Rolling Out Ideas on Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Alright, ladies and gents, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for the brain dump.  The novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, has a lot of possible ways that it can relate to a project about using new platforms such as Goodreads and Amazon to read and study.  I have quite a few different ways that I could go with this book, so I’ll give a brief overview of it for those of you who aren’t familiar, throw out some potential ideas for an angle, and then I am DEFINITELY open to suggestions on which are hot and which are not.

First off, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a young adult book based in the Deep South back when all the Jim Crow laws were being enacted and racism was pretty heavy.  The story is told by Cassie, a little black girl, and all of the events are through her innocent, naïve perspective.  There is a big focus on land in the story, because her family owns their own and that is something that sets them apart from the other black families in their neighborhood.  She makes friends with a few of the white children, but is discouraged from doing so by her parents.  One of her older friends, also black, gets involved with the white teenage boys and pays a heavy price for it.  Ok, that’s a reallyyyyy brief summary.

A few ideas:

• ·         The obvious racism.  Comparing the lack of acceptance of new ways to garner information (social media, online, etc.) in favor of traditionally-held methods to the white dominance over the suppressed black culture.
• ·         Land.  It would be interesting to discuss property rights with this one, for example, comparing the dependence and love that Cassie’s family has for their land to the need that authors have to maintain ownership over their works.  Piracy and illegal downloading of material could be compared to the ease with which white people usurped the land legally owned by their black neighbors.
• ·         Cassie’s point of view.  Cassie is a child who grew up in a world where people told her that things were a certain way, but her own experiences told her otherwise.  This could be compared to our generation, who were taught as children how to use traditional methods, but automatically sort of transitioned into the digital era.  The things that we were once told would “rot our brains” are now our most powerful resource. (Compare to Cassie’s friendship with the white children)
• ·         TJ, her older friend, getting too far ahead of himself and paying the price for it.  This could go with some social media platforms getting too big too fast and becoming difficult to control. (This one is a stretch, I know, but just roll with me because it has potential in my head, sort of.)  This would probably have to be against Goodreads and Amazon, discussing the potential dangers about trusting everything to the digital and forgetting what we know to be “safe.”

Ok friends, that’s all that I have so far.  I hope that they made sense!  Things will develop more along the way, but here are a few starting points!