Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis

Elijah of Buxton / Christopher Paul Curtis.— New York : Scholastic, 2007. Scheduled for publication in October 2007.

ISBN: 9780439023443

Elijah Freeman was the first child born free in Canada. His other claim to fame was that, as an infant, he had thrown up on Frederick Douglass while the famous orator was visiting the settlement of former slaves in Buxton, Ontario. Buxton is right across the river from Detroit. It’s 1859 and eleven-year-old Elijah sometimes finds it hard to understand how some words or ways of talking will make his elders fly into an unexpected rage. It’s because he’s never known slavery. He can see the physical scars that it’s left on many of the adults, but he can’t see the emotional ones, until an unplanned trip to Michigan gives him a frightening first-hand view.

Curtis’s always strong sense of humor and his ability to accurately see and report from a child’s point of view makes Elijah of Buxton by turns laugh-out-loud funny and icily frightening, with a bright bit of Hope at the end of the tale.

1. Freedom -- Fiction. 2. Slavery -- Fiction. 3. Blacks -- Canada -- Fiction. 4. North Buxton (Ont.) -- Fiction. 5. Canada -- Fiction.

813.54