Booktalking Colorado - Full Booktalk Record

Booktalking Colorado Full Record:

	Title:	Messenger
	Author:	Schwartz, Virginia Frances
	Date Published:	2002
	Genre:	Fantasy
	Grade Level:	6 - 8
	Booktalker:	Sam Marsh

Booktalk:
Pa died on October 12, 1923, before I was born. There was a sign. Hundreds of crows circling our cabin that morning as Pa left for work. The shaft collapsed on him. He was brought to the cabin and lay there for three days and nights, anointed with holy water. I was still inside, floating, listening. They buried him just outside Cobalt along the nine other miners killed in the cave-in. Ma was so sunk in grief that she didn't even notice the cramps until the water broke. It took two days, and I was still almost a month early. "She's come to tell you your husband is in heaven," they said to ma. I was a quiet babe, tiny and dark, coal black hair, with big eyes that seemed to eat everything. They wondered if I'd survive the week, I did...Pa was with me. I was named Frances after my mother. Ma mostly stayed in bed for months. Aunt Tracey stayed with us sometimes and cooked and cleaned for us, as well as her own children. Croatian miners chopped our wood and tended our animals. In the deep of the winter, my brothers had to tend me because ma drifted off to sleep so much. My older brother Phillip worried about ma, but he only saw her from the outside. I am the one who was my father's messenger, sent to awaken her and tell her to go on...I knew she would. In December, we got a letter from Aunt Rose, Pa's sister in Severin, Croatia. She had a dream that the miners there told her was an omen of death. She begged him not to go to work once he got the letter...she had sent it on October 1st. It was February of the next year, in the midst of a blizzard, when ma heard the call "Frances," warning her to get up. I was ice cold. In the dead of night, she went into the blizzard, chopped wood and brought it into the cabin, restarted the fire, and brought in snow to put on a kettle. After breakfast, they went to the barn to check on and feed the animals and rake the floor of the barn, piling up the manure and soiled straw for use in the garden come spring. That day, at age 7, Phillip became the man in the family. That spring, ma planted seeds that her youngest sister sent her, using the manure and soiled straw from the winter. She also went to the company depot for a monthly food parcel that she was owed like all families who had lost fathers and brothers to the mines. She was owed a settlement from the mine for pa's death, but the mine didn't have the money. I wouldn't come for another two years. We got through the floods and the cousins who had come from the old country. They tried to convince ma that we had to leave, but she wouldn't go. Pa was there, watching over us. We both knew, even though we never talked about it. Then, in September, it all changed. Ma was flying around the rooms like a whirlwind, packing. "We're going to Schumacher with the cousins," she said. She'd had a message from pa that his time on earth was up and he'd gone on to heaven. I noticed it right away. The feeling wasn't there anymore. The cabin felt deserted. Pa really HAD gone. At 2&1/2, I bolted out the door looking for him. I clung to Phillip when he caught me and howled. Eventually, I cried myself to sleep. The next morning we rode to the railroad station and away from our old life.