In Kumalo’s remote, bereft village where “the maize hardly reaches the height of a man,” only the elderly are left. While there, Kumalo is also determined to find his only child, his son Absalom, who went in search of his aunt and never returned. Stephen Kumalo, an elderly Zulu village pastor, travels to Johannesburg in search of his sister at the behest of a stranger’s letter that alludes to her grave suffering. Miraculously within weeks, an American publisher readily accepted the manuscript. He completed the book in San Francisco, where newfound friends read it, admired it, had it typed, and sent it to New York. In between extensive meetings and site visits, Paton managed to write Cry in just three months. To further train himself, Paton toured penal systems in 1946 throughout Scandinavia, Britain, Canada, and the United States at his own expense. By the end of World War II, Paton was already an accomplished educator who reformed a Johannesburg reformatory for troubled black youths into a school where boys aged 9 to 21 could get both an education and learn a trade. How Alan Paton’s now-classic first got to the presses is itself a noteworthy story to share. I picked it up recently because it’s on our daughter’s middle school reading list and while I vaguely remembered some of the plot, I realized I had never read it through … Heartbreak and hope are two words that define this 1948 classic by one of South Africa’s most important writers.
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