Jeremy Simms is a bored and lonely 10-year-old Mississippi boy who hangs around on the porch of the village store. Most days, he says in this brief, powerful Depression-era story, ''I just sat on that porch, looking out at the rain and the gloom and ain't nothing much happened to break the expectedness of it all.'' Nothing, that is, until the day when the bus to Jackson careens off the rickety bridge over a flood-swollen creek and Jeremy becomes a participant in the drama.
Mildred D. Taylor has already written three splendid, award-winning novels about the Logans, a black land-owning family. In Mississippi Bridge, she's jumped to a different point of view. Jeremy is white, the son of a mean-spirited local farmer. Like Huck Finn, Jeremy accepts the racism of the day as a given but is troubled by its cruel daily practices — especially because he longs to be friends with the self-sufficient and charismatic Logan children, who regard his awkward overtures with suspicion.
Taylor evokes the currents of conflicted feelings and the painful, pointless losses caused by racism with pungent immediacy. Her black characters especially, as perceived through Jeremy's eyes, have an amazing presence, power, and vitality. Taylor continues the story of the Logan family in this book set in rural Mississippi during the 1930s from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy named Jeremy. Jeremy is white and claims to have always liked playing with the Logan kids, even though they are black and his family and the white community is against white people associating with black people. Jeremy tells of the harsh double standards in the local store when the storeowner Mr. Wallace lets a white woman try on a hat before buying it, but will not allow Rudine, a black woman, to try on the hat without buying it. Jeremy sees the lack of fairness in this act and many others. Other men in the store, including Jeremy’s father, call Josias, a black man, a liar because Josias says that he is traveling to go to a promised job.
The white and black people get on the bus to travel, with the white people sitting in the front and the black people sitting in the back. Jeremy follows the Logan children down across the bridge as they walk toward their house in the rain. After a while, Jeremy returns to the store where the bus is still sitting. The bus driver is arguing with the black passengers telling them to get off the bus since there is not enough room. More white people have come to board the bus and travel on that day. Josias refuses to leave the bus. He explains that he absolutely has to travel on that very day. The bus driver literally throws him off the bus into the mud.
The bus begins its journey. As the bus begins to cross the bridge, it loses control and crashes off of the bridge into the rushing water below. All of the people that were on the bus are now injured. And, the black people who were made to get off are amazingly saved. As Josias says, “Onliest thing I know is that the good book, it say the Lord work in mighty mysterious ways”
Big Question? What would you have done if you were put in the situations of the the black people of the past?
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