Too crowded, don't you know.' The picture-book format allows room for the relationship to develop between Sarah, who labors in the cotton fields with an infant strapped to her back, and Toby, the 'old man,' who utters the magic African words that give her flight. They couldn't take their wings across the water on the slave ships. The ones that could fly shed their wings. On the following spread, images of the Middle Passage set a fittingly somber tone, depicting Africans who 'were captured for Slavery. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic,' opens the narrative, as the full-color artwork reveals elegant, beautifully clothed individuals with feathered wings serenely ascending into the sky. Making dramatic use of shadow and light, Leo and Diane Dillon (whose half-tone illustrations also graced the original volume) ably convey the tale's simultaneous messages of oppression and freedom, of sadness and hope. It is truly an American classic.Resplendent, powerful paintings by these two-time Caldecott-winning artists bring new life to the title story from the late Hamilton's 1985 collection, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales Higgins, the Great remains the only novel ever to win the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award. In 1974, Virginia Hamilton dazzled the world with her powerful account of a young man’s coming of age trapped between heritage of his mountain home and his desires for the future. So when two strangers arrive in the hills, one bringing the promise of fame in the world beyond the mountains and the other the revelation that choice and action both lie within his grasp, M.C.’s life is changed forever. looks behind, he sees only the massive remains of strip mining a gigantic heap of dirt and debris perched threateningly on a cliff above his home. knows why his father never wants his family to leave. looks out from atop the gleaming forty foot pole that his father planted in the mountain for him a gift for swimming the Ohio River he sees only the rolling hills and shady valleys that stretch out for miles in front of him. It bears her name, and her descendants have lived there ever since. His great grandmother escaped to the mountain as a runaway slave and made it her home. M.C.’s family is rooted to the slopes of Sarah’s Mountain.

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