The Other Side

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The Other Side book cover

The Other Side is children's book written by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Released in 2001, its central metaphor a fence that divides blacks from whites.[1]

Summary

The storyteller and hero of the story is Clover, a young African-American girl. She lives alongside a fence which isolates her town. Her mom tells her never to move over to the opposite side. One summer, she sees a white girl on the opposite side of the fence. The girl seems to be very lonely and is even outside when it is raining.

Clover chooses to converse with the girl on the opposite side of the fence. The two girls are not permitted to cross the fence, so they basically choose to sit on the fence together. In the first place, Clover's friends won't let Annie, the girl from the opposite side, play with them but then all of the girls understand that the fence (an image isolating the whites and blacks) ought not be there.[2]

Anti-racism value

The Other Side Girls on Fence

The Other Side is perfect for introducing a difficult topic: segregation. Understanding segregation is vital for kids to get a handle on the motivation behind the youthful voices that met up to change the world. The book presents the subject through investigating the force of imagery in writing and this present reality.

The writer clarifies that she wanted the narrative of Clover and Annie to be a book in which youngs people change the world every day through seemingly simple acts of resistance, and she wanted it to be about trust. On each page, the fence is depicted as a quiet, yet incredible portrayal of isolation, a theme that the little girls in the story battle to sort out. The symbolic illustrations and the activities of the young ladies  require students to think deeper, past the the literal meaning of the content and pictures. As the story goes, readers are reminded that occasionally an answer is so straightforward, as simple as sitting together as friends on a fence, grasping a better view of the world.[3]

References

  1. The Other Side. Retrieved on December 29, 2020.
  2. The Other Side. Retrieved on December 28, 2020.
  3. Blow, Mary. The Other Side: A Symbolic View of Segregation. Retrieved on December 29, 2020.