Bass Reeves

Gill (Strange Fruit) launches the Tales of the Talented Tenth series, about notable figures in African-American history, with an entry outlining the life of Bass Reeves, among the first black Deputy U.S. Marshals. Over seven chapters, Gill skillfully shifts (and draws parallels) between Reeves’s childhood as a slave and his adult service as a marshal; two hard-hitting motifs are a menacing, avian Jim Crow figure and a pickaninny caricature, the latter used as a rebus-style replacement for racial epithets in the dialogue. Gill’s artwork is proficient, though as a biography, the book is uneven. Reeves meets and marries his wife in the space of four panels (she’s never named), and Reeves’s “most difficult arrest”—that of his own son, wanted for murdering his wife—is resolved quickly and with little emotion. (A scene in which Reeves cuts the rope of a man being hanged by a lynch mob, only to bring the man, accused of stealing a horse, to jail, serves as more powerful evidence of Reeves’s deep-seated sense of justice.) A bibliography is included for readers seeking to learn more about Reeves. Ages 12–up. (Nov.)■