Mildred B. Taylor, The Land

Mildred B. Taylor's 'The Land' is a nice book, I recommend that you read it!

Mildred B. Taylor's 'The Land' is a wonderfully woven tale of growing up and pursuing one's dream, set in reconstruction southern states, this well written text explores the angst of a half white, black and native American young man, Paul Logan. Taylor blends the extensive oral traditions of her own family into the story without biasing the text with preachy politics. Instead, she craftily demonstrates Paul as an an open-minded bright young man who faces the startling and painful discoveries of prejudice in his own family and inequality in the eyes of the law. Paul's tale is told within the parameters of a bildungsroman, or novel of education. Universally, the novel extolls the virtues of education as the best tool with which to operate and succeed in a biased and prejudiced world. While the novel could have fallen easily into the direction of demonizing and creating caricatures of all whites and blacks, Taylor masterfully transcends that facile temptation and instead makes this novel for adolescents a primer of human psychology and an invitation to examine one's own excluding tendencies. Taylor leads Paul through Jim Crow southern bias in a first person narrative tale that includes teen rebellion and resentment, innocence lost, love and friendships, anger and alienation, and throughout a sublime attraction to nature as the healing balm and relief from the constant yearning for freedom and need to establish one's stand in an indifferent and unjust world. The Land resonates across generations and cultures because it brilliantly simplifies and makes concrete the ideas of John Locke: life, liberty, and estate (land), which one hundred years later would be translated into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Paul pursues his happiness despite his unhappy journey to acquire land and create his estate. A down-to-earth yarn, this satisfying read reinforces Taylor's reputation as one of our great writers for children and adults. Paul's personal journey puts a face on the history of the time it reflects. She creates passages that resemble the best of Twain and Harper Lee. Readers get a glimpse into the architecture of racial prejudice that has taken as many years to resolve as it did to build the system of economy that relied upon it. Without endorsing that system and the slave trade that fed it, Taylor gives us an understanding of the aftermath of the civil war from the perspective of slaves who toiled on the plantations, those who had owned them, and, in the case of Paul, those who were created by the unlikely union of slave owners and their slaves. Paul, who fits in neither world perfectly, completes his journey to acquire "the land". Taylor makes that acquisition a purchase that transcends the gorgeous terrain of Hollenbeck's land that Paul buys; Paul comes to reside comfortably in the terrain of human potential through his pain, joy, love, and education as a human being. He pursues that happy destination with strength of character, intellectual and social intelligence. Taylor succeeds in creating a moral hero in a landscape of difficult social institutions.