By Jane Yolen
October 1492 from the beach: a Taíno boy watches three ships come in, tries to tell his elders these men are dangerous, and is not listened to.
A boy on the island his people call Guanahani dreams of three great birds riding the sea, and wakes up frightened. Then the birds are really there, and men come out of them, pale, with hair on their faces and cloth on their bodies. The chief welcomes them, because that is what you do, and there is a feast. The boy is the only one who won't go near. He watches their eyes. He notices that when a man wears gold, the strangers look at the gold and not at the man. He tries to say so and he's told he's a child and to be quiet. The strangers take some of the young men onto the ships as a gift, and he is one of them, and out at sea he understands what is happening and goes over the side and swims. He gets home. He goes island to island for years telling people what is coming and nobody believes him either. He tells you all this as an old man, and by then his people are gone, and their tongue is gone, and even his own name is gone, and he asks you to be careful about who you welcome.
Every child in an American classroom has already been handed the version where three ships arrive and the story starts. This book puts them on the sand looking out, before anything happens, with someone who is about to lose everything and doesn't know it yet. That reversal does something a lesson can't: your child spends the whole book knowing more than the narrator and less than the ending, and comes out understanding that the same event has two shapes depending on where you were standing. It also gives them a Taíno boy as a person with a mind and an argument, which the textbook page does not.