In Book 1, Jack conspires with friend Jeremy to undermine their racist, secessionist teacher's efforts to poison his students' minds with his benefits-of-slavery lectures.
Will the students buy into it? Not if Jack has any say.
The book is dedicated...
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Illustrator: Inga Shalvashvili, Georgia, Russia
Setting: 1860, a one-room fictional schoolhouse, Charleston, South Carolina, USA
Author's Note: Charleston had a free public school system established in the early 19th Century and had rudiments of public education as far back as the 1700s. The free school system gained the most popularity in Charleston where it began in 1812, when the city had five schools. A glimpse of those schools comes from an 1887 account by Charleston School Superintendent Henry P. Archer: No child under eight was admitted unless he or she had made some proficiency in reading. Students were taught "reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling, parsing [study of sentence components and parts of speech], geology, grammar and the pence and multiplication tables. Special attention was paid to penmanship." Schoolmasters were required to furnish quarterly to the school board examples of student work.
The Battle Begins Part 1
Crawling up alongside the red wooden façade of the schoolhouse, Jack and I peekedthrough the windows and scanned the room. There was Mike sitting on one end of a bench, paying the strictest attention to master's lesson.
"The sniveling little worm," Jack said, scrunching up his nose. "I knew he didn't have the nerve to skip. Next, he'll be licking Whittemore's boots - the little worm."
"What are we gonna do?" I asked.
"What do ya mean what'a we gonna do? What are you gonna do you moron?" Jack said and rapped his knuckles on the wooden door of the school house as hard as he could, then bolted toward the hedges across the Meetinghouse Road, saying, "Run son if you knows what's good for ya!"
