Four Girls Travelling in Time

by Liz Henry

These books aren’t new but they all feature girls travelling in time. In A Girl Called Boy by Belinda Hurmence, a girl on a road trip in the Appalachians with family and friends is extremely embarrassed when her parents refer to their ancestors who were slaves in that part of the world.

Blanche Overtha Yancey or “Boy”‘s eye-rolling and scoffing at her dad’s stone African charm leads to her going back 150 years to be barefoot in the snow with a couple of guys who are running away. She ends up working in the fields and living in slave cabins for a while, hearing tales of what must be her ancestors and family members, then being brought to work for a lady who treats her as a sort of pet. “Boy” struggles hard with the horrible conditions and with the trauma of losing her freedom. She deals with some very complicated issues & conflicting loyalties. All I can say is that here is one spoiled middle class teenager who comes back from time travel suddenly quite interested in the history of her brave ancestors & what her mom and dad have to tell her. A Girl Called Boy has been reprinted recently, so it’s easily available.

I re-read Andre Norton’s Octagon Magic and Lavender-Green Magic just afterwards. In Octagon Magic, an orphaned girl named Lorrie moves in with her aunt, and is shy and miserable in school, teased for being Canadian. She makes friends with two weird old ladies next door: Miss Ashmeade who teaches her fantastic embroidery, and Hallie who serves them both tea and gingerbread only to bustle back off to the kitchen. Guess which weird old lady is black. Despite Hallie’s apparent residency in the kitchen, she’s a pretty cool character. With powers emanating from embroidery, some magic dolls and an octagon-shaped dollhouse, Lorrie goes back 100+ years in time to watch either Miss Ashmeade or her ancestor and Hallie or *her* ancestor save some orphaned white kids, some runaway slaves in an Underground Railroad closet, and a wounded Confederate soldier who escaped from a Union prison camp and was being hunted by dogs. Meanwhile in her own time Lorrie learns how to make friends and with Miss Ashmeade’s help she engineers things so that she and her new friend Lisabeth, who is the only black girl in the class, get to be on the Valentine’s fund raising committee. That’s not even a spoiler, because you can see it coming a mile away and while it’s a bit sweet it’s also laughable and one wants Lisabeth to dye her hair bright green and tell the nasty racist middle school Valentine’s Committee to go right to hell.

In Lavender-Green Magic, Holly Wade and her siblings Judy and Crockett have to go live with their grandparents in rural New England, while their mom works a new job as a rest home nurse and their dad is missing in action in Vietnam. The grandparents Luther and Mercy live in a fixed-up barn that used to be part of the big house that burned down, and they run the town dump; Luther fixes up furniture and does light hauling, while Mercy has herb gardens and glues china together. Holly expects to be met with racism from the town of pretty much all white people and warns her sister from trusting anyone they meet at school — and she also is self-conscious of living out at the dump in a house that doesn’t even have running water or toilets.

Anyway, in that situation, Holly and Judy find a dream pillow with a maze embroidered on it that takes them back in time. They then also find the actual maze that used to belong to the Dimsdale family; at the center of the maze they talk to a Colonial era witch. Is she a good witch or a bad witch!? Uh-oh… one sister starts to be swayed and corrupted by power. The other one calls her on it, which makes for some interesting character development. Holly reads a bunch of local history for her school project to connect the happenings in the dreams and the maze with old letters and maps and documents. My favorite part of this book has got to be the Halloween costumes, where Judy dresses up like the magic witch’s cat, Crockett is a robot and wins the prize, and Holly wears a djellaba and brushes out her hair to be an African princess.

No one in the book actually acts racist which is a relief but makes Holly look a little bit unjustifiably suspicious, as if all she has to do to not suffer from racism is think good thoughts before she goes to sleep on her magic herbal dream pillow. My other conclusion from this book was that, as with The Three Investigators (Jupiter, Bob, and Pete: ???), living in the town dump would be incredibly awesome.

Here are two different book covers for Lavender-Green Magic:

The older illustration from the 70s is certainly beautiful and represents one of the witches in the book, but I really prefer to think of the new cover being in schools and bookstores and libraries, and hurray for changing times and publishers who are not chicken to put characters of color on the book cover especially when, as in Lavender-Green Magic, they’re the protagonist.

Now, after this diet of YA and time travel, I began thinking that someone could do a great syllabus based on time travel, race, and gender. Put Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Terry Bisson’s Fire in the Mountain with these 3 YA books, and you would get the core of a good class!

- More blogging by Liz Henry at http://liz-henry.blogspot.com

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