Along with From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea I picked up Surrounded: America’s First School for Black Girls, 1832 from the library to help (hopefully) re-set my reading brain. This is a graphic novel in translation (originally written and published in French) which is focuses in on a more unknown bit of American history. I feel comfortable calling it such as this is one of my general areas and this school and the court cases surrounding it had missed me, even though Crandall v. State (of Connecticut) was one of the first civil rights case in U.S. history and would be influential in Dred Scott v. Sandford and Brown v. Board of Education.
This is my second Wilfrid Lupano (following last year’s A Sea of Love) and I felt comfortable with his style of storytelling and Stéphane Fert’s illustrations caught my eye immediately. The book tells the story, as the subtitle suggests, of the Canterbury, Connecticut girl’s boarding school run by Prudence Crandall that in 1832 transitioned to being a school for black girls and the incessant pushback it received which necessitated court cases to defend the school’s right to exist, and the girl’s right to education. The story focuses on the girls who attended the school and how the social and political climate following Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831 was felt throughout the country and served as cover for the violence visited upon the school for the two years of its existence.
There are multiple threads of story here, and some are more balanced than others. I also had some trouble with the pacing (but that could be an adult reading a book aimed at grades 7-10). There is a subplot with a woman who chooses to live in the woods away from society that felt ancillary in many ways. The art style, while beautiful, felt at times mismatched to the darkness of the story being told.
