It Jes’ Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
Age Range: 6 - 11 years
Grade Level: 1 - 3
2012 Book Links Lasting Connections
2013 Ezra Jack Keats Book Award
2013 CCBC Choices
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SUMMARY
It Jes’ Happened is an inspiring biography of folk artist Bill Traylor, who was a former slave. At the age of eighty-five, he drew pictures based on his observations of rural and urban life in Alabama. This tribute honors a man who enriched the world with warm, energetic, and humorous works of art.
Bill Traylor worked all day in the hot fields, and when slavery ended, Bill's family stayed on the farm as sharecroppers.
Bill grew up to raise his own family, but by 1935, Bill was eighty-one and all alone on his farm. So he packed his bag and moved to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Lonely and poor, he wandered the busy downtown streets. But deep within himself Bill had a reservoir of memories of working and living on the land, and soon those memories blossomed into pictures.
Bill drew people, places, and animals from his earlier life, as well as scenes of the city around him… soon, his world was filled with nostalgia that could be seen and touched.
REVIEWS
“Christie’s own flat primitive style is a perfect match for Traylor’s story, and he deftly uses a second naïve style to represent Traylor’s own art. But the real artistry here is in Don Tate’s finely crafted account of Traylor’s first eighty years; the ordinary events in the life of an ordinary African American man are made notable by Tate’s repetition of the line: “Bill saved up memories of these times deep inside.” When these memories later burst into art, they are made all the more meaningful.”—Horn Book
“This picture-book introduction to the artist Bill Traylor is astonishing in both its biographical facts and how they are depicted in Christie’s beautiful illustrations. . . . in images of the artist creating figures on the sidewalk or on scrap paper and discarded cardboard boxes, Christies’s paintings in acrylic and gouache recreate the style of Traylor’s pictures and show how they danced with rhythm. Young people will relate to the folk-art illustrations, while this will interest many adults, too. An afterword fills in more, including the role of the white artist who helped Traylor get recognition.”—Booklist