essay questions for roll of thunder

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

By mildred d. taylor.

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• What do the kids do in order to avoid being splashed by the school bus? What is the result?

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• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Novel Summary
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Chapters 1-3
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Chapters 4-6
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Chapters 7-9
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Chapters 10-12
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Character Profiles
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Metaphor Analysis
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Theme Analysis
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Top Ten Quotes
• Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Biography: Mildred D. Taylor

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Essay Q&A

1. Compare and contrast the Logan children’s personalities and describe the similarities and differences of Cassie and Stacey’s coming of age While Roll of Thunder is primarily the coming-of-age story of Cassie Logan, she and her brothers all develop a more mature understanding of race relations in the South during the year described.  From the beginning of the novel, Cassie and Little Man are presented as the Logan children most open about their feelings.  In contrast, Stacey is from the outset portrayed as more restrained, formulating plans to carry out rather than reacting in the heat of the moment.  From their first day of school through the spring revival, the Logan children learn tough lessons about the world around them, each expressing their new-found knowledge in different ways. Little Man is outraged upon seeing the word “nigra” printed in his first school book, and is most frequently depicted trying to keep clean.  As the youngest sibling, he is presented as innocent and worthy of protection from the harsh realities that surround him, a job his older siblings welcome.  Christopher-John is a quieter character, who must be encouraged to follow along on the children’s nighttime explorations.  He cheerfully goes along, but it is Cassie and Stacey who lead their peers in rebellion. Cassie is still learning to control her temper, which appears frequently, including when she resists apologizing to “Miss” Lillian Jean Simms.  She wreaks her revenge by feigning friendship and earning the white girl’s trust solely to abuse it and regain a sense of her own power.  Papa has explained Cassie must choose her battles and that just as he has decided not to pursue Charlie Simms in this particular instance, she, too, must learn when to let things go. Stacey shares his sister’s intense frustrations, but also shows the wisdom of restraint.  He masterminds the children’s revenge on the school bus that dirties them by insisting on patience and then returning to the scene to dig the ditch that destroys the offending vehicle.  Over the course of the novel,  he shows even greater self-discipline, a widening chasm from his sister who is eager to see justice swiftly done. Whether due to her age or gender, or both, Cassie has not accompanied her father on the railroad as Stacey has, and certain elements of his greater worldliness are directly attributable to this difference in exposure. 2. What is the importance of the novel’s title? “Roll of thunder, hear my cry,” is a line from a spiritual sung by slaves, which appears in a song hummed by Mr. Morrison at the beginning of chapter 11.  Its lines include reference to a white man coming whip in hand “but I ain’t gonna let him turn me ‘round,” a clear allusion to the resistance of the Logan family to the racial oppression still evident in the 1930s. Mama, Papa and Big Ma have all imparted their opinions about the legacy of slavery to the Logan children, and shared their sense of injustice at the way things are.  They encourage the next generation not to accept the status quo, but to carefully identify their means of resistance to an unjust world order.  Rather than depending on the heavens to save them from the anger and fear exhibited by their white neighbors, the Logans organize a boycott of the Wallace store and encourage their black friends to also shop in Vicksburg.  But their efforts are met with violence, and the storm metaphor surfaces multiple times in the novel to illustrate the similarities between race relations and weather patterns.            Though it is somewhat unpredictable which incident will set off a storm of hate, there is no doubt that something big is brewing throughout the novel, until the crescendo of the fire lit by Papa in an attempt to save his land and family.  While it a major accomplishment that, for the first time, blacks and whites are linked in their efforts to fight the blaze, it is not enough that they are united at last against a common enemy threatening life and property.  To quell the leaping flames it is a natural rain that is needed.  The distant roar of thunder that opens and closes the penultimate chapter lends a sense of foreboding to the storm that has long been brewing.  Mama and Big Ma fight the blaze with buckets of water, but it takes a torrential downpour of larger-than-life proportions to spare three-quarters of the Logans’ cotton and to reinforce the fact that all human beings in the story depend on nature. 3. How is friendship explored in this novel? Besides being blood relatives, the members of the Logan family are bound by a deep respect for one another and a shared value and love for the land.  Few of their neighbors grasp this tie, or exhibit it in their own families.  The Averys are portrayed as poor and ignorant sharecroppers, and the Simmses as similarly challenged to demonstrate by example to their children how to treat their fellow human beings. Their peers look up to the Logans and seek their acceptance, but none earn their full respect and friendship. T.J. wants nothing more than to be listened to and respected, and will do or say anything to be the center of attention.  His lack of respect for the moral order disgusts Cassie and her brothers, who shun him.  Stacey understands and sympathizes with T.J. but denies him the prize of his friendship. Jeremy Simms also desperately craves Stacey’s approval, and from the start attempts to distinguish himself from his family and white peers, extending himself time and again.  Although he walks as far as he can along the way to school with the Logans, his gestures are not encouraged or welcomed, through no fault of his own, but rather due to the larger racial forces in operation in full force in the still segregated South.  The clear message is that friendship is predicated on racial equality, and until that is developed, true friendship between blacks and whites is as much a dream as Jeremy’s fantasy that he can see the Logan farm from his tree house. Perhaps the most compelling example of friendship in the novel is that between David Logan and Mr. Morrison, the man he brings home from the railroad to protect his family.  Mr. Morrison appreciates the generosity of food, shelter and company, and repays the Logans by shielding their children from further attack, keeping watch in the night with a shotgun by his side.  He is honest in explaining how he lost his job, for fighting with white men, and is rewarded for this quality which the Logans greatly value. Although friendship is an important theme throughout Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry , it is mostly the bonds of family that remain unquestioned and intact by the novel’s end.  Family loyalty, to each other and to their shared land, is prized above all else. 4.  What is the symbolic value of the land in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry ? As Big Ma repeats frequently in this novel, the Logans cherish their land and will protect it at any price.  Her refrain is echoed by her sons, David and Hammer, the only living men in the family, and David’s wife Mary who shares in working and appreciating it.  As a schoolteacher, Mary knows well that her husband’s family struggled to pay for the 400 acres on which they reside, not only tilling the soil and cultivating the cotton crop yearly, but also warding off those who wish to reclaim it for white ownership.  Slavery is a fresh wound in the family’s collective memory, the horrors of which are most often recounted by Big Ma, whose forebears were not born free. Because they own their own land, the Logans have an important place in the black community.  While their neighbors share-crop on white-owned land and must borrow from the Grangers to buy their supplies, the Logans are self-sufficient and able to provide for themselves, even demonstrating their independence by boycotting the racist Wallace store in favor of shopping twenty-two miles away in Vicksburg.            Unlike the Logans, who respect the land for both the gifts it gives in sustaining them and for its symbolic value in making them more equal to the white landowners, Harlan Granger wants to buy back their 400 acres to demonstrate the superiority of the white race.  He is living in the past and wishes to return to the era of slaves and masters, which he believes the “right” order of things.  Of the white adults, only Mr. Jamison questions this belief, and instead upholds the legal right of the Logans to their land. Land is portrayed as the central concern of the elder Logans, who have learned through the generations before them that the independence it enables is key to success in this country.  Besides the economic benefits of working it instead of another’s acres, the Logan land is responsible for the closeness of the family.  They share important memories in its trees and fields and depend upon it to create the same respect in the next generation of Logans. 5. How is a sense of hope conveyed throughout the novel? Despite the ugliness of racism and violence permeating the novel, its main characters share a sense of hope that they will yet emerge triumphant.  While the forces of hate run deep and the white families still teach their children anger and fear of difference, the Logans encourage Cassie and her three brothers to develop a sense of respect for themselves before they expect others to treat them with respect.  Big Ma, as the oldest character in the novel, has seen many decades of similar mistreatment of her friends and neighbors, yet is the one to most often tell the youngest character, Little Man, that the sun will shine again. The most appealing characters in this book are youthful and optimistic, with even Cassie’s parents resorting to creative means to see justice done in the community.  They persuade their neighbors to band together and shop in Vicksburg rather than contribute to the Wallaces’ and Grangers’ meager profit at their own expense.  Clearly there are problems enveloping them all much bigger than anyone can solve, but David and Mary Logan insist on the importance of doing their part and trying to create another way. By being told in the first-person by a nine-year-old losing her sense of naivete and opening her eyes to the racial realities around her, this novel is by nature hopeful.  As Cassie grows and changes, thinking before she speaks or acts and beginning to help her younger brothers do the same, her observations deepen and she becomes a stronger agent of change in her community.  Instead of the child she was in the opening chapter, joining her brother in rejecting the dirty school books out of a sense of righteous indignation, by the novel’s close she has developed into a more worldly young adult, still somewhat in her older brother’s shadow but peering out of the woods in which she’d been hiding with a far more adult pair of eyes than she possessed at the start of the school year.  Although most of this learning took place outside the schoolhouse, Cassie nevertheless emerges an educated and independent person, likely to follow in her parents’ footsteps in seeking all means possible to do what she must in paving the way towards racial equality for future generations.

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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred taylor, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Introduction

Roll of thunder, hear my cry: plot summary, roll of thunder, hear my cry: detailed summary & analysis, roll of thunder, hear my cry: themes, roll of thunder, hear my cry: quotes, roll of thunder, hear my cry: characters, roll of thunder, hear my cry: symbols, roll of thunder, hear my cry: theme wheel, brief biography of mildred taylor.

Historical Context of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Other books related to roll of thunder, hear my cry.

• Full Title: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
• When Written: 1976
• Where Written: Los Angeles
• When Published: 1976
• Literary Period: Contemporary/Social Realism
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Setting: Rural Mississippi during the Depression (early 1930s)
• Climax: R.W. and Melvin Simms trick T.J. into robbing Barnett Mercantile with them.
• Antagonist: Racism, Harlan Granger, the Wallaces, the Simms family
• Point of View: First person, Cassie’s point of view

Extra Credit for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Peace Corps. Mildred Taylor joined the Peace Corps in 1965 and taught English and history in Ethiopia for two years before returning to the States to get her Masters degree.

Storytelling Genes. Mildred Taylor says that her father is the one who taught her the importance of storytelling. He showed her that telling stories is a way to pass down family legacies and educate others about history. Taylor’s characters are also often autobiographical—David and Stacey Logan are based on her grandfather and father.

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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Discussion Questions

In the opening chapter, the white bus driver takes great glee in running the black children off the road, forcing them to jump into the weeds and briars on the shoulder. He laughs as he splashes them with mud. Why would a grown man do such a cruel thing to children? Why do the white children laugh when he does?

What are some of the differences between the black school and the white school?

When it's properly displayed, the American flag should be the same height or higher than any state flag. Outside the white school, the Mississippi state flag, which is also the flag of the Confederacy, flies higher than the American flag. Why do the white residents fly the state flag higher? What does it mean to them?

There are many injustices in Cassie's town, including the Mississippi flag's flying higher than the...

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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

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Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Character Analysis

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Summary and Study Guide

Mildred D. Taylor’s semi-autobiographical Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a middle grade novel first published in 1976. The novel received the 1977 John Newbery Medal and was recognized by the Coretta Scott King Book Awards. With more than 6.5 million copies in print, the novel anchors Taylor’s “Logan saga,” a series of novels about the same family. A 1978 TV movie of the novel was nominated for two Emmy Awards. This guide references the 2016 paperback edition.

Plot Summary

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In 1933, 9-year-old narrator Cassie Logan lives with her family in rural Mississippi. She and her three brothers—Stacey, Christopher John, and Little Man—walk to the Great Faith Elementary and Secondary School for Black students along a dusty road with their friends. The group must dodge a school bus carrying White students to the better-funded Jefferson Davis School. One of the friends, T.J., tells the Logans that White men set fire to three members of the Berry family. Cassie’s father, David, returns home from his job working on the railroad with Mr. Morrison, who is to help protect the Logans’ home. David decides that his family will no longer shop at the local Wallace store, as they are likely responsible for the attack on the Berrys.

The bus driver from the White school intentionally splashes mud on the Logans, and Stacey devises a plan: the Logan children dig a trench in the road, which fills with rainwater. The bus becomes stuck in the trench, damaging it. Later, they hear that a party of White men is going after more Black families. The Logans worry the men will target her family because of their bus prank. Cassie sees White men outside of the Logan home that night, but they leave without incident. Stacey and the Logans follow T.J. to the Wallace store. Stacey punches T.J. for stealing his mother’s test scores and letting him take the blame. Mary learns they were at the store and takes them to see Mr. Berry’s terrible burns. Stacey, Cassie, and T.J. travel to Strawberry with Big Ma to sell goods. There, Cassie bumps into Lillian Jean Simms . Both Lillian Jean and her father push Cassie, but Big Ma makes Cassie apologize.

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Uncle Hammer, David’s brother who lives in Chicago, arrives for a visit. He gifts Stacey a new coat. T.J. teases Stacey about his coat and convinces him to give it to him. Uncle Hammer berates Stacey for letting T.J. fool him and urges him to learn from the mistake. David returns in the early morning hours of Christmas Eve. The family tells stories by the fire, and Mr. Morrison closes the night with a sad tale about the massacre of his family by White men during the Reconstruction period, a decade after the Civil War.

Cassie’s mother, Mary, is fired for her role in the boycott. T.J. divulged this role to the White men, so the Logan’s cut ties with T.J. T.J. begins spending time with the White Simms boys. Several families drop out of the Vicksburg arrangement. Still, David goes shopping there with Stacey and Mr. Morrison again. The Wallaces attack their wagon, shooting David. David recovers well. Mr. Morrison takes the children along in the wagon to run an errand. The Wallaces attack again, but Mr. Morrison lifts their truck from the road, stunning them with his strength.

The bank suddenly requires full payment of the Logans’ mortgage, but Uncle Hammer sells his Packard to pay it. One night, T.J. shows up at the Logan house battered and bruised; he broke into the Mercantile with the Simmses, and the brothers likely killed Mr. Barnett and harmed his wife. The Simmses beat T.J. and blame him for the robbery and assault. The Logan children accompany T.J. home, and the Wallaces and Simmses arrive, intending to lynch TJ. They turn him over to a sheriff after David catches his field on fire to distract them.

The White men fight the fire alongside the adult Logans. It begins to rain, dousing the fire. Stacey says that Mr. Jamison used his car to block the Wallaces from taking T.J. Mr. Granger would not intervene until he saw the fire. Then, he ordered the White men to leave T.J. with the sheriff and go fight the fire. David and Mr. Morrison return home and learn that Mr. Barnett died of his injury. Mr. Jamison warns David to lay low. Cassie realizes that her father lit his own field on fire to stop the White men from lynching T.J. Stacey worries that T.J. will receive a death sentence. David cannot say that he will not. Stacey runs into the forest, crying. David follows T.J. Cassie cries in her bed “for T.J. and the land” (276).  

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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Essay question.

What is the authors purpose and effects created by having the novel narrated by a nine year old girl.

Cameron to my mind this is cheating and totally unacceptable. Getting the answers off a website is not the way to go about life. I'm going to have a word with you when you get back

ha ha ha ha ha ha that is funny u got busted on the internet out of all places there are on the internet =... ) im crying thats so funny

are u his mom or something cuz u sure r acting like it

the purpose to me was that to make the book seem a little better he used her and had her tell the story to attract all the little kids or any reader into the book i dont know really im just telling you how i feel about it

umm...isnt it obvious?

its so that the book cann relate to children better. If the story was told by an adult, children wouldn't find the book as interseting to read than if it was actually told from the point of view of a child.

wats up people

I have just completed this for a 7th grade reading assignment. I found the novel very interesting, and cannot wait to purchase, "Let the Circle be Unbroken," to find out what accusations are brought against T.J. that R.W. and Melvin might have made up.

I personally think that a child narrates this novel to portray the thoughts and ideas that are brought upon children when racism against blacks was very strong. It makes the novel more interesting and enjoyable in Cassie Logan's point of view.

If it were to be told in Mama's point of view for example, you would still know the children's reactions, but not their thoughts. Most adults dealing with segregation and racism living in southern states during that era learned to cope with the unfair treatment.

By knowing Cassie's thoughts, it portrays an image in your mind of how bad they had it, and how the blacks were not just physically hurt, with punishment such as lynching, but mentally as well.

It makes the story more enjoyable and puts more meaning into it rather an adult be narrating it.

I hoped I helped, good luck with your essay! And in my mind, this is not cheating. It is making use of your resources ;)

i like the book roll of thunder hear my cry since i do it at school with my teacher Mrs.Alleyne she teaches me really good and i also have a literature exam tomorrow so i just came out in here n read the summaries instead of reading back the whole back again i really enjoyed this book i hope

basically, when children comes into the picture, we would naturally view them as innocent and unblemished, idealised and carefree. Sensitive and ignorant.

It is therefore apt for the author to use Cassie as a mouth piece. She is a young child who, though young, is already on the recieving end of prejudice. Therefore she matures, and we able to see the prejudices against the blacks that she faces, and we see this ugly truth, slowly unfurling and rearing it's ugly head at us. To put it mildly, Cassie is a blank slate.

Therefore, as this book is targeted at older children kinda thing,seeing things from a child's perspective allows us to see something that we talk for granted, throws into sharp relief the innocence and prejudices of the book, and also lets us trust what ever the author is trying to convey, simply because we would trust a child more.

in the book it is obvious that Cassie has evolved from someone who doesn't really understand what is happening around her to one that is empathetic to the situation, as can be seen from when she cried for both TJ and the land, in both cases, both suffered from something that they were unable to control.

I see startling similiarities between To Kill A Mockingbird and this book, and i prefer the former because it also talks about prejudices in a white society, and alot more. ALL SHOULD GO READ IT IF YOU LIKED ROLL OF THUNDER!

Good Luck Cameron. You were a little too obvious, and you should attempt the essay. Sheesh, you're making me sound all goodygoody

dude this book is hella dumb y u arguing over it? move on with your lives!!!! get a girlfriend!!

<3thug nasty

no, it's to show racism as Cassie experiences it for the first time

cassie has experienced the racism in school before, which is why they have litlle man

but, cassie has never experienced racism outside of school, which is why they had the whole incident in Strawberry

I think its fair because what if your taking a reading counts quiz and you didnt read the book you can get the answers right here. I think this is very useful

Oh by the way the book was very good maybe you should read or reread the book you might find it interresting.

eassy ,q&a

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