Today, TeachingBooks.net welcomes author Tony Abbott as he stops by on his blog tour to discuss his new book Lunch-Box Dream (Frances Foster Books/FSG, 2011).
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Lunch-Box Dream is a story of two families during one week in June 1959. A white family—two brothers, their mother, and their grandmother—drives south from Ohio, visiting Civil War battlefields along the way. Simultaneously, a black family in Atlanta sends their young boy to visit relatives in a smaller town outside that city. These two stories aim toward each other, crossing only at a bus station at the end of the book. I’ve never liked spoilers, so I won’t say more than that, but the book explores family life and racism and is based on memories of a trip I took when my family lived in Cleveland.
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Tony Abbott, his brother, and grandmother.
Photo courtesy of Tony Abbott, 2011
The first hurdle I had to jump was the basic one of how to tell the story. I was young during that original trip, and what I saw of Jim Crow in action (primarily in Georgia) did not tell a full story even though it was powerful in memory. It was one-sided, thin, accurate only as a reflection of my family and myself. When I chanced to read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, it struck me that multiple viewpoints might be the way to tell my story. Fragmented memory could be made whole by invention: imagining the other side of what I saw—the black people involved in the scenes I remember, and allowing them to tell it. Thus, the Thomas family was born. From that point on, I wrote fairly fiercely over a period of several months.
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Perryville Battlefield, Perryville, Kentucky
Photo courtesy of Tony Abbott, 2011
Besides discussing the trip with my mother, whose memories abetted my own, research included reading dozens of books — novels, history, biography — to help create the new threads of story. I then consulted the Cleveland and Atlanta newspapers for the week in June when the trip took place. I found complete runs at the University of Connecticut, where I went to school. Delightfully, my wife and I were able to drive the fifty-year-old route; my mother had actually saved the AAA TripTik prepared for her in 1959. This half-century old relic sits in my office now. Driving the older roads (since overtaken by highways) and revisiting the battlegrounds added a depth of realism to descriptions of the journey south.
Finding the right editor and publisher enabled all the work to come together in a way that I’m so proud of. I’ve now started discussing Lunch-Box Dream with social studies teachers, history teachers, language teachers, all looking for fresh ways to talk with their students about the Civil Rights era. I couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.
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