By Patricia Polacco
Patricia Polacco's own family story: two teenage Union soldiers, one Black and one white, and a friendship the Civil War does not spare.
Say, a white teenage Union soldier, is shot and left for dead in a field. Pink, a Black soldier who was born into slavery and is now fighting with a Black regiment, finds him and carries him back to his mother, Moe Moe Bay. She nurses Say back to health, and the two boys grow as close as brothers. But this is the real Civil War, and it doesn't spare them. Confederate marauders kill Moe Moe Bay. The boys are captured, and because Pink is Black he is taken to the Andersonville prison camp and hanged there within hours. Patricia Polacco tells it because Say was her own great-great-grandfather, and she's handing it down the way it reached her.
This is where the unit stops treating slavery and the war as something abstract and puts a face on what they cost. It's a picture book, but it belongs at the very top of the age band, not below it. It earns that place because it's true and because it won't hand you a comforting ending. In a classroom it makes the human stakes real, and it opens honest talk about the racism Black soldiers faced inside the Union army and about who was expected to do the dying.