MY MOTHERS WILDEST DREAMS

A Black child reflects on the resilience, vision, and hope of women in this picture book that explores a family’s history.

A Black youngster studies sepia family photographs on a table. The text refers to the “wildest dreams” of the kid’s “Mothers.” On the next page, a Black mother and child in 19th-century clothing hold flowers as they load wood into a cabin’s cast-iron stove. “I am the wish Grandma Hanna made as she labored to make her home safe and warm in the Old Dominion,” the narrator says. “I am Mama Mamie’s desire for her children to always find their way back to each other.” Light tracks multiple lineages of mothers through farming, moves into cities, and family gatherings. Each woman is represented by a flower. The struggles of raising families during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow are implicit. Wu Wa hopes that her children will pull down “pillars of hate” (a kid points to a Confederate monument). Explanations of historical details are left to adult readers’ discretion and children’s developmental readiness. Rather than focus on hardships, Mikai’s illustrations show seven mothers in moments of communion with their families. Beautiful digital paintings contrast the warm browns of skin, wood, and earth with the bright jewel tones of cloth, flowers, and food. Finally, the child from the first page appears again, thrown into the air by the kid’s own mother in a field of symbolic flowers.

A veneration of Black women’s work and a celebration of survival, determination, and joy.