The Fighting for Justice Series: Biddy Mason Speaks Up

The first volume in nonprofit California publisher Heyday Books’ Fighting for Justice series, Fred Korematsu Speaks Up, earned deserved acclaim and multiple awards, including a Jane Addams Peace Award Honor Book. A year later, Heyday Books and co-author Laura Atkins have returned with the second volume in the series, Biddy Mason Speaks Up, working with African-American poet and educator Arisa White and illustrator Laura Freeman.

This well-researched and attractively presented volume portrays the life of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, born into slavery in Georgia in 1818. Separated as a baby from her parents – as so many enslaved human beings were in order to provide profit for the enslavers – she was raised by a midwife who trained her to be a healer. Prohibited from learning to read and write, she nonetheless became one of the most respected healers in northern Mississippi, Utah, and California, where she lived when the white Mormon rancher who bought her forced her to move with his family and serve them. In California, Mason, her three daughters, and a friend and her children became famous when, in 1856, they challenged their enslaved status in this free state and won. Now free, Mason was able to keep her earnings from her work. With the money, she bought a house, owned land and buildings in Los Angeles, and became a major philanthropist in that growing city in the late nineteenth century.

As in the earlier volume, Biddy Mason Speaks Up combines moving poetry with informational sections in each chapter along with a full-page illustration of a key scene in that chapter. A timeline combines major events in Mason’s life with those in U.S. history before and during that time to provide a broader context. Also useful for classrooms and individual readers are questions that make personal connections, such as, “Have you ever been taken away from someone you love?” Freeman’s colorful and expressive paintings are a strength of the book, as they show the love among members of “pulled together” families on the plantation, the healers’ care for their patients, Mason’s joy at becoming free at last, and a moving scene of her extended family, with images in the sky of Granny Ellen and daughter Ann, who died in 1857 of smallpox at the age of 14. Illustrations of the healing plants that Granny Ellen and Mason used are a bonus that will appeal to young botanists. Like Fred Korematsu’s story, Biddy Mason’s is one with roots in California and significance everywhere.