"Used to be a time when there was no music on the planet," imagines Williams (And in the Beginning). But Imani, an African grasshopper, plays so sweetly that the Ancestors agree to give him the gift of song: "A wallop of tune fell on Imani, and the world soaked up the rest like a sponge." As the grasshopper travels across Africa, singing and playing, he meets Umoja, a weaver who plays the flute. When slave traders capture Umoja (and Imani with him), the man is chained while Imani escapes notice. What can he do? "Do not cry…. Busy yourself with what you can do. Give us music! Give us hope!" Umoja tells him. In the new land, Imani finds a wife, Hope (she translates Imani's name as Faith), and teaches his children to sing, but he never again finds Umoja. Slaves in the new world learn Imani's songs, too. "Sometimes they sang them bittersweet, but they always sang on!" Daly's (Gift of the Sun) diminutive figures move through rolling landscapes of ocher earth and lapis sky; their very smallness suggests lives lived within nature, not in opposition to it. Even the menacing slave ships are dwarfed by the unchanging horizons of sea and sky. Both a eulogy for the lost freedom of countless captives and a celebration of the land from which they came, Williams's moving tale never skips a beat. Ages 6-9. (Jan.)
