Teach learns to read alongside his master’s son and transfers this knowledge through forbidden tutorials to enslaved men, women, and children. Lesa Cline-Ransome’s free verse narrative in Teach’s hushed voice opens on Monday and closes with lifted voices at Sunday School. As the congregation reads the biblical lines “Let My People Go” that Teach has written on a slate held high by the preacher, their “songs rise out of whispers” to “fill the air with the sounds of freedom.” James E. Ransome’s illustrations create a visual chorus as well-paced double-page spreads and vignettes move between watercolors and calibrated light and shadow. The art not only echoes the text but also amplifies its literal and metaphoric strength. 

The cohesive unity of any picture book starts with its book jacket. This dust jacket beckons for the reader’s engagement as it initiates the first marriage between the book’s words, pictures, and message. In bright white and serif font, the title claims the top third of the jacket’s horizontal space and has three distinctive levels. The italics of "They Call Me" invoke a declarative tone whose certainty resounds in the taller word "Teach" below it.  The title character boldly asserts his name, his role, and his authority. The word Teach falls along a central beam that buttresses the barn just as the idea of teaching structures the narrative. The next level of font reads “Lessons in Freedom.” In all caps, these words function as a banner for illicit classroom below and add visual stability to the image. The coruscating light source illuminates the power — and danger — of knowledge.  

The dust jacket art immediately apprehends the reader and offers a vocabulary of color, line, and composition that will serve one’s reading of the entire book. Controlled lines capture the roughly hewn wood and define the barn’s sturdy beams. A figure sits up and to the left, just at the picture’s edge. Perched precariously on a beam, his right hand holds the slate as his left grasps the post and his legs dangle. Because his face looks toward the center from the margin, the reader, too, looks to the central image.  

Here, six figures encircle a man holding up and pointing to the letter G written in white on a black slate. Five figures sit on bales of hay and hold pieces of chalk as they try to imitate the drawn letter; one stands as he writes. Fluid, loose lines articulate the drapes of clothing, the tilt of a head, the movement of an arm, the detail of a face, the attentive direction of Teach’s gaze. The circle defines the foreground and establishes the picture’s center space as a clandestine place marked by intense focus.  

Ransome’s use of color enables one to read geometries that fortify the composition. The brilliant white of the type font is picked up in Teach’s eyes, in pieces of chalk held by some figures, in the letter G itself. Though the figures sit in a circle with Teach at the head, white shirt backs form a triangle, and that triangle intersects the triangle made by the darker clothing.  A purposeful use of blues in a dress, pants, or headdress direct the viewer’s eye horizontally across the picture space and back again. Learning to read this picture mimics learning to read letters: One’s eyes move back and forth as they do the hard work required of decoding. The eye finds relief in a cool blue or soft green. Touches of gray and yellow mute the white shirts worn by the male figures and resolve the composition’s visual unity. 

The education that begins on this book’s jacket cover and ends with its back jacket image of a capped black man holding an open newspaper that stretches taut beneath his hands. His eyes move across the page he reads, and they move in exactly the opposite direction of the book’s reader’s eyes. That only a few words on the paper he holds are legible to the reader accent the puzzlement, frustration, and imprisonment that restricts anyone who cannot read. Teach understands that words hold secrets and that reading it unharnesses those secrets.  

Just as Teach’s words narrate literacy as freedom in time and place, so do the illustrations establish historical period and vivify learning to read. In the background of this picture of concentration and momentary safety despite danger, there’s a light behind the ever-so-slightly opened barn door. The burning light of freedom.   

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of They Call Me Teach]