By Jacqueline Woodson
A fence runs through a town and keeps the Black side and the white side apart, and one summer two girls work out that nobody ever said they couldn't sit on top of it.
Clover's mama tells her not to climb over the fence, and never really says why, only that it isn't safe. On the other side there's a white girl, Annie, who stands in the rain watching. All summer Clover watches back. Clover's friends won't let Annie play. Then Clover notices the loophole every child would notice: they were told not to cross the fence, and nobody said one word about sitting on it. So the two of them sit up there, side by side, legs hanging, and by the end of the summer the other girls climb up too. It's spare and quiet, maybe two hundred words, and E. B. Lewis's watercolors do half the talking.
It's the gentlest way in on this shelf, and the one a six-year-old can hold. Segregation arrives as a thing your child already understands completely: a fence, and a rule about it that nobody will explain. There's no history lesson and no villain, and Woodson never says the word racism. She just puts two girls on either side of a line drawn by grown-ups and lets your child feel how stupid the line is. That's why it works even for a child who has no idea what segregation was, and why it still lands for one who does.