Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102060067
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by ANN ALEXANDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Growing up in Harlem in the 1930s, Faith Ringgold went with her family to Tar Beach on hot summer nights. Tar Beach was not really a beach but rather the name her parents and their friends gave the roof of their apartment building.
Families would gather on the rooftop after dark, bringing picnic baskets, bottles of wine, gas lanterns, card tables and mattresses for sleepy children.
"Tar Beach" is Ringgold's story of Cassie, an 8-year- old girl who discovers while her parents are playing cards that she can fly.
Soaring above the skyscrapers of Manhattan, Cassie looks down on Tar Beach. She imagines a world where she owns the George Washington Bridge and where her father, a construction worker, is rich and wears a business suit.
In this make-believe world, her mother laughs and sleeps late every morning, and the family always has ice cream for dessert. Anyone can fly, Cassie tells her envious younger brother: "All you need is somewhere to go that you can't get to any other way. The next thing you know, you're flying among the stars."
The story is delightfully told, but what sets "Tar Beach" apart are the illustrations. Faith Ringgold, who still lives in Harlem, has been painting professionally since the 1950s. Two decades ago she began experimenting with "story quilts" and paintings on lengths of cloth, often collaborating with her mother, a dressmaker and fashion designer.
Ringgold wrote the original text of "Tar Beach" on fabric strips surrounded by a quilt border, that in turn surrounds a painting on cloth. She says that as she worked on the project she was haunted by stories of her great-great-grandmother, who had stitched quilts as a slave in antebellum Florida.
According to family tradition, Susie Shannon, while sewing, told stories of slaves "flying" to freedom. Thus both the narrative and the art form have roots deep in the African-American past.
Like all good children's books, "Tar Beach" can be understood on different levels and will "grow" with the child. It should bring joy to children and parents alike. The original quilt painting is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
by CNB