The people Bud encounters are poor but mostly kind, and usually African-American. Along the way, he experiences the Great Depression firsthand, seeking meals at homeless missions, camping in Hooverville and trying to hop a freight train to Chicago. He escapes from an abusive foster home (is there any other kind in children’s literature outside of Betsy Byars’ The Pinballs or Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins?) Unwilling to return to the overcrowded orphanage where he lived the previous four years, Bud sets out on a search for his roots. In fact, he commits the world’s rules to memory once he figures them out-hence, Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself, of which there are at least 328.
Calloway’s Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!! (with six exclamation points!) fit into one battered suitcase that he takes everywhere.īud is an astute observer of the world around him. All his worldly possessions, which include rocks his mother collected and 25-year-old flyers for a band-Herman E. Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis is the story of Bud (not Buddy, as he carefully points out to everyone he meets), a ten-year-old African-American foster child who is determined to find his father in Depression-era Michigan.
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