Wednesday's Child: Hattie Mae Finds Home

Wednesday's Child tells the story of Hattie Mae Thompson, a young Black girl whose childhood on the southside of Chicago ends abruptly in 1911 when her mother falls ill with tuberculosis. Initially accompanying her father, a minstrel with one of the traveling circuses that wintered at Peru, Indiana, she eventually lands in Lyles Station in southern Indiana, becoming a member of the farming community that began as a free Black settlement.  For nearly two years, letters received and sent are her only connections to her parents.  Torn between her mother, ill in a Chicago sanitarium, her father, a traveling musician, and her aunt and uncle, who are farmers near Lyles Station, Hattie Mae seeks the comfort, security, and sense of belonging that makes her feel at home.  Not until she attends school to become a teacher does she realize where home lies--making her not a child of woe but rather a young woman with a kind and grateful heart.

Paperback, 176 pages.  2025, The Indiana Historical Society Press.  by Alan K. Garinger.