Julianne Sisung

Ask for the Moon Julianne Sisung

An old man and a baby create heartache and joyful triumph in a 1920s Michigan resort town. When Pastor Jenkins yells "Get the log out!" everyone understands what he's talking about, and they pluck the offending timber from their eyes. Irish Abby, a small-town woman, and her father run two hotels in Idlewild, a growing resort in Michigan's north west. They host church services, funerals, meetings and baptisms. Upstairs, the lodgings house famous activists such as W. E. B. Dubois, novelists like Charles Chesnutt, and too many entertainers to count. It is the "roaring twenties" when jazz, women's liberation, wild dancing and Jim Crow laws surface and shock the nation. Abby continues to fight the bigotry she despises, and, in Ask for the Moon, she tries to comprehend the 1920s Negro experience and their current reality. But she can't. And Samuel's past raises its hostile face, forcing him to turn from her. Shorty and Strange Al get married, and her brother Marcus comes home from jail; Betty's baby is kidnapped, and the Black Legion terrorizes the area; cantankerous old Frank Adams surprises everyone, and Yancy threatens Samuel with the Legion's brutal punishment. Idlewild moves from infancy into the troubled teens and young adulthood. The Idlewild resort began as a 2700-acre plot of land purchased in 1912 and was homesteaded for three years. Immediately after, lots began selling for $1 down and $1 a month to black men in the largest cities of America. Because of the nation's bigotry and unrest, they needed a place where they could play together, and they found it in Idlewild. During the 20's, our nation suffered unequaled hatred at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Riots, marches, cross burnings and lynching proliferated. The Black Legion was born, a group of men more violent than even the KKK, and added to the nation's pain. Jim Crow fought reconstruction and hollow emancipation laws and made it impossible for black men, women and children to live free as Lincoln intended. Yet Idlewild persevered in its serenity and its determination to remain an oasis in the middle of chaos. Michigan's small town was a living, breathing egalitarian dream. Ask for the Moon personifies the development of Idlewild through the events, change, and growth of its characters. It attempts to describe racial relationships and comprehension through the colored eyes of a small-town white woman.