The Long-Awaited Conclusion to the Logan Family Series

I’ve loved Mildred D. Taylor’s books since I was a child. In eighth grade, I listened as my Georgia history teacher, Mr. Benton, read aloud from Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry each week. I fell in love with Cassie Logan, the book’s intuitive, beautiful protagonist. The other books I read as a child featured mostly white female protagonists. Sure, there was Allison Cloud, the bookish Native American girl from Girl Talk, and there were Claudia Kishi and Jessi Ramsey from The Babysitter’s Club, but other than those few the characters in the books I read were mostly white.

The white authors I read frequently reflected on how blue a character’s eyes were, and I could always tell what the authors’ beauty standards were. The authors of the Sweet Valley series loved long blonde hair and tan skin (but not black skin) and a size six body. In the stories I write, the characters don’t have blue eyes, and I don’t favor the ultra-thin beauty standard either. I often struggle to describe my beautiful black female characters without using food comparisons. Yes, that’s a thing. I’ve read books by writers, both black and white, who say a black woman is peanut butter brown, has skin that shines like pudding, or is the color of a pecan. Food. Food. Food.

Reading a book series in which the black female telling the story doesn’t suffer low self-esteem is something that gave me hope as a child. Stop for a moment and consider the most popular dark-skinned black women in literature. There’s Celie in The Color Purple, the narrator of Salvage the Bones, and of course Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye. Though there’s hope at the end of The Color Purple, overall Celie and the other protagonists from the aforementioned books are stepped on, shat on, and all but tarred and feathered by their tormentors.

Then we have Cassie Logan, a young woman who is smart and hard-working and has a life that, even in Mississippi in the 1930s-1940s, isn’t completely hopeless. I’m proud of Cassie Logan, proud as if she were my own daughter. I love how her family sticks up for one another and stays together. I can write beautiful black females because another author came before me and wrote Cassie Logan and did it like a boss. Mildred Taylor didn’t write black women with white readers in mind. She didn’t say that Cassie was pretty “for a colored girl” or that she had white features, like thin lips or a thin nose to make her somehow more palatable or attractive to white people.

Today, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the last book in the Logan family series: All the Days Past, All the Days to Come. (This says a lot because I never buy those expensive ass brand-new hardcovers–the last one I bought was Harper Lee’s second novel–and I prefer to buy used books cheaply.) For the next week, I will catch up with Cassie Logan, who last narrated the series in a book released in 1990. Yes, it’s been thirty years since The Road to Memphis was first published, and the other books Taylor has written since then were both prequels and not narrated by Cassie. This new book was not only a long time coming, but one I did not expect until last summer when I saw it available for a pre-release purchase on Audible. For years, I’d thought Taylor had passed away. I kept wondering if she’d died before finishing the series. For years, I’ve wanted to know what became of Cassie’s family after WWII. Did her brothers serve in the armed forces? Did Cassie pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer? I wanted to know if Cassie would marry the lawyer she met in 1941 or if she’d marry Moe, the sweet man from her community. Now, sitting here typing this, with the newest and last installment of the beloved series, I wonder, will this book, like all my favorite books, break my heart?