daddy’s boss knew.” Just the three of them with just a couple of bags, leaving everyone and everything they’ve ever known. It’s early in the morning when they leave. It hands them people they can get to know and care about. This book hands young readers not just specifics. Historical events like The Great Migration are vague. No series of rote facts, Overground Railroad puts you in the shoes of the ordinary people that had to leave everything and everyone they knew in search of a better life. I don’t do it even though I am simultaneously seething with jealousy over all the opportunities for a fuller education they’re getting while, at the same time, feeling so pleased that books like this one are being published. Now that I have children of my own to whom I can read books like Overground Railroad by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome, it is taking all my restraint not to punctuate every other page of this book with little asides like, “Do you kids know how lucky you are to even have books like this right now?” and “Are you fully appreciating how much better your sense of history is going to be than mine ever was?” I am good. Heck, I only got the most superfluous smattering of information about the Underground Railroad, and most of that was due to Virginia Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear, but I digress. Pretty much I can guarantee that unless you were part of the slightest sliver of students, odds are back in the day you had never heard of the Overground Railroad or The Great Migration. Now I don’t care how amazing your education was in the 1980s. But of course the unspoken suggestion there is that this is history we never learned in school. The standard joke amongst children’s librarians is that we learn most of our American history through children’s books.
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