As carefully executed as McKissack's writings, Pinkney's black-and-white scratchboard illustrations enhance the book's atmosphere, at once clearly regional in setting and otherworldly in tone. Here, African Americans' historical lack of political power finds its counterbalance in a display of supernatural power: ghosts exact vengeance for lynchings slaves use ancient magic to enforce their master's promise of emancipation. It is about a girl, Mirandy, who attempts to catch the wind so he will be her partner for the upcoming junior cakewalk. These short works-haunting in both senses of the word-explore aspects of the African American experience in the South, from slavery to the Underground Railroad and emancipation, from the era of Pullman cars to the desegregation of buses, from the terror of the Ku Klux Klan to '60s activism. Mirandy and Brother Wind is a 1988 children's picture book by Patricia McKissack and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Her nine stories and one poem, however, are far too good to be reserved for that special time when it is neither day nor night and when shapes and shadows play tricks on the mind. When I was growing up in the South, writes McKissack, we called the half hour just before nightfall the dark-thirty.
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