Bright Road

Based on the story, "See How They Run," which ran in the June, 1951 issue of "The Ladies' Home Journal" and subsequently won that year's Christopher Award. The story was written by Mary Elizabeth Vroman, a fourth-generation school teacher from the British West Indies. "Bright Road" has only one white actor in the cast, Robert Horton. Jane Richards is a young 4th-grade teacher in the South who has a problem in her classroom with 11-year-old C.T. Young, a backward boy whose pride has made him a stubborn rebel and an exalted liar. Jane believes in him, discovers that he has an interest in nature when he spends his time watching a caterpillar in a tree trunk as it develops a cocoon. C. T. is devoted to his family and also to little Tanya, who adores him. When Tanya, despite every effort to save her on the part of Dr. Mitchell, dies of viral pneumonia, the embittered C.T. stays away from school. When he returns and gets into a fight, he is punished by being sent to Coventry. But when a swarm of bees invades the classroom and panics the students, C.T. takes charge and, capturing the queen bee, leads the swarm outside and earns the praise of the school principal. But C.T. has urgent business at hand: the cocoon is splitting and a butterfly is ready to emerge. He has been saving it for Tanya, but now presents it to Jane, who calls the other children to watch the unfolding miracle of nature.