![]() ![]() ![]() She worries about the sixth grade dance, since it’s going to mean “trying to match steps with boys she’s slugged.” She makes a conscious decision to stop buying teen magazines like Tiger Beat and Seventeen after she realizes she never sees a face that looks like hers on the cover. Revolutions are everywhere, Delphine is learning. “By the end of the Olympic Games, those same athletes left the stadium with a new flag and a new name: Zambia,” Mr. ![]() He tells the class that four years earlier his country’s athletes went to the Olympics as “North Rhodesians,” while there was a revolution under way at home. The teacher Delphine was so looking forward to getting for sixth grade has traded places with a teacher from Africa, who shares lots of eye-opening information about the world at large. Big Ma’s frequent stern warnings about “not making a Negro spectacle” of yourselves, now sounds like “oppression” to girls who spent summer vacation having their political consciousness raised. Her father is now romantically involved with a woman his mother, Big Ma, doesn’t like. The Gaither sisters – Delphine, who narrates their story, Vonetta, and Fern - are returning to Brooklyn after spending the summer of 1968 with their (formerly) estranged mother, Cecile, a poet who lives in Oakland, California and is active in the Black Panther Party.ĭelphine, the oldest, is eager to begin school, but like society in general in the late 1960s, change and conflict are reshaping the contours of her life. ![]()
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