In 1924, before the Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, twelve-year-old African American Leanora Sutter was running scared. Even though she and her father have dealt with racism before, she is terrified of what will happen to them next now that the Ku Klux Klan has come to their small Vermont town. Then one evening, the shooter who was attempting to decimate Leanora and his dad together in one shot fired the gun and killed Leanora’s dad. Now, she cannot determine whom to trust among the townspeople. She does not know if Constable Johnson is trustable and if she can tell him what she saw that night. The general store owner Harvey Pettibone and Mrs. Sara Chickering, the avoiding farmer lady who was once like a second mother to Leanora, and many other characters are against each other, mostly against Leanora, because of the Ku Klux Klan. The tension builds as Leanora tries to decide whom to put her faith in during these dangerous times. ‘Witness’ is written entirely in free-verse poetry, and each poem shows the inner thoughts of eleven different characters, including Leonora, Harvey, and Sara, about their emotions toward the KKK dominating their town. Everyone believes that they know which side is right and which side is wrong, but when a furtive shooter opens fire on Sara Chickering’s house, each person must painfully reevaluate their position. Besides being a wonderfully in-depth examination of racism and identity, Witness is also a great historical mystery. The clues each character drops helps to figure out who the guilty shooter is.
The poetry about a boy named Lewis, who could not come to school the next morning, presented a mixture of sympathy and numbness. Every day, the boy was down in the sandbank making big cities, and every day, the big boys came and stumped the cities down, so every day, he had to start again. However, this time, he was buried in his very sand city. Leanora, like Lewis, was getting buried in all the whiteness. The poetry is about how the girl felt about the racism she encountered. The poetry shimmers the hard, rough, and malfunctioning society a little girl lives on and her unnaturally mature thoughts.
Witness
