The Liberation of Gabriel King

I finished this book a while ago and just loved it. It was a real quick read that really struck home with me. It's about a boy and girl growing up in the 70's in a small southern town. They are best friends, against all odds considering that he's white and she's black. Together they devise a way to help him overcome all his fears, the worst one of which is attending the fifth grade. They spend their summer conquering bullies, spiders, and the KKK. It is a wonderful story of friendship, morals, and strength. What I most enjoyed about it though was that I felt like I'd been transported back to that time in my life when I was enjoying similar adventures with my brother Jonathan, albeit at a younger age.
Before I went to Kindergarten, my family moved from Simi Valley, California (which is a city much like you imagine when you think of southern California; you know...the palm trees, big houses, important jobs, etc.) to a very small community in central California called Greenfield. Greenfield is on the outskirts of the San Joaquin Valley. It is, or at least was back then, a farming community. My grandparents lived nearby and owned a tire yard (I think my Dad was working for my grandfather and that's why we moved there). To the mind of an adventurous five year old, a tire yard is almost as magical as a fairytale castle. On this huge piece of cemented property that my grandparents owned were hundreds of rows of every size of tires imaginable. The rows were stacked so high that to my eye, they reached the clouds. Jonathan and I spent countless hours running in and out of the stacks, playing hide-and-go-seek and looking for 'treasures'. I remember one particularly exciting time when we found a barrel of some sort of acid that would disintegrate anything we put in it. Now that was fun. To this day, I cannot think of what sort of liquid would actually be lying around in an open barrel that would have such a chemical property, but would not melt the container it was in.
Some of the other adventures we enjoyed were running through the cotton fields that were close to our house and particularly looking for crop dusters. Crop dusters are the low flying aircraft that spray chemical pesticides on crops, but we called them 'our friends' because whenever we would be running through the cotton fields and they would come, we would eagerly wave to them and they would always wave back. We also called tumbleweeds 'our friends', I guess because they were always blowing in to say "Hi". I remember many times that we took Mom's kitchen spoons down to the irrigation ditches to catch tadpoles. We discovered that if we bent the spoons where the handle meets the spoon part, it was easier to hold. I don't remember if Mom ever found out what we were using the spoons for, but I remember her being upset that all of her spoons were bent.
It's not like we had a KKK clan in our small community like they did in the story of Gabriel King, but I do remember some prejudices. One night as Jonathan and I were coming home from some adventure, we saw the wild lights from ambulances parked across the street from our house. We were small and crept into the dark corners of the neighbors yard for a better view of what was going on. To my recollection what we witnessed was the aftermath of a bloody fight, most likely alcohol induced. I remember seeing blood and thinking there was a gun involved, but I can't be sure. The part that I remember most was knowing (or being told) that they were Mexicans and for some reason that seemed to explain everything. I am grateful to have matured and outgrown such feelings and beliefs, but it just goes to show that even though southern California may not be "the south," prejudices still abound there as well as in many other parts of the world.
Ultimately, I think that "The Liberation of Gabriel King" would ring familiar to most of us were we to examine the recesses of our minds for those sometimes fun, sometimes scary, and sometimes wrong moments in our childhoods.