The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou by Kristin Hunter

First published: 1968

Type of work: Social realism

Themes: Poverty, race and ethnicity, and social issues

Time of work: The 1960’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: A black ghetto in Philadelphia

Principal Characters:

• Louretta Hawkins, a talented black teenager who lives in an urban ghetto
• Rosetta Hawkins, her strict, religious mother
• Arneatha Hawkins, her sister, an unwed mother
• William Hawkins, her older brother, the head of the household
• Philip “Fess” Satterthwaite, a brilliant, owl-eyed poet and gang member
• Jethro Jackson, an epileptic tenor who also belongs to the Hawks gang
• Officer Lafferty, a white policeman who brutalizes Southside males
• Calvin, an artist who is new in the neighborhood

The Story

Boys, singing in an alley behind Louretta Hawkins’ house, are threatened by a policeman named Lafferty, who regularly beats, arrests, and shoots black ghetto males. Lou helps them escape. She and her mother live in a five-room house with seven other people. Lou often takes care of the younger children, including sister Arneatha’s out-of-wedlock baby. The whole family lives on brother William’s post office salary, because their father has deserted them.

William has been saving money to buy a printing press, and against his mother’s wishes, he rents the vacant Baptist church building down the street to set up a printing business for supplemental income. Lou begs him to let the gang members use part of it as a clubhouse, to get them off the streets so that Lafferty cannot harass them.

A blind blues singer, who has fallen on hard times, and some teachers come to help the boys with their music. Lou plays the piano for them. A new boy, the most talented member of the Hawks gang, is so intelligent that he goes to a special school, but he hates whites and leads a secret group that wants to overthrow the establishment. Called “Fess” for professor, he writes beautiful poetry and song lyrics. Another new boy in the neighborhood is Calvin, an artist who letters William’s sign for him.

When the group holds a dance to raise money for musical instruments, Officer Lafferty and several other policemen force their way in to search the boys for weapons. They find nothing, but a young rookie overreacts and shoots the tenor, Jethro, whose fear has thrown him into an epileptic seizure. After Jethro is taken to the hospital and everyone is gone, William and Lou find weapons hidden in the piano.

Arneatha steals the dance profits and, when William insists that she pay the money back, runs away. Louretta is disillusioned and leaves school. She tries to give blood to help Jethro, but cannot. At a night meeting of Fess’s secret group, her light skin and reddish hair are suspect, so she leaves and is followed by Fess, who tries to rape her. She bites him and runs home.

William is fired, and Calvin is seriously beaten by gang members, who blame him for tipping off police about a planned fight with the Avengers gang on the night of the dance. He is innocent, but is seriously hurt. When Jethro dies, Avengers team up with Hawks to write about the murder in their newspaper; Fess composes verses entitled “Lament for Jethro.”

Lou thwarts the youths’ planned ambush of Lafferty and plays the piano to get them singing. She takes Jethro’s tenor part, and they work on music for Fess’s poem. At the funeral, television news cameras record them as they sing “Lament for Jethro.” The next day, promoters sign them up to make a record, which becomes a hit. William does well in his print shop, Officer Lafferty is suspended from the police force, and all ends happily.

Context

This is the first juvenile book written by Kristin Hunter, who has also written several books and numerous poems, short stories, book reviews, and articles for adults. In addition, she wrote a play that was produced in Philadelphia and a CBS television documentary, Minority of One, for which she won a prize. Hunter also won the Book World Festival Award in 1973 and the Christopher Award in 1974.

The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou won awards from the National Council on Interracial Books for Children and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It is an important book, because it was one of the first to give young people a true picture of ghetto life in American cities. It shows the beginnings of Afro-American pride in the race, which culminated in the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” and of the intensifying anger that led to a penetration of the wall of American segregation. Family values, speech patterns, habits, and religious practices are faithfully portrayed. The ending has been criticized as unrealistic, but when it is viewed as part of the melodrama formula the author chose as the pattern with which to tell her story, no other ending is possible.

Lou in the Limelight (1981) continues Louretta’s story. It was written to satisfy readers’ requests to know what happened to the characters.