Through her individual experiences, we learn much about the collective condition of people during this era in American history. While Wineburg (5) spoke of "the tension that underlies every encounter with the past: the tension with the familiar and the strange, between feelings of closeness and feelings of distance from the people we seek to understand ”, this book explicitly contained a remarkable mixture of these tensions. Race, violence, segregation, historically and culturally influenced ideas are heavy and pervasive throughout the book and are juxtaposed with multiple familiar scenes and childhood feelings that students can more easily relate to . In the face of institutionalized racism, racist actions, and bigoted mindsets that come into stark conflict with our modern moral sense of fairness and justice, we are compelled to engage in historical reflection and empathy in the aim of contextualizing the logics of each character and making sense of a remarkably different era. that our