Ragtime Tumpie

Stunningly illustrated and as joyful as St. Louis jazz, Ragtime Tumpie is a "fictional account" of an incident in the childhood of the flamboyant and legendary entertainer Josephine Baker. Although the author's note at the end of the book details Baker's famous accomplishments--her work for the French Resistance, her adopted "Rainbow Tribe," her Ziegfeld Follies stardom--the book is not a traditional biography. It is a fully developed picture book that resonates with the sights and colors of the turn-of-the century era it describes. Ragtime Tumpie's saucy exuberance, spicy as a gingersnap, is irresistible. "I'm gonna be a honky-tonk dancer," Tumpie says, and she remembers all the times her mother took her to see her drummer father and his friends play the "Dill Pickles Rag" and the "Chicken Chowder." She goes to sleep lulled by the "lazy-bluesy sound of the saxophones" and dances through the winter in the apartment with her mother "just to keep warm." When she wins a silver dollar in a dance contest held by an itinerant Medicine Man, Tumpie knows that she will "never stop dancin' now!" Although the plot is simple, the book's emotional reverberations are complex. Fuchs's rich paintings are luminous and golden. The faces of even minor characters seem breathtakingly real. The shopkeepers smile at Tumpie snatching fruit in the sun-drenched Soulard Market, old Savannah dances in a "swirl of hot color," and Tumpie's disapproving stepfather looks out from the shadows of a cracked mirror. Tumpie's face, especially, is unforgettable as she dances barefoot to "real jug band jazz" and walks through streets that seem "alive with dancing and color and the fast joy of ragtime music." Ages 5-9.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 2-5-- Full-page paintings in mellow tones of gold and brown, with warm touches of rosy pink, show black Americans in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. Smiling workers, musicians, and housewives surround the small, appealing figure of the young girl who would one day be the famous Josephine Baker. The accompanying text tells how "Tumpie," as she was then called, spent her days picking half-rotted fruit from the freight yards and gathering coal fallen from the hopper cars. At night, Tumpie would go with her mother to the honky-tonks, to hear ragtime music and to dance to the "syn-co-pa-tion" of the drums. When, one day, a traveling peddlar staged a dance contest in the neighborhood, Tumpie won the prize, a shiny silver dollar, and knew that dance would be her life. The story of Tumpie is fiction, based on what is known of Baker's early years, and a brief note describes the entertainer's later career. The book can be used as fictionalized biography to introduce Baker, a black woman who found fame and fortune in Europe earlier in this century. However, its most obvious use, magnificently achieved in the vibrant illustrations, is to present a slice-of-American-life in an urban black community, and to show the capacity of music and dance to enrich the lives of people even in the poorest of material circumstances. --Shirley Wilton, Ocean County College, Toms River, NJ
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.