Publication Date: May 1, 1992 | Age Level: 9 and up
Billie Tommie, a ten-year-old Seminole Indian, lives with his family in a chickee on a mangrove island in the Florida Everglades. Billie is the first in his family to attend school. Now he walks in two worlds--the traditonal world of his ancestors and the modern world of teachers, tourists, and schoolmates.
Billie's grandfather, Abraham, tells him the legends, stories, and rituals that are important to the Seminole people. Abraham says that an honest man who leads a good life will walk the path to the city in the sky when he dies. But Billie wants to learn more about the white man's ways.
Caught between two cultures, which path will Billie take?
The Newbery Medal winner's thoughtful tale concerns the critical choice facing a 10-year-old Seminole Indian boy treading the line between two cultures. Ages 9-12. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Publisher
Billie Tommie, a ten-year-old Seminole Indian, lives with his family in a chickee on a mangrove island in the Florida Everglades. Billie is the first in his family to attend school. Now he walks in two worlds--the traditonal world of his ancestors and the modern world of teachers, tourists, and schoolmates.
Billie's grandfather, Abraham, tells him the legends, stories, and rituals that are important to the Seminole people. Abraham says that an honest man who leads a good life will walk the path to the city in the sky when he dies. But Billie wants to learn more about the white man's ways.
Caught between two cultures, which path will Billie take?
I guess I've been writing for about as long as I can remember. Telling stories, anyway, if not writing them down. I had my first short story published when I was sixteen, and wrote stories to help put myself through college, planning to become a clinical psychologist. By the time I graduated with a BA degree, however, I decided that writing was really my first love, so I gave up plans for graduate school and began writing full time.
I'm not happy unless I spend some time writing every day. It's as though pressure builds up inside me, and writing even a little helps to release it. On a hard-writing day, I write about six hours. Tending to other writing business, answering mail, and just thinking about a book takes another four hours. I spend from three months to a year on a children's book, depending on how well I know the characters before I begin and how much research I need to do. A novel for adults, because it's longer, takes a year or more. When my work is going well, I wake early in the mornings, hoping it's time to get up. When the writing is hard and the words are flat, I'm not very pleasant to be around.
Getting an idea for a book is the easy part. Keeping other ideas away while I'm working on one story is what's difficult. My books are based on things that have happened to me, things I have heard or read about, all mixed up with imaginings. The best part about writing is the moment a character comes alive on paper, or when a place that existed only in my head becomes real. There are no bands playing at this moment, no audience applauding--a very solitary time, actually--but it's what I like most. I've now had more than 120 books published, and about 2000 short stories, articles and poems.
I live in Bethesda, Maryland, with my husband, Rex, a speech pathologist, who's the first person to read my manuscripts when they're finished. Our sons, Jeff and Michael, are grown now, but along with their wives and children, we often enjoy vacations together in the mountains or at the ocean. When I'm not writing, I like to hike, swim, play the piano and attend the theater.
I'm lucky to have my family, because they have contributed a great deal to my books. But I'm also lucky to have the troop of noisy, chattering characters who travel with me inside my head. As long as they are poking, prodding, demanding a place in a book, I have things to do and stories to tell.
Ten-year-old Billie Tommy is a Seminole Indian who lives with his family in a chickee in the Florida Everglades. He struggles to find a path through life which is both true to his heritage yet helpful to modern society. But it is very difficult even for adutls to straddle two worlds with opposing social values.
We learn about Seminole history, customs, religion, and injustice from white men. We experience terrible hurricanes plus American crudeness and prejudice. Will Billie choose to become a New Indian or walk the path to being a True Indian, as taught by his grandfather?.
Throughout the entire story there lurks the spectre of The Big One--a 15-foot alligator which terrorizes the locals. When the boys are out frogging, will the Big One get them at last? Billie's grandparents are set in the old ways and refuse to accept life in a new camp. And why won't his uncle teach him to wrestle an alligator, which earns good pay?
This is a very thoughtful book with both physical and mental action. Reminds us how hard it must be to walk the social tightrope beween two worlds in modern society, and how shamefully many whites treat native Americans. There are men of honor and wisdom among all native populations, with words of dignity which all races should value. (A book with a similar locale but set 80 years ago is Lostman's River, by Cynthia De Felice.)
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The book "To Walk the Sky Path" is about a boy named Billie Tommie who lives in Florida's Everglades. Billie is stuck between two worlds--modern and Seminole Indian.
I think that this book has too little action. The story doesn't get you interested at the start, so you can't get into the rest of the book.
I recommend this book to people who like easy-going books and books about everyday life.
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Ten year-old Billie is a Seminole native american. He lives in the Florida Everglades with his grandpa, grandma, brother, sister, mom, dad, and uncle.
Billie is the first one in his family to go to school. When he sleeps over at his friend Jeff's house, he cannot understand how they can eat food that was in a box or a can.
Seminole native american or All-American person, Billie wonders which he would like to be more.
I recommend tihs book to people who like books about other cultures.
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