Seminole Diary: Remembrances of a Slave

Inspired by the author's research for Now Let Me Fly: The Story of a Slave Family , this is an equally trenchant tale. An African American woman and her daughter find the diary of an ancestor named Libbie. In simple dialect, the girl's entries relate how, in 1834, she, her father and her sister, Clarissa, joined other plantation slaves to run away from a cruel master. They encounter a group of Seminole Indians (with ``skin the color of walnuts, dressed in feathers, beads, and silver'') who are willing to give them land to farm and who treat them ``like brothers,'' even though the runaways, as protection from slave catchers, are technically the tribe's slaves. Though Libbie mourns her estrangement from Clarissa, who is taken in by a woman who has lost her own daughter, life is tranquil until the government forces the Seminoles to move to a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory. Libbie and her father accompany them, but Clarissa flees to Florida with her adoptive Seminole family. ``I will probably never see my little sister . . . again,'' writes Libbie, closing her diary with the melancholy words, ``There is nothing more I can say.'' Johnson's softly focused, vividly hued paintings affectingly illustrate this emotion-charged account of a little-known chapter in American history. Ages 5-8. (Sept.)