Leaving Lymon

Lymon, has music in his bones, and he also has many strikes against him making life a huge challenge as he grows into young adulthood.

Young Lymon Is an African American boy living in 1940s Mississippi with his loving, guitar-playing grandpops and ever disgruntled grandmother, called Ma. Lymon’s has a mother in Chicago, but he’s told she is flighty and when Lymon was born to his teenaged mother, Daisy, she abandoned him.

She left Mississippi and moved to Chicago, and started herself another family;

Grady is Lymon’s biological father, who is incarcerated at Parchman a prison camp with unspeakable bad conditions. Parchman is Mississippi’s oldest maximum security prison. Grady is a good man who loves his son , but when he gets out of prison, he proves to be flighty as well.

As you see Lymon has a tough life. He is a likeable child and worthy of so much more yet Lymon seems to attract negativity. When Grandpops dies and Ma sickens from diabetes, the relatives can no longer afford Lymon’s upkeep. They send him to Chicago to live with Daisy, her two sons, and her husband, Robert, who beats Lymon regularly. After Lymon takes money from Robert, the money sent by an aunt for his upkeep, the police send him to a boys’ home, which proves to be a turning point in his life.

Cline-Ransome is a new author for me and I recognize masterful storytelling and will read more of her work. I predict Middle school readers will be engaged in the hard life of Lymon Caldwell while learning about historical racial biases in the penal system, the plight of children during the Great Migration, the discrimination faced by Northern blacks, and more. (Historical fiction. 8-12)