[CALIBK12] Richie's Picks: CROWS & CARDS

[BudNotBuddy at aol.com]

Richie's Picks: CROWS & CARDS by Joseph  Helgerson, Houghton Mifflin, April 
2009, 344p., ISBN:  978-0-618-88395-0
 
"It's the same story the crow told me, it's the only one he  know." -- 
Hunter/Garcia 
 
"'You've got a great-uncle, name of Seth, who's down in St.  Louis.  He used 
to be a trapper on the Missouri but has turned to tanning  in his dotage.  
Fact is, I hear tell he's the best tanner there is west of  the Mississippi.  
When it comes to treating furs, he knows himself some  secrets.  Picked 'em up 
from the Indians, I shouldn't be surprised.   We're going to put you on a 
steamer with a letter of introduction and see if  he'll take you on.'
"Hearing that left me feeling buried alive, with Pa's every  word landing 
like another shovelful of dirt atop me.  When it comes right  down to it, 
twelve-year-olds don't have much bargaining power, not with the  likes of my pa.  So 
it looked as if I was doomed to learn a trade that  didn't have any future at 
all.  What with beaver hats going out of  fashion, the fur business was 
keeling over as we spoke.  Beavers  themselves were getting trapped out, as was 
pretty much every other  living thing with the misfortune to wear fur and have 
four  legs."
 
How many of you are first-born sons?  If you've found  yourself in that 
position, like Zebulon Crabtree (the oldest of seven kids) and  me (the oldest of 
three), then you know well what it is like to navigate the  world without the 
instruction manual that most younger siblings have ready  access to -- thanks 
to having watched the first-born  repeatedly fall on his face.  So, if you find 
 yourself overly appalled or skeptical about how easily twelve  year-old Zeb 
falls for the silken spiel of riverboat gambler Charles  Ambrosius "Chilly" 
Larpenteur, and hands over the entire $70  apprenticing fee his pa has had to 
scrape up for grand-Uncle Seth,  then I bet you haven't spent much time 
stumbling through the world, searching  for direction as an oldest son.  
 
And the boy falls hard.  By time wide-eyed Zeb steps  off that river steamer 
into 1849 St. Louis, he has lost the money and become  Chilly's apprentice, 
has pledged a blood oath to the Brotherhood  of the Gamblers, and finds himself 
heading for a new home on the  outskirts of St. Louis -- an inn, housing a 
gambling parlor.  (Chilly  is secretly half-owner of the establishment.)  There, 
Zeb  is installed as the keystone to Chilly's scheme for methodically  
cheating a never-ending stream of men who pass through that gambling  parlor.
 
CROWS AND CARDS is an exceptional coming-of-age story in  which Zeb must 
untangle himself from the web of Chilly's lies about  the righteousness of the 
cheating (Chilly calls it "shortening.") and seek  out understanding of what is 
necessary to become a man of character. 
 
Having been thrown to the world by his father, the  boy has the good fortune 
to be nurtured, instead, by two wise  men:  
 
The first is Ho-John, the inn's resident slave who steadfastly  burns every 
one of the meals that he is required to prepare.  His feet are  permanently 
chained together, having three times been "caught clinging to a  log while trying 
to swim to Illinois, which didn't tolerate  slavery."
 
 
"'Do people really think of this place as a gambler's  den?'
"'Mostly.  And if you're bound and determined to become  some kind of gambler 
yourself,' Ho-John added, 'just don't go thinking you're  somebody important. 
 That's all I'm asking.'
"I didn't know how to handle such a request as that, so I  didn't say much of 
anything to it.  It was the kind of undermining talk  that nags at a person 
though.  After a bit, I said kind of sassy-like, 'So what exactly is it would 
make a person  important?'
"'That's a question every man's got to answer for himself,'  Ho-John said, 
ignoring my tone, 'but owning my own tools would do 'er for  me.'
"There wasn't much I could say to that, coming as it did from  a slave, who 
had never owned anything his whole life and didn't have no hopes of  ever 
owning anything either, not unless he ran away again."
 
The second nurturing male character is the  blind Indian seer who is in 
possession of the golden treasure that  Chilly covets as being the key to true 
happiness.  Zeb's first encounter  with "the chief" takes place as the river 
steamer docks in St.  Louis:
 
"Up to then the chief had been staring straight ahead, but now  he turned 
toward the Rose Melinda and gazed at me.  You could tell  in a flash he was 
blind, as both his eyes were snowier than a blizzard, not that  it mattered.  I 
sure enough felt as though he was seeing parts of me never  before seen under the 
sun, parts I didn't even know I had."
 
Having, myself, made that lonely journey as  a firstborn son who can still 
well remember how clueless and  vulnerable, how lacking of the instruction 
manual I felt as a  twelve year old, I was continually and thoroughly immersed in 
Zeb's  path to discovery.  Author Joseph Helgerson, himself, came of age  
living close to the Mississippi and reading Twain.  Helgerson has  given us a 
notable and engaging piece of historical fiction that poses some  of the biggest 
questions with which a young person must come to  terms.
      
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks  http://richiespicks.com
Moderator,  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
BudNotBuddy at aol.com
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks




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