One Crazy Summer

One Crazy Summer
by Rita Williams-Garcia
J WIL


Sisters Delphine, Vonetta and Fern are sent to California to spend a month with a mother they have never met. Instead of taking them to Disneyland, Cecile greets them with “No one told y’all to come out here.”

It is 1968, the summer when Black Panther founder, Huey Newton was jailed and member, Bobby Hutton was gunned down by police. It is a year when racial tensions are high and changes in the fabric of society are coming to fruition, sometimes in peace, sometimes in violence.

Rather than care for the kids, Cecile sends them to the Black Panther youth program each day. For meals, the girls use their Disneyland money to order take-out from a neighborhood restaurant. She does not allow them into certain parts of the house where she is working on her poetry.

Slowly, over the month, Delphine makes inroads into understanding her mother’s life and past and why she is the way that she is. The sisters also make friends with various children and a few adults in the Oakland community. They are all impressed by Hirohito, the half-black, half-Japanese, young heartthrob of the youth program.
In a presentation given at a Black Panther rally, one of the sisters finds her own poetic voice and expresses it before the cheering crowd.

Delphine is self-sufficient and practical; patient, protective and supportive to her younger sisters. During the month that she spends almost completely without adult supervision, she proves her resourcefulness and her loyalty to her family, including to her new found mother. She experiences her first interest in a boy and the interest is returned. She is exposed to many points of view on many different aspects of life. She forms new friendships and begins a hard won connection with her mother. Her identity as a young African-American woman begins to shift and she learns to refer to herself in new terms.

Reviewed by
J’Ann Peacock Alvarado
June 15, 2010