TROUBLED WATERS

The Alabama River tells its story—a tale as long and wide as the waterway itself.

Reminiscent of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers, illustrated by E.B. Lewis (2009), this elegantly wrought, first-person telling is both human and natural history. Lines from Negro spirituals that sing of rivers, like “Wade in the Water,” appear between Weatherford’s stanzas in a scriptlike font. The Alabama describes its size (“318 miles long, fifty to 200 yards wide, / and from three to forty feet deep”) and notes that its Choctaw name means “Thicket Clearers.” It also recalls enslaved Africans hiding in its waters as they sought freedom and the Cherokee people who passed its banks on the Trail of Tears. Throughout, Collier’s signature collage illustrations add richness, depth, hope, and light to the river’s weighty story. Weatherford never flinches from the horrors of oppression: victims of lynching thrown into the river, civil rights protesters beaten as they made their way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. But Collier’s paintings emphasize Black and Native Americans’ determination to survive and triumph. The inclusion of blue spheres—a motif that pops up in many of the illustrator’s works—suggests that the downtrodden, like air bubbles, will rise. Weatherford’s extensive historical timeline will give budding historians much to consider and research further.

A gorgeously illustrated, truthfully told history that no collection should be without.