Africa Dream was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1977, with illustrations by Carole Byard, and won the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. The book is a prose poem in picture-book form: a child dreams of Africa — not the Africa of news reports or geography textbooks, but an Africa of beauty, warmth, and belonging. In the dream, the child crosses a desert on a camel, shops in a crowded market, reads books in a city of long ago, and is embraced by a grandmother who has been dead for many years.
Greenfield’s text is spare and incantatory, each sentence a simple declarative that accumulates emotional force through rhythm and repetition. The dream-framework allows her to bypass the complexities of actual African history and geography and offer instead something more primal: a sense of connection, of inheritance, of belonging to a people and a place. For African American children growing up in the 1970s — many of whom had no direct knowledge of Africa beyond what they saw on television — the book offered a way of imagining ancestral connection that was personal and emotional rather than merely historical.
Carole Byard’s illustrations are extraordinary: sweeping, dreamlike compositions in rich browns and golds that evoke both African landscape and the fluid logic of dreams. The collaboration between text and image creates something more than either could achieve alone — a meditation on diaspora and belonging that speaks to children without condescending to them.
Collecting Africa Dream
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1977): Hardcover with dust jacket, illustrations by Carole Byard. Coretta Scott King Award winner.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Later printings: $5–$15