Single Woman Double Clutches

Poetry and 51 color landscapes and school bus photographs compiled by the author and book artist Kate Hitt who drove the big yellow bus and thousands of kindergarten through 12th grade students to and from their public schools for 14 years. These poems tell the stories and explore the hearts and minds of the bus riders who came from a wide variety of cultures: some with white and privileged parents, and some from immigrants and farmworker families. Side by side on the school bus every day, the kids experienced the social diversity of cultures, ages, gender, and race, and learned how to interact peaceably. The poems portray their humor, inquisitiveness, wisdom, and deep intelligence, while the prose and the views from the bus detail the agricultural history, beauty and the complex demography of the mountainous coastal landscape. The author, who lived in the Santa Cruz, California area for almost 35 years, has some answers to questions about the immigrant refugees who have crossed over the southern border to work in the fields and orchards, and why they try to make a new life in the US despite racism, language barriers, poverty and many other challenges. The most egregious betrayals are the federal incarceration and deportation of innocent people, the use of toxic pesticides around the schools, and the political system that bars the child immigrants from becoming citizens.