Tree of Hope - Softcover

Through Florrie's eyes readers experience the despair and hopelessness of talented actors who were forced to leave the stage to find other work when the Lafayette Theatre closed its doors; the golden days of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s have disappeared into the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Florrie's father, once an actor, toils at the Allnight Bakery. Florrie's greatest dream is for her father to be able to leave his job and return to the stage, and so she makes a wish on a tree that grows next to the Lafayette Theatre; it has become a symbol of endurance for black actors, a tree of hope. A director, Mr. Welles, arrives when President Roosevelt orders that the doors of the theatre be opened; there is to be a staging of Macbeth, and Florrie's father gets a part. An author's note attests to the veracity of events in the story, when Orson Welles directed African-Americans in roles from which they were once excluded. Cooper's lavish oil-wash, full-page paintings pay mute tribute to the loss of luster and its regeneration in Harlem, in scenes in which the footlights cast a glow, and in which the faces tell a story that hardly needs words. (bibliography) (Picture book. 4-8) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

As they did in Shakerag, a tale of Elvis Presley's Southern childhood, Littlesugar and Cooper join forces to vividly evoke the past. This time the subject is the rebirth of African-American theater in Harlem during the Great Depression. Young Florrie has often heard the stories of how her father found joy as an actor at the Lafayette Theatre in the 1920s, the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. He even met Florrie's mother there. But with hard times, the theater has closed, and now its only sign of life is the twisted tree that grows beside it. Every day Florrie and her father wish on the "Tree of Hope" for the return of the Lafayette. The wish finally comes true when, sponsored by the Federal Theater Project, director Orson Welles mounts an African-American production of Macbeth. In her ambitious text, Littlesugar unobtrusively uses history to anchor the experiences of a particular fictional family. After a somewhat slow denouement, the elements of her story neatly come full circle. Cooper's luminous oil paintings, fine as ever, breathe life into both the gritty period cityscapes and the memorable characters, whose faces are alternately shaded by despair and lit by hope. Ages 4-8. (Oct.)
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