Book Review: The Well

Title: The Well

Author: Mildred D. Taylor

Date: 1995

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-05652-7

Length: 92 pages

Quote: “It is David’s story, but…it becomes Cassie’s and her brothers’ too.”

In other words, it’s part of the Logan family saga. The fictional Logan family, based on Mildred Taylor’s own family, are Black landowners in segregated Mississippi. They constantly confront racism, yet they always know they’re better off than some people because they have their land and their unity as a family.

David Logan is the father of Cassie and Stacey and their little brothers. Though it was the sixth volume published in the saga, it takes place before Cassie and Stacey are born, while David is a middle school boy.

Because the Logan family saga is child-focussed, publishers and teachers have made what I consider the mistake of marketing it to children. Children can read Taylor’s words; children can certainly relate to the Simms and Logan children’s family feud. The trouble is that children don’t see how that lively, funny, childish feuding perpetuates the nastier grown-up hate that maintains the hostile atmosphere and carries it down to future generations. Most children’s stories are written by adults, and many are more about the adult characters than they are about the children and would be better read by other adults. The Logan family saga fit that description more than average. A story about how children learn all about stocks and bonds, and sort out those of Great-Grandpa’s certificates that turn out to be worth just the amount of money their parents need, may bore child readers; a story about how children act out their parents’ mutual resentments can lead child readers astray.

Kids love it when Cassie and Stacey enhance that puddle the hateful bus driver likes to speed through just to splash them. They love it when Cassie beats up Lillian Jean Simms. They love it when Hammer Logan knocks Charlie Simms down, too, as any good brother would. Serves those bullies right! Yessss! Kids relate to the frustration David and Hammer feel when Charlie finds a way to get revenge, and relish the punishment Charlie’s father gives him…but in the end everybody loses the benefit of the well. Kids do not necessarily understand that Charlie’s frustrated ego is still seeking revenge when the grown-up Charlie Simms has opportunities to show hate to the Logan children and their little friends; that David is still paying for Hammer’s having defended him when Charlie pushes Cassie off the sidewalk. From a ten-year-old’s viewpoint the lesson The Well teaches is that Charlie is a jerk, and needs to be knocked down harder and more often.

For adults the Logan family stories are excellent—well written, fact-based stories that explain why so many Black Americans are so unfriendly to so many of the White Americans who now long to have Black friends, and also deserve to outlive our generation as true stories about why hostility and revenge never make things better.

For children—I am afraid—the Logan family saga are just one more of the punches children feel Charlie Simms needs, one more act of revenge, one more brick in the wall. Neither David nor Cassie ever meets one of the White adults who actually want to make things better, at this period, like the ones who sent Joycelyn Elders to medical school. That happened; it’s history. But in these books it’s not balanced with any awareness on the Logans’ part that they happen to have particularly bad neighbors. The Logans all grow up feeling, as Stacey puts it in Let the Circle Be Unbroken, you “can’t love nobody White, and don’t ever try.” So the history is one-sided, and though White children can and do empathize with the Logan children’s instincts (and ability) to hit back, they take away from this kind of one-sided history the message that the fight is still going on. I remember the bus story in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry as a positive inspiration to a peaceful protest my schoolmates and I were doing about our own bus system; child readers do not have to be Black to identify with the Logan children. But it wouldn’t surprise me if some child readers took the Logan stories as a positive inspiration to go out and beat up a schoolmate in the other color category.

So I would advise parents and teachers: Do not buy the Logan stories for your children, even though some of them look like picture books to read aloud to preschoolers. Do not make these stories required reading at school. Do read these stories, yourselves, and when the children want to read them, talk about them with the children. Discuss how the personal hostilities just keep going on and going on. Discuss ways people have actually made things better, instead of perpetuating the feuds. Read the true stories. White Americans need to read Black American history; if you are White, let the Logan family saga provoke you to read the facts.