Marshall Cavendish Children's Books
40 pages, Ages 4 to 10

As a young boy growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina, Romare Bearden listened to his great-grandmother's Cherokee stories and the whistles of trains steaming through town. When Romare’s family, faced with unjust Jim Crow laws, decided to head north, tears stung Romare's eyes but he watched out the train window as the world whizzed by.

Later he captured his childhood memories in a famous painting, Watching the Good Trains Go By. Using that painting as inspiration and creating a text influenced by the blues and jazz that Bearden loved, Jeanne Walker Harvey has created a story of Bearden's childhood. She describes the patchwork of daily Southern life that he saw from the train's window and the story of his arrival in shimmering New York City.

Artists and critics today praise the collages for which Bearden became famous, collages filled with visual metaphors honoring his past, African American culture, and the human experience.

Read a snippet from the book. More about Romare Bearden.