Music in My Heart: My Journey with Melody

Now everyone is staring at me. Melody asks me what’s wrong. I feel the same pressure I felt outside Sam’s Soda Shop, when I chickened out. I don’t want to chicken out again.

I swallow the lump in my throat and point at the book. There’s some really important stuff missing, I tell them: nothing about Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman. Yvonne flips through the book, and I can tell she’s getting angry. Melody’s mom asks when the book was printed. Just five years ago, in 1959, Yvonne says. But she can’t even find a picture of a Black person in it!

Lila puts her hand on Yvonne’s and says she just saw one. When Yvonne turns back a page, though, Lila’s face crumbles. It’s just a picture of an unnamed slave. The only Black people in the whole book are slaves. Yvonne shakes her head.

Lila’s brows furrow. No Black scientists or inventors, not even George Washington Carver? She checks the index again and slumps her shoulders. She thought she was going to a good school.

Melody’s mom squeezes her daughter’s shoulders. She says in a lot of ways, it is a good school. But it’s also mostly White, so some changes come more slowly.

Melody says Lila can change things, the way the Junior Block Club wrote letters to get the playground fixed. Mrs. Ellison likes the idea. Melody offers to help Lila write letters, telling the school how books like this make them feel and asking for newer, better books that teach about famous Black scientists like Carver, Charles Drew, and Lewis Latimer.

I ask if I can help too. I want to make things better for Lila and everyone else at her school. Lila grins and hugs me and Melody both. Yvonne claps her hands together. That’s the spirit.