It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw

New Voices Award Honor, Lee & Low BooksEzra Jack Book Award Honor, Ezra Jack Keats FoundationEditor's Choice, BooklistBest Children's Books of the Year: Outstanding Merit, Bank Street College of Education100 Magnificent Children's Books, Fuse #8 Production, SLJChoices, Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)Original Art Show, Society of Illustrators The inspiring biography of self-taught (outsider) artist Bill Traylor, a former slave who at the age of eighty-five began to draw pictures based on his memories and observations of rural and urban life in Alabama. Growing up as an enslaved boy on an Alabama cotton farm, Bill Traylor worked all day in the hot fields. When slavery ended, Bill's family stayed on the farm as sharecroppers. There Bill grew to manhood, raised his own family, and cared for the land and his animals. By 1935 Bill was eighty-one and all alone on his farm. So he packed his bag and moved to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Lonely and poor, he wandered the busy