Goin' Someplace Special, by Patricia C. McKissack and Illustrations by Jerry Pinkney - Historical Fiction

What a delight to read! I was tearing up by the end of the book. Goin’ Someplace Special is a historical fiction picturebook that is set in the segregated past of Nashville, Tennessee. ‘Tricia Ann feels like she is old enough to go to a place that she affectionately calls “Someplace Special” by herself, today, without her Mama Frances with her. She so looks forward to this place and getting there, but along the way she is faced with the hatred and ignorance that some showed during the segregation time period. ‘Tricia Ann has to sit in the “Colored Only” section of the bus, she isn’t allowed to sit on a bench in a park for it is reserved for “white’s only”, and when she accidentally gets pushed into a hotel lobby, she is publicly humiliated by the hotel matron because black people are not allowed in the hotel unless they are workers. With all of the humiliation and disappointment disrupting her at one time joyful attitude, the reader is continuously left wondering what makes the “Someplace Special” so special. I wanted to comfort the poor girl and yell at the ignorant people along the way who dared to disrupt her happiness. Yet, the reader is not disappointed at the end to find that the “Someplace Special” that ‘Trisha Ann has been trying to get to is a library, where everyone can go and read.

My heart was breaking for little ‘Trisha Ann, who had gotten herself all beautified for this little outing. She was so excited about going to a special place on her own and met with so much injustice and unfairness along the way. The last picture of the book, with her looking up with so much expectation pulled at my heart. I know, through that look of her’s and the library sign that reads PUBLIC LIBRARY: ALL ARE WELCOME, that she will finally get the respect that she deserves. How very fitting that a house of knowledge, a library (one of my favorite places in the world) was one of the first places to desegregate in a peaceful manner and allow ALL people to enter in the late 1950s! I love it!

I learned something from this book that I must share with my students and with other friends, Nashville, Tennessee’s public library board of directors decided to integrate all of their facilities long before the rest of the city had. That just shows that not all white people were ignorant and filled with the stupidity of hatred that unfortunately the majority of the city must have been filled with! The author of this book actually wrote the story from her own perspective, remembering her own trips to the library, where she was welcome, despite what her skin color was. She wrote a quote in the Author’s Note that gives me goosebumps, “…reading is the doorway to freedom” (pg. 32, McKissack, 2001). How very true!