SPECIAL ISSUE | 49.3 SUMMER 2022 A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES SPECIAL ISSUE: CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA Guest edited by Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek COLLEGE LITERATURE
COLLEGE LITERATURE A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES SPECIAL ISSUE CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA GUEST EDITORS ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK 49.3 SUMMER 2022
INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL BOARD
STEPHEN GREENBLATT, Harvard University
College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing origi nal and innovative scholarly research across the various periods, intellectual fields, and geographical locations that comprise the changing discipline of Anglophone and comparative literary studies. The journal is committed to the renewal of critique as a historically determinate, self-reflexive, and socially substantive practice, which in resist ing “empathy with the victor” (Benjamin) remains perpetually dissatisfied with each new consensus. We are convinced that literature remains a significant locus for such a renewal, since in seeking to establish a space “outside” normative social values, literary (and other) texts continually stage and restage the discursive, disciplinary, and institu tional limits that enable such norms, and so work to reveal critique’s complicity with them. In interrogating critical practice, the journal aims to investigate its involvement in broader parameters of public debate organized by such enduring (though mutating) political demarcations as those between the private and the public, the national and the global, or indeed between the cultural and the political itself.
College Literature welcomes submissions from across the range of scholarship in liter ary studies. It invites studies that explore how changing structures of social experience (such as the transnational reach of culture, or the transgressive power of sexuality, or the excessive potential of the past over contemporary interpretation) call on us to rethink existing critical assumptions, conceptual terms, and historical frameworks. Alongside work that reconsiders “traditional” or “conventional” critical orthodoxies, College Litera ture also welcomes scholarship that questions the “new orthodoxies” that developed as radical critiques of those existing positions but that are also embedded within specific intellectual trajectories and historical configurations of experience.
HOWARD CAYGILL, Kingston University
JAMES ENGELL, Harvard University
ANIA LOOMBA, University of Pennsylvania GRAHAM M AC PHEE, West Chester University
JOE CLEARY, Yale University
MARY ANN CAWS, Graduate Center, City University of New York
KAREN L. KILCUP, University of North Carolina Greensboro FRANÇOISE LIONNET, University of California, Los Angeles
JOHN MARX, University of California, Davis CARY NELSON, University of Illinois PETER NICHOLLS, New York University
MICHAEL CORNETT, Duke University
NATHALIE F. ANDERSON, Swarthmore College
HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR., Vanderbilt University
PATRICK COLM HOGAN, University of Connecticut DAVID JOHNSON, Open University
STEPHEN REGAN, Durham University PAUL SMITH, George Mason University
TERESA S. SOUFAS, Temple University HORTENSE J. SPILLERS, Vanderbilt University GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK, Columbia University
MARTHA J. CUTTER, University of Connecticut TERENCE E. DIGGORY, Skidmore College TERRY EAGLETON, Lancaster University
EDITORIAL POLICY
EDITORIAL TEAM EDITOR CAROLYN SORISIO, West Chester University GUEST EDITORS ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN, Middle Tennessee State University LAURA DUBEK, Middle Tennessee State University ASSOCIATE EDITORS TYLER BRADWAY, SUNY Cortland WILL BRIDGES, University of Rochester CONOR M c CARTHY, Maynooth University STACIE M c CORMICK, Texas Christian University ELIZABETH RIVLIN, Clemson University MARÍA SÁNCHEZ, University of North Carolina, Greensboro ROBERT VOLPICELLI, Randolph–Macon College BOOK REVIEW EDITOR RACHEL BANNER, West Chester University ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR SCOTT GIBSON, Universidad San Francisco de Quito ASSISTANT TO THE JOURNAL KATHLEEN M. BRADY, West Chester University GRADUATE ASSISTANTS LAUREN GOOD, West Chester University KRISTIN O’NEILL, West Chester University COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022
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CONTENTS SPECIAL ISSUE CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA 349 ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK Introduction: Children, Too, Sing America: Ending Apartheid in and of Children’s Literature ESSAYS 373 SEOHYUN KIM Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen’s Passing 400 HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES Isis as Little Red Riding Hood: Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston’s “Drenched in Light” 421 MAUDE HINES “Mature Themes”: Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter 448 EWA KLE˛CZAJ-SIARA In Search of Faith Ringgold’s Picture Books 468 E. GALE GREENLEE A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks’s Homemade Love 500 KAAVONIA HINTON Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: A Young Adult Adaptation for All Ages 524 ELLEN DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK Dream Keepers 584 NICOLE KING Afterword: Writing Black Children, Writing “Black Aliveness” APPENDICES 595 Abstracts
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA: ENDING APARTHEID IN AND OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK
On March 2, 2021, National Read Across America Day, the estate of Theodor Geisel, known to millions as Dr. Seuss, announced that it would no longer publish six of the best-selling author’s books, each of which “portray[s] people in ways that are hurtful and wrong” (Dr. Seuss Enterprises 2021). This announcement touched a cul tural nerve, attracting the attention of national media outlets and politicians as well as academics and advocates for anti-racist educa tion and greater diversity in children’s books. Articles and op-eds appeared in mainstream publications in and outside the US. Shortly after the announcement, National Public Radio aired a segment on All Things Considered that featured commentary by two English pro fessors: Donald Pease, who holds a position named after Geisel at Dartmouth, and Michelle H. Martin, who teaches children’s liter ature at the University of Washington. Pease used Geisel’s biogra phy to contextualize the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease mass-producing racist images, noting that Geisel himself “evolved” with regard to race and thereby effectively countering the idea that the decision constituted a threat to childhood from so-called can cel culture. Martin, the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African
Since the publication of the New England Primer in the 1680s, US children’s literature has functioned pedagogically and with ideo logical intent, offering readers depictions of “approved” behavior, attitudes, and ideas. Toni Morrison, the most celebrated writer in the African American literary tradition, structured her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in a way that exposes and indicts the racism of this ideological intent: fourteen-year-old Pecola’s life plays out within the context of the mid-twentieth-century Dick and Jane basal readers, White master narratives that render Pecola both invisible and irrelevant. Whether with conscious intent or not, when Representative McCarthy tweeted his staged reading, he entered a high-stakes debate about race and representation in children’s literature. And by choosing to read a book by Dr. Seuss that did not contain the same derogatory images as those books being withdrawn from the market, he participated in (and, with the full weight of his political office, sanctioned) a centuries-long practice of erasing childhoods other than those that are White and
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American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 (2004), offered a wider historical context for understanding both the racist stereotypes in Dr. Seuss’s books and the decision to stop publishing them, point ing out that Geisel wrote for a White audience, his popular books responding to a market dominated by “stiff, humorless” books for children, such as the basal readers Martin remembers from her 1960s childhood (Ulaby 2021). While Martin emphasized the changing landscape for children’s books over the last fifty years, with more stories for and about children of color, the publishing industry and the US children’s literary tradition remain predominantly and unde niablyFourWhite.days after the announcement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Congressman Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to read Green Eggs and Ham, tweeting a video of his performance with the message, “I still like Dr. Seuss.” While many political pundits rec ognized the minority leader’s stunt as an attempt to deflect atten tion away from contentious and more serious matters of policy, his scripted performance should also be understood as an insidi ous example of how White supremacy reconstitutes itself through mass media—in this case via Twitter and books for children. Indeed, McCarthy’s viral video, dismissed as political theater, actu ally underscores the vexed relationship between children’s litera ture and the process of reconstructing White American identity.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura middle class. The Congressman’s proclamation of support for Dr. Seuss veiled a much darker message, however, one that circulated on flyers following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE.
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This latest controversy over Dr. Seuss’s work and legacy brings renewed attention to US children’s literature as a contested site that reveals the contradictions inherent in our nation’s racist history and proclaimed sense of itself. In his provocatively titled Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books, Philip Nel makes a strong case for considering chil dren’s literature “one of the most important arenas in which to com bat prejudice” because “what we read when we are young shapes us deeply.” Authors who write for children do not need to be convinced of this fact; indeed, Black authors routinely report that they began writing in order to replace derogatory and stereotyped images in stories with depictions that more accurately reflect themselves and others who look like them. Nel, however, in writing to an audience of teachers, scholars, and other gatekeepers, seeks to change criti cal practices (and attitudes) within academia, schools, libraries, and other institutions committed to youth literacy, by putting children’s literary studies at the center of discussions about (anti)racism. Taking up a provocative term used by children’s author Christopher Myers in a 2014 op-ed for The New York Times titled “Children’s Literature: Apartheid or Just a General Lack of Color?” Nel ends his study by calling these scholars to action: “To dismantle our children’s litera ture apartheid, we must change the ways we produce, promote, read, and teach literature for young people” (2017, 202). This special issue responds to that call by bringing together critics from fields of study that too often operate independently—African American literary studies and US children’s literary studies. We seek to further the cause of dismantling children’s literature apartheid1 by widening the constituencies actively invested in Black children’s literature as well as literary constructions of Black childhood, whether they appear in books marketed to young readers or adults. With a few notable exceptions, calls for integrating these sepa rate fields of study have gone unanswered. In a 2010 interview with The Brown Bookshelf, Dianne Johnson, a literary critic who focuses on writers who have spent their careers producing texts specifically for children, makes clear that “many of the most important writ ers in [the African American] tradition, such as James Baldwin and
Twenty years earlier, Johnson had published Telling Tales: The Peda gogy and the Promise of African American Literature for Youth, hoping to encourage scholarly attention to, among other topics, “the interre lationship between Black children’s literature and adult literature” (Johnson 1990, 12). That critical space remains essentially unex plored. In 1998, in their introduction to a special issue of African American Review highlighting Black texts for young readers, Johnson and Catherine Lewis call it “disturbing” that scholars who consider themselves well-read in the African American literary tradition (presumably the readers of AAR ) do not know the work of writers such as Virginia Hamilton, Eloise Greenfield, Tom Feelings, Jerry Pinkney, Rosa Guy, Mildred Taylor, and Pat Cummings. Kathar ine Capshaw makes a similar point with regard to US ethnic lit erature in her introduction to a special issue of MELUS in 2002, arguing that an “awareness of ethnic children’s literature may open up our approaches to studying and teaching adult texts.” Capshaw’s insistence that we “cannot tell the story of ethnic American writ ing without the voice of children’s literature” applies as well to US writing writ large and Black children’s literature (Capshaw 2002, 7).
In Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Literature Before 1900, Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane present scholars with primary source material intended “to bring two largely separate fields (early African American literary studies and children’s literature studies) into conversation in ways that shift the parameters of both”; by seek ing to “unsettle traditional histories and theorizations of children’s literature to permit an expanded appreciation of the investments and accomplishments of black children’s culture,” Capshaw and Duane imagine the possibilities of putting Black children and Black childhoods at the center of a more broadly conceived literary critical practice (2017, x). We turn our attention to Black children’s literature and literary constructions of Black childhood, in part, to mark the centennial of Langston Hughes’s literary debut in the pages of the NAACP’s dual publications—The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book (a magazine for chil dren). From his debut in 1921 to his death in 1967, Hughes straddled the arbitrary line between children’s and adult literature, producing texts and criticism relevant to both. He included many of his most popular poems in collections marketed to children. Hughes chose to include “I, too,” originally published in a special issue of Survey Graphic (1925), in his first children’s book, The Dream Keeper and Other
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Nikki Giovanni, also produced work for children” (Brown 2010).
I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. (Hughes 2003, 82) “I, too” has been invoked throughout its nearly one-hundred-year history. In 2016, at the unveiling of the National Museum of Afri can American History and Culture in Washington, DC, President Obama used the final line as a refrain in a speech about the impor tance of confronting the contradictions of the nation’s history. Near the end of his speech, the “I” becomes “We,” the “darker brother” becoming a choir of voices, dispelling the myth of a single story, not just of America but of African Americans. Hughes’s selection of “I, too” for his children’s collection should remind us that Black chil dren, though often seated in the kitchen when company comes, also sing in that choir.
We invoke Hughes’s poem for reasons particular to each of our academic fields of study: for too long, Black children have been denied a place at the scholarly table. This denial mirrors the inattention to Black children’s concerns in our public discourse and manifests in a dearth of scholarship on Black children’s texts and Black literary childhood. As president of the Children’s Literature Association, Capshaw called for a renewed focus on diversity in her field, describ ing the current state of scholarship on non-White children’s texts
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Introduct I on 353 Poems
(1932). The speaker of “I, too,” echoing Walt Whitman, asserts his place at the table while underscoring the twoness of America: I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow
They’llBesides,Then.“EatSayNobody’llWhenI’llTomorrow,strong.beatthetablecompanycomes.daretome,inthekitchen,”seehowbeautiful
354 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 “bereft” (2014, 238). In African American literary studies, the state of scholarship on children’s texts could be described as minuscule if not nonexistent. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for example, while including in biographical headnotes the fact that an author also published work for children, contains not one author or illustrator who produced work exclusively for young readers. The most prominent nod toward an author’s work for children amounts to four sentences in the headnote for Lucille Clifton, winner of both the Coretta Scott King Award (for Everett Anderson’s Goodbye in 1984) and a National Book Award for Poetry (for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems in 2000). In Oxford’s A Historical Guide to Lang ston Hughes, the concluding chapter, “Bibliographic Essay,” contains one paragraph on “Children’s Literature and Juvenile Biographies” and begins with a statement—“Children’s literature is a new area of scholarly study” (Hubbard 2004, 214)—that prompts the question: new to whom? At best, this perspective reflects a separate-and-equal mindset regarding Black children’s literature, a mindset this special issue seeks to challenge.
Framing a call to dismantle children’s literature apartheid by invoking Hughes calls attention to the arbitrary nature of bound aries between fields of study: although he did not identify as a chil dren’s writer, Hughes most certainly participated in both literary traditions. In the most comprehensive overview of the Black chil dren’s literary tradition to date, Free Within Ourselves: The Develop ment of African American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop honors Hughes in her title, echoing a phrase from his 1925 mani festo, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Bishop notes that Hughes and Arna Bontemps, the writer Violet J. Harris regards as “the contemporary ‘father’ of Black children’s literature,” were the first Black writers with work for children published by mainstream presses (quoted Bishop 2007, 46). Hughes’s The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, illustrated by Helen Sewell (reissued with illustrations by Brian Pinkney in 1994), and Hughes and Bontemps’s coauthored novella, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, illustrated by E. Simms Campbell (reissued by Oxford in 1993), both appeared in 1932. Con sidered a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes has been the subject of numerous biographies introducing him to young readers as well as the inspiration for a slew of award-winning chil dren’s books that signify on his work; such awards, in part, reflect Hughes’s continued currency within children’s literature.2 Within African American literary studies, Hughes is perhaps second only
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura to Toni Morrison in the amount of scholarship his work has gener ated. In 2001 the University of Missouri Press began publishing the sixteen-volume The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, two of which focus exclusively on his work for children. A new documentary, I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled, introduces the prolific writer to yet another generation of readers and activists.3 The doc umentary’s teaser features Hughes’s poem “Kids Who Die,” with imagery and dramatic recitations by children that frame Hughes as an ancestor to the Black Lives Matter movement. One hundred years after his literary debut in the pages of The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book, Hughes continues to sing America while Americans of all ages continue to listen and learn from him.
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Hughes’s continued relevance speaks to the as-yet-unrealized “tomorrow” of “I, too”: the “darker brother” remains relegated to the “kitchen,” his beauty unrecognized by a persistent and perni cious “they” that wields power over Black bodies through various means, including within the pages of books marketed to children. Throughout his writing career, Hughes challenged the normali zation of Whiteness in the world of children’s books not only by publishing poems, stories, biographies, and nonfiction that docu mented and celebrated Black life but also by confronting racism in White children’s literature. 4 In “Books and the Negro Child,” published in Children’s Library Yearbook, Hughes rebuked purvey ors of racist imagery, sounding notes that echo in our most recent reckoning with Dr. Seuss: “The need today is for books that Negro parents and teachers can read to their children without hesitancy as to the psychological effect on the growing mind, books whose dark characters are not all clowns, and whose illustrations are not merely caricatures” (1932, 109). In 1944, Hughes responded to a request to review Ada Claire Darby’s Jump Lively Jeff, writing that he did not expect Black readers to like the book. To support his view, Hughes noted the following: the Black boy’s name is Jefferson Davis; young Jeff eats watermelon; other characters include Aunt Car’line and Mammy; and everyone speaks in “slavery-time comic, antiquated dialect” (Rampersad and Roessel 2015, 259). In 2015, upon the publi cation of Hughes’s Selected Letters, Kia Makarechi featured Hughes’s response to Jump Lively Jeff in a short piece for Vanity Fair with a title that underscores the poet’s relevance to current debates about race, representation, and racism in children’s literature: “Langston Hughes’s 1944 Rebuke of a Racist Children’s Book Could Have Been Written Today.”
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Yuill astutely observes that Lanes’s attempt to explain the appeal of Sambo in terms of a rejection of racism may actually reveal an acceptance of White supremacy as well as “a fascination with the distorted images of blacks” in mass media (1976, 9).5 In “From Lit tle Black Sambo to Popo and Fifina,” Harris cites such fascination to explain Bontemps’s exclusion from the canon of children’s literature: the White reading public, Harris argues, prefers minstrel-inspired depictions of Blacks over Bontemps’s “oppositional images” (1990, 126).6 Hughes responded to Little Black Sambo with scorn, describing
Challenges to racism in US children’s literature—then and now—typically face fierce resistance from White readers blissfully ignorant of, or apathetic to, the ways in which books such as Darby’s Jump Lively Jeff or Seuss’s And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street per petuate stereotypes of people of color and thus advance the cause of White supremacy. A case in point involves the problematic history of the phenomenally popular The Story of Little Black Sambo, writ ten and illustrated by Scottish-born Helen Bannerman in 1898. Pre sented as people living in the jungle, Sambo and his parents, Black Jumbo and Black Mumbo, have pitch-black skin and the exaggerated features characteristic of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. In her 1976 study of the book’s history, Little Black Sambo: A Closer Look, solicited by the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), Phyllis J. Yuill documents twenty-seven versions of the book published in the US between 1905 and 1953, each version welcomed and heralded in a fashion advocates for anti-racist education would likely describe as cringe-worthy. In 1936 The Horn Book Magazine called the publi cation of a sequel, Sambo and the Twins, “the event of the year among children’s books” (Yuill 1976, 6). Yuill notes the ways in which crit ics evolved (or not) regarding race by analyzing Selma Lanes’s com ments in Down the Rabbit Hole. Lanes assesses Bannerman’s original story about a boy who outwits tigers, animals who then turn into butter that the boy’s mother uses to make hundreds of pancakes for a family feast, giving the book an “A-plus” for teaching White children to consider the humanity of Black people “without feeling either guilty or anxious”:
In loving Sambo, unreservedly, in some way every white had the feeling that he was also accepting the black man as a fellow human being. The nursery bookshelf was integrated, and no prejudice could be said to exist in a home where Little Black Sambo and Peter Rabbit stood side by side on the same shelf. (Lanes 1971, 162)
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THE ALL-WHITE PUBLISHING WORLD Visible at several different levels—editors, agents, and reviewers— the Whiteness of the publishing industry serves the interests of White supremacy by controlling what stories get told and in what way. Zora Neale Hurston tackled this issue in 1950, in an essay for Negro Digest appropriately titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Employing her signature sardonic wit, Hurston first declares herself “amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes” before presenting this indifference as a threat to “national coherence and solidarity.” Lack of knowledge, Hurston argues, “cannot fail to bar our understanding.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek it as written and drawn in the “pickaninny” style, with imagery poi sonous to relationships between White children and their Black peers. By Hughes’s death in 1967, the number of Sambo defenders had diminished but not disappeared. The editors of The Anthology of Children’s Literature (Houghton Mifflin), a textbook used in chil dren’s literature courses in schools of education and library science, included the story in its picture book section in 1959, choosing to exclude it from the textbook’s 1970 edition; in 1971, Wilson’s Chil dren’s Catalog also dropped Sambo. But as Nina Mikkelsen argues in “Little Black Sambo Revisited,” her review of Pictus Orbis Sambo, the character lived on, showing up, “like the bad penny,” in “memora bilia of popular culture, canon wars, and new versions” (Mikkelsen 2001, 261). In 1996, Julius Lester and illustrator Jerry Pinkney collab orated to publish Sam and the Tigers, a retelling of Bannerman’s story that replaces racist depictions but retains the folktale elements. An American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children’s Book for 1997, their revision of a racist bestseller won the Children’s Litera ture Association’s Phoenix Picture Book Award in 2016.7 Why did it take a century for Sam to rise out of the ashes of Sambo? Addressing this question requires attention to three mutu ally reinforcing factors that create and maintain apartheid in US children’s literature: (1) a White-dominated publishing industry, (2) the pervasiveness of racist stereotyping as well as the policing of rep resentations of Blackness, and (3) the association of childhood with innocence and thus Whiteness. We offer a brief discussion of each factor in order to provide a sense of the strength and persistence of the forces preventing a place at the table for a diverse chorus of Black writers whose works center Black children and Black childhoods.
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Man, like all the other animals fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote some thing malign” (1979, 169). Well aware that publishers print what sells, Hurston puts the blame for the “gap in the national literature” on a White public averse to any literary or visual representation of Black people that does not reinforce racist stereotypes. Hurston could have easily provided examples of White-preferred caricatures of Black people, given their ubiquity in US popular culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s phenomenally popular 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, for example, features the asexual, docile Tom and the unruly, unkempt Topsy. Both caricatures reappear in the form of Mammy—asexual and completely devoted to her White owners—and the mischievous Prissy in Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer prize-winning Gone With the Wind, the film version of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940 and a Best Support ing Actress Award for Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy. The first Black actor to win an Oscar, McDaniel sat at a segregated table for the awards ceremony, a requirement that clearly illustrates the complicity of the movie industry in maintaining Jim Crow via its artistic productions as well as its institutional practices. That same year, Richard Wright’s Native Son became the first Book-ofthe-Month Club selection by a Black writer, the novel introducing readers to Bigger Thomas, an unrepentant murderer and rapist just barely out of reform school. A significant moneymaker for Wright, Native Son drew fire from Hurston and, more famously, James Bald win, who disparaged the novel as participating, alongside Stowe’s nineteenth-century bestseller, in a protest tradition that distorted and debased Black experience, “surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity” (Baldwin 1998, 34).
Hurston’s astute analysis suggests that without some kind of intervention, the White publishing industry will not challenge entrenched notions of Blackness. Scholars point to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act as exam ples of political forces affecting publishing practices. In her key note address at the Children’s Literature Association conference, Capshaw noted a “surge in children’s book productivity” following mid-twentieth-century civil rights legislation, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the establishment of the Council of Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), calling the 1970s “a special moment” for Black children’s literature (2014, 241). In his op-ed for the New York Times, “I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize
the Industry,” multiple award-winning young adult author Walter Dean Myers remembers this historical period similarly: “Things were looking up. I believed that my children and their contemporar ies would not only escape the demeaning images I had experienced but would have strong, positive images as well.” For Myers (1986), revolutionizing the industry meant “bringing it to a quality and dimension that would raise the standards of all children’s books.”
Ellen Butler Donovan and
But what Myers hoped would be a turning point for the next gen eration of young readers turned out to be a window of opportunity that opened ever so slightly and then slammed shut. Put another way, the “all-white world” of children’s books that Nancy Larrick documented in her landmark study, published in 1965, proved to be incredibly adept at accommodating calls for more diversity while continuing to support and uphold White supremacy.
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Richard Jean So’s research does for our current era what Lar rick did for hers—it draws attention to significant racial inequality in publishing by using data analysis. In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020), So documents the all-White world of adult fiction over a seventy-year period. His findings reached a general audience via a New York Times op-ed co written with journalist Guy Wezerek, “Just How White is the Book Industry?” The answer is, even Whiter than we academics imagined. So demonstrates that even as multiculturalism made a demonstra ble difference in what college students read (measured by Norton anthologies, curriculum, and syllabi), the situation in the college classroom does not reflect any measurable change in the White ness of the publishing industry. A professor of English and Cultural Analytics, So mentions both Hurston’s 1950 essay and Morrison’s tenure at Random House in his op-ed, 8 seeking to make connec tions between his data and the material conditions Black writers continue to face in a racist marketplace. Though adult fiction pub lished by five mainstream presses comprises his dataset, So high lights contemporary Black young adult writers receiving rejections from publishers who wonder aloud why they would publish The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas when they already publish books by Jason Reynolds: apparently, one Black young adult writer is enough. So’s op-ed responds directly to a hashtag originating with L.L. Mc Kinney, a Black fantasy writer, who sought to call attention to racial disparities in advances paid to writers: #PublishingPaidMe would document just how much publishers value (or not) Black stories at a time when these same corporations issued statements of support in
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In her assessment of the current state of Black children’s literature, published in The Lion and the Unicorn in 2019, Karen Chandler echoes the concerns of Hughes’s 1926 manifesto. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes rejects the idea that Black artists should cater to expectations that reflect White middle-class atti tudes and values, whether such expectations come from Whites or Blacks. Hughes references the “racial mountain” in “I, too,” an oft-ignored aspect of his famous poem: the “they” sending the “darker brother” to the “kitchen” include Black Americans adher ing to White middle-class notions of beauty and respectability and rejecting the forms and values of Black artistic expression (such as spirituals, the blues, and folklore) that Hughes championed. In her survey of the current moment, Chandler comes to a similar con clusion: while Black writers for young readers seem to be in vogue, enjoying both popular and critical success, institutional practices continue to limit the range of Black representation by ignoring the work of previous generations of groundbreaking Black authors and by the persistent stereotypes that still populate books about Black experience.12 Like Hughes, Chandler worries that the rich diversity that constitutes a distinct Black cultural history is in danger of being distorted, if not erased, and she wonders what effect this erasure will have on children:13 I feel unsettled by some of the representations of black identity, and I wonder what they may contribute to children’s understanding of
POLICING REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS
conjunction with Black Lives Matter. Not surprisingly, So’s research proves the disconnect between public relations rhetoric and whose/ which stories get told. His study, briefly summarized in the op-ed and discussed at length in his book, concludes that the publishing industry is 95 percent White.9 Data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center reveals the same lack of access to authors of color and lack of diversity in children’s books.10 While So remains optimistic that once publishers understand the scope of the prob lem, they will find effective ways to address it (such as hiring more people of color as editors), McKinney, speaking from experience as a Black writer of fantasy fiction, rejects both the ignorance de fense and the idea that publishers simply respond to market forces: “They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism” (So and Wezerek 2020).11
Butler
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14
(WHITE) CHILDHOOD AND INNOCENCE
Ellen Donovan and black and American cultural foundations and also how they may influence children’s vision of the past, present, and future. I see a diverse, multigenerational group of black authors engaging with necessary questions about identity and social belonging, but worry that some of the most progressive and critical voices are being pre maturely silenced. (Chandler 2019, 172)
The construction of childhood as innocent and therefore White, or as White and therefore innocent, manifests in discussions that tran scend disciplinary boundaries and typically take place within the context of concerns about racial (in)justice. For example, research consistently demonstrates racial disparities in disciplinary prac tices in public schools as well as arrests and various forms of abuse (including murder) of children by law enforcement. A product of the nineteenth century, “childhood innocence” has tremendous politi cal power, Robin Bernstein (2017) calling it “a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons.” The author of Racial Innocence: Performing Ameri can Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), Bernstein explains in “Let Black Kids be Kids” that understanding violence against Black children requires remembering that slavery dehumanized Black people, denying them agency and adulthood, constructing
Whereas Chandler puts the burden of responsibility on institutional practices, McKinney explains such silencing in terms of White investment in Black pain, relating the lack of diversity in Black books to the film and television industry in which Black actors win awards for portraying drug dealers, gang members, addicts, and maids, characters “steeped in stereotypes about the struggle, ready-made for non-Black consumption” (McKinney 2020). McKinney notes that books for younger readers suffer a similar fate when cultural gatekeepers (such as agents, editors, reviewers, teachers, and librari ans) choose to highlight so-called “issue” books over texts that offer diverse alternative representations. Just as damaging is how genre polices representation. Nel devotes an entire chapter in Was the Cat in the Hat Black? to the industry’s focus on Black trauma through its preference for realism, historical fiction, and nonfiction. McKinney makes a similar argument, countering the “trauma porn” favored by the industry by offering a list of contemporary Black fantasy novels that present young Black protagonists as heroic adventurers.
This Special Issue draws attention to yet another factor that sup ports and upholds apartheid in and of children’s literature: the rel ative lack of scholarly attention to Black children and childhood.
The concept of childhood innocence also shapes children’s read ing via often heated discussions about age-appropriate content. While such discussions typically draw attention to textual elements such as vulgar language or scenes with implicit or explicit sexual ref erences, they more often than not mask a more fundamental objec tion to a book’s ideological perspective. For example, the American Library Association’s list of the ten most challenged books in 2020 includes seven works intended for children, three of which are authored or coauthored by a Black writer and address racism: Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely’s All American Boys; and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give.16 Though the content that attracts efforts at censorship shifts in response to cultural anxieties, often under girding the anxiety about books by Black writers is the notion that (White) children should be protected from content that unsettles the (racist) status quo. When White supremacy is threatened, cul tural forces coalesce to defend White children.
362 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 them as perpetually undisciplined children so as to rationalize and justify keeping them in a state of perpetual bondage. Conse quently, though Black people were denied agency and adulthood, they were also denied the affordances that were assigned to White childhood—innocence and, therefore, protection. The influence of “childhood innocence” as an element of White supremacy on the material conditions of Black lives is clearly destructive.15 Yet the concept survives, often as an unexamined assumption. Writing nearly fifty years apart, both Broderick (1973) and McKinney (2020) make explicit the idea that unexamined assumptions about (White) childhood, on the part of cultural gatekeepers, impede accurate representations of other kinds of childhood, often retrospectively rationalized with comments like “Black people don’t read” or “Black people don’t buy books.”
In the one hundred years since Hughes made his literary debut, scholarship centering the Black child has been produced primar ily, but not exclusively, by a handful of Black scholars in children’s literary studies and (multicultural) education.17 A notable and early
A (CRITICAL) FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura
exception, Dorothy M. Broderick’s The Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction (1973) surveyed one hundred forty years of children’s books (1827–1967), Broderick concluding with an indictment of her White colleagues for failing to recognize that so-called neutral content supports the status quo, perpetuating the production of books that do little to represent authentic Black experiences. In his review of Broderick’s book for The Library Quarterly, Spencer G. Shaw fore grounds his own response to what he calls a “penetrative work”:
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It is fascinating to see several starred and double-starred titles from the Children’s Catalog critically lacking in an honest portrayal of black people. It is disturbing to find so few titles in children’s fiction which would help a black child gain any sense of identity or self-es teem. It is equally disheartening to note the subliminal effect some of these titles have had in perpetuating among white children a false sense of superiority and intolerant tolerance. (Shaw 1975, 441)
The essays in “Children, Too, Sing America” address this crit ical failure of imagination by centering literary constructions of Black children and childhood in a wide range of texts, published since Hughes’s debut and up to the present. Seohyun Kim and Holly Blackford Humes offer readings of fictional texts by Black women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In “Vexation or Joy: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Kim offers an original reading of Larsen’s novel that focuses on the protagonist’s relationship with her sons as well as her complicated fascination with her friend Clare’s childhood, aspects of the text often ignored by critics.18 In “Isis as Little Red:
Given that we began our discussion of apartheid in and of children’s literature with the recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease publication of six books that contain racist imagery, and the White backlash that immediately followed, we must conclude that in the nearly fifty years since Broderick’s study, not much has changed. As Shaw notes in his review, Broderick herself acknowledged that “a ready-made solution is not available magically to change fic tion about blacks for children” (441). We can, however, choose to change our perspective on the value and purpose of literary inquiry into Black childhood. We can decide to center Black children and childhoods in our classrooms and our scholarly work, whether we approach that work from the field of African American literature or US children’s literature or from an interest in material/popular culture, racial justice, or antiracist education.
Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Drenched in Light,’” Humes shows how Hurston, early in her writing career, signifies on the folk tale of Little Red Riding Hood by casting her young protagonist in the titular role and surrounding her with wolves. Humes makes a compelling case for Hurston’s continued investment in the European folktale by reading Tea Cake as the wolf and Janie as an older Little Red in Hurston’s best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In “‘Mature Themes’: Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter,” Maude Hines reorients our understanding of childhood innocence in her examination of the literary treatment of young Black children’s often traumatic recognition of racial ineq uity. In a variety of texts, from DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to James Baldwin’s recently reissued book for children, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976), Hines reflects on the mean ing and value of literary representations of Black childhood. Two essays focus on joyful depictions of Black girlhood in picture books published between 1991 and 2002. Ewa Kleczaj-Siara profiles the work of an artist known primarily for her story quilts: “In Search of Faith Ringgold’s Picture Books” argues for reading Ringgold as a “counter-storyteller” who offers her intergenerational audience not only revisionist history that focuses on Black agency but also images of Blackness that emphasize joy and possibility. E. Gale Greenlee argues for reading feminist cultural critic bell hooks within the con text of her oft-ignored stories for young children in “A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks’s Homemade Love.” Greenlee’s analysis highlights hooks’s ability to reformulate her feminist theory into an aesthetic and affective experience for young readers (and the adults in their lives) by means of a picture book—a fitting and timely trib ute to hooks’s legacy. KaaVonia Hinton highlights YA writer Jason Reynolds’s recent collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi in “Jason Reyn olds’s Stamped: A Young Adult Adaptation for All Ages.” Hinton dis cusses Stamped within a tradition of Black nonfiction that includes Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, giving us a glimpse of an African American literary tradition that underscores the commitment of both youth and adults to the free dom struggle. By taking up a critical stance at the intersection of African American literary studies and children’s literary studies, each essay challenges apartheid in and of children’s literature. The backmatter features twenty-eight profiles of Dream Keep ers, twentieth-century Black writers and illustrators whose literary and/or visual representations of Black childhoods deserve more
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2 Award-winning books marketed to youth that celebrate and/or signify on Langston Hughes in the last twenty years include Lesa Cline-Ran some’s Finding Langston (Coretta Scott King [CSK] Honor Book 2019); Jacqueline Woodson’s brown girl dreaming (National Book Award 2014; Newberry Medal 2015; CSK Award 2015); Bryan Collier, Illustrator of I, Too, Am America (CSK Illustrator Award 2013); Charles R. Smith Jr., Photographer, My People, text by Hughes (CSK Illustrator Award 2010); E. B. Lewis, Illustrator of The Negro Speaks of Rivers, text by Hughes (CSK
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scholarly attention. Many have established reputations as writers for adults, with entries in the Norton Anthology of African American Liter ature that may mention but not discuss in any meaningful way their work for children. As the essays in this issue illustrate, attention to the work produced for children enriches our understanding of a writer’s oeuvre. Other Dream Keepers write or illustrate works for children and so may be known only by scholars who specialize in children’s literature. Arranged alphabetically, these selected artists form a canon of sorts, one that does not separate texts or authors according to intended audience and that recognizes that sometimes the audience includes readers of all ages. These Dream Keepers carry on the work of Langston Hughes, giving us the opportunity to hear (and celebrate) Black children singing America.
The editors would like to acknowledge the financial support of Middle Tennessee State University’s Office of Research and Special Projects, which provided a Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award, and MTSU’s English Department’s Richard and Virginia Peck Trust Fund. We would also like to thank the following colleagues and graduate stu dents for their participation in a writing workshop for essay contribu tors: Lois Bennett, Laura Black, Sidney Blaylock Jr., Harlow Crandall, Carline Encarnacion, Kimberly Feher Cerchiaro, Sekou Franklin, Mar tha Hixon, Alfred Lutz, Christy Lynch, OlaOmi Amoloku, Leslie Tay lor, Cheryl Torsney, Christopher Weedman, Laura White, and Jericho Williams. For providing feedback on this introduction, we thank Alfred Lutz and Mischa Renfroe. 1 Christopher Myers and Philip Nel both use apartheid to refer to the sys tematic separation of Black texts from the canon of (White) children’s literature. We use this term similarly—to call attention to racist prac tices that foster and sustain a system wherein Whiteness dominates US children’s literature—but also to refer to the marginalization of Black children’s texts within the African American literary tradition, writ large.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek
NOTES
Writing in 1975, children’s author Eloise Greenfield described the images of Blacks that pervaded the culture, focusing specifically on television: “The mirror that they hold up for children is a carnival mirror, a fun house mirror, reflecting misshapen images, exaggerated or devaluated as the needs of situation comedy demand” (1975, 626). The prevalence of such distortions and the effect they might have on her own children prompted Greenfield to turn her attention from writing for adults to writing for children.
6 Violet J. Harris defines an oppositional text as “one in which the author, consciously or unconsciously, creates a text that contradicts traditional portrayals of an ethnic, religious, linguistic, or gender group. In the pro cess of creating the text and making it available to the public, the author engages in a cultural process that might alter the group’s status, or at least, change some perceptions of the group” (1990, 110).
The Phoenix Picture Book Award “recognizes an exemplary picture book that conveys its story (whether fact or fiction) through the syn ergy between pictures and text, or through pictures alone if there is no text. . . . [The] award will be given to the author and/or illustrator . . . of a book for children first published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award at the time of its publication but which, from the perspective of time, is deemed worthy of special attention” (Children’s Literature Association 2021, 106).
7
5
366 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Illustrator Award 2010); Benny Andrews, Illustrator of Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes, edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad (CSK Illustrator Honor 2007); Bryan Collier, Illustrator of Visiting Lang ston, written by Willie Perdomo (CSK Illustrator Honor 2003).
As of this writing, the documentary has not yet been released.
Hughes’s efforts to reach Black audiences beyond New York elites, such as his lecture and reading engagements tour through the US South in 1931 and 1932, prompted an inexpensive reprint of selections from The Weary Blues and the compilation The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Rec itations, works he considered appropriate for the intergenerational audi ence of Black “teachers, students, and townspeople” who attended these events (Rampersad 1986, 233; quoting Hughes’s March 5, 1932, letter to the Rosenwald Fund that sponsored the tour).
8
3
From 1967 to 1983, Toni Morrison served as the first Black female editor at Random House, shepherding to publication works by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayle Jones (among others) as well as what she considered her greatest editorial achievement: a stunning collection of
In addition to Dream Keeper and Other Poems and Hughes’s collaboration with Arna Bontemps, Popo and Fifina, other selected works explicitly for children include the First series of books (1952–1964) that cover topics such as jazz, rhythm, the West Indies, and Africa, and Black Misery (1969).
4
10 In 2019, the year for which the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) collected the most recently available authoritative data, of the 3,717 books received by the CCBC from US publishers, only 451 books featured Black or African content and only 224 books were written by Black or African authors. Just over 12 percent of books made for children featured a Black main character or Black experience, and barely 6 per cent of books were written or illustrated by a Black or African author. The CCBC tracks other minority content and representation, including Asian, Indigenous, Arab, Latinx, and Pacific Islander. As problematic as the statistics are for Black/African authors and content, other ethnic and/or racial minorities fare even worse.
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11 L.L. McKinney’s indictment of American cultural production as a tradition of racism in contrast to So’s more optimistic conclusion was anticipated by research published as early as 1973. In her study exam ining Black representation in children’s books, The Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction, Dorothy M. Broderick argued that more diverse and accurate depictions of the Black experience will require wider access for Black writers and illustrators to publication, autonomy over their subject matter, and more informed reviewers, insisting they “be experts in the fields in which they review and be made to demonstrate when dealing with a fiction title about blacks that they have read widely in the adult materials considered standard in the field” (1973, 182).
9 Richard Jean So used WorldCat to generate a list of book titles within an established set of parameters—fiction in English, published between 1950–2018 by one of the five major publishers, held by ten or more librar ies, and in digital format. These parameters yielded a dataset of 8,004 books and 4,010 authors. So then eliminated books for which the race of the author could not be established and concluded that the industry is 95 percent White. He estimates that for genre fiction—romance and fantasy, for example—the publishing industry is closer to 98 percent White.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek I on 367 artifacts illustrating Black history that amounted to a clarion call for a second renaissance in Black arts and letters. Published in 1974, The Black Book offered Black writers a wealth of primary materials from which to draw inspiration. An 1856 news clipping about a slave mother named Margaret Gardner, for example, inspired Morrison to write her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987).
12 Children’s literature, in conjunction with its sister fields of childhood literacy, classroom pedagogy, and librarianship, tends to focus on imme diately contemporary texts. Because young readers exist as children in a particular and specific historical moment, scholars tend to focus on con temporary books. A contemporary title may enjoy momentary attention, only to be set aside within five years as new trends and titles appear. The
16 Of the remaining titles on the list, two titles address racism: Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard’s S omething Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice (illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin).
average lifespan of publication of a children’s book is two years, though books that win major awards such as the Caldecott and the Newbery have a longer life (Kidd 2007,168). Attention to recently published texts discourages the kinds of scholarship that define a literary tradition.
Two others, Alex Gino’s George and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, both specifically for children, do not have race as a central feature. Three titles on the list are also often read by young adults, two of which have racial themes: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
13 In The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hun ger Games, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas uses the phrase “imagination gap” to describe the effects of “the diversity crisis in children’s and young adult media” (2019, 5). How will children imagine different possibilities for themselves if media consistently portrays them in limited if not stereo typical roles?
15 In their op-ed rejecting “adultification” as an explanation for violence against Black children, Stacey Patton and Toby Rollo conclude: “How, then, do we protect Black children, when the designation of childhood innocence itself invokes the spectre of slavery and provokes so much coercion and violence in white society?” Their answer is to reject “the white supremacist hierarchy which privileges and protects adults over children” while also “asserting a radical Black challenge to white concep tions of childhood” (Patton and Rollo 2021).
17 In addition to the titles referred to in this introduction, other booklength literary criticism that focus on representations of Black experi ence include Rudine Sims, Shadow and Substance (Urbana: NCTE, 1982);
14 Genre is simply the next iteration of cultural representations of the Black experience that serve White supremacy. Broderick noted that children’s books of her own era served White readers: “This distortion [of Black experience] took the form of imposing white middle-class val ues upon black people and teaching the doctrine of ‘we are all alike’ to the white readers for whom the books were obviously intended” (1973, 3). She concludes that the books articulate “what the adult white estab lishment wished white children to know about black people” (6). She is just as forthright about the likely message Black readers would receive from these books: “If the authors of the sample books intended their books to reach a black audience, it seems fair to conclude that they were intending to help the blacks accept the lowly status assigned to them within society” (7).
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Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek 369 Osayimwense Osa, ed., The All-White World of Children’s Books and African American Children’s Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995);
Free Within Ourselves: The Development of Afri can American Children’s Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Broderick, Dorothy M. 1973. The Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction. New York: R. R. Bowker. Brown, Tameka Fryer. 2010. “Dinah Johnson.” The Brown Bookshelf, Febru ary 17, 2010. https://thebrownbookshelf.com/28days/dinah-johnson-2/. Capshaw, Katharine. 2002. “Introduction: The Landscape of Ethnic American Children’s Literature.” MELUS 27 (2): 3-8. . 2014. “Ethnic Studies and Children’s Literature: A Conversation Between Fields.” The Lion and the Unicorn 38 (2): 237–57. Capshaw, Katharine, and Anna Mae Duane, eds. 2017. Who Writes For Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. “CCBC Diversity Statistics.” 2019. Cooperative Children’s Book Center. Chandler,/books-by-and-or-about-poc-2018/.ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statisticshttps://Karen.2019.“UncertainDirectionsinBlackChildren’sLiterature.” The Lion and the Unicorn 43 (2): 172–81.
Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Charac terizations of African-Americans, 1790–1900 (New York: Garland, 1998); Katharine Capshaw, Civil Rights Childhoods: Picturing Liberation in Afri can American Photobooks (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2014); Nancy D. Tolson, Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues: The Crea tivity of Black Writers and Illustrators (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Neal A. Lester, Once Upon a Time in a Different World: Issues and Ideas in African American Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Nicole King’s forthcoming Black Childhood in Modern African American Fic tion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Other recent nota ble work that centers Black children has been published by Roberta Price Gardner and Michelle P. Phillips.
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18 The 2021 film adaptation of Passing (directed by Rebecca Hall) also ignores this aspect of Nella Larsen’s novel.
WORKS CITED Baldwin, James. 1998. “Many Thousands Gone.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 19–34. New York: Penguin. First pub lished Bernstein,1951.Robin. 2017. “Let Black Kids Be Kids.” The New York Times, July 26, 2017. Bishop,-discrimination.html/.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/black-kidsRudineSims.2007.
Children’s Literature Association. 2021. Policies and Procedures. Last modified December 17, 2021. %20and%20Procedures_%20December%202021.pdf.https://chla.memberclicks.net/assets/2021/Policies Greenfield, Eloise. 1975. “Something to Shout About.” The Horn Book Mag azine, no. 51, 614–26. Harris, Violet J. 1990. “From Little Black Sambo to Popo and Fifina: Arna Bontemps and the Creation of African-American Children’s Litera ture.” The Lion and the Unicorn 14 (1): 108–27. Hubbard, Dolan. 2004. “Bibliographic Essay.” In A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes, edited by Steven C. Tracy, 197–234. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Langston. 1932. “Books and the Negro Child.” Children’s Library Yearbook, no. 4, 108–110. . 2003. “I, too.” In Works for Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing, edited by Dianne Johnson, 82. Vol. 11 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. First published 1926. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1979. “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” In I Love Myself When I am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker, 169–73. New York: Feminist Press. First published 1950. Johnson, Dianne. 1990. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African American Literature for Youth. New York: Greenwood Press. Johnson, Dianne, and Catherine Lewis. 1998. “Introduction: Children’s and Young-Adult Literature.” African American Review 32 (1): 5–7. Kidd, Kenneth. 2007. “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of New bery Gold.” Children’s Literature 35: 166–90. Lanes, Selma. 1971. Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures & Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. New York: Atheneum. Larrick, Nancy. 1965. “The All-White World of Children’s Books.” The Saturday Review, September 11, 1965, 63–65 and 84–85. https://www.unz Makarechi,.com/print/SaturdayRev-1965sep11-00063/.Kia.2015.“LangstonHughes’s1944
McKinney, L.L. 2020. “The Role Publishing Plays in the Commodification of Black Pain.” Tor.com, June 17, 2020. Mikkelsen,/the-role-publishing-plays-in-the-commodification-of-black-pain/.https://www.tor.com/2020/06/17Nina.2001.“
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The New York Times, November 9, 1986.
ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN is a Professor of English at Middle Ten nessee State University where she teaches courses in children’s and YA literature. Her research focuses primarily on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American children’s literature. Her most recent essay focuses on the link between print culture and defini tions of boyhood.
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Nel,-revolutionize-the-industry.html/..com/1986/11/09/books/children-s-books-i-actually-thought-we-wouldhttps://nytimesPhilip.2017.
1975. Review of Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction, by Dorothy M. Broderick. The Library Quarterly 45 (4): 440–41. So, Richard Jean, and Gus Wezerek. 2020. “Just How White Is the Book Industry?” The New York Times, December 11, 2020.
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The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagina tion from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York: NYU Press. Ulaby, Neda. 2021. “Looking Again at a Doctor’s Old Rhymes, Seuss Works Haven’t Kept Up with the Times.” All Things Considered, March 2, 2021. Yuill,-doctors-old-rhymes-seuss-works-havent-kept-up-with-the-times.https://www.npr.org/2021/03/02/972970871/looking-again-at-aPhyllisJ.1976.
Was The Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism in Chil dren’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press. Patton, Stacey, and Toby Rollo. 2021. “Black Children Are Not Being Killed Because They Are ‘Adultified’; They’re Murdered Because They’re Black.” NewsOne, June 3, 2021. https://newsone.com/4160834 /black-children-adultification/. Rampersad, Arnold. 1986. The Life of Langston Hughes Volume 1: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rampersad, Arnold, David Roessel, and Christa Fratantoro, eds. 2015. Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf. Dr. Seuss Enterprises. 2021. “Statement from Dr. Seuss Enterprises.” Seuss ville, March 2, 2021. https://www.seussville.com/statement-from-dr-seuss
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Little Black Sambo: A Closer Look. New York: Racism and Sexism Resource Center for Educators.
372 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 LAURA DUBEK is a Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She specializes in African American literature and pop ular culture. She has published essays on Zora Neale Hurston, Rich ard Wright, Ann Petry, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and Spike Lee. Her scholarship in children’s/YA literature includes an essay on David F. Walker’s graphic narrative, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison’s commemorative photobook, Remember: The Journey to School Integration. She is the edi tor of Living Legacies: Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement.
Judith Butler takes issue with Du Bois’s assessment of Passing, point ing out his failure to recognize that “Larsen was struggling with the conflict produced . . . by the moral injunctions typified by Du Bois.” Butler argues that Du Bois misinterprets Passing by neglect ing Larsen’s challenge to racial uplift’s “idealization of bourgeoise family life” and its “social constraints on black women’s sexuality” (2011, 132). Building on Butler’s argument, my essay claims that Du Bois’s idealization of respectable motherhood leads him to describe Larsen’s female characters as opposites: Irene as a “race-conscious Puritan” and respectable mother who “is proud of her dark husband and lovely boys,” and Clare who is “the lonesome hedonist,” indif ferent to her daughter and threatening Irene’s marriage (2007, 98).
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 ESSAYS JOY OR VEXATION: RESPECTABLE MOTHERHOOD AND THE TROPE OF CHILDHOOD IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING SEOHYUN KIM
In 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois declared Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) “one of the finest novels of the year,” hailing it for exploring the psychological intricacy related to racial passing “fearlessly and with consummate art” (2007, 97, 98). Praising Larsen’s conscientious development of Black characters, Du Bois tacitly frames the novel as a contributor to racial uplift literature, texts that combat racist misrepresentations of Black people as incapable of moral thinking.
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Leaders and upholders of racial uplift promoted respectable moth erhood as a primary virtue for Black women. This was part of a racial uplift mission to prove Black people’s capacity to maintain stable, monogamous families, thereby redressing a legacy left by enslavement that hindered Black people’s ability to form and nurture lasting fam ily bonds. Importantly, uplift leaders did not regard Black motherly roles as passive or subordinate; Black respectable motherhood, which recognized Black women’s power in their attentive commitment to motherhood practices, thus differed from True Womanhood ideol ogy, which underscored women’s submissiveness. This is why, along with male uplift leaders such as Du Bois, Black women leaders also played a vital role in moralizing and professionalizing Black moth ers. For example, Black Baptist women who upheld the politics of respectability “fused the rhetoric of war with that of domesticity” in expressing their perception of themselves as “joined in a struggle for the economic, educational, and moral advancement of their people” (Higginbotham 1993, 146). However, as Kevin Kelly Gaines notes, racial uplift at the turn of the twentieth century became “an ide ology of self-help articulated mainly in racial and middle-class spe cific, rather than in broader, egalitarian social terms” (1996, 20). This shift of racial uplift into a Black middle-class ideology is reflected in Irene’s approach to motherhood. Unlike racial uplift leaders’ lingering expectations that respectable motherhood should foster collective and personal empowerment, Irene’s narrow objective of preserving the stability of her middle-class family leads her to avoid vexing questions about her own and her family members’ happiness if they involve any challenges to middle-class respectability.
Du Bois’s placement of Irene and Clare in opposition reduces Clare to being a threat to Irene’s family. Focusing on Larsen’s use of the trope of childhood reveals Irene’s fascination with Clare’s seemingly dishonorable but willful agency in creating joy and refusing self-ab negation. By featuring the complicated perception and practice of erotic power that cannot be explained by the principles of respect able motherhood central to the ideology of racial uplift, Passing fos ters a space where Black women’s engagement with their childhood desires and passion can be a distinctive site to imagine and muse on their will and pursuit of Black joy.
Passing intertwines two facets of Irene’s life as a critique of racial uplift’s excessive emphasis on respectable motherhood, which counts respectability and motherhood as essential components of Black women’s agency. On the one hand, Irene, who tries to present
Seohyun Kim | Essays 375 herself as a respectable Black mother capable of protecting her fam ily’s stability, fails to engage with the complex dimensions of Black joy. On the other hand, Irene is bemused by her attraction to Clare, her childhood friend, who prioritizes pleasure over both respecta bility and motherhood. Given the historical significance of racial uplift’s reclamation of Black motherhood, it is important to avoid the trap of proposing that Black women’s freedom and autonomy requires the refusal of motherhood. In this essay, I investigate the ways in which Passing reconfigures Black women’s erotic power and their willful resistance to self-abnegation by juxtaposing Irene’s abstract idea of her sons’ childhood happiness with her complex fas cination with Clare, whom Irene sees as carrying the trace of her childhood passion for pleasure.
While Irene condemns Clare for being selfish in her attempt to rejoin the Black community at the expense of her own and others’ safety, she does not consider Clare’s behavior mindless. Although Irene never expresses her fascination with Clare forthrightly, the ways in which Irene narrates her observations, thoughts, and feel ings about Clare suggest that Irene is drawn to Clare’s investment in the erotic power that Audre Lorde theorizes as “an assertion of lifeforce of women” and Black women’s “creative source” (2007, 55, 59). In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya V. Hartman extends Lorde’s emphasis on Black women’s exploration of eroticism into “experiments of freedom,” linking Black girls’ and women’s imaginative yearnings for a freer life with their love of beauty and pleasure, which reformers and Black uplifters in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries rendered as “promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward” (2019, xiv, xv). Hartman delineates how Black wom en’s ability to cherish deeper and richer feelings through beauty and pleasure empowers them to resist the social perception of Black girls and women “as nothing more than the victims of a long history of violation and destined for the trade” (120). As I examine the subtle evolution of Irene’s capacity to tap into Clare’s erotic power of pur suing self-nourishing joy, I am not claiming that Irene fully compre hends and unravels the significance of Clare’s passion for pleasure to the extent that Lorde and Hartman have articulated in their stud ies about Black women’s desires. Yet, their studies—which perceive Black women’s sexuality as a rich source of inner power with rad ical personal and political possibilities—are useful in illuminating how Clare’s erotic power prompts Irene to notice a Black joy that conflicts with racial uplift ideals. Ultimately, I aim to highlight the
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significance of Irene’s recognition of Clare’s erotic power in contrast to her inability to expand her fleeting sense of and vague wish for happiness as a Black mother due to her internalized compulsion to maintain her family as an embodiment of American middle-class Black
Lorde’srespectability.andHartman’s studies open a critical space where Clare’s erotic power, which is suggested in Irene’s depiction of her memory about Clare’s childhood, can be examined as her desire for a freer life in light of language relevant to Black girls and women’s quotidian feelings and experiences. My scrutiny of the unarticulated emotional components in Irene’s description about Clare complements the existing scholarship which tends to objectify Irene’s and Clare’s bod ies or desires in their discussion of the representation of Black wom en’s sexuality in Passing. Given the fact that racial uplift’s idealization of motherhood silenced Black women’s sexuality in the 1920s, many scholars, such as Deborah E. McDowell and Ann duCille, have main tained that Larsen’s illustration of Black women’s sexual desire in the domestic setting should be considered one of her major achieve ments. However, many of these studies have ignored the fact that Irene and Clare were childhood friends, thus overlooking emotional components involved in Irene’s conflicting feelings about Clare’s erotic power which Irene links with Clare’s girlhood willfulness. For example, McDowell’s groundbreaking study on the subtext of homosexual desire between Irene and Clare unveils Irene’s attempt to deal with sexual desire awoken by Clare, yet the textual evidence McDowell analyzes to support her argument focuses on Irene’s sen suous descriptions about Clare’s exterior appearance and materials that serve as metaphors for Clare’s physical body. Considering that Kate Baldwin aptly notes that Irene’s fragmented nature of describ ing Clare’s body testifies to her apparent inability to “piece together Clare as a ‘person’” (2007, 477), we might say that McDowell’s analysis relegates Clare to an objectified state under Irene’s sexually intrigued gaze. Dissenting from McDowell’s exclusive focus on the sexual sen sations that Irene has toward Clare’s body, duCille argues that Irene and Clare are drawn to each other out of their psychological desire for “a whole self”: Clare is Irene’s “exotic sexual other,” and Irene is Clare’s “exotic racial self” (1993, 105). duCille’s explication of Irene’s and Clare’s desire for each other in terms of their “exotic” otherness is instructive in understanding Larsen’s critical and creative engage ment with the primitivism prevalent in Harlem during the 1920s. However, it is important to note that duCille’s heavy reliance on
Lorde insists that Black women recover deep feelings and pow erful words for their rich emotions and spirits, not from outside of themselves, but from “within our lives” (2007, 59), including from their girlhood. Among many ways that Lorde puts forward to restore erotic power, she emphasizes the necessity of being gentle and kind to one’s inner “girl child” who is “brave” in the way they live through racism and sexism while being “bruised” in their struggle for free dom (175). Lorde uses the trope of childhood as a means of drawing attention to the often-overlooked layers of emotions experienced by Black girls but forgotten by Black women. The original intention of Lorde’s affirmation of underappreciated Black girlhood is to criti cize anti-Black society for stereotyping Black girls, but her criticism is also applicable to racial uplift’s early education on motherhood. Uplift leaders imposed maternal obligations on Black girls so much so that Black girlhood is largely represented as an extension of duti ful motherhood; indeed, Anne Stavney interprets the cover of The Children’s Number (October 1924) of The Crisis as an example of the racial uplift movement’s expectation that even preadolescent Black girls should dream to be “the little colored mother of tomorrow” (1998, 540). In Passing, while Irene does not mention her own girl hood, she reconstructs her memory of Clare as a bruised but brave girl child living in poverty with a violent working-class father. In recalling Clare’s childhood after their reunion, Irene tries to relate Clare to beauty in the sense not only of her physical appearance, but also of her ability to live the kind of “terrible beauty” that Hartman describes as “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfig uration of the given” (33). By juxtaposing Irene’s limited idea of her sons’ happiness with her attraction to Clare’s childhood power of willful pursuit of her desires, Larsen delves into how Black women’s relationality to Black childhood not only impacts their conceptual ization of joy, but also their practice of willful refusal to submit to racial uplift norms of respectability.
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By invoking Clare’s childhood and using childhood tropes in describing Clare, Irene reprimands Clare for acting like a woman who does not mature beyond the stage of a selfish and willful child.
Sara Ahmed explains that the quality of willfulness is typically used
language traditionally used to fetishize and objectify Black women may be viewed as a theoretical shortcoming, considering that other Black feminists, such as Lorde and Hartman, have worked to rectify the use of language that reflects racism and sexism.
Larsen adopts a free indirect style in Passing fur ther supports the necessity of reading against the grain of Irene’s thoughts. Larsen tells the story mostly from Irene’s point of view while also including an external narrator who occasionally interrupts Irene’s justifications for her own viewpoint. Using this style, Larsen critiques Irene’s limits as a mother, her inability to expand her vague ideas about childhood joy and happiness. Moreover, Larsen also shows that Irene’s unarticulated intimacy with and her affinity to Clare’s childlike and willful erotic power are actually closer than she can admit. Felice Blake distinguishes “intimate antagonisms” from pure hatred by pointing out that the former encourages us to ruminate on “what language and vocabulary can best represent and affirm Black lives” (2018, 11). Drawing on Blake’s argument that intimate conflicts “refuse dominant conceptions of gender, sexual, and cultural normatively, and understand intimacy itself as counter cultural” (21), I claim that Larsen uses Irene’s intimate antagonisms toward Clare, based on their different approach to motherhood, as a vehicle to reimagine Black women’s pursuit of self-serving pleasure in relation to their willful refusal to be undone by the social pressure for them to be “respectable.”
IRENE’S AMBIVALENT PRACTICE OF RESPECTABLE MOTHERHOOD
378 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 to stigmatize girls who place their own interests over those of others; willfulness is regarded as a problem that must be “straightened” into a “willing[ness] not to have a will of one’s own” and a willingness to prioritize the common good over her own will (2017, 68). Indeed, Irene’s analogy of Clare as a willful child conveys her discomfort with Clare’s dangerous pursuit of her desire even at the risk of her safety and that of Margery, Clare’s daughter. But is there more to Irene’s condemnation of Clare’s willfulness? In her labeling of her childhood friend as willful, Irene not only insinuates her captivation with young Clare’s ability to create a joy which is normally unac ceptable for Black girls and women, but also reveals her apprehen sion that childlike willfulness can be so powerful that it may outlive adults’ control and thereby potentially destabilize the social codes that Irene herself adheres to in order to maintain a sense of stability andThesecurity.factthat
In Passing, the purpose of Irene’s motherhood is not to advance Black liberation, but to preserve the dignity of middle-class Black families. Therefore, despite the toll it takes on her, she constantly
Seohyun Kim | Essays 379 endeavors to please her sons and her husband while hiding her per turbation and struggles in order to keep her family stable and main tain her reputation as a respectable Black mother and wife within Black society. Irene’s recollection of the day when she is reunited with Clare in Chicago begins with her shopping. On “a brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like a molten rain” (Larsen 2007, 7), she goes to several stores in search of specific items but comes up short. By focusing on Irene’s effort to get a drawing book about which her son Theodore “had so gravely and insistently given her precise directions” (8), Stavney claims that Irene presents herself as “the enduring, sacrificing mother” (1998, 552). Indeed, Irene strenuously pursues the task in the midst of “the heat and crowds” so much so that she begins to feel faint (Larsen 2007, 8). Also, in her role as a wife, Irene strives to prevent her fam ily from falling apart. Being well aware of Brian’s restlessness in mar riage, Irene “had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies” (60). Irene, however, gets exceedingly unnerved as she learns that he has invited Clare to come to her tea party even though he knew she disapproved it. Although agonized by her strong suspicion that Brian is captivated by Clare’s beauty, Irene acts as if all is well at the party in order to project a carefully constructed image of a stable, happy family. While Du Bois sees Irene as a model of respectable motherhood, this scene, by focusing on Irene’s efforts to conceal her pain and self-doubts about her approach to mother hood and being a wife, reveals the costs of maintaining that image for Black women.
Irene covers up her anxieties about motherhood in yet another way—by condemning Clare’s lack of parental commitment. During her conversation with Clare about what mothers should mean to and do for their children, Irene presents herself as a caring mother by contrasting herself with Clare. However, their dialogue discloses Irene’s agitation about her motherly responsibilities as much as it does Clare’s rejection of them. When Irene attempts to dissuade Clare from returning to the Black community after years of passing as White and after her marriage to John Bellew, she demands Clare consider the tragic consequences that would result from the expo sure of her Blackness. In response, Clare, “with stricken eyes and compressed lips,” says that “being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world,” and Irene fleetingly sympathizes with Clare’s inarticu late uneasiness that “was so often in her own heart of late.” However, Irene immediately asserts that “we mothers are all responsible for
Later, when Clare expresses an unwillingness to visit her daughter in Switzerland during the summer, Irene suggests Clare would feel happy to see her daughter again. Clare answers that “children aren’t everything” and continues with laughter: “there are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.”
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Irene chafes at Clare’s nonchalance, but she also suspects Clare’s laughter is intended to mock her own preoccupation with mother hood. Assuming a “secret joke of her own” in Clare’s tone, Irene defends herself: “I know very well that I take being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house. I can’t help it. And, really, I don’t think it’s anything to laugh at” (58).
Irene’s desperate defense of her preoccupation with the management of her house and her sons, despite the fact that Clare did not men tion it explicitly, implies a deep ambivalence regarding the demand ing practice of being a dutiful mother.
Irene performs the ideals of respectable motherhood to maintain the stability and security of her middle-class family and her personal respectable image, not for the sake of racial pride. To be more spe cific, she does not see motherhood as a respectable means to achieve other aspirations such as the expansion of education and the fight against racism to empower Black girls and women. While Irene insists that she is not “ashamed of” living and being perceived as a Black person (Larsen 2007, 11), the novel contains no explicit expres sions of her racial pride nor pride in her Black family. For example, when her childhood friends Gertrude and Clare, who are married to White men, share the fears they had during their pregnancies about the possibility that their babies might have had dark skin, Irene tells them “‘one of my boys is dark’ . . . in a voice of whose even tones she was proud” (26). Irene is proud of her ability to maintain composure in the face of offensive comments about Blackness rather than actu ally being proud that one of her sons was born with dark skin. As Samira Kawash aptly puts it, Irene’s loyalty to race is “less a loyalty to the dignity of her race than it is a loyalty to the very principle of race, insofar as it is the condition of order, predictability, and secu rity in her life. The alternative is the uncontrollable, the irrational, the unpredictable” (1997, 157). Irene’s endeavors to maintain respect ability center on her own ability to exert self-control and maintain
the security and happiness of our children.” Warning Clare of the possibility that Mr. Bellew would separate Clare and her daughter if her Black heritage is exposed, Irene calls Clare’s attempt to recon nect with the Black community “a selfish whim” (Larsen 2007, 48).
Despite Irene’s promulgation of the importance of motherhood to Clare, Larsen connects Irene’s ambivalence about Black moth erhood to her habit of passing as White as well as her lack of inter est in confronting racial injustice and asserting racial pride. When Irene shops downtown with Felise, who has “golden cheeks” and “curly black Negro hair,” they run into Clare’s husband. Believing Irene to be White, Bellew betrays his “displeasure” at Irene’s being with Felise. Irene explains to Felise that she only passes “for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that” and Bellew is the only one to whom she is “socially” passing (Larsen 2007, 70). Although Irene downplays the seriousness of her decep tion, Larsen suggests that the way Irene engages with Whiteness sig nificantly affects her ability to imagine happiness as a Black mother. In the elevator to the rooftop at the Drayton, Irene compares her experience to “being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that had left below” (8). Irene distinguishes the Drayton rooftop, an all-White space, from the sweltering weather she has had to endure for her sons as well as the bridge party that night “whose atmosphere would be so thick and hot that every breath would be like breathing soul.” Her moment of respite in the Drayton is not, however, free from intrusive thoughts about her role as a dutiful mother and her role as respectable woman at the bridge party that night. She thinks of both her demanding son Ted and her husband Brian, who always want something “that was difficult or impossible to get” (9). Addi tionally, by settling “the problem of the proper one of two frocks for the bridge party,” she considers the proper image of a Black woman that she will display for both White and Black people in attendance (10). Nonetheless, Irene perceives the rooftop, where she is seen physically disassociated from her Blackness, as a delightful escape
Seohyun Kim | Essays 381 her poise even when the dignity of Blackness is questioned. This is why, when Irene finds her duty of motherhood too overwhelming to restrain herself, she takes advantage of her ability to pass as White to maintain her self-control. The moment when she almost faints while shopping for her sons in Chicago, Irene decides to take a break from the arduous task and get some fresh air. The taxi driver per ceives Irene as a White woman, and so takes her to the Drayton, a hotel with a rooftop tearoom from which Black people are “ejected” (Larsen 2007, 11). As Rafael Walker notes, Irene is not interested in disturbing “the stability of racial ideology” (2016, 180), so she lets others categorize her race for her and does not question it.
Irene’s active maintenance of Black respectability and her ten dency to relieve her anxiety by periodically withdrawing from her Blackness, becomes even more problematic when she encounters vexing questions regarding the security and happiness of her hus band and sons. On their way to a print shop to collect the hand bills and tickets for the Negro Welfare League dance party, Irene discloses to Brian her apprehension that their son, Brian Junior, is “pick[ing] up queer ideas about things.” Hearing Irene’s concern, Brian asks her whether she is talking about “ideas about sex” and then he refutes it by responding “If sex isn’t a joke, what is it?” Two reasons may explain Irene’s wish to limit her son’s knowledge about sexuality. By specifying that Junior is engaging not just with “jokes” but with “dreadful jokes,” Irene does not plead for him to remain entirely ignorant about sex, but she still tries to define his child hood as the separation from anything that might disturb the notion of respectability which links sexuality to marriage and procreation, not to pleasure. Irene’s anxieties about what she sees as her son’s improper attitude toward sexuality are further compounded by the fact that anti-Black racism often criminalizes Black men and young Black boys through false accusations of sexual misconduct. Interest ingly, Irene uses her concern as an opportunity to suggest they send Junior to “some European school” and to ask Brian “to take him over” (Larsen 2007, 42). Irene does not clarify her reasoning behind her wish to send him to Europe, but she might want to protect Jun ior’s knowledge about sex from being misconstrued as a threat. In addition, Irene probably believes that Junior’s childhood in Europe would help extricate herself from the fear that the jokes about sex Junior hears (and makes) will negatively impact not only his life, but also her careful and burdensome management of respectability. As implied by her phrase “some European school,” Irene lacks concrete ideas and plans for her son’s life in Europe. Irene’s vague plan to send him to Europe indicates her willingness to admit the potential misunderstanding about Blackness if that misrecognition allows her and her family to avoid squarely confronting the funda mental difficulties associated with maintaining “the respectability” of Black people in America. Irene must know that Blackness is fet ishized in Europe: she mentions Josephine Baker, a Black American performer who gained enormous popularity in France, during ran dom conversation with the tea party attendees (Larsen 2007, 64).
382 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 from the spaces that require the constant maintenance of a carefully constructed image.
Therefore, in Europe, Otherization of Blackness and Black people’s approach to it operate on a more individual level, whereas in Brazil, where there is a higher proportion of mixed-race people and those who identify as Black, Blackness is discussed as a more collective identity. These circumstances are true today, and it is likely that such attitudes were also prevalent at the turn of the twentieth cen tury. These cultural and political contexts suggest that Irene pos sibly fears that Brian’s time in Brazil would require her to actively redefine what an uplifted Blackness should look like and to figure out her new role in a new Black community. Such consideration would radically unsettle her attempt to maintain the stability and security of her middle-class Black family.
Irene’s desire for Brian to take Junior to Europe is also linked to her discouragement of Brian’s desire to emigrate to Brazil. She expects that her suggestion would give Brian “a break in the easy monotony that seemed . . . so hateful to him” (Larsen 2007, 43).
Although both Europe and Brazil were thought of as a refuge from US racism in the early twentieth century, Brazil was considered a site of Black nationalism and idealized as a land of opportunity (Meade and Pirio 1988). Brian remarks that “uplifting the brother’s no easy job” in America: he is tired of visiting “sick people, and their stupid, meddling families, and smelly, dirty rooms, and climbing filthy steps in dark hallways” (Larsen 2007, 39). Brian might have grown weary of striving for racial equality in the US and would like to escape it. However, his specific desire for his family to relocate to Brazil implies his commitment to envisioning new ways to express and ele vate Blackness which dramatically differs from Irene’s conservative wish to preserve the status quo. In Europe, “plantation slavery was not focused on home territories [of Europe], as was the case in the United States” and “many European countries have no long-standing Black population” (Keaton, Sharpley-Whiting, and Stovall 2012, 6).
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European eroticization of the racialized body was manifested in “the negrophilia sweeping over Europe” (Cheng 2010, 14), which was implicitly projected onto Black men such as Jack Johnson (ArcherStraw 2000, 44–49). In Irene’s mind, the European version of sub tle fetishization of Black men which Junior might experience would allow him to defer directly grappling with blatant sexualization of Black men at least during his childhood, much like she uses mis identification of her race in the Drayton Hotel as an opportunity to retreat from the demands required to maintain a respectable image of a Black mother.
By assessing, rather than merely conveying, Irene’s thoughts, the novel makes clear that Irene’s preoccupation with managing her family members’ happiness acts as a deterrent to any contemplation of the complexity of Black happiness, reflection that might allow Junior to have joy with “queer ideas” of sex and Brian to envision new, more liberating forms of “uplifting” the race (42, 39). Irene’s idea of sending her son and her husband to Europe speaks to her reluctance to engage with both Junior and Brian’s desires, yearn ings that challenge the security and stability of her heteronormative middle-class
It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plans of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. Nor did she admit that all other plans, all other ways, she regarded as menaces, more or less indirect, to that security of place and substance which she insisted upon for her sons and in a lesser degree for herself. (Larsen 2007, 43)
Furthermore,family.Irene’s quarrel with Brian about whether their sons should learn about the violence of lynching displays her defensive and restrictive conceptualization of the happiness of her sons, which results in her failure to grasp the complexities of Black childhood. Irene tries to stop Brian from having a conversation with their sons about anti-Black violence, stating that she wishes “their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be” (Larsen 2007, 73). Irene characterizes her sons’ childhood happiness as a vacancy of knowledge about corruption prevalent in reality, which approximates the romanticized notion of innocence.
Analyzing romanticization of childhood innocence, James R. Kin caid contends that innocence understood as “emptiness” becomes a defining characteristic of childhood as adults try to fill their desire in that imagined vacuum of innocence of children (1998, 12).
Although the narrator mostly delivers Irene’s observations and thoughts, when Irene insists that her wish is grounded on her concern for Brian’s happiness and her sons’ security, the narrator comments on her thoughts, critiquing the protagonist’s narrow-mindedness:
While Kincaid’s study of child innocence unveils the complexities of adult erotic desires and sexuality projected on the construction of the child as an embodiment of purity, Robin Bernstein unmasks racialized innocence as a concept that defined children as White:
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Crucially, Larsen presents Irene and Brian’s views of Black child hood as a debate, suggesting disapproval of Irene’s view but not necessarily approval of Brian’s. By having Brian impatiently dismiss Irene’s opposition to his parenting philosophy as “evidences of such stupidity,” Larsen examines possible limits in racial uplift’s percep tion that Black childhood and Black adulthood exist on a contin uum based on their mature ability to engage with racial issues. Brian maintains that giving their sons “proper preparation for life” and “giv[ing] them some inkling of what’s before them” are the duties that Black parents should exercise (Larsen 2007, 74), his claim reso nating with racial uplift leaders’ emphasis on raising “race-conscious children” that grow up to be future race leaders (Mitchell 2004, 12).
“innocence was raced white” and “angelic white children were con trasted with pickaninnies so grotesque as to suggest that only white children were children” (2011, 4, 16). Considering this historical and cultural context of childhood innocence, Irene’s wish that her sons remain ignorant of racism can be interpreted as her resistance to the exclusion of Black children from the purview of childhood inno cence. However, Larsen problematizes Irene’s idea that her sons’ childhood happiness should repel knowledge about racial violence.
Brian informs her that Junior has already been called a racial slur, so Irene’s wish for her sons’ innocence, which parallels the transcend ence of corrupted reality, is more an imagined status that she wants her sons to have than one they can experience, and thus her idea of childhood happiness would leave them vulnerable rather than pro tected. Irene’s tendency to control her sons’ knowledge diminishes the opportunities that the boys might have to explore the complex dimensions of their lives as Black children.
Racial uplift leaders needed to highlight the mature consciousness of Black people, including Black children, to restore their agency because anti-Blackness perpetuates the colonial trope of infantiliza tion of Black people in the US. Bernstein explores this trope in Racial izing Innocence: “The pickaninny, as a de-childed juvenile, ultimately reserved infant-hood for black adults. The libelous, de-childed pick aninny was interdependent with the libel of the ‘childlike Negro.’ At stake in the refutation of the pickaninny image was not only black childhood but also black adulthood” (2011, 55). Racial uplift leaders deemed children’s education integral to the project of establishing self-esteem in a racially unjust society. In Children’s Literature and the Harlem Renaissance, Katherine Capshaw Smith notes that the annual Children’s Number of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, included
WILLFUL CHILDLIKE JOY: BLACK GIRLS AND WOMEN’S DESIRE FOR PLEASURE
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Irene’s defense of middle-class Blackness prevents her from imag ining alternative constructions of Black childhood, possibilities that go beyond racial uplift’s view that Black childhood should be a preparation period for race leaders. By contrast, Irene’s reunion with her childhood friend Clare reminds her of Clare’s childhood, marked by a longing for freedom, prompting Irene to notice Clare’s erotic power related to girlhood. The day when they meet again in the Drayton hotel, Clare tells Irene about her girlhood after her father’s death, an event that necessitated living with her racist aunts. Clare says, “I wanted things . . . when I used to go over to the south side, I used almost to hate all of you. You had all the things I wanted and never had had. It made me all the more determined to get them, and others” (Larsen 2007, 19). Clare does not identify the “things” she wished for. The lack of specificity in Clare’s desire for “things” and “others” suggests that Clare is not content with minimal safety but constantly driven to desire more liberating possibilities for her life. Irene remembers this as Clare’s “having way” (14), and Walker aptly interprets the “having way” of Clare as “oscillatory biraciality,” a subversive mode of passing, which has the power to disrupt binary
many “cross written” stories and poems that targeted both child and adult readers. Even The Brownie’s Book (1920–21), published to serve as a space where child readers could celebrate Black cultural identity through fantasy and playfulness (Smith 2004, 26–28), pre sented political issues in an indirect way, thereby encouraging child readers to cultivate their strength and work as young race leaders in a well-disciplined manner. While Larsen faults Irene for failing to trust her sons’ capacity to tackle racial issues, she also questions Bri an’s argument that early education on mature themes would “keep [Brian Junior] from lots of disappointment later on” (Larsen 2007, 42). Brian’s claim that their sons’ “future happiness” might come at the cost of a happy childhood raises another issue of confining Black childhood to a temporally previous stage of adulthood (74). Portray ing Brian’s intransigent stance that their sons should develop a tol erance for disappointment and hurtful feelings as early as possible, Larsen suggests his inflexible conflation of Black childhood with the pre-stage of race-leaders risks deferring meaningful discussions about Black children’s joy, unconstrained by scripts of racial uplift.
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constructions of race in the US (2016, 180). Admittedly, Clare’s attempt to rejoin Black society while refusing her duty for her own family might look similar to Irene’s habit of passing as White. How ever, Irene uses passing as an opportunity to momentarily with draw from her overwhelming obligations to maintain middle-class Blackness, to fortify her strength and resolve. Clare’s passing, on the other hand, disturbs and disrupts the stability of the color line and deregulates the standards of careful behavior expected from Black people who do pass as White, as exemplified by Clare’s marriage with a White man. The first day of their reunion, Clare shares with Irene that she was forced to pass as White at first by her aunts who “forbade [her] to mention Negroes to the neighbours, or even to mention the south side” (Larsen 2007, 19). Clare, however, did not remain a victim of her aunt’s abuses: she made the rebellious choice to marry Bellew. As Eric King Watts maintains, “Clare’s passing is not mobilized simply for ‘having,’ it is invigorated as a way of ‘mak ing’” (2012, 181). In her choice to pass as White through marriage, Clare exercises her agency to live a freer life by leaving the aunts who provided her with “a roof over [her] head, and food, and clothes” (19), the minimal protection an adult can provide for a child in their care. Even within the marriage, Clare continues to mock the color line rather than remain a victim of it by ridiculing her racist husband when she invites her childhood friends to laugh at his use of his offensive nickname for her—“Nig” (29).
When remembering their first reunion in Chicago, Irene mostly recounts what she observed and rehearses what Clare said to her primarily through direct dialogue, rather than adding her personal thoughts and reflections. In comparison, starting from their second reunion that begins with Clare’s letter two years later, Irene inter prets Clare’s actions and words. Irene’s interpretation about Clare is guided by her effort to contain her fascination with Clare in order to maintain her sense of security, so Larsen encourages readers to recognize the contradictions underlying Irene’s report about Clare. Irene’s dissimulation can even be identified when she professes the value of security. After repeatedly feeling perturbed by Clare’s attempts to rejoin the Black community, Irene eventually concedes that “in spite of searchings and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her security was the most important and desired thing in life” (Larsen 2007, 76). Irene’s assertion here ironically reinforces “the narrative ambiguity” that Claudia Tate sees resulting from “Irene’s emotional turbulence” (1980, 143). By depicting the process
of mental anguish that Irene undergoes to reach her conclusion, Larsen implies that Irene is actually concerned with halting her growing awareness of the values of “happiness, love, and wild ecstasy that she had never known” but perceived through Clare (Larsen 2007, 76). Likewise, in presenting Irene’s interaction with Clare, Larsen displays the complexities of Irene’s developing understand ing of Clare’s erotic spirit, an understanding obscured by Irene’s condemnation of Clare as selfish. Larsen demonstrates her interest in Black women’s erotic expansion of their freedom, in tension with ideas of respectable motherhood, through Irene’s subtle disclosures and ongoing confusions concerning her attraction to her childhood friend’s commitment to pleasure. In the novel’s opening scene, Larsen uses Irene’s reading of Clare’s letter to establish Irene’s complicated attraction to Clare’s willful way of expressing her desire. Finding the “foreign paper of extraordinary size” of the envelope “furtive, but yet in some pecu liar, determined way a little flaunting” (Larsen 2007, 5), Irene senses that Clare wants more than what Irene herself tries so hard to safe guard—a sensible adjustment to Black middle-class culture and val ues. When reading the letter, by “puzzling out, as best she could, carelessly formed worlds [sic] or making instinctive guesses at them” out of the “sheets upon thin sheets of it,” Irene connects to the “wild desire” to reconnect with her life as Black that Clare writes she felt after their reunion (7). Larsen’s use of quotation marks and ellipses in presenting the content of the letter makes it ambiguous whether the powerful yearning of Clare to rejoin Irene is the product of Irene’s selective interpretation or the essence of Clare’s desire. Around the quotation marks that she uses to indicate what is written in Clare’s letter, Larsen notes that Irene is “making instinctive guesses at [Clare’s words]” and certain “words [in Clare’s letter] stood out from among the many paragraphs of other words” (7). Larsen thus makes clear that Clare’s words are mediated through Irene’s perspective and even her voice, assuming Irene reads the letter out loud. More over, Larsen uses ellipses in a way that makes it unclear whether an omission is made by Clare or Irene. The presentation of the letter, which begins “ . . . For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before” gives an impression that it is Irene who omits the parts where ellip ses are used, and, simultaneously, Larsen leaves open the possibility that the ellipses were made by Clare herself, as suggested in the final words of the letter: “this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that time in
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And for a swift moment
Seohyun Kim | Essays 389 Chicago. . . .” (7; ellipses in original). Larsen encourages readers to see that not only does Clare unleash her desires in an unconstrained way but also that Irene’s narration about Clare is at least partially influenced by Irene’s perspective, particularly her focus on Clare’s desires and interior longings.
It is unlikely that Irene really witnessed Clare’s private moment that she narrates here: Irene “seemed to see it” (5). Nevertheless, through her imagined construction of young Clare as a Black girl who works dangerously to make “the red frock,” Irene reveals her interest in Clare’s persistent pursuit of beauty and pleasure in an environment which Irene thinks could not possibly provide any pleasure. Irene’s illustration in substantial detail particularly captures Clare’s “fugi tive gestures of refusal” (Hartman 2019, 19)1 to be “undone” (Sharpe 2019) by her intemperate father. The process of Clare’s dressmaking constructed in Irene’s memory thus resembles what Christina
Larsen hints that Irene perceives Clare’s approach to her desire as more powerful than Clare may actually possess, so much so that Irene constructs stories about Clare’s girlhood that Clare does not share with her. Even before reading the letter, Irene recalls that young Clare took a risk in actualizing her desire when she was a Black girl, and she reconstructs her memory about Clare as a child who lived with a working-class father in a “ramshackle flat” on the south side of Chicago (Larsen 2007, 77):
Irene Redfield seemed to see a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less fright ening because they were, for the most part, ineffectual. Sometimes he did manage to reach her. But only the fact that the child had edged herself and her poor sewing over to the farthermost corner of the sofa suggested that she was in any way perturbed by this menace to herself and her work.
Clare had known well enough that it was unsafe to take a por tion of the dollar that was her weekly wage for the doing of many errands for the dressmaker who lived on the top floor of the build ing of which Bob Kendry was a janitor. But the knowledge had not deterred her. She wanted to go to her Sunday school’s picnic, and she had made up her mind to wear a new dress. In spite of certain unpleasantness and possible danger, she had taken the money to buy the material for that pathetic little red frock. (Larsen 2007, 5–6)
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Irene once again summons up the image of Clare’s childhood when she expresses her irritation over Clare’s insistence on joining the N. W. L dance party, at which point Irene reveals her slightly evolved sensitivity to Clare’s passion for a freer life. Irene asks Clare
Despite her implicit fascination with Clare’s ability to create a self-nourishing pleasure, Irene simultaneously fears that Clare’s attempt to return to the Black community would be accompanied by a search for pleasure that would seriously undermine the safety and stability of respectable norms of Blackness. Consequently, Irene comes to a harsh judgment of Clare, reassuring herself that she is in a position to dismiss Clare’s proclivity for her passion. First, she describes the dress that Clare created as “pathetic.” Irene’s bitter commentary on the outcome of Clare’s work can be interpreted as her attempt to reclaim her control over how she perceives Clare’s quest for pleasure by interrupting her own, possibly inadvertent, elaboration on Clare’s erotic power. Furthermore, right after recall ing that “there had been, even in those days, nothing sacrificial in Clare Kendry’s idea of life, no allegiance beyond her own immedi ate desire,” Irene adds that young Clare was “selfish, and cold, and hard” (Larsen 2007, 6). McDowell analyzes this moment to prove Irene’s unreliability as a narrator. According to McDowell, it is Irene who “with a cold, hard, exploitative, and manipulative deter mination, tries to protect her most cherished attainment,” including security, children, material comfort, and social respectability, and Irene delivers such an unfair assessment of Clare in hopes of dis pelling her sexual desire awoken by and her feelings toward Clare (2004, xxiv–xxv). Though I disagree with McDowell’s conclusion that Irene’s response to Clare is primarily physical, choosing instead to base my analysis upon Lorde’s more expansive view of the erotic, nonetheless, I find essentially accurate McDowell’s assessment that Irene’s description of Clare as “selfish, and cold, and hard” reveals less about Clare’s true nature and more about Irene’s own limit in acknowledging her attraction to Clare.
Irene’s attentiveness to Clare’s childhood suggests that Irene’s feelings about Clare are something other than what Lorde defines as the pornographic, which “represents the suppression of true feel ing . . . [and] emphasizes sensation without feeling” (Lorde 2007, 54).
Sharpe dubs “a black aesthetics” of making “livable moments, spaces, and places, in the midst of all that was unlivable” (2019), which has its theoretical roots in Lorde’s discussion of the erotic as “a space where women can learn to find joy and feeling in life” (Musser 2014, 148).
Irene’s detailed elaboration of her sentiments about Clare, who car ries the trace of her childhood into adulthood, contrasts with the opening scene, in which Irene is highly indirect in revealing her fas cination with Clare through her reconstruction of Clare’s childhood. Furthermore, Irene’s verbalization of Clare’s loneliness through her invocation of a “somewhat lonely child” testifies that Irene at this point identifies with Clare’s vulnerability. Irene comes to rec ognize that Clare’s pursuit of her desire is more than self-centered action and is instead an expression of her yearning for intimacy with Black people. Irene’s evolving sensitivity to Clare, suggested in this scene, marks my departure from McDowell’s investigation of Irene’s increasing attempts to renounce her sexual desire toward Clare.
The phrase, “somewhat lonely child,” implies only an inchoate growth in how Irene perceives Clare. The notion of willfulness that Irene relates to Clare’s insistence coincides with Ahmed’s explana tion of the term willfulness as “an individual in going astray gets in the way of the happiness of others” (2017, 71). However, Irene does not simply revile Clare’s willfulness; notably, Irene articulates her contradictory impression of Clare as “attractive” and simulta neously “disturbing” (Larsen 2007, 51). Irene is attracted to Clare’s retention of her power to boldly create and grasp a chance for her pleasure in the Black community as opposed to what she herself set tles for—a fleeting sense of respite by withdrawing from Blackness in the rooftop of the White-only hotel. At the same time, Irene is disturbed that Clare in adulthood still retains the courage she exer cised during her childhood because Irene perceives Clare’s child like approach to self-serving pleasure as destabilizing to her own view of childhood happiness. In her role as a mother who exercises
to “be reasonable” by warning Clare of the dangerous possibility that any acquaintance of her husband might recognize her intermin gling with Black people. Clare replies, “you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh,” which results in Irene’s eventual acquiescence (Larsen 2007, 51; emphasis added).
Diego A. Millan parses Clare’s response and concludes that “her repetition of ‘with’ emphasizes a desire for intimacy that apexes in hearing laughter” (2019, 119). Indeed, Irene reveals her discernment of Clare’s longing to belong to a community intimated in Clare’s plea by noting Clare’s loneliness in her subse quent reflections on the conversation. Irene believes that “Clare . . . had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, some what lonely child—selfish, wilful, and disturbing” (Larsen 2007, 52).
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Alongsidehierarchies.herdiscomfort,
Irene feels bewildered by “a touching gladness” brought by Clare’s intimacies with her sons and her house servants, wondering whether Clare’s visitation is “a joy or a vexation” (Larsen 2007, 56, 57). In his analysis of playfulness, Jericho Williams
mature self-restraint, Irene wishes that her sons could temporarily enjoy their childhood without regard to racial injustice and the need to prepare for it. However, Clare forces Irene to recognize that the spirit of willfulness Irene has associated with Clare’s childhood does not belong to childhood exclusively, but can and does outlive it.
Irene is even more confounded by her perception of Clare’s child likeness when she notices that Clare’s childlike ignorance of the rules of the Black middle-class household engenders intimacies against and beyond its decorum. Ironically, while Irene thinks she wants to spurn Clare to safeguard her marriage, she allows Clare to visit her home frequently, giving her a great deal of freedom within it: She came to them frequently after that. Always with a touching gladness that welled up and overflowed on all the Redfield house hold. Yet Irene could never be sure whether her comings were a joy or aCertainlyvexation.she was no trouble. She had not to be entertained, or even noticed—if anyone could ever avoid noticing Clare. If Irene happened to be out or occupied, Clare could very happily amuse her self with Ted and Junior, who had conceived for her admiration that verged on adoration, especially Ted. Or, lacking the boys, she would descend to the kitchen and, with—to Irene—an exasperating child like lack of perception, spend her visit in talk and merriment with Zulena and Sadie. (Larsen 2007, 57)
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Presenting this scene of her sons’ and servants’ mirthful moments with Clare, Irene notes that Clare’s behavior in her house evi dences “an exasperating childlike lack of perception.” The syntax in which “childlike” modifies “lack of perception” indicates that Irene chooses the word “childlike” to disapprove of Clare’s joyful intimacy with her sons and house servants, which Irene probably does not normally experience due to her constant maintenance of middle-class decorum. Moreover, with an assumption that “[Clare] wouldn’t have spoiled her own Margery so outrageously, nor been so friendly with white servants” (57), Irene is irked that Clare does not see the value of the domestic order and tranquility established in the Black household. Irene’s annoyance at Clare’s “childlike lack of perception” betrays Irene’s internalization of and deep investment in social
THE CHILD AS A TROPE FOR RESISTANCE TO SELF-ABNEGATION
2
The power of Clare’s childlike defiance in both Black and White communities is so unsettling to the strictures of 1920s society that her transgression results in her death. Strikingly, after Clare’s death, the narrator employs the trope of childhood to illustrate that the way in which Irene deals with her desires entails her own willful refusal of self-abnegation. In the ending, Mr. Bellew appears at the party hosted by Felise and calls out Clare’s racial heritage. The novel leaves it unclear whether he compels Clare to take her own life or if he impels Irene to push Clare out a window. Due to this vagueness, scholars posit varying interpretations of Irene’s role in that incident. Candice Marie Jenkins contends that Irene murders Clare with a “salvific wish” to “save herself, and her community, from the social stigma [of primitivism] that Clare’s behavior invites or, perhaps, confirms” (2007, 23, 31). Butler maintains that Irene’s ultimate allegiance to racial uplift’s double-bound relationship with the White patriarchal institution of the nuclear family makes her complicit in Mr. Bellew’s murder of Clare, arguing that Irene “accept[s] the terms of power which threatened her” and “become[s] its instrument in the end” (2011, 137). Jenkins and Butler propound that Irene ends up being assimilated into the patriarchal and racist confinement of Black women’s sexuality despite the strong possi bility that she was sexually attracted to Clare. However, duCille puts forward that Irene, by murdering Clare, “ceases to be a typical, passive, conventional tragic mulatta who pales beside the powerful
Seohyun Kim | Essays 393 explains that the “childlike sense of joy” embodied by Irene’s sons represents “a children’s world free of social artifice that engulfs Clare and Irene” (2019, 137). Williams’s focus on the capacity of childhood joy to transcend restrictive social categories aligns with his read ing of Clare’s “childlike freedom of motherhood” given her decision to be “a parent unshackled from the constraints of her child” (137, 136). Williams concludes his analysis on childhood and childlikeness with an emphasis on their transcendental spirit as “the promises of play away from . . . their own social expectations” (141). Indeed, the scene described above exhibits that Clare’s childlike disregard of Black middle-class domestic respectability, combined with her will ful refusal to sacrifice herself for motherhood, challenges and dis rupts social expectations, but it also builds transformative modes of relationality that allow for mutual joy across age and class.
394 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 image of woman-proud blues performers” and thus Irene proves that the “defender of middle-class marriage, bourgeois home, fam ily, fidelity, and, above all, security” requires “blues force” (1993, 108). While each reading interprets Irene’s role in Clare’s death dif ferently, all of them see Irene’s relationality with Clare vanishing at the point of Clare’s death. None of them take into account the narrator’s use of the trope of childhood, a trope that should draw our attention to the moment when Irene willfully refuses to erase her proximity to Clare.
At the end of Passing, Larsen rejects a voyeuristic gaze that can make Clare’s death a mere obscene crime scene. The absent por trayal of Clare’s dead body stands in sharp contrast to the early scene in which Irene, while shopping, witnesses “a man toppled over and became an inert crumpled heap on the scorching cement” (Larsen 2007, 8) and another scene where she vividly depicts the “white frag ments” of a shattered cup and its “dark stains [that] dotted the bright rug” during the party at her house (66). In comparison, the confir mation of Clare’s death through the party attendees’ dialogues and reactions blocks the readers’ voyeuristic gaze that might derive per verse enjoyment from the depiction of the dead body of the lightskinned Black woman. Instead, the novel shifts its focus to Irene’s reaction to Clare’s death. In the final scene, the narrator, whose voice mostly has been inseparable from Irene’s, begins to distance itself from Irene’s inner thoughts and instead highlights Irene’s failure to restrain her emotions. After arriving on the street where Clare’s body had fallen, “Irene struggled against the sob of thankful ness that rose in her throat. Choked down, it turned to a whimper, like a hurt child’s. Someone laid a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture. Brian wrapped his coat about her. She began to cry rock ingly, her entire body heaving with convulsive sobs” (81). In contrast to the previous instances where Irene scrupulously restrains herself from revealing her inner turbulence by reminding herself of “all the self control, common sense, that she was proud of,” the narrator portrays Irene’s bodily reactions which reveal her uncontrolled emo tions (74). To understand the narrator’s role here, it would be helpful to refer to Butler’s analysis concerning another scene where the nar rator discloses Irene’s “little choked exclamation of admiration” for Clare (Larsen 2007, 53). Butler argues that the narrator “serves the function of exposing more than Irene herself can risk” by supplying “the words Irene might have spoken [but that were] caught in Irene’s throat” due to her effort to exercise self-restraint (2011, 124). Butler’s
The narrator’s persistent observation of Irene’s reaction reveals that when Irene refuses restraint, she does not lose all agency but rather opens up a space for embracing the erotic power that she has described through the trope and image of the child—the erotic power that entails a willful refusal of self-abnegation. The narra tor’s comparison of Irene’s crying to a hurt child’s whimper might suggest that Irene appears to need protection. Indeed, Brian seems to perceive Irene’s reaction that way because he comes to Irene and gives “a slight perfunctory attempt to comfort her” by saying “there, there, Irene. You mustn’t” (Larsen 2007, 81). However, while Brian patronizes her, Irene does not let his patriarchal gesture silence her. Instead, the narrator retools the trope of a hurt child and calls attention to Irene’s exertion of enigmatic willfulness. Hearing the suspicion from “a strange man, official, and authoritative” that Mr. Bellew might have murdered Clare, Irene asserts, “I’m quite certain that he didn’t. I was there too. As close as he was. She just fell, before anybody could stop her. I—” (82). In doing so, Irene refuses to be omitted from the narrative about Clare. Surprisingly, as she rejects the possibility that Mr. Bellew killed Clare, Irene willfully draws attention to her own culpability for Clare’s death. While talking to the official, Irene faints. According to Butler, this anticlimactic ending signifies that “Irene slipped into . . . a living death” (2011, 138). Larsen does not, however, leave us with an entirely pessimistic ending to the story. Irene loses her consciousness when she is about to say more about herself. Her words, which end with the singular first-person pronoun, enhance the speculation about possible inti macies between Irene and Clare. Many stories could have unfolded out of Irene’s unfinished utterance, left as a lingering sign of her willfulness: what “I” have done to Clare, how “I” have felt about
insight can be extended to the significance of the narrator’s descrip tion of Irene’s bodily reaction at the scene of Clare’s demise because the narrator reveals that Irene feels more than she can manage once more. By “struggl[ing] against the sob of thankfulness,” Irene at first struggles to regain a sense of control. The emotion Irene is con scious of and tries to hold back is “the sob of thankfulness,” which could suggest that she is relieved that her consternation regarding Clare’s unruly demeanor is finally over. However, when Irene fails to restrain “the sob of thankfulness,” she expresses vulnerability and grief, emotions she has suppressed. The narrator communicates this moment by deploying the trope of childhood: “a whimper, like a hurt child’s” (Larsen 2007, 81).
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NOTES
I wish to thank the guest editors of this special issue, Ellen Butler Dono van and Laura Dubek, for their generous support and guidance in the revision process. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, Kristin Mahoney, Sarah Hamilton, Raven Baugh, Adam Pfau, and all others who read this article for their thoughtful comments on this essay.
As Du Bois aptly points out, Larsen’s Passing delves into “the psy chology” of racial passing (2007, 98). However, due to his idealization of Irene as mother in opposition to Clare, Du Bois glosses over the effect of Irene’s practice of passing as White and instead exclusively stresses the harmful consequence of Clare’s passing. In comparison, my essay has examined the ways in which Passing actually compli cates Irene’s practice of respectable motherhood promoted by racial uplift and its relation to her trouble with conceptualizing happiness and joy. In addition to Larsen, other Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance have used the image and trope of the child to figura tively expand their longing for freedom beyond and against constric tions of respectability integral to racial uplift. Wallace Thurman, for example, refers to the “holy children of Niggeratti Manor [who] die from the want of a little gin” in Infants of the Spring to explore for bidden desires under heteropatriarchy (1999, 90). The figure of the child continues to play a role in conceptions of Black people’s plea sure and erotic creativity, as we have seen in the writing of Lorde who uses the child figure to encourage Black women to reclaim their pleasure. A critical examination of Black writers’ creative explora tion of childlikeness would expand and enrich the discussion about various forms that Black joy and desire can take.
Clare when she was alive, or how “I” feel about Clare’s death. While this openness invites readers to wonder about what Irene could have said, it does not entirely yield to the readers’ arbitrary imagination. Readers’ speculation should be grounded on Irene’s insistence on her proximity to Clare and her refusal to make Clare disappear from her life. In the end, with her willful refusal of self-erasure in her rela tionship with Clare, Irene puts herself on “the edge of danger” in the same manner she thinks Clare has lived her life.
1 Saidiya V. Hartman notes that her idea of “fugitive gesture” is inspired by Tina M. Campt (2017).
2 When scholars read Nella Larsen’s biographical information alongside her novels, many pay attention to her forlorn childhood caused by the early loss of her West Indian father and the subsequent remarriage of
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Petrine. 2000. Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Cul ture in the 1920s. New York: Thames & Hudson. Baldwin, Kate. 2007. “The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing.” In Passing, edited by Carla Kaplan, 463–85. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. First published 1998. Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press. Blake, Felice. 2018. Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Lon don: Routledge. Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press . Cheng, Anne Anline. 2010. Second Skin: Josephine Baker & The Modern Sur face. New York: Oxford University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2007. “Passing.” In Passing, edited by Carla Kaplan, 97–98. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. First Published 1929. duCille, Ann. 1993. The Coupling Convention: Tradition and the Black Female Talent. New York: Oxford University Press. Gaines, Kevin Kelly. 1996. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Car olina Hartman,Press.Saidiya V. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Larsen’s traumatized childhood and trouble with motherhood could be understood in connection to the fact that Larsen and her husband, Elmer Imes, were a childless couple. However, it is widely overlooked that Larsen had a close and positive interaction with children outside of the role of a mother. The first Black librarian in New York, Larsen worked in the children’s departments between 1921 and 1929. The Harlem branch in the 1920s lacked children’s books with accurate representation of Black people (Hochman 2014), so “to make up for the dearth of books, Larsen read stories aloud and helped to create exhibits” (Hutchinson 2006, 156). Larsen’s personal experience as a children’s librarian could explain her conscientious interest in how Black adults and children can create delight in a condition which racial uplift leaders might not consider ideal and how they can expand childlike joy often underestimated by racial uplift’s high expectations of maturity and uprightness.
Seohyun Kim | Essays 397 her White Danish immigrant mother to a man who did not like Larsen.
Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Archer-Straw,Press.
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Danielle, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Edward Stovall. 2012. Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Black ness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kincaid, James R. 1998. Erotic Innocence. Durham, NC: Duke University Larsen,Press.Nella. 2007. Passing. New York: A. A. Knopf. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. First Published 1929. Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider. New York: Crossing Press. McDowell, Deborah E. 2004. Introduction to Quicksand and Passing, by Nella Larsen, ix–xxxv. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Meade, Teresa, and Gregory Alonso Pirio. 1988. “In Search of the AfroAmerican ‘Eldorado’: Attempts by North American Blacks to Enter Brazil in the 1920s.” Luso-Brazilian Review 25 (1): 85–110. Mitchell, Michele. 2004. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Millan,Press.Diego A. 2019. “Intimacy and Laughter in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” South Atlantic Review 84 (2–3): 106–25. Musser, Amber Jamila. 2014. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. New York: NYU Press. Sharpe, Christina. 2019. “Beauty is a Method.” e-flux no. 105, December 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. 2004. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renais sance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stavney, Anne. 1998. “‘Mothers of Tomorrow’: The New Negro Renais sance and the Politics of Maternal Representation.” African American Review 32 (4): 533–61. Tate, Claudia. 1980. “Nella Larsen’s Passing : A Problem of Interpretation.” Black American Literature Forum 14 (4): 142–46. Thurman, Wallace. 1999. Infants of the Spring. New York: Random House. Walker, Rafael. 2016. “Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing.” MELUS 41 (1): 165–92.
Seohyun Kim | Essays 399 Williams, Jericho. 2019. “Parent Trap: Circumventing Adulthood with Play in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” South Atlantic Review 84 (2–3): 126–43. Watts, Eric King. 2012. Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Politics of the New Negro Movement. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. SEOHYUN KIM is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Michigan State University. She specializes in twentieth-century African American literature and Black studies. Her dissertation explores Black and mixed-race writers’ creative and critical engage ments with Blackness as contributors to the discourse of Black free dom at two moments of racial uplift, the post-Reconstruction era and the Harlem Renaissance.
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 ISIS AS LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD:
In “Drenched in Light” (1924), her second published story, Zora Neale Hurston focuses on a young Black girl’s rebellious perspective to establish a conflicted narrative situation that she would expand and reframe in her subsequent works: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), her controversial autobiography. This conflicted narrative situation involves a spirited, imaginative, artistic child and her grandmother, who embodies the past trauma of slavery and acceptance of oppres sion, which, in the grandmother’s view, makes the emboldened young girl’s behavior reckless and unsafe. Hurston’s own grand mother receives the writer’s comic ire in Dust Tracks: “God knows, grandmother would break me or kill me, if she had her way. Killing me looked like the best one, anyway” (1996, 54). Critics have pointed out the parallels between the child Isis in “Drenched in Light” and Hurston’s own lived experience. Indeed, Hurston continually repre sented her childhood conflict with older Black women who feared her high spirits and daring interactions with White passersby, in the context of a racist culture, for this conflict was not only her own, but also one through which she situated herself as a perpetually liminal
ILLUMINATING ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S “DRENCHED IN LIGHT” HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES
Holly Blackford Humes Essays 401 figure in between Black communities and White patronage. Hurs ton’s liminality makes her a compelling but challenging figure of study, her rich oeuvre—fiction, nonfiction, drama, criticism—invit ing a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives.
“Drenched in Light” is replete with symbolism based in the European folktale of Little Red Riding Hood. In her story, Hurston deploys the intertext of the folktale Red Riding Hood to portray the mischievous and transgressive nature of the child held back by
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Although “Drenched in Light” has not received the same level of attention as Hurston’s subsequent works, critics agree that it offers an early, albeit ambiguous, statement on the complexity of becom ing a Black female artist in a time when other Harlem Renaissance figures, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, advocated for scripted versions of Black childhood and so-called authentic Black voices. Connecting “Drenched in Light” to similar representations of Hurston’s child hood in “How it Feels to be Colored Me” and Dust Tracks, Ayesha K. Hardison (2013) reads Isis as a threshold figure who skirts the boundaries of acceptable (performance) and unacceptable (min strelsy) in order to create her own pleasure in artistry and audience; however, she argues, this enterprise lacks critical awareness of what it means for Black bodies to perform for Whites. Doris Davis (2007) reads Isis a bit differently, linking her with Hurston’s account in Dust Tracks of losing her supportive mother in childhood, focusing on how “Drenched in Light”—like Their Eyes Were Watching God —creates “psychic space” for the Black female artist to navigate boundaries and unearth the silenced voices of Black women. Tina Barr (2002) discusses “Drenched” within the context of Hurston’s other work. Barr links the myth of Isis to both the Black child protagonist in the story and the Black women at the center of Their Eyes: these charac ters embrace a type of female artistry that defies the perceived lim its imposed by the Black community. In “How it Feels to be Colored Me” and Dust Tracks, Hurston continually situates her child self on thresholds between Black and White communities to explore pleas ure and profit in organic artistic expression. Whereas some readers see only the risk of racist exploitation, bringing a childhood studies perspective to the short tale and putting the Black child at the center of inquiry open up space for new interpretations of Isis’s journey, widening the literary context for Hurston’s constructions of Black girlhood. Such an approach asks that we bring a different set of tradi tions to bear on the Black girl’s journey as she navigates disciplinary boundaries, ecstatic freedoms, and vexed terrains of exploitation.
Red Riding Hood is complicated. There are myriad versions, but they all, in different ways, raise questions about female agency, sexuality, desire, intergenerational dynamics, coming of age, and the patriarchy. Red Riding Hood, as Charles Perrault defined her in 1697, or Red Cap (the Brothers Grimm ver sion of 1812) addresses the same conflicted narrative situation we see Hurston invigorating in her short story—being marked as special and, in fact, spoiled with a red cloak everyone knows marks the girl as distinct from her community. Red’s great sin, according to both Perrault’s and the Grimm’s tales, is her desire to make her own way through the forest, regardless of the prescriptive path to grandmoth er’s. The red clothing, introduced by Perrault, was not a feature of the oral tale, which focused on the (White) girl and her grandmother and generally ended happily. Versions by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm transformed the tale for White bourgeois audiences at the same time that “childhood” was being constructed as a protected period of development, tied to specific morals and codes for civilized behavior. Scholars such as Jack Zipes document that originally, Red
her grandmother. Equating the prior generation born into slavery with the wolf, the modern Black child simply cannot acquiesce to a racist culture that requires the performance of passivity and humil ity before White people. Isis, for example, notices that the grand mother has a hairy chin, which, she thinks, “No ladies don’t weah” (2008, 20). So Isis kindly tries to shave her while she sleeps, get ting into much trouble. Isis then steals her grandmother’s new red tablecloth from Orlando—a cloth with some white in the fringe— to dance at a community celebration, attracting the notice of both her Black community and White patrons. The visibility of the red tablecloth, transformed into a cloak and trailing gown, only solidi fies her preferred identity, for “everybody in the country, white and colored, knew little Isis Watts, the joyful.” She is always “the lit tle brown figure perched upon the gate post,” looking “yearningly up the gleaming shell road that led to Orlando” (17). In Dust Tracks, Hurston discusses her desire for a journey beyond her own yard, an important child geography. The red tablecloth in “Drenched in Light” enables this journey for Isis. The red tablecloth from Orlando becomes a means for the Black girl to move through various commu nities and become a sort of centerpiece or host of the event, inviting us to read “Drenched in Light” as an active conversation with both a well-known folktale and, crucially, the very idea of folklore as com munal
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Theexpressivity.historyofLittle
Resituating Isis as Little Red, Hurston fashions her own model of Isis as a folkloric trickster who disrupts and revises the European
Holly Blackford Humes | Essays 403 was more of a trickster and got out of her own situation, telling the wolf she has to defecate and, after he ties a rope around her so she can go outside, simply escaping (1993, 4, 28–30). The oral tale of the girl and her grandmother, whose blood she usually consumes before she outwits the wolf, empowered female tricksters, whereas the col lected versions for children transformed Red into a passive (and pun ished) sexual object. In other words, Zipes argues, Red Riding Hood transformed from a hopeful (White) female coming-of-age story to a story of rape that blames the victim for straying from the path, or, in mythic logic, looking for the prettiest flowers in the wilderness. Hurston signifies on this folktale, casting a Black child in the titular role. Other characters play the wolf and the huntsman, and some characters play multiple roles. Applying this folktale to the sit uation of a desiring Black child (Isis), who wants to imagine, social ize, dance, and flirt with performance, is already complex, but the ending of “Drenched in Light” raises particularly intriguing ques tions. Hurston inserts a White couple into the role of the “hunts man” (from the Brothers Grimm version). The White couple comes to protect Isis, challenge the grandmother, and enable Isis to dance for them at the hotel, a public space feared by the grandmother because of a history of sexualizing and commodifying Black female bodies. Why cast an obviously problematic White couple into the role of huntsman? Given the tale’s focus on Isis’s point of view, what racial implications emerge? A multivalent set of questions arises about the story’s announcement of cultivating White patronage to escape the constrictive grandmother, who equates Isis’s boldness with the public as “too ’oomanish jumpin’ up in everybody’s face dat pass” (2008, 17). The grandmother’s construction of public display as inappropriately “womanish” stems from a history of chattel slav ery and the oversexualization of Black women. Hurston’s use of Red Riding Hood, however, establishes the tale’s problematic resonance with seduction and objectification, which as Zipes argues, is an arti fact of how Red was adapted for a White bourgeois sensibility that rendered her more a passive victim complicit with her seduction, rather than the trickster she was in the oral tales of France (1993, 4–6, 18–26). While the ending of “Drenched in Light” provides an ominous account of being adopted by a White couple who wants to possess Isis Watts’s sunshine, it also emphasizes Isis as a trickster, following the Red of the oral tales.
A collector of folklore and an anthropologist who studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University (Gates, 2018, xlii), Hurston appreciated folklore and myth. Further, she maintained an interest in the oral tale-telling practices and performances of Black communities, con tinually exploring the speech acts of gathered neighborhood resi dents often based in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, a town incorporated exclusively by people of color. The situation of telling folklore on the porch, exchanging gossip about the community, and passing judgment on those who turn against the community (or do things like hurt their mule) recurs throughout her fiction and auto biography, wherein the child Hurston would eavesdrop on commu nal stories at Joe Clarke’s store porch: Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths. The right and the wrong, the who, when and why was passed on, and nobody doubted the conclusions. . . . But what I really loved to hear was the menfolks holding a “lying” session. That is, straining against each other in telling folk tales. God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men. (Hurston 1996, 47–48)
As folktales always have, the communal and familial context of shar ing folklore dismantles the division between children and adults, the yard or porch space becoming a center of performed commu nity that both polices and supports individuals through tales at once didactic and aesthetic. Famous for their trickster content, the Brer Rabbit tales are examples of “signifying” codes about how underdogs (enslaved Black people) use cunning to outwit those with power,
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TO GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE
lineage that rendered Red both an object and victim. Closely read ing the threshold spaces glossed in “Drenched in Light” and rooting them in the complex history and framework of Little Red, I argue that Hurston employed her interest in folklore and oral traditions to empower Isis rather than render her an exploited, passive object. The legacy of Isis as Red Riding Hood can also be distinguished in Janie Crawford, the female protagonist of Hurston’s most wellknown work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie, too, encounters a wolf in disguise: Janie’s revisions to Isis’s fabled story only deepening and underscoring the value of what Hurston accomplished in her eight-page story “Drenched in Light.”
“Git down offa dat gate post! You li’l sow, you! Git down! Setting up dere looking dem white folks right in de face! They’s gowine to lynch you, yet. And don’t stand in dat door—way gazing out at ’em neither. Youse too brazen to live long.” (Hurston, 1996, 34)
In her autobiography, Hurston remembers receiving a book of Brothers Grimm tales as a gift from two White women who noticed her in school when she read aloud the myth of Persephone (1996, 39). The significance of this gift, and the memory of it, speaks to the way in which she later used White patronage to situate herself as a bard of African American voices. She, along with Langston Hughes, was sup ported by a White patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who preferred the two writers call her Godmother. Hurston’s feelings on White and Black audiences for her fiction are tricky to discern; in her essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928), for example, she is outspoken about the need to move beyond the Black/White binary and render other artistic subjects rooted in Black communities and relationships. She is known for doing just that in her literary works, focusing on the role of orality and storytelling in the Black community—voices that are simultaneously empowering and judgmental, but always authentic and artistic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the highly vocal grandmother figure of “Drenched in Light,” who distills this paradox of empowerment and judgment. Black grandmothers in Hurston’s work present the paradoxical influence of nurturance and judgment, embodying characteristics of independence, empowerment, and strength alongside voiced messages of conservatism and the need to accommodate racist restrictions. In her autobiography, Hurston con textualizes the grandmother’s point of view: My grandmother worried about my forward ways a great deal. She had known slavery and to her, my brazenness was unthinkable.
Holly Blackford Humes Essays 405 land, resources, and especially food. Hurston’s recollections in Dust Tracks explain how folklore, as a living cultural practice meeting communal needs, holds a different significance than the White, lit erary process of collecting, translating, editing, and framing folk tales—of the sort done by Joel Chandler Harris for the Brer Rabbit tales. Robert Hemenway calls “Drenched in Light” Hurston’s man ifesto celebrating the independence that the writer located in her Eatonville roots (1977, 10–11); Eatonville, both in fiction and fact, modeled for Hurston a communal, folkloric context. Hurston brings her interest in folklore and folkloric method to bear in her revision of Little Red, using the journey as a critical way to explore racial ized, intergenerational boundaries.
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Crucially, the threshold boundary of the fence or gate between yard and road defines the fictional girls’ ambitions and longings. Isis con tinually perches on her fence post, watches the road, runs alongside travelers and rides with them, including White cattlemen who look for her when they pass. Boundaries between culture and nature, or civilization and forest, are always significant in folk tales and female development, for crossing from private into public space is seen as a risk to virtue, dangerously close to becoming a commodity. Through
Notwithstanding the justification offered in the grandmother’s voice, a chastisement that at once promotes brazen behavior while discouraging it, fictional grandmothers in Hurston’s work promote the idea that spectating and performance are context- and audi ence-based.
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The yard and fences where Hurston’s girls “hang” embody an unusual meeting between domesticated and wild, Black and White.
Davis notes that the grandmother in “Drenched in Light” is a trickster herself, scoring from the White couple money that far exceeds the cost of the ruined tablecloth (2007, 278). The ambiguity in these Black grandmothers, when it frames the young Black girl’s experience, is encapsulated in the Red Riding Hood tale, wherein the grandmother and wolf are in fact disturbingly inter changeable. The traditional strip tease in the tale, when the wolf disguised as the grandmother tells Red to take off her clothes one by one, is a classic scene of revelation staged by the trickster wolf, who typically demands Red strip but is really revealing his own disguise.
From a childhood studies perspective, yards, fences, and porches in Hurston’s work signify a situation of domesticity on proper display. Not only does Grandma chastise Isis for not raking the yard, a sym bol of how the space embodies a negotiation between domestic and public in which the grandmother is supposed to domesticate nature (as tame herself), but she also reprimands Isis for sitting with her legs open, after commanding her to sit on the porch. You behave like a lady in the yard so people can see you as a lady in the yard. In order for any sense of “private” woman to emerge, as opposed to the “womanish” behavior despised by the grandmothers, the home becomes a contested site of conspicuous consumption in which proper nineteenth-century standards of closed-leg womanhood are to be performed. Akin to the performances of tales and judgments occurring in community porch settings throughout her fiction, Hurston tests her female characters as threshold figures learning les sons and navigating boundaries as they are forced to display being a nice girl, which Red—in all versions of the tale—never really was.
the lens of children’s geographies, yards are liminal spaces to nego tiate boundaries between the social and the domestic, the middle landscape of “nature” and the cultivated space of socialization.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdydo-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?”
Isis longs to cross this boundary. Like Hurston reflecting on her childhood in Dust Tracks on a Road, Isis spends her time at the gate of her yard, watching for passersby, including White travelers with whom she can “go a piece of the way” (Hurston 1996, 34), as she intuits the road and horizon that lies before her. This “piece of the way” is not the “whole” way, argues Hardison, indicating a migratory negotiation with White patrons through space and performance (2013, 222). In “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” Hurston expresses this space as both performative and spectating, a space in between the public world of commodification and the private world of desire: Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eaton ville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. . . . The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tour ists as the tourists got out of the village.
Usually, automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in far thest Florida. (Hurston 2020)
Imperializing the boundary between yard and road, yet perching in a way adults usually cannot, Hurston constructs a childhood self who operates as both spectator and participant, a subject and an object, in a broader gallery performance of race and curiosity about bound aries. Her essay also explains how White people for whom she would sing, recite, or dance would give her money. This monetary reward marked their difference from Black people and stood apart from her love of performance; she actually loved to perform and would need payment to stop, she observes. The yard becomes a contact zone between expectations of Black and White communities, between commodification and self-expression. Inhabiting a “crossroads of interracial social interaction and exchange” (Hardison 2013, 217), the
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child’s performance fluidly moving between paid and unpaid means the activity itself is the value. This is one of the definitions of play: non-instrumental activity in which “play has its own instrumental behaviors” (Sutton-Smith 2009, 189), but such behaviors are only instrumental insofar as they aspire to goals or outcomes. Isis’s public play engenders a conflict between the child’s perspective on her per formance and her grandmother’s assertion that the very things the child sees as play are too womanish, within the context of a racist culture that exploits Black (female) bodies.
This critical stance, taken by grandmothers, stems from a long his tory of idealizing White womanhood and sexualizing Black women. Hazel Carby’s work on the binary opposition between perceptions of White women and Black women deconstructs these assumptions. Carby argues that White women were “glorified” in their purity and motherhood, whereas Black women were seen as “breeders,” associ ated with the unbridled sexuality of White slaveholders as if Black women were somehow complicit with their own sexual assault under the longstanding policy of being forced to submit to slaveholders (1987, Any30–37):historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without a recognition of the dialectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true wom anhood, black female sexuality was nevertheless used to define what those boundaries were. The contradictions at a material and ideo logical level can clearly be seen in the dichotomy between repressed and overt representations of sexuality in the simultaneous existence
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Glossing the importance of this threshold space for both Isis and young Hurston posits a major difference between this early work of Hurston’s and her last novel Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), in which a Black child is coaxed to perform for a White audience and, in the course of doing so, inadvertently reveals her genitals. Hurston’s early work refuses a critical stance on the girl’s joy in performance: [Hurston’s] threshold figure, a black child who does not anticipate any danger in performing in the presence of whites, walks the line between artistry and minstrelsy. Generally, the discourse on inter racial cultural exchange and intraracial difference in Hurston’s work celebrates white patronage of black folk art and condemns the black community’s critical stance toward black bodies performing for white audiences. (Hardison 2013, 219–20)
The red tablecloth plays a significant role in “Drenched,” provid ing the strongest visual and symbolic link to the Little Red Riding Hood tale. Young Isis dons her grandmother’s bright red tablecloth, which was purchased in Orlando (the endpoint of the road outside Isis’s yard), and journeys into the community to join the festivi ties and dance, attracting and reveling in the public attention that shames her Grandmagrandmother:hadreturned to the house and missed Isis and straightway sought her at the festivities expecting to find her in soiled dress, shoeless, gaping at the crowd, but what she saw drove her frantic. Here was her granddaughter dancing before a gaping crowd in her brand new red table-cloth. . . . [Isis] heard her cry: “Mah Gowd, mah brand new table-cloth Ah jus’ bought f’um O’landah!” as [Isis] fled through the crowd and on into the woods. (Hurston 2008, 22)
It is hard to discern which is more shocking for Grandma Potts— the display of Isis or the display of the tablecloth. The tablecloth came from the “hosting” center of her grandmother’s household, representing the disjunction between a girl’s desire to ascend and the authority figures who both mark her “specialness” (the red cloak) and yet test her readiness and daring. In the lens of child development theory, the tablecloth acts as what D. W. Winnicott defines as a transitional object, an object usually from a child’s home that mediates between fantasy and reality, or internal and external reality. Winnicott explains that transitional objects are paradoxical because they are both “found” and “created” by the child (1971, 4).
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The idea of Black girls as sexually precocious was likewise deeply entrenched in racist pseudoscience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; myths of menstruating early were as familiar as myths about Black male youths as overly sexual, inverting actual realities of who was raping whom. Isis’s grandmother is thus justified in fearing that Isis’s actions could be equated with the myth of precocity, or at least a level of daring that a White passerby may crush. These fears give Isis both a performative boundary to transgress and be curious about and an experience of oppression within which Isis navigates trickery to survive. She deploys trickery against her grandmother: although she rides with white men “a piece,” she hides in the back yard and lies about where she has been when her grandmother comes to scold her and see if her raking is complete.
Holly Blackford Essays 409 of two definitions of motherhood: the glorified and the breeder. (Carby 1987, 30)
Isis’s extravagant fantasies, articulated throughout the story, are realized when she touches the tablecloth and also when she wears it. As both found and created objects, transitional objects occupy a space between being an active subject and a public object. The red cloak enables a liminality between public and private, positing a journey into forest and change. The red cloak may be “too ample for her meager form” (Hurston 2008, 22), but through investing it with new meaning, Isis has, in her grandmother’s words, “done traipsed all over the woods, uh dancin’ an uh prancin’ in it” (24).
The donning of the tablecloth can be theorized as what Hurston calls “the will to adorn” in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.”
The “will to adorn” is the impulse to move beyond con vention with adornment that satisfies the soul of the creator: “The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare for the volup tuous child of the sun, hence the adornment. It arises out of the same impulse as the wearing of jewelry and the making of sculpture—the urge to adorn” (Hurston 1997). Crucially, Isis’s grandmother already bought this item to signal her own “will to adorn”; embodying the artistic and consumptive practices of her grandmother, the table cloth embeds her grandmother’s own pretense at status, artistry, and beauty. The tablecloth is practically a magical object from the story’s beginning; even before Isis wears it, she takes shelter under it (from her grandmother) and begins to imagine herself “various personages,” including ones that “rode white horses with flaring pink nostrils to the horizon” (2008, 19). The beckoning horizon appears in both Dust Tracks and Their Eyes as a boundless essence to the dreams of Black girls. Importantly, these dreams are already made tangible in household items and the grandmother’s decor. For Isis, as for Red and her cloak, the tablecloth represents both shel ter and ambition; the grandmother’s shock represents the politics of respectability: proper girlhood and ambition lie exclusively in the home as decorative display. In “Drenched in Light,” Hurston resituates the tale of Little Red Riding Hood in the context of White patriarchy and the economic exploitation of Black bodies. Originally a French tale, Red was first a trickster who got herself out of her precarious situation (Zipes 1993, 23). Male editors changed the story. Perrault had her stray from the path for the prettiest flowers, and then be summarily eaten. The Brothers Grimm version introduced the huntsman rescuer, taking away Red’s agency with a different objectification. In one perspec tive, we can see that Hurston situates her Isis as the original trickster
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Red. After all, Isis has a blade and holds it against her grandmother’s chin, deciding to shave her hair while she sleeps! She claims to the White couple she meant well and draws their sympathy for both trying to shave her hairy grandmother (no lady would want those gray hairs) and ruining the tablecloth, for which the White couple pay $5 and promptly witness a dramatic change in the grandmother’s demeanor and tone. In another perspective, the White couple as huntsman introduces the history of White male editorial changes to the tale, applying them to race relations and suggesting different generations have different means of coping with structures of rac ism. Isis is delighted the White woman Helen wants her to dance for her, to the point that Helen’s husband notes that Isis has, in fact, adopted the White woman. Yet the “sale” of Isis—her grandmother agreeing she can accompany the couple to their hotel—and the omi nous tone of Helen needing Isis’s light for herself are disturbing and conflict with the tone of Isis’s own response to the situation. While Isis seems to believe she has tricked her grandmother/wolf with a White huntsman who enables her much greater freedom of expres sion, the narrator is less certain. In fact, in the ominous ending, the White couple pays the grandmother more than the tablecloth was worth, and as Helen looks “hungrily” into the distance, Isis rides off with her and her husband Harry/hairy, multiplying the possibilities of how wolves come in myriad disguises.
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The question of what this “adoption” by or of a White woman means, along with the risk of minstrelsy in the performing Black child Isis, is haunted by the cultural iconography of Topsy, a fic tional character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Topsy took off in a life of her own in minstrel shows (Meer 2005) and dolls (Bernstein 2011). In Stowe’s novel , Topsy is both a minstrel figure and a playful, intelligent, and imaginative trickster who perpetually challenges and disrupts Aunt Ophelia’s sense of domestic order. A New England spinster, Aunt Ophelia considers it her duty to help her brother St. Clare with the household operations at his Louisi ana plantation. Ophelia’s racism becomes apparent when her brother purchases Topsy for her. Seen by both characters and the narrator as an incorrigible example of the slave system, Topsy vocally and per formatively embraces her sinful nature and does her best to unsettle
Aunt Ophelia’s housekeeping. Stowe’s narrator takes pains to point out how “smart and energetic” Topsy is, how quickly she could learn “the proprieties of Miss Ophelia’s chamber,” and how her “scenic performances” are Topsy’s choice rather than actual incompetence.
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If unsupervised, Topsy would hold “a perfect carnival of confusion” and enact a histrionic scene with Ophelia’s clothing or pillow feath ers as inspiration: “On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her rehearsals before the glass in great style” (Stowe 2018, 238). However, the descriptions of Topsy engaging in grotesque drollery embed an easily exploited comic ele ment; the comedy derives from the battle with the ironically named “Miss Feely,” who eventually adopts her. In minstrel traditions, Topsy quickly transformed into the stereotypical “pickaninny” mocked for her outlandish behavior and performance. For example, in the film in which Shirley Temple performs a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, audiences laugh when Topsy comes on stage and eats the fresh flowers from the table (Seiter 1936). Topsy’s comic presence in the sentimental drama of the White child Evangeline buttresses the division by which a binary opposition marked Black and White childhoods, echoing the perception of Black women as public and sexual whereas White women were seen as private and pure. Robin Bernstein links the history of Topsy and topsy-turvy dolls to show that their lineage in material culture cultivated violence and the denigration of Black female bodies (2011, 69–90). Facing this lineage head-on, Hurston has Isis court the affection of a White woman so the young girl can dance unimpeded. JANIE CRAWFORD AS HUNTSMAN
EYES WATCHING WOLVES:
For Hurston’s young Black girls and women, wolves come in differ ent forms, their journeys taking them a “piece of the way” with myr iad moments of constriction and freedom. Although Hurston used the situation and name of Isis in Jonah’s Gourd Vine, it is really in her masterwork Their Eyes Were Watching God where she shows her ongoing consideration of Little Red confronting grandmothers and wolves in a quest for self-expression. Understanding how the skein of Little Red unwinds strands of racism and intergenerational conflict in “Drenched” sets the stage for tracing Janie’s journey in Hurston’s 1937 novel. Tension between the teenage Janie and her grandmother preoccupies the novel’s opening sections, framing Janie’s subse quent quest to find a true partner. Her grandmother, born in slavery, explains to Janie, “Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out” (1990, 14), and to keep Janie safe, marries her off at sixteen. Janie’s grandmother has framed Janie’s
Holly Blackford Humes | Essays 413 life in a certain way, but when Janie meets Tea Cake at age forty, she decides, “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means tuh live mine” (108). Living her own way does not mean, however, that she will bypass wolves. When Tea Cake takes on the characteristics of a wolf after being bitten by a rabid dog, the folktale morphs into a sexual paradigm. Hurston’s use of an older protagonist allows fuller expression of Little Red’s journey to sexual maturity. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a substantial revision, expansion, and aging of Red Riding Hood in “Drenched.” The voice accepting White domination in Their Eyes is the grandmother’s, and it frames Janie’s journey into nature and the important boundary of her grandmother’s gate: “[Janie] thought awhile and decided that her conscious life had commenced at Nanny’s gate” (1990, 11). The yard and threshold space define Janie’s burgeoning desires, and Janie’s time in the yard and at the gate engender conflict with the grand mother. Janie’s grandmother slaps Janie for kissing a boy at the gate, although the actual symbolic logic of the novel suggests that the slap is a reprimand for Janie’s autoerotic awakenings under the pear tree in the yard, a scene replete with thinly veiled allusions to multi ple orgasms as Janie contemplates marriage and nature. The grand mother’s solution of marrying off Janie is meant to keep her safe, given the rape of her own daughter, but is experienced as cruel and an end to the natural excursions and curiosities of childhood. Mar rying Logan, Janie is unable to feel what she felt on her own under the pear tree, the “pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and lan guid” as she watches the “dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” (10–11). By turning the yard into an autoerotic sexual space of play, Hurston solidifies a child’s geography as a negotiation for self-expression.Janiebearsout the Red Cap situation of the text, particularly in the way her grandmother marks her as liminal yet denies her free dom, recognizing risk in self-expression. Nanny has raised Janie with a White family and continually dressed her differently from the children of her own race. As Red learns, being singled out is danger ous. Young Hurston in Dust Tracks is sent in a red and white dress to perform for the White ladies at school. Isis of “Drenched in Light” is at an earlier stage than Janie—eleven years old—and she is not dressed in the tablecloth by anyone else but seizes it with her own idea of playing the gypsy for the community. Janie, in contrast, wears a wine-colored dress when Jody displays her as his trophy wife and prevents her from giving a speech to the community, demonstrating
414 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 his ideological continuity with Janie’s grandmother, which leaves Janie in unsatisfying relationships. In “Drenched,” there is a subtle suggestion that the grandmother’s tablecloth, at least in Isis’s view, is a symbol of status-seeking; in Their Eyes, Hurston seems to have faced head-on the problem of how “the will to adorn” risks putting oneself at odds with community. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston also explores more deeply the sexualization of Black girls. Isis’s grandmother calls her granddaughter “womanish,” and Janie’s grandmother announces her granddaughter’s womanhood after witnessing her kiss a boy—both pronouncements the result of the history of chattel slavery. Whereas Janie’s grandmother in Their Eyes is clearer about wishing to prevent Janie from the same fate as her mother, raped by the schoolmaster, the grandmothers in these two narratives veil their fears and make their admonitions seem arbitrary to the children. The intense fear of being sexualized and therefore compromised in the yard drives Janie’s grandmother’s diatribe against Janie throwing herself away on “trash” and needing to marry immediately. The engagement with the pear tree and “marriages” between bees and blossoms, which result in Janie’s orgasms, clarify the yard as a space of distinction between a “budding” girl and separation from the grandmother’s house and expectations, into the unknown. It is now, in contem porary literature and media, quite accepted and even fashionable to equate the wolf in Red’s tale with Red’s own burgeoning desire. For example, in the television series “Once Upon a Time” (ABC, 2011–2018), Red is the wolf, and in the three Red tales by Angela Carter (first published 1979) the wolf stands for a White girl’s meta morphosis as well as the desire she has for male companionship and sexual expression. In “Drenched in Light,” Isis tries to shave her grandmother, knowing full well ladies do not want facial hair: “They were long gray hairs curled here and there against the dark brown skin. Isis was moved with pity for her mother’s mother” (2008, 20). In this moment of attempted cleansing, which captures how the body and the lady differ, the narrator calls the grandmother “her mother’s mother,” positing a lineage linked with the missing mother of the tale that we find important elsewhere in Hurston’s work. This moment also embeds a mixed desire for feminine and masculine; just as the grandmother is both male and female, human and ani mal, here, Isis is moved by familial connection yet dying to hold the phallic blade: “The thing with her was to hold the razor—sufficient in itself” (21). Just like Little Red, whose encounter with the wolf is
Holly Blackford Humes | Essays 415 an opportunity to confront something within herself, in the shaving scene, Isis becomes aware of her desire to gender-bend, something she recognizes in her grandmother. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston explores more fully the value of wolves for Black female creative expression. Although he beckons a path far from grandmother’s house, Tea Cake becomes the most obvious wolf in Hurston’s oeuvre. Admittedly, Janie’s desire for Tea Cake in Their Eyes stems from her deep desire to pur sue the pleasures of passion, playfulness, and egalitarian work along side of her lover. Tea Cake is introduced after Janie’s first marriage to an old man who cannot satisfy her and her subsequent marriage to a class-conscious man (Jody) who forces Janie into a quasi-White marital role of submissive wife. Rather than a hairy grandmother veiling the wolf, it is Janie’s true love who transforms into a mad dog and threatens to kill her. Fearful “of this strange thing in Tea Cake’s body,” Janie loads her pistol, hoping she will not have to use it but realizing “that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all” (1990, 169). When she shoots Tea Cake dead, Janie has become her own huntsman, prepared to cope with the demonic disguise in her beloved. When Janie faces murder charges, White women come to her defense, whereas her own community nurses old grievances and withholds their support. The continual marginality of the Black female who stands out from her community and makes her own way provided Hurston with an artistic subject that could encompass unending complexities and vacillations between voice andThesilence.metaphor of Tea Cake’s transformation into a menacing dog raises questions about how Hurston reconfigured the trope of the disguised wolf through time, just as she reenacted a Black child’s performance in Seraph on the Suwanee. As Mark Anthony Neal notes (2012), Tea Cake was probably based on Hurston’s research into High John the Conqueror, the trickster folk hero upon whom Brer Rabbit is based, and which appears in her collection The Sanctified Church (1981). However, Tea Cake also symbolizes an unrealized potential of partnership:Therabid dog becomes a useful metaphor for the challenges of realizing a progressive black manhood, especially in regard to the realities of antiblack racism, poverty, and white supremacy. But [his death means] . Tea Cake exists as a literal fantasy of the possibili ties—unrealized in Hurston’s novel—of a black feminist manhood. (Neal 2012, 261)
As Hurston’s intergenerational conflict deepened and shifted, her consideration of wolves and huntsmen shifted too; they became symptoms of how a woman must negotiate and eventually reject nineteenth-century prescriptions and define womanhood for herself.
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“Drenched in Light” positions Isis as a willful, independent trick ster willing to gamble herself as a White-possessed object against her grandmother. In Isis’s view of the game, the tablecloth already embodied her grandmother’s aspirations in class and culture, ones that already had white fringes. In myriad ways, the girls of Afri can American women’s fiction are empowered by these vocal and dominant grandmothers, who are merely aghast at what they might have created. By marking them apart from their communities with fine clothing and domestic arrangements, the older Black women have both made conditions dangerous (red stands out in a forest)
Although a controversial figure (Mesa El Ashmawi 2009, 203–6) whose violence against Janie is as meaningful as the fact that he teaches her to play checkers and shoot a rifle, Tea Cake distills the problem of sorting through the sexual implications of the Little Red tale once Janie articulates that life with Tea Cake is living her own rather than her grandmother’s way. Barr notes that the goddess Isis links both the characters named Isis and Janie, who is literally back from the dead and who has, like the goddess, resurrected and put together the body of her husband, in some sense (2002, 104–5). As the goddess Isis is a trickster, so, too, are Isis and Janie. Returning to Eatonville, Janie walks past the “wagging tongues” on Joe Clarke’s old store porch and tells her story to Pheoby, as a sort of healing wives’ tale. Women comprise the audience for such intimate tales, not the broader community who judges Janie for leaving, wearing certain clothes, parading her status above them, and refusing to share all her business—the downside of communal eyes always watching.
Hurston amalgamates European traditions that contributed to shaping passive childhood and pits them against African American traditions that emphasize the cunning of Brer Rabbit against Fox and Bear. You might say that the collection of the Brothers Grimm tales she received from two White women as a child transformed, in Hurston’s literary imagination, from a symbol of exploitation to a means of empowerment and intergenerational collaboration.
BEYOND CHILDHOOD COLLECTIONS
Holly Blackford Humes | Essays 417 and special for the ambitious young women on the path. The table cloth, already a central element of the grandmother’s house and a stimulant to Isis’s imagination, is paid for by the White couple, paid more than its value, which is a purchase of Isis as well. Hardison argues, “The white couple and the grandmother in the story func tion as a ‘triad [that] suggests a metaphor for the struggle to control black art. . . . Isis, the subversive artist, remains true to her self and emerges triumphant: She has gotten the best of all three” (2013, 222). Isis wants to dance and does not care who defines it, as long as she occupies center stage. Along with winning the game against the grandmother, who wants to privatize and domesticate Isis, comes the grandmother’s public acquiescence to whatever the White couple want. Grand mother wants Isis to bathe before going, and Helen prefers her as she is and does not imagine Isis would want to be scrubbed, which, of course, illustrates a racist view of “folk authenticity.” In some ways it is impossible to discern the attitude of the end of the story, even while Helen’s vampiric need for Isis’s light is clearly ominous. What remains ambiguous is whether the White patron’s vampiric need rules the day. Does Helen adopt Isis, or does Isis adopt Helen?
Writing about the lineage of the trickster in African American writ ing, William Andrews defines the trickster as an interstitial figure morally beholden to no one but the self: The African trickster’s interstitial relationship to all community makes him or her a perpetual anomaly and ambiguity with no steady alliances to either side of the basic binary oppositions—order/disor der, creation/destruction/good/evil, life/death—that structure cul ture. The trickster’s interstitiality enables him or her to play both sides of these oppositions against the middle, which the trickster alone occupies, not in order to reconcile opposites but to embody their coexistence in a kind of irreducible dialogue. This dialogue can serve many functions, not the least of which is the stimulation of free thinking about the necessity of any traditional opposition or hierarchy valorized by culture. (Andrews 1988, 206)
At the end of “Drenched in Light,” Isis occupies the center position, and the adults around her represent binary oppositions between and within which she dances. Isis’s own excursion as an artist symbol izes the destruction of the tablecloth and the creation of something new, centering Black and White communities as all gather to watch. Significantly, Isis’s performance destroys the boundary between
WORKS CITED
While Hurston often pits women against each other—mistresses, women from different classes, grandmothers and granddaughters— she usually does so at the expense of one woman’s expressivity and the abundance of the other. Isis’s expressivity comes at the expense of her grandmother’s, this pattern recurring throughout Hurston’s fiction. However, the grandmother’s voice and even her profit off the ruined tablecloth signify, in subtle form, the deep connection between survival and the trickster role under conditions of oppres sion. As Davis writes, “Hurston herself is the ultimate trickster, cre ating characters whose sharp tongues, deceptions, equivocations, and chicanery secure their survival. In her seminal use of the female signifying character, Hurston is, as Gates notes, the ‘first author of the tradition to represent signifying itself as a vehicle of liberation for an oppressed woman’” (2007, 272). By extension, liberation of the Black female child is presented as a destruction of boundaries and an embrace of centers and thresholds, where signifying prac tices undergo rehearsal and revision, tablecloths become gypsy gar ments, and Black bodies are neither completely free nor completely commodified.
Andrews, William. 1988. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerica Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barr, Tina. 2002. “‘Queen of the Niggerati’ and the Nile: The Isis-Osiris Myth in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Journal of Modern Literature 25 (3/4): 101–13. Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Albany, NY: NYU Press. Carby, Hazel. 1987. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press. Carter, Angela. 2015. The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories. New York: Penguin. First published 1979. Davis, Doris. 2007. “‘De Talkin’ Game’: The Creation of Psychic Space in Selected Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26 (2): 269–86.
children and adults: “Some grown people joined the children about her. . . . the crowd clapping their hands for her. No one listened to the Exalted one, for little by little the multitude had surrounded the brown dancer” (2008, 22). The emphasis on destroying boundaries, rather orgiastically, suggests a template for reading the ending as demolishing boundaries between self-expression and exploitation.
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In The Annotated African American Folktales, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar, xxiii–lii. New York: Liveright. Hardison, Ayesha K. 2013. “Crossing the Threshold: Zora Neale Hurston, Racial Performance, and ‘Seraph on the Suwanee.’” African American Review 46 (2/3): 217–35. Hemenway, Robert. 1977. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1990. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper. First published 1937. . 1996. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper. First published 1942.. 1997. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” In Sweat, edited by Cheryl Wall, 55–71. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. . 2008. “Drenched in Light.” In The Complete Stories, edited by, 17–25. New York: Harper. . 2020. “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” Dotdash Press: Meer,-neale-hurston-1688772.https://www.thoughtco.com/how-it-feels-to-be-colored-me-by-zoraThoughtCo.Sarah.2005. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Atlanta: University of Georgia Press. Mesa El Ashmawi, Yvonne. 2009. “Janie’s Tea Cake: Sinner, Saint, or Merely Mortal?” The Explicator 67 (3): 203–206. Neal, Mark Anthony. 2012. “Finding Tea Cake: An Imagined Black Femi nist Manhood.” Palimpsest 1 (2): 256–63. Seiter, William, dir. 1936. Dimples. Twentieth Century Fox. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 2018. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton. Sutton-Smith, Brian. 2009. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Har vard University Press. Winnicott, D. W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Zipes, Jack. 1993. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood. New York: Routledge.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2018. “Foreword: The Politics of ‘Negro Folklore.”
Holly Blackford Humes | Essays 419
HOLLY BLACKFORD HUMES (Ph.D., University of California, Berke ley) is Professor of English and Communication at Rutgers Univer sity-Camden, where she teaches and publishes literary criticism on American and children’s literature. Her books include Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (2004), Mockingbird Passing: Closeted Traditions and Sexual Curiosities in Harper Lee’s Novel (2011), The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (2011), Alice to Algernon:
420 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 The Evolution of Child Consciousness in the Novel (2018), and edited vol umes 100 Years of Anne with an ‘e’: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables (2009) and Something Great and Complete: The Centennial Study of My Antonia (2018). Her next project is Beyond Womanish: The Black Female Bildungsroman.
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 “MATURE THEMES”: CHILDHOOD IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY SCENE OF ENCOUNTER MAUDE HINES
In their introduction to the 2018 reissue of James Baldwin’s 1976 “story of childhood” Little Man, Little Man, Nicholas Boggs and Jen nifer DeVere Brody write, “part of what makes [it] so noteworthy for its time is its self-aware presentation as a ‘child’s story for adults’ that tackles such mature themes as poverty, police brutality, crime, intergenerational relations, addiction, racism, and social marginal ity through the voice and vision of a black child” (2018, xvi). With the exception of “intergenerational relations,” this list of “mature themes” catalogues the most egregious effects of white supremacy on Black individuals and Black communities. Rather than being goalposts for maturation, these themes are “mature” because we want to protect children from such troubling realities. Baldwin is far from alone in not cordoning off his child characters (and readers) from the “mature” effects of white supremacy. Examples of the selfaware presentation Boggs and Brody praise Baldwin for permeate the African American literary tradition. The persistent racial awak ening trope variously described as the “stock scene of racial discov ery” (Cooke 1984, 72), “becoming colored” (Wald 1990), or a “nigga wake-up call” (Gillota 2013, 28) is, when rendered in literary form,
422 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 more often than not visited upon a child—a fact critical discussion tends to overlook.1 When we focus on what “the child” is doing in these scenes, we can begin to see the power of this figure for refram ing Black innocence, exposing the workings of white supremacy, and marshalling the future to confront the past.
Attending to how the “voice and vision” of childhood lends a potent set of attributes to the literary device I call “Encounter” allows us to see kinships between the personal narratives we associ ate with racial awakening and other ways of introducing childhood into the juxtaposition—including the aesthetic juxtaposition of chil dren’s literary forms with adult themes that Boggs and Brody find unusual in Baldwin’s book. In this essay, I introduce Encounter as a literary device and develop it as a methodology. I begin by outlining several attributes that characterize moments of Encounter in con versation with current work in critical childhood studies, theories of racial identity development, and a critical examination of the haunt ing persistence of past events in the nation’s racial consciousness. The succeeding sections explore the child’s function in exemplary literary texts in various genres published over an extended period of time by major writers in the African American literary tradition: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), James Weldon John son’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Countee Cullen’s “Incident” (1925), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), Frank Horne’s “Nigger: A Chant for Children” (1927), and Langston Hughes’s Black Misery (1969). The examples show how childhood and “mature themes” come together in scenes of Encoun ter, importing the power of childhood through personal memories of childhood trauma, fictional representations of childhood encoun ters with white supremacy, aesthetic encounters between forms of children’s literature and “adult” themes, or addresses to a mixedage readership. Taken together, these scenes explore questions of innocence and injury, using the figure of the child in the context of troubling realities as a way of troubling reality. I conclude by return ing to Baldwin’s 1976 Little Man, Little Man and countering Boggs and Brody’s assessment. The lens of Encounter illuminates how Lit tle Man, Little Man ’s real difference lies not in using the aesthetics of children’s forms to instruct adults but in inviting child readers to share in the complexity of Encounter’s use of the figure of child hood—a strategy that addresses an old paradox of innocence in Afri can American children’s literature.
An aesthetic form that uses childhood to make ideology visible, Encounter erupts in catalyzing moments that juxtapose childhood with the “mature themes” that signal white supremacy’s legacy, marshaling associations with childhood to emphasize and reveal ideology at work. Child characters can encounter racist structures without engaging literary Encounter, and I use differential capitali zation to distinguish the two senses of the word. A constellation of attributes characterizes Encounter (with a capital “E”): didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, and hopeful futu rity. Childhood’s importance to this literary device becomes clear when we place Encounter alongside one of its real-life referents: the “encounter stage,” coined by social psychologist William E. Cross (1991) in the model of Black identity development he calls “Nigres cence,” and its later elaboration by education psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum. An acceptance of white supremacy’s precepts char acterizes the “pre-encounter” stage, while the “encounter” stage describes a period of revolution in thinking about racial identity catalyzed by an event or series of events that forces acknowledg ment of “the personal impact of racism” (Tatum 2003, 55). Unlike these theories of racial identity development that describe a gradual process, literary depictions tend to stage childhood encounters with white supremacy that are temporally compacted and immediately transformative, converging the encounter stage with its catalyzing event. And while Cross focuses on young adults and Tatum on ado lescents, Encounter in its literary form tends to feature very young children, an especially striking feature given the evidence that real Black children face increased racism as they develop bodies read as “adult” (Tatum 2003, 53–54; Hughes et al. 2006).
By featuring much younger children than either Cross or Tatum describe, literary Encounter leverages a set of associations child hood imports, such as innocence, didacticism, and futurity, to reveal the trauma of social systems otherwise invisible, to render the trauma legible to readers, and to teach a new set of cultural reading practices. Childhood as deployed in literary Encounter negotiates a particularly insidious form of racial/temporal distortion, whereby a culture that has infantilized Black adults can also refuse to see Black children as children (Breslow 2019). Five of childhood’s salient attributes contribute to Encounter as a literary device, beginning with didacticism, which calls attention to the instructive nature of
Maude Hines | Essays 423 DEFINING ENCOUNTER
Scenes of Encounter tend to hold gothic echoes: an encounter with white supremacy is an encounter with ghosts. If, as Avery F. Gor don argues, “haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make . . . their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance)” (2008, xvi), it is useful to frame the child’s exposure to white supremacy’s effects through the lens of such “ghostly matters” (7) or Saidiya Hartman’s “afterlives of slavery” (2008, 6). The newness of the child shows the oldness of racism by contrast, and moments of literary Encoun ter are frequently accompanied by gothic effects: the revelation of things hidden (the child’s first-seeing); the old and monstrous (the anti-Black racism that is a legacy of American chattel slavery); an emotional charge in the reader; the sense of being trapped, or buried alive; and a premature loss of innocence. Teresa A. Goddu notes that “many texts that are not predominantly gothic use gothic effects at key moments to register cultural contradictions” (1997, 10). Such is the case with scenes of Encounter, which problematize unequal dis tribution of innocence and reveal the impossibility of changing the future without reckoning with the past. If white supremacy projects its own monstrosity by constructing Blackness as monstrous, then childhood as deployed in these texts refuses the gothic convention of Blackness-as-horror, instead rendering white supremacy itself in gothic terms, a reversal Maisha Wester has identified as a feature of the African American gothic (2016, 28).
the scene, cuing readers to expect something to be taught. One of these lessons teaches seeing anew: since adult readers have long since incorporated the social order, focalization through a child who sees its symptoms for the first time, often as a shock, is an instructive reminder. The child’s first-seeing reveals that which goes without saying and is therefore hidden; in this way, the child is the learner and also the teacher. The scene of Encounter stages a rite of passage and means of achieving cultural literacy for adult readers as well as children, who experience a vicarious encounter by seeing the cul tural violence of white supremacy (a very old form) as a visitation upon an innocent child (a very new one).
Encounter’s gothic reversal requires paradoxical innocence. A per sistent trope in gothic horror, premature loss of (white) innocence blurs adult and child timelines through the elision of innocence by experience, to great uncanny effect.2 And in employing paradoxi cal innocence to expose the machinery of white supremacy, literary scenes of Encounter thus play on a standard horror trope: the child
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Maude Hines | Essays 425 who can see what others cannot. Childhood innocence is, however, a complex topic for African American authors to negotiate. Innocence adheres to white childhood at the expense of racial others. In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), Robin Bernstein explains how African American children are and have been systematically excluded from the very concept of childhood innocence.3 On one hand, Encounter insists on Black chil dren’s innocence: juxtaposing Black innocence and white supremacy emphasizes both, as white supremacy’s effects become more legi ble and severe when targeted against a very young child, while the monstrousness of white supremacy’s effects brings into relief the Black child’s blameless innocence. On the other hand, Encounter represents a loss of innocence as it exposes the child character to “mature” themes. Indeed, it makes innocence of white supremacy impossible, an important difference from the type of white child hood innocence Bernstein lays bare. In “Stranger in the Village,” Baldwin uses the word “innocence” to describe a monstrous refusal to acknowledge and understand white supremacy’s effects: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” (1998b, 129). Baldwin’s reframing of innocence is useful as we follow the way Encounter emphasizes blameless innocence while eschewing protec tion for child characters and readers to reframe innocence of white supremacy’s ideology as monstrous.
Encounter’s temporal elasticity makes use of the multiple tempo ralities inherent in the way we imagine childhood. The child is both a child in the present and the adult they will be in the future, while the adult in the present preserves the child of the past. Clémentine Beauvais identifies “temporal otherness” as “the central distinction between adult and child”: “child and adult are symbolically set apart by their belonging to different temporalities—and . . . this difference modulates the distribution of ‘powers’ between the two categories” (2015, 4). Children and adults occupy the same moment on different temporal trajectories: according to Beauvais, there is a “potentiality and power of ‘unrealized time’ inherent in the symbolic construc tion of children” (18). Children have “a longer future in which to act,” while adults possess “a longer time past with its accumulated bag gage of experience [and] knowledge” (18–19). Moments of Encounter engage the child’s “temporal otherness” by blurring lines between “child” and “adult” in the traumatic encounter at their center. As the
continued presence of what never should have happened in the past, trauma’s persistence blurs temporal distinctions. Scenes of Encoun ter are thus related through temporal collapse and expansion: seem ing to take forever, or reduced to a single moment, they render their protracted lessons as nearly instantaneous.
Hopeful futurity is another characteristic childhood brings to Encounter. Hope, together with “anguish . . . , wait, and desire,” is among the “time-related concepts” Beauvais reminds us “cannot be let aside when dealing with the adult-child relationship and its symbolic representations” (2015, 4–5). Such future-oriented emo tions help explain childhood’s centrality to the message of racial uplift in writing published in the decades before Little Man, Little Man ’s first appearance in 1976—both inside and outside the text. As Katha rine Capshaw demonstrates in Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, child and adult readerships were blurred during the Harlem Renaissance, and children were seen as a vehicle for racial uplift. Du Bois, in particular, had “faith in the ability of young people to lead the race into the future” (2006, 2). In Representations of Childhood in American Modernism, Michelle H. Phillips connects these tendencies with reform movements generally, encapsulat ing the temporal elasticity associated with childhood: “childhood was the impressionable point at and through which future history would be made” (2016, 1). Real-world debates over whether Black children should be exposed to the reality of racism or protected in their innocence reflect (and are reflected in) Encounter’s negotia tion of innocence. They also inform a vision of the child as a means to affect the future. Imperatives to preserve childhood innocence were at odds with a conviction that early awareness of racism, prop erly taught, would protect children from damaging social encoun ters and help train a well-equipped generation of race workers and activists. A belief that African American children cannot afford not to see race explains the preponderance of scenes of Encounter in African American literature. The legacies of white supremacy that register in the present are rooted in the past, while the urge to protect our children from them is bound up in the hope they will grow into adulthood in a brighter future. Inattention to childhood makes us inattentive to Encounter’s engagement with these tem poral contradictions. A speculative mode, Encounter invests in the child figure’s futurity through the pessimistic threat of continued injury and the optimistic hope for a future in which white suprem acy has been defeated.
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The familiar opening paragraphs of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk are paradigmatic in their constellation of childhood, didacticism,
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The attributes childhood brings to literary scenes of Encoun ter— didacticism, gothic echoes, paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, and hopeful futurity —coalesce in different ways across various texts. The scenes of Encounter we’ll explore now span multiple genres and decades, showing that attention to Encounter unsettles a lin ear approach to African American literature—or, for that matter, to “growing up.” African American authors found multiple ways of deploying this device in works for child and adult audiences, to powerful effect. These moments reach back into the past and for ward into the future through the figure of the child and through legacies of racism, protest, and love, with the imperative to act in the present to change the future. They illustrate the folly of keeping a line between children and these “mature themes” in the service of protection. Reframing the juxtaposition attenuates white suprem acy’s hold, opens space for resistance and reform, and imagines a different future. ENCOUNTER
A full accounting of African American literary scenes of Encounter would begin with slave narratives and the trope of enslaved chil dren learning to read—in terms of both literacy and social under standing. Reading about a child learning to read operates as a sort of mise en abyme, extending its lessons to readers. And as Wester has shown, slave narratives rewrite gothic motifs (2016, 35–66). I begin instead with works that are indebted to those narratives: early twen tieth-century texts that present adults looking back on childhood in memoir and fiction. These texts reveal old and hidden structures, enacting the discovery of slavery’s ghosts rather than the lived expe rience of slavery itself. A particular knowledge paradox connects the use of childhood in these representations of remembrance: the child’s innocent gaze exposes and re-presents as new what adults have come to accept; didactic associations render it as a lesson in cultural literacy; and associations with futurity offer a narrative of how the adult writing the memoir came to be. At the same time, the lessons learned contradict the ones being taught, and here a par ticular type of childhood innocence—innocence maintained by not internalizing white supremacy (or pre-Encounter)—produces the desired paradoxical effect.
READING
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paradoxical innocence, temporal elasticity, hopeful futurity, and gothic echoes. Childhood is critical to this seminal sociological text that lays bare the workings of white supremacy using metaphors that remain central to understanding the multiplicity of Black expe rience and resilience and the structures that seek to repress and sep arate us. In introducing his concept of the “veil,” Du Bois writes, It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing. . . . In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card— refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, may hap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. (Du Bois 1990, 7–8; emphasis added)
Du Bois’s narrative is typical in presenting a young child’s expo sure to white supremacy as a gothic corruption of innocence. Its elastic temporality collapses the experience to a single moment in time, while engaging what Beauvais calls the “power” of futurity we invest in childhood. The episode reflects the encounter’s origins in a past far older than the child, arming the child to fight its mani festations in the future. Du Bois deploys the confrontation between an innocent child (himself) and old ghosts (the legacy of white supremacy that blinds the “newcomer” to his humanity) to set up a more general phenomenon (such a revelation “bursts upon one ”— his own is but one example). Encounter’s gothic echoes are central figures (“veil,” “shadow”) in Du Bois’s text. The veil is a versatile metaphor: in addition to a veil between worlds, shutting the young child out, it is also a birth caul, invoking one who can see what oth ers can’t: “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” (8). The second sight Du Bois outlines throughout Souls as an effect of double con sciousness (seeing through a “twoness” that brings white suprema cy’s cultural assumptions into focus) is reinforced in this episode by childhood’s innocence of those assumptions: focalizing through a child who sees it for the first time exposes the monstrosity of what adults might take for granted (the child’s own “second sight”). At the same time, the episode desecrates that innocence. This encoun ter between a small child (“a little thing”) and the haunting legacy of white supremacy collapses time into a moment of revelation (“all
and Tatum’s research presents the “encounter stage” as iterative and gradual, Du Bois’s literary staging of the Encounter renders the child’s movement through it as instantaneous as the experience that catalyzes it: I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. (Du Bois 1990, 8)
The child learns a different lesson than the one being taught: while the Black child is seen as the problem by the white child, he “refuse[s] to accept her judgment as “peremptorily” as she refuses his card. Thus, the child maintains a paradoxical innocence by refusing to internalize the lesson. The adult Du Bois uses the childhood epi sode to reframe white supremacy as the problem. Richard Wright uses the same mixture of innocence and didacti cism in Black Boy, a memoir that chronicles his childhood in the Jim Crow South. As with Du Bois, the child’s futurity connects him with the author who is looking back, explaining his current way of see ing the world. But the vicarious nature of Wright’s experience—he recalls seeing another Black boy beaten—highlights the importance of the child’s gaze. Despite being told he is “too young to under stand” (he is six years old), young Richard vows never to let any body beat him, broods about the “seemingly causeless beating,” and takes it as exemplary of “the relations between whites and blacks” (Wright 1945, 20–21). The adult Wright narrates a transformation enabled by his childish refusal of what goes without saying, valu ing innocence over experience. In this elastic temporality, the “future” has already happened. The child’s innocent not-knowing reveals for readers of any age what adults might take for granted: “I could not understand why some people had enough food and others did
Maude Hines | Essays 429 in a day”; “suddenness”) in which the child understands his differ ence—a difference Du Bois clarifies as not personal (“like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing”) but rather a systemic difference in access (“shut out”). The episode’s setting in a “wee wooden school house” highlights its instructive nature. Temporal elasticity also char acterizes both the young child still present in the affected adult (“I remember well”) and the persistence of the experience with an old racism that animates one child to rebuff another, both of them sym bols of Whilefuturity.Cross’s
430 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 not” (17). Associations with didacticism are reflected in the child’s thirst for knowledge: “Every happening in the neighborhood, no matter how trivial, became my business. It was in this manner that I first stumbled upon the relations between whites and blacks, and what I learned frightened me” (20). Wright enters Cross’s encounter stage when he is only six years old, and his adult narration reads like a child understanding unnatural secrets: “Whenever I saw ‘white’ people now I stared at them, wondering what they were really like” (21). Vicarious Encounter provides a mirror to the self through iden tification with other Black folk: if this can happen to them, it could happen to me. Vicarious Encounter’s effects are enhanced when the gaze is a child’s gaze, suggesting (again) innocence (and its loss), didacticism (learning lessons and teaching them to readers), and futurity (the child as a vehicle for delivering those lessons from the past into the future).
In a country where whiteness is associ ated with humanity, individualism, and subjectivity, the metaphor of racial transformation allows Johnson to imbue his character with those assets. Johnson uses whiteness to enhance his character’s inno cence, which is both childlike and monstrous. A student at a racially mixed northern elementary school, the protagonist hurls rocks and racial epithets at Black students until he learns of his own Black ness through humiliating public exposure by his teacher and the principal. He loses his monstrous innocence together with his child ish innocence. His emotional reaction recalls the time-collapsing effects of Encounter in Du Bois’s retrospective: “I sat down dazed. I saw and heard nothing. . . . When school was dismissed I went out in a kind of stupor” (Johnson 1990, 11). He too talks about the inci dent from the vantage of adulthood, describing it as “not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die” (13). Temporally, the transformation is both instantaneous and expanding: “And so I have often lived through that hour, that day, that week in which was wrought the miracle of my transition from one world into another” (14; emphasis added). The fictional scene replicates memoir’s narra tion of the traumatic and formative effects of Encounter, suffusing
James Weldon Johnson uses a similar autobiographical voice—an adult narrator reflecting back on a childhood scene of Encounter— in his 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the fictional work Johnson presents as a confessional memoir. Johnson’s young protagonist learns he is African American after participating fully in the racist structure, a hyperbolic version of what Cross and Tatum would call “pre-encounter.”
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Johnson’s protagonist then narrates his own white to Black transformation as a metonym for Blackness under white supremacy generally:From that time I looked out through other eyes, my thoughts were colored, my words dictated, my actions limited by one dominating, all pervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact.
a single moment with the full weight of white supremacy’s performative power, expanding it into the future and recursively “liv[ing] through it” again and again, at different ages.
And this is the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, nor even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man. It is wonderful to me that the race has progressed so broadly as it has, since most of its thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of one funnel. (Johnson 1990, 14) He has gone from internalizing white supremacy to seeing it from the outside. His second sight comes at great expense, through effects that are narrated in the language of gothic horror. To look “out through other eyes” and have one’s “words dictated . . . actions limited” reads as possession, while the “constantly increas[ing] force and weight” and “dwarfing, warping, distorting influence” are hallu cinatory and confining, suggesting a grotesque bodily deformation that reflects his inhumanity under white supremacy. The fun neled-down time, sights, and emotion of the description are figured here on the scale of an entire race, most of whose “thought and all of its activity must run through the narrow neck of one funnel.” The scene of Encounter juxtaposes these gothic effects with childhood, whose innocence emphasizes the monstrousness of white suprema cy’s “dwarfing, warping, distorting influence.”
While the scenes we’ve looked at so far insist on the child’s inno cence while sacrificing it in the act of revealing monstrosity, Zora Neale Hurston refuses the gothic tropes that do that work. In both her autobiographical essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston uses the metaphor of instantaneous racial transformation in the language of adult recol lection to describe a child’s entry into white supremacy’s symbolic order. “I remember the very day that I became colored,” she writes in “How It Feels” (Hurston 1979, 152; emphasis added). “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found
432 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 it out in certain ways.” Hurston distinguishes herself by refusing gothic tropes: we never learn what these “ways” are, and she refuses to “belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood.” “But I am not trag ically colored,” Hurston writes. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all” (153). In representing “tragic” stories of Nigrescence as a “school,” Hurston underlines their ubiquity and significance; her language acknowledges gothic tropes by resisting them. Interestingly, Hurs ton’s departure leads her back to the same place. She narrates her Blackness as a product of the white gaze, reflecting the onus back on white people: “I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (154). In this model of temporal elasticity, the adult has access “even now” to the child’s powerful “unconscious” innocence of her place in a rac ist system. A version of this self-discovery makes its way into Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston’s novelistic mapping of the literal and figurative terrain a young girl navigates on her way to becoming a woman in control of her own destiny. Like other literary Encoun ters, the (more) fictionalized version features a much younger child. While Hurston says she was thirteen when she herself “became colored,” her heroine Janie Crawford is only six when she sees herself in a photograph. While the scene is narrated as Janie’s first-person recollection to her friend Phoebe, the child Janie is animated in the adult Janie’s speech: “Ah looked at de picture a long time and seen it was mah dress and mah hair so Ah said: ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’” (Hurston 1978, 21). Though the photograph shows Janie her image from the outside, her revelation causes no internal revolution. Her image of herself is unchanged. In fiction, Hurston paints a picture of a young girl exposing a fault line in white supremacy, already know ing how to defeat the system, if not dismantle it, and insistent upon her own humanity. Janie is in many ways the example of what we want the child reader to be: undefined by the monster she knows wants to destroy her, her protected innocence paradoxically inter twined with acquired wisdom. More common is the kind of crush ing blow described by Du Bois and Johnson: the comparison brings Hurston’s refusal into relief.
All of these authors use external organizing principles (Jim Crow, the school, the itinerant photographer) that force protagonists to see themselves from the outside, through the eyes of others. And by
Aesthetic markers of children’s literature in adult texts call upon readers’ associations with their own childhoods as they read disturb ing content: the children’s format emphasizes that this is a scene of instruction for readers, too.
Cullen’s widely anthologized twelve-line poem “Incident” invokes childhood through both its eight-year-old subject and its nurseryrhyme meter:
Countee Cullen’s “Incident” and Frank Horne’s “Nigger: A Chant for Children,” two poems I turn to next, provide particularly evocative examples of the collapsing of generations. Like Margaret Walker’s “boys and girls who grew . . . to be man and woman . . . to marry their playmates . . . and then die / of consumption and anemia and lynching” (2001, 402–403), child and adult exist simultaneously in these poems, in what Jonathan Culler calls “the strange time of the lyric now” (2015, 294). Walker’s accelerated progression here is different from that of the gothic white child whose premature age is terrifying. Instead, it uses the aging to represent the real mon ster that confines them, their “dreams deferred,” pressed down and ready to explode. Such a blurring counters the “temporal positioning of blackness within a suspended potentiation and subjection” that Jacob Breslow argues is responsible for the infantilization of Black men, the refusal of childhood to Black boys, and the dismissal of objection as “whining” that situates the subject “as both childish and out of time” (2019, 482, 488). Rather, the temporal elasticity of these poems redeems both ages, insisting on a redemptive innocence that can adhere to both children and adults. The primary encounter between childhood and white supremacy is echoed by these poems’ aesthetics: by using children’s verse to portray the violence of white supremacy, they stage an encounter between form and meaning.
Maude Hines | Essays 433 holding a mirror to the system that defines the child as the problem, each of these scenes reveals where the true monstrosity lies. The same moment of Encounter forms Du Bois’s exceptionalism (those other boys are learning the “proper” lessons), Wright’s seeing rac ism as a white problem, and Hurston’s refusal to enter the “sobbing school” and to see herself without “a sharp white background,” and it is the child’s refusal to see as “natural” what was supposed to be learned that produces the effect. The adult self formed by Encounter highlights not only its place in a linear development narrative but also its continued importance in the adult life of the authors as a nonlinear present-past that disrupts that narrative.
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The poem’s encounter between form and meaning amplifies the speaker’s recollected confrontation with white supremacy, rendered metonymically as an encounter with one of its violent linguistic instruments. Reading “Incident” in the context of American mod ernism, Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that “the poem presents the blow of social learning of one’s place in a racial/racist order” (2001, 17). In other words, it corresponds to Cross’s theory of Nigrescence except in the age of the child. The “incident” is not only between two individuals, it is between an individual (the narrator) and the system of white supremacy merely represented by the small “Baltimor ean”—a system made painfully visible to those it marks and excludes but learned by all children. The invocation brings associations with innocence (how can such violence be visited upon a child?), with didacticism (what will the child learn from this experience?), and with futurity (how will this affect the adult he grows into?). While the child looks toward the future, the epithet “Nigger” is freighted with history. The word reflects the system of white supremacy neces sary to commit the crime of American chattel slavery, the projection of responsibility onto its victims, and an insistence on perpetuating both the crime and its perverse justification in the present in which it is uttered. In encountering the epithet, the child comes up against all of its metonymic power to summon old ghosts.
Cullen’s poem distinguishes itself by not catalyzing an instan taneous entry into the encounter stage: “Incident” ends without narrating the speaker’s internal revolution, preserving his memory of childhood innocence in the “lyric now.” Affectively, the child in the poem goes from full of emotion (“Heart-filled, head-filled with glee”) and full of seeing “the whole of Baltimore” to empty (“That’s
Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a KeepBaltimoreanlookingstraight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December: Of all the things that happened there That’s all that I remember. (Cullen 2001, 384–85)
Cullen’s “Incident” insists on innocence for its young Black child, an innocence culturally reserved for white children. The innocence, in turn, intensifies the poem’s violence. The child is possessed of a blameless innocence: he doesn’t deserve this treatment, rendering the epithet exponentially worse. The child is vulnerable (experience hasn’t steeled him to withstand this violence). The child is innocent of the workings of racist social systems, seeing kinship in the white child through age (“And he was no whit bigger, / And so I smiled”).
In Cross’s and Tatum’s terms, this is symptomatic of the “pre-en counter” stage. Didacticism, too, is rendered perversely, as the eightyear-old’s openness to the sights of the big city are reflected in the repeated phrase “I saw.” He is hungry to see, to learn, increasing his openness to the poison that he absorbs in “old Baltimore.” The eight-year-old child’s racial innocence thus has the opposite effect of Bernstein’s “racial innocence”: what earns protection in white chil dren renders him vulnerable to the epithet and its performativity. For the white child, experience is uncanny; for the African Amer ican child, it is wise (or canny). By showing a Black child beset by gothic confinement, rather than producing it for readers, “Incident” reflects white supremacy’s horror while resisting the adultification
While the poem reduces and compresses time into a single “Inci dent” for the speaker, for the reader it also hearkens back to the past and forward to the future through the power of the epithet and the presence of the child, a combination that underscores the threat of the past’s effects continuing into the future. At least three distinct times are implied in the poem. The speaker’s use of the past tense throughout the poem, as well as words like “whit” suggest that he is looking back as an adult on a childhood experience “in ret rospective control of the narrated event” (DuPlessis 2001, 18). The child engages a two-directional temporality, innocently receiving the weight of history encapsulated in the epithet, and carrying its effects into the future. The epithet is thus a performative utterance, and the poem lays bare the anatomy of historical trauma.
Maude Hines | Essays 435 all that I remember”). Time, too, is funneled down, with eight months (“May until December”) collapsed into a single moment (“Incident”), which DuPlessis describes as “freeze-framed” because “Cullen has engineered a pause before the decisive word” (2001, 18).
The flattening pressure on ebullient plenty reflects the claustropho bic entrapment of the gothic. The tragedy in this reduction is made more poignant through the eyes of a child, whose associations with both innocence and didacticism render his loss more poignant.
436 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 of its speaker. Cullen’s poem saliently insists on the innocence of its subject—although it is unclear by the end whether he keeps it or enters the encounter stage with grim determination, steeled against white supremacy’s future effects.
Horne’s poem “Nigger: A Chant for Children” also juxtaposes children’s meter with “mature” content, staging the violent encoun ter in its very title. Like we saw in “Incident,” the epithet imports and injects the historical violence of white supremacy. The poem begins with a “Little Black boy / Chased down the street — ‘Nig ger, nigger never die / Black face an’ shiny eye, / Nigger . . . nig ger . . . nigger . . . ’” (Horne 2001, 402). As with Cullen’s “very small” speaker, the word “little” underscores the innocence of the pursued. By importing a schoolyard chant uttered by real children, Horne imports the threat of physical violence that accompanies it, together with the monstrous lesson in white supremacy learned by pursued and pursuers alike. The familiarity of the schoolyard chant empha sizes the didactic nature of this lesson in white supremacy—indeed, this is the same one recited by Johnson’s protagonist in Autobiogra phy of an Ex-Colored Man.
The poem’s successive stanzas describe the accomplishments of great men—Hannibal, Othello, Crispus Attucks, Toussaint L’Ou verture, and finally Jesus Christ—followed each time by “Nigger . . . nigger . . . nigger . . .” Placing his “little Black boy” in company with these real and fictional giants across time and space, and suggesting that they, too, feel white supremacy’s weight, Horne brings a sim ultaneity of multiple times and geographies into the present place of the poem. Childhood’s associations with futurity are amplified by the possibilities for great things. The last stanza differs from the first by only one word, but that word is pivotal: in changing “chased” to “runs,” Horne changes the tense from a past single incident to a present and ongoing one, engages in the now-familiar turn against white supremacy, and changes the perspective from the pursuers to the pursued—who may, in fact, no longer be pursued but proudly running, bearing associations with the accomplishments of heroes, his innocence protected despite awareness of the system that would target him. By reframing the epithet “nigger” through another jux taposition (insult / pride), Horne’s poem engages temporal elasticity, raising the stature of the persecuted boy by placing him against a host of possible futures and a comparison to past greatness. DuPles sis calls the poem “a vaccine employing the ugly virus of this word to control—and expose—its effects” (2001, 132). Horne’s poem creates
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Encounter’s temporal elasticity and metaphors of inoculation and contagion permeate criticism as well. Reading a more contemporary canon of African American children’s liter ature, Dianne Johnson-Feelings looks at books that combine the modes of inoculation (“strategies for acting and reacting in a racist, sexist society” that cultivate immunity) and protection (“a network of psychological protection, nurturance, and education”) (1990, 7, 12). Her emphasis on the importance of countering negative images and “rewriting our past” and her call for books that feature dream ing and new “national mythologies” reflect the temporal elasticity we associate with childhood, and extend it to children’s books. John son-Feelings’s call for new national mythologies echoes the gothic reversal played out in literary scenes of Encounter: the national story must be rewritten, not the child. Until that happens, the past will continue to haunt the present. The battle is a rhetorical one, but with real effects.
I turn now to two books that answer Johnson-Feelings’s call by engaging the figure of the child to bring new light to old problems and invest in the future through child readers, positioning those readers simultaneously as present children and future adults. Lang ston Hughes’s last book, Black Misery, illustrates the inequality of inherent notions of innocence. Accompanied by Arouni’s powerful
ENCOUNTERING READERS
Inoculation remains a useful metaphor for thinking about the role of literature for child readers as we move outside the text and con sider readership. While the affordances of the gothic render the child figure from an adult perspective, when we turn to writing for children, the motivation shifts from focusing on characters to inoc ulating readers for the futures they represent. The inoculating struc ture of Horne’s poem recalls the language of intentional exposure to the realities of racism that informed debates in the first half of the twentieth century, and that continue today. Our investment in books for young readers, in particular, imbues them with future-ori ented emotions like hope (that they will protect children, or prepare them) and fear (that they will expose children to negative messages about themselves).
a recipe for entering the encounter stage by mixing the depiction of catalyzing racism to which children are already exposed with an attenuating exposure to proud Black history. The epithet’s repetition across seven stanzas recontextualizes it and removes its virulence.
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black-and-white illustrations, Hughes’s text describes a series of relatable childhood disappointments and insults, addressed to young readers in the second person. In addressing child readers and not just representing child characters, Black Misery attenuates the virus that creates the “adult themes” it represents, inoculating a reader ship with the power to change the future. Hughes was asked to write Black Misery by the publisher of Suzanne H. Heller’s popular Misery series (Crawford 2019), which in turn riffed on the popular 1962 Pea nuts anthology Happiness is a Warm Puppy. Heller’s books list such “miseries” as “when you spend your last ten cents on a Good Humor and it falls of the stick” or “when you eat a whole box of Cracker Jacks and realize you ate the prize” (Heller 1964, n.p.), commiser ating with children who, like those in the series’ illustrations, are white children with pocket money and cars. By contrast, Hughes’s illustrated children’s book is darker and thus more instructive for an audience of children and adults: “Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home,” writes Hughes. “Misery is when you first real ize so many things bad have black in them, like black cats, black arts, blackball” (Hughes [1969] 1996, n.p.). Black Misery is, in effect, a litany of childhood encounters that, through empathy, humor, and solidarity, strives for effects opposite those of the representations it describes. The book’s inverse color scheme—white words on black pages—reflects the reversal. Black Misery exemplifies the philosophy of strengthening child readers by inoculating them with a weakened virus—white supremacy’s gaze refracted and reinterpreted. While its second-person address accentuates the encounter with the reader staged by the text itself, Black Misery addresses multiple audiences at once, pointing out the ridiculousness of white supremacy in lines like “when you start to help an old white lady across the street and she thinks you’re trying to snatch her purse,” for example, or the powerful last line: “when you see that it takes the whole National Guard to get you into the new integrated school.” Like other texts aimed at young readers that feature juxtapositions between child characters and white supremacy’s “mature” effects, Black Misery shifts away from the gothic and toward an inoculating transmission of positive messages, its futurity set on child readers outside the text more than characters within. As with Black Misery, the child’s gaze of Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man is not only represented in the book but welcomed from readers, a way for Baldwin to reach children directly and to affect a
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future he will not live to see. Little Man, Little Man chronicles the Harlem adventures of four-year-old TJ and his two friends—sevenyear-old WT and eight-year-old Blinky. It shares elements with the literary encounters staged by its predecessors—Baldwin’s own child hood memories, aesthetic encounters between children’s literature forms and “adult” themes, dissemination to a mixed-age readership, and of course the juxtaposition of childhood with “mature themes.”
Four-year-old TJ, the book’s narrator-protagonist, is even younger than the children in previous examples, and his gaze dominates Little Man, Little Man. Baldwin portrays TJ as an unusually perceptive child, with a canny attunement to the world around him. The scenes in Lit tle Man, Little Man are steeped in TJ’s perceptions. This is brought home when TJ is able to read emotions on the face of a man married to an alcoholic wife with a complexity and accuracy unimpeded by adult judgment: “It like he want to hit her, and, at the same time, he want to kiss her. It like he want to strangle her. It like he almost going to cry” (Baldwin 2018, 83). If adult readers discern the alcohol ism, racism, and social marginality that surround TJ (and of which he is innocent), they must do so through his little boy’s gaze, which opens up new ways of seeing. TJ’s mistrust of another child’s glasses emphasizes perspectival differences, the help some of us need to see, and the paradoxical relationship between age and “know[ing]”: “It was some white folks at school bought her them glasses. If he can’t see out them, how she going to see out them? And she older than he is. . . . She ought know better” (Baldwin 2018, 8). His disdain for Blinky’s glasses (and thus his refusal to adopt a white gaze) puts read ers on notice that TJ is in control of his own vision and he will be reading both with and against the text. This is a model for readers, who are encouraged to make their own interpretation of what TJ narrates. As he goes through a day in his Harlem neighborhood, TJ sees the “poverty, police brutality, crime, . . . addiction, racism, and
What makes Little Man, Little Man unique in this context is the way it invites adult readers to don a child’s perspective while also wel coming child readers into conventions of Encounter familiar from literature aimed at adult readers (though no doubt discovered and read by children). The child’s perspective imports aspects of didacti cism and the child’s not-knowing for all ages of readers while other conventions of Encounter—temporal elasticity, gothic echoes, and paradoxical innocence—are softened. Little Man, Little Man engages readers of all ages as they learn (and relearn) about Harlem together with the multifarious social issues it presents.
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social marginality” Boggs and Brody describe as “mature.” The way he describes them reflects white supremacist culture’s influence: as in Black Misery, media depictions of neighborhoods like TJ’s present a type of encounter, and what he learns from them presents a differ ent set of lessons for readers. Television sets and film strips frame the illustrations that accompany a section of the book in which TJ imagines familiar narrative resolutions for a police chase and “reads” his own experience and neighborhood as he has been taught to do (12–17). And yet TJ’s paradoxical innocence gives him vision that cannot be contained by cultural prescription, and Little Man, Little Man takes its own job as media influence seriously, attenuating its “mature themes” with love, as we saw in Hughes’s Black Misery. TJ is already inoculated with Black love and reads against the prescribed vision of his neighborhood; the child’s perspective is one instrument of counter influence. His father “look like he mad but he ain’t” and “try to act mean, but he ain’t mean” (56). Miss Lee “don’t smile a bit, except you can tell she really smiling to herself inside. She having fun. It all in her eyes” (31). Like Hughes’s depiction of the slum/home gestalt that requires careful interpretation, or like Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa” whose speaker insists that “Black love is Black wealth and they’ll / probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy” (2003), so too does TJ see love and kindness in adult characters. In setting up other conventions of Encounter in this book self-consciously aimed at a mixed-age audience, there is a softening, an openness, and an insistence on keeping space for not-knowing. In this text not otherwise characterized by gothic conventions, atten tion to Encounter helps discern gothic echoes. An interlude featur ing Miss Beanpole, a woman TJ describes as “old as time” and “a little bit white and a little bit colored” has particularly Faulknerian undertones. Miss Beanpole locks her door with a “long iron stick,” and TJ is “always afraid [she] will . . . start beating him over the head with it” (Baldwin 2018, 40). He describes her apartment as “dark” and says “Miss Beanpole ain’t never dressed.” We see Miss Beanpole through TJ’s gaze, and we are left to wonder what history the child is picking up on: “It like a real weird room. Like a room in the movies or the TV where something happened in the room a long time ago and somebody hid in the room and they saw what happened and they still hiding in the room” (46). There is a sense of other timelines, in Beauvais’s terms, to which TJ doesn’t have access, yet still perceives.
eruption of the gothic bears the hallmarks of Encounter—but read ers aren’t sure with what, because the child’s gaze brings its outlines only dimly into focus.
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Afraid of “bumping into” something in the room, TJ worries that whoever is hiding there will “jump out and tell what they saw.” This
Addressing adult readers who have been children, and child readers who will be adults, Little Man, Little Man gives Encounter’s temporal characteristics a similar softening. An exposure to heroin addiction recalls the temporal elasticity and foreclosure we see in earlier texts such as Cullen’s “Incident” and Walker’s “For My Peo ple.” When TJ tells WT that he “won’t never get to be like” the heroin junkies who shoot dope on the rooftops or behind the stairs, “WT say, just like a real old man, ‘They didn’t think so, neither’” (Baldwin 2018, 22–23). The description of a seven-year-old as “like a real old man” reads as a type of uncanny encounter attenuated by the unfazed gaze of a four-year-old. And yet it also demonstrates that WT has experienced things that are too “mature” for his age. “They didn’t think so, neither” (bolded in the book) calls attention to the children the junkies have been, and to their deferred dreams. The look backward calls our attention to the future: what future will TJ inherit? Is he different from the others? Will he grow up to be a junkie? Will he get out of the neighborhood? If he does, will that be “good”? Addressing readers of diverse ages through TJ’s four-yearold perspective, the book affirms Black beauty as it teaches white supremacy’s ugly effects, functioning, according to Baldwin, as a “celebration of the self-esteem of black children” (quoted in Boggs 1999, 125). Little Man, Little Man celebrates the beauty and ugliness of TJ’s neighborhood, to paraphrase Hughes. Baldwin knows that its “mature themes” are already familiar to children like TJ, at whose expense other children are protected from such knowledge: so why segregate childhood from mature themes in the book? Like Hughes, he doesn’t segregate them, but he also adds adult Encounter, bring ing the child in to conversations about the child.
By the time Baldwin wrote Little Man, Little Man, the scene of Encounter was well established as a literary tool. The “mature” themes Boggs and Brody identify do not disqualify it as a children’s book. Indeed, calling Little Man, Little Man an “adults’ book in the subversive drag of children’s literature” (Boggs 1999, 125) ignores its primary focus and reflects a widespread bias that gauges literary importance by relevance to adults. 4 When the 1976 dust jacket calls
THE URGENCY OF ENCOUNTER Encounter both reflects and affects its real-life referents, and I end this essay by moving from literary representations to Baldwin’s 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers,” which remains painfully relevant today. Acutely aware of the symbolic power of childhood’s temporal elasticity to negotiate Encounter and imagine possible futures, Bald win’s speech reads like an applied version of Beauvais’s theory of the “mighty child.” Baldwin describes a series of potentially catalyzing events as he moves seamlessly from “the child” to “I” to “you,” and from the past to the present to the future. White supremacy brings the weight of history into the present, described by Baldwin as “a deliberate policy hammered into place in order to make money from black flesh. And now, in 1963, because we have never faced this fact, we are in intolerable trouble” (Baldwin 1998c, 682). Baldwin’s descrip tion of the Encounter stage—in which he describes a child who “can more or less accept [repeated indignities and denied opportunities] with an absolutely inarticulate and dangerous rage inside . . . all the more dangerous because it is never expressed” (681)—weaponizes the child as a future adult while making the child’s futurity (or “might,” in Beauvais’s terms) America’s only hope: the “child must help [America] to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy” (683). There is no reason to protect the child from white suprema cy’s effects because he already sees them, whether inoculated or not: “You know—you know instinctively—that none of this is for you. You know this before you are told ” (680; emphasis added). Innocence here adheres not to the child (who “know[s] instinctively”) but to those who “have never faced” the gothic history of slavery, the “mon strous” innocents Baldwin had already warned of ten years earlier in “Stranger in the Village.” In Baldwin’s urgent message to teachers,
the protagonists “black, poor, and less than four feet high” (Boggs and Brody 2018, xvi), it adds childhood itself to race and class as an important ingredient in the nexus of marginalization. Some readers may not be Black, or poor, but all are or have been children. Little Man, Little Man disrupts the aetonormative assumptions rampant in our culture, and it does so both inside and outside the text: child readers are as essential here to childhood’s performative aspects as are child characters.
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Maude Hines | Essays 443 as in the texts explored throughout this essay, the scene of Encoun ter produces nonlinear temporalities that elide differences between child and adult and challenge the teleological development narrative that situates adults as superior to children. These readings show us it is possible to occupy many chronological positions at once—recall ing childhood memories as adults, feeling their continued effects in the present, and addressing future adults through child readers whose futures we can neither predict nor control.
While fictional children confront the legacy of America’s past and carry hope into the future, a crossover readership engages the past and the future, together in the present. Responsibility lies with adults who, as with Miss Beanpole’s room, must see for themselves with open eyes. The stakes are high: as Baldwin put it in 1953, “the past is all that makes the present coherent, and . . . the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly” (1998a, 6). Today we are living in the future imagined for the children who populate the texts under consideration here. The tension between inoculation and innocence can be felt in “the Talk”—the conversa tion parents must have with our Black children about the dangers of police and other institutional violence. The “mature themes” of “poverty, police brutality, crime, . . . addiction, racism, and social marginality” persist in the real world as the bodies affected by them accumulate. We bear witness to this accumulation through our tel evision screens and other media, replicating Baldwin’s portrayal of TJ’s environment. If we can’t afford to protect some children from “mature” themes in literature because their lives are already haunted by them, then how can we afford to protect others? In a culture in which innocence is unequally distributed, even children’s innocence of racism is monstrous. The child’s view allows a fresh perspective on old and violent formations, underlining their atrocity and making them legible to adult readers. And it is up to adult readers to do some thing about it. Gordon uses the term “encounter” to describe trans formative personal involvement in forces greater than the individual and “barely visible”: “change cannot occur without the encounter, without the something you have to try for yourself. There are no guaran teed outcomes for an encounter. . . . But if you think you can fight and eliminate the systems’ complicated ‘nastiness’ without it, you will not get very far because it will return to haunt you” (2008, 202–3). Non-Black readers need to understand the “personal impact of [anti-Black] racism,” and here’s where the difference between liter ary Encounter and real-life identity development comes acutely into
1 Michelle H. Phillips’s reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls within the context of his writing for children is a notable exception. Phillips reads Black childhood as analogous to the twoness of double consciousness and the color line itself (2013, 591).
4 Little Man, Little Man was billed not only as a “child’s story for adults,” as Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody (2018) note in their introduc tion, but also as “an adult’s book for children,” as Boggs notes in an ear lier essay. Despite acknowledging the antimetabole in the billing, Boggs goes on to call Little Man, Little Man “Baldwin’s adults’ book, in the sub versive drag of children’s literature” (1999, 125).
WORKS CITED Baldwin, James. 1998a. “Autobiographical Notes.” In James Baldwin: Col lected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 5–10. New York: Library of America. First published 1953. . 1998b. “Stranger in the Village.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 117–36. New York: Library of America. First published 1953.
Thanks to David Wolf, Eddy Francisco Alvarez, Jr., McEvoy Campbell, Leslie Frost, the members of the Portland State Women, Gender, and Sexualities critique group, the draft readers, guest editors, and co-con tributors of this special issue, and to Cécile Accilien and the Colonialism Seminar at the University of Kansas.
3 Robin Bernstein (2011) notes a division between white and Black chil dren in the American imaginary, a division whose emblem is the distinc tion between Topsy and Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. White childhood innocence is protected and healing—the image of Little Eva’s white hand on Uncle Tom’s brown arm reflects her innocence of racist symptoms at an individual level. Bernstein (2017) traces the evolution of earlier con nections between whiteness and childhood innocence to current insis tence on seeing Black children as adults.
444 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 focus. We can’t defer responsibility to the future. The future is now. And for all of our children, so is the past. NOTES
2 I use the term “uncanny” here in the Freudian sense of being at once familiar and unfamiliar (e.g., a child who is at once childlike and adult like). There are many examples of the trope of the uncanny child, among them Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw and films like Village of the Damned, The Omen, and The Others. In this last example, a scene show ing a young girl apparently possessed by a very old woman is especially uncanny. See Karen J. Renner (2013) for more on this phenomenon.
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. 1998c. “A Talk to Teachers.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays, edited by Toni Morrison, 678–86. New York: Library of America. First published 1963. . 2018. Little Man, Little Man. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. First published 1976. Beauvais, Clémentine. 2015. The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press. . 2017. “Opinion | Let Black Kids Just Be Kids.” The New York Times, July 26, 2017. Boggs,-discrimination.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/black-kidsNicholas.1999.“OfMimicryand(LittleManLittle)Man.”In James Baldwin Now, edited by Dwight McBride, 122–60. New York: NYU Press. Boggs, Nicholas, and Jennifer DeVere Brody. 2018. “Introduction.” In Little Man, Little Man, edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody, xv–xxii. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Breslow, Jacob. 2019. “Adolescent Citizenship, or Temporality and the Negation of Black Childhood in Two Eras.” American Quarterly 71 (2): Capshaw473–94.(Smith), Katharine. 2006. Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renais sance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cooke, Michael G. 1984. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crawford, Margo Natalie. 2019. “Mood Books: The Textual Production of Black Feeling.” The Langston Hughes Review 25 (2): 162–78. https://doiCross,org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.2.0162.WilliamE.1991.
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Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Iden tity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Cullen, Countee. 2001. “Incident.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman, 384–85. New York: Signet Classics. First published 1925. Culler, Jonathan. 2015. Theory of the Lyric. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1990. The Souls of Black Folk. Library of America. New York: Vintage Books. First published 1903. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 2001. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillota, David. 2013. Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Giovanni, Nikki. 2003. “Nikki-Rosa.” In The Collected Poetry of Nikki Gio vanni: 1968–1998, 53. New York: William Morrow. First published 1968. Goddu, Teresa A. 1997. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gordon, Avery F. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagi nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heller, Suzanne H. 1964. Misery. New York: Paul S. Eriksson. Horne, Frank. 2001. “Nigger: A Chant for Children.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman, 402–3. New York: Signet Classics. First published 1927. Hughes, Langston. 1996. Black Misery. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published 1969. Hughes, Diane, James Rodriguez, Emilie P. Smith, Deborah J. Johnson, Howard C. Stevenson, and Paul Spicer. 2006. “Parents’ Ethnic–Racial Socialization Practices: A Review of Research and Directions for Future Study.” Developmental Psychology 42 (5): 747–70. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1978. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Urbana: Univer sity of Illinois Press. First published 1937. . 1979. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 152–55. New York: Feminist Press. First published 1928 Johnson, James Weldon. 1990. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. New York: Penguin. First published 1912. Johnson-Feelings, Dianne. 1990. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth. New York: Greenwood Press. Phillips, Michelle H. 2013. “The Children of Double Consciousness: From ‘The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies’ Book.’” PMLA 128 (3): 590–607. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23489295.
. 2016. Representations of Childhood in American Modernism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Renner, Karen J. 2013. The “Evil Child” in Literature, Film, and Popular Cul ture. New York: Routledge. Tatum, Beverly Daniel. 2003. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race. New York: Basic Wald,Books.Priscilla. 1990. “Becoming Colored: The Self-Authorized Language of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston.” American Literary History 2 (1): Walker,79–100.Margaret.
2001. “For My People.” In Black Voices, edited by Abra ham Chapman, 459–60. New York: Signet Classics. First published Wester,1942. Maisha. 2016. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wright, Richard. 1945. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Brothers.
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MAUDE HINES is Professor of English and Chair of Black Studies at Portland State University, where she sits on the Women, Gen der, & Sexuality Studies Governing Board, and Vice President / President-Elect of the Children’s Literature Association. “Mature Themes” grows out of her current book project, Slavery’s Ghosts, which explores scenes of childhood Encounter across a variety of periods and genres.
Maude
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 IN SEARCH OF FAITH RINGGOLD’S PICTURE BOOKS EWA KLE˛CZAJ-SIARA
Resistance is the secret of joy. —Alice Walker
More than fifty years after completing “Die,” a large canvas paint ing depicting a race riot, #20 in her American People Series (1967), Faith Ringgold is experiencing a resurgence of sorts. In “Inspired Anew, She’s Still Fighting Back,” New York Times writer Bob Mor ris attributes this new interest in the eighty-nine-year-old artist to the Tate Museum of London’s 2017 exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Placing Ringgold in a narrative of art history that includes both Picasso and Romare Bearden, Morris heralds Ringgold as a precursor not only to young Black female painters but also to artists such as Beyoncé, noting that twenty years before the Grammy Award-winner filmed a video inside the Louvre (2018), Ringgold had produced a quilt titled “Dancing at the Louvre,” #1 of The French Collection Part I. A trailblazer with an impressive body of work in different mediums—canvas, murals, silkscreen, and nar rative or story quilts—Ringgold also wrote and illustrated more
Black joy manifests in Ringgold’s picture books as a celebration of Black history and the potential of Black children, particularly girls, to become active participants, as Ringgold herself continues to be, in the march toward freedom and equality.
The search for Ringgold’s picture books begins with the art of quilt ing and the idea that quilters have always had the power to not only make political statements but also solicit political action. As public art, politically inspired quilts commemorate the victims of dramatic events and inspire viewers to resist current and persistent threats.
Recognizing Ringgold as an exemplar of a Black female creative tradition that encompasses multiple modes of expression brings overdue critical attention to her literary accomplishments. While in some ways a precursor, Ringgold is also a participant in the US children’s literary tradition. Her contributions, like those of other Black women writers, reflect her experiences with sexism and rac ism. She creates fictional characters (such as Cassie, who was born in Harlem in 1931, just like Ringgold) and honors historical figures (such as Rosa Parks in If A Bus Could Talk) who resist limitations on what they can do and be. To search for Ringgold’s picture books is to find what Alice Walker found in her mothers’ gardens and what Kleaver Cruz (2017) describes as Black joy: “healing, resistance, and regeneration.”
RINGGOLD AS “QUILT-ARTIST”
than a dozen picture books marketed to children. But only the most careful reader of the Times profile would pick up on that fact. In the photo above Morris’s title, Ringgold appears in her New Jersey home, seated next to a life-sized doll. The caption identifies the girldoll as Cassie, the main character in Tar Beach (1991), the book that garnered Ringgold both a Caldecott honor citation and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award.
The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt of 1987, composed of forty-two thousand images made by a diverse group of artists as well as ordinary people, is a seminal work in contemporary quilting. Orig inally exhibited on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., during the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the selected panels could be seen online as well as in many local museums across the country. Known as “the Moby-Dick of quilts” (Howe 1997, 109), it raised awareness about the AIDS epidemic and served as a sort of mentor text for other artists and activists. Created in a similar mode, the World Trade Center Memorial Quilt (2015) honored the victims
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of 9/11. The Covid Memorial Quilt, started as a school project in California in 2020 to recognize those who did not survive the pan demic, is still in progress. It has become a global initiative, with people from all over the world enlarging the quilt with their own squares. Currently on exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Minneapolis, We Are the Story: A Visual Response to Racism (2021) consists of eighty-nine patchwork quilts made by art ists of different nationalities, races, and genders as a response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The quilts in We Are the Story highlight the history of civil rights, police brutality, and racism in America, expressing the quilters’ individual experiences as well as collective Black resilience in the face of racial injustice and terror. Projects of healing and regeneration, quilts promote a sense of com munity, a collage of heterogeneous images merging individual stories into one narrative, a collective “we.” Many of these quilt projects emerged after marches held in major American cities, demonstrating the strong link between activism and art. In his article on the AIDS Quilt, Lawrence Howe argues that the patchwork projects reflect “the democratic and novelistic principles of American cultural iden tity by fusing the private and the public, the personal and the polit ical, individualism with community” (1997, 114). The recent protests against police brutality in Minneapolis, as well as in many cities all across the US and abroad, inspired artists to participate in political protest via quilting, just as Ringgold has done since the 1960s. Scholars consider quilting to be a metaphor of African Ameri can experience (Hedges 1977; Davis 1998; Mazloomi 1998; Wahlman 2001). In “Narrative Quilts and Quilted Narratives,” Margaret M. Dunn and Ann R. Morris use the term “quilt-artist” to refer not only to quilters but also to any African American woman whose work illustrates the diversity of Black experience. They call Faith Ring gold and Alice Walker “quilt-artists” who function as “the carrier[s] of tradition, embracing the past and creating continuity.” While Ringgold creates painted story quilts, including longer narratives around the frames of her paintings, Walker produces “quilted nar ratives,” or “verbal quilts” (Dunn and Morris 1992, 27, 29). Although each of Walker’s stories creates a different fictional world, like the squares that make up a quilt, these worlds form a harmonious art work or, to use Dunn and Morris’s words, a “whole cloth” (30). Put ting Ringgold in conversation with Walker provides a wider, richer context for both artists while underscoring what Black children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop calls Ringgold’s “hybrid”
Patchworks correspond to the original rhetoric of quilts, which Olga I. Davis defines as “making a space for oppressed voices to name their experience, reclaim their history, and transform the future” (1998, 67), and Ringgold also experiments with the form. In a way that draws on the slave tradition of quilting, Ringgold applies new techniques and adds new elements, Maude S. Wahlman arguing that Ringgold “takes a basic pattern idea and then does variations on it just as musicians will do with a jazz piece” (2001, 10). She revises standard representations of Blackness by means of her stylistic choices. Ringgold’s improvisational method combines the tradition of the needle with the power of words, her quilts both visual and verbal narratives. Along with symbolic images and patterns typical of African quilts, words have always been important elements of her artistic creations. In the course of her career, she began by placing single words on the canvas, then short sentences, and finally longer narratives around the frames of the paintings, which she refers to as storyWhilequilts.at this point Ringgold’s place in modern art history seems secure, she remains on the periphery in the literary realm. An artist whose picture books invite interdisciplinary perspectives, she has yet to receive the literary critical attention she deserves. Ringgold
Ewa Klęczaj-Siara | Essays 451 literary texts (2007, 144). Such hybridity requires reading Ringgold’s picture books within the context of her artwork, seeing both forms of artistic expression in harmony, and forming a “whole cloth” or extended visual narrative.
The politicized content of Ringgold’s textile works has contrib uted to a resurgence of her popularity within the last few years, her depictions of Black people’s power and resilience captivating viewers in American and European museums, including London’s Serpen tine Galleries, Sweden’s Bildmuseet, and the United States’s Glen stone museum in Maryland, each of which has hosted Ringgold’s travelling show of more than seventy works. Ringgold’s Street Story Quilt (1985) was selected for the 150th anniversary display of the Met ropolitan Museum of Art. Comprised of three pieces of fabric rep resenting the same Harlem façade at different moments, Street tells the story of a Black boy orphaned after his family dies in a fire. Hav ing experienced poverty and racism, he returns home as a successful writer and actor. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s chairwoman of modern and contemporary art, Sheena Wagstaff, perceives Street as “a story of survival and redemption . . . [that] speaks to powerful social and historical inequalities” (Morris 2020).
452 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 continues as well as extends the African American quilting tradi tion into the literary world. Art historians typically cite two of her picture books as extended forms of her painted story quilts: Tar Beach (1991) and Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House (1993). In these two books, Ringgold presents as many as thirty of her single paintings as vibrant full-page illustrations. The former is an extended ver sion of Ringgold’s painted story quilt of the same title, Tar Beach (1988), #1 in the Women on a Bridge series (Figure 1). First displayed at the Guggenheim Museum, Tar Beach became one of the most requested objects for loan to other institutions (Ringgold 1995b, 269). The family gathering at Aunt Connie’s is based on The Dinner Quilt (1986), now included in a private collection. Most of the illus trations in Ringgold’s picture books feature parts of her paintings in close-up. For example, in Tar Beach, several pictures show Cassie flying in the sky, and instead of one panorama of the city, individual illustrations highlight such details as the food on the table, the chil dren lying on the mattress and gazing up at the sky, the bridge, and the urban landscape. The picture books also digress from the origi nal paintings, bringing us closer to the places at a distance from the children’s apartment. We can see the Union Building with Cassie’s father working on its roof, the structure of the George Washington Bridge, and the Ice Cream Factory. Several illustrations depict what Cassie sees in her dreams: the richly decorated imaginary home of her family; her father dressed in smart clothes, returning home car rying a briefcase; and her mother sleeping in a beautiful, brightly colored bedroom.
The illustrations in Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House demonstrate similar adaptation strategies with Ringgold extending her original artwork by providing more information and foregrounding the role of the children. While The Dinner Quilt (1986) shows family mem bers sitting at the table and, as we learn from the accompanying narrative, talking about the achievements of Black women, the pic ture book’s illustrations go well beyond this motif, focusing on the children’s adventure of talking to the women in the portraits as well as their subsequent interactions with family members. The first two illustrations in Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House depict the main char acters of the story, Aunt Connie and Uncle Bates, in front of their house, as well as Lonnie, their adopted son, playing on the beach with his cousin Melody. Then we see the children inside the house playing hide-and-seek. As they go up the stairs to the attic, they hear the voices of the Black women from Aunt Connie’s paintings.
Twelve illustrations feature the portraits of these historical figures with concise narrative containing biographical information. After hearing their (hi)stories, the children carry the paintings to the din ing room. The illustration of the children rejoining the family dinner and listening to Aunt Connie’s stories is an adaptation of Ringgold’s painted quilt: twelve people sit at the dining table wearing the same clothes as in the painting. At both sides of the table, just next to Aunt Connie, sit Lonnie and Melody. The following two illustra tions go beyond the motif of the original painting, foregrounding the children’s imaginary vision of dining with their ancestors. The Figure 1. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.
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In an essay for Children’s Literature in Education, Joyce Mill man argues, “If [Ringgold’s] quilts have been accepted as a fine art form that integrates written text and images and invite the viewer to create meaning from that union, then Ringgold’s picture books, and those of other author-illustrators, should be seriously considered as a fine art form” (2005, 391). Searching for Ringgold’s picture books and finding “fine art,” however, does not require us to discount what Walker would call their “everyday use.” In Walker’s widely antholo gized short story “Everyday Use” (1973), the central conflict revolves around the purpose and value of a quilt. Mama and one of her daugh ters, Maggie, who never leaves home, believe the quilt is for practical use only. The other daughter, Dee, after spending a long time away from the community, appreciates the quilt as an aesthetic artifact. Dee wants to put it on the wall or send it to a museum. Believing that quilts serve their function properly only if they are kept home and passed down from generation to generation, Mama decides to give the quilt to Maggie, declaring: “I reckon she would [use them]. . . .
The artistic quality of Ringgold’s picture books—strong colors, repetitive background patterns, schematic figures of the main char acters, and page borders with a variety of flowery patterns—incor porates many elements from her paintings, suggesting that Ringgold wants her texts for children to be read and understood in the same way as her artworks—as expressions of Black joy and reminders that the work toward perfecting our union and achieving democracy con tinues.
“And I never thought I would marry an African American opera singer with red hair and green eyes,” I whispered back. (Ringgold 1993)
God knows I been saving ’em for long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” (Walker 1995, 2381). For Walker, quilting—as well as traditionally female activities such as gardening, cooking, and sto rytelling—create and transmit Black culture and values, providing knowledge and a sense of connection, belonging, and joy. Similarly,
final illustration shows the characters in front of the image of the Seal of the President of the United States, whispering to each other about their imagined futures:
In Ringgold’s literary adaptation of her quilt, her child characters, inspired by their ancestors, imagine traveling much farther down the road to freedom land.
“I never thought my wife and the mother of our children would be the president of the United States,” Lonnie whispered in my ear.
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while Ringgold’s quilt-inspired picture books should be considered both “fine art” and artifact, they most definitely have an “everyday use.” Children’s books frequently involve parent-child interaction within the home, which enables young readers to relate the content of the picture books to the material conditions of their everyday lives. Ringgold’s books immerse young Black readers in their cul ture, helping them to appreciate the efforts of their ancestors and to recognize the effects of that ancestral struggle in the present world.
Ringgold’s picture book Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) makes clear the historic “everyday use” of quilts in the struggle for Black liberation. In the story of Cassie and her brother Be Be, two contemporary child characters who discover a train driv ing enslaved Black people to freedom, quilts appear twice. In the first instance, a quilt appears on the roof of a little house in the woods. Symbolizing safety and protection, the quilt guides Cassie as she travels on foot along the Underground Railroad. Aunt Harriet instructs her: “Go on to a weather-beaten house with a star quilt flung on the roof. If you don’t see the quilt, hide in the woods until Figure 2. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.
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To search for Ringgold’s picture books means recognizing her unique contributions to a literary practice Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Amy Stornaiuolo refer to as “restorying” and a pedagogical (literacy) practice Roberta Price Gardner refers to as “counter-visuality.” In “Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice,” Thomas and Stornaiuolo define “restorying” as “a process by which people reshape narratives to represent a diversity of perspectives and experiences that are often missing or silenced in mainstream texts, media, and popular discourse” (2016, 313). While the “people” Thomas and Stornaiuolo name are youth engaging with various forms of media, “reshaping” narratives that exclude them, Ringgold herself “reshapes” conven tional narratives of Black history from a Black child’s perspective and thus should be seen as a counter-storyteller. She also revises standard representations of Blackness by means of her stylistic choices, “the purposeful contortion of subjects and objects . . . to convey certain sentiments, intrinsic characteristics, conditions, or ideologies,” a strat egy Gardner refers to as “counter-visuality” (2017, 126). Ringgold’s art has always been contrary. Her early paintings range from images of racial inequalities (The American People Series; The Black Light Series) to idealized pictures of Black life (The French Collection). She added pic ture books to her artistic repertoire in 1991 with Tar Beach and in the next three decades produced a virtual bookshelf of picture and board books on topics central to Black history and American identity: slav ery (The Invisible Princess [1998]; Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in
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it appears. Then it is safe to go in” (Ringgold 1992). The motif of the quilt appears again at the end of the story, as commemorative public art celebrating a successful crossing at the Canadian border (Fig ure 2). After reaching Niagara Falls, the siblings come back to their home in Harlem. It is the year 1949 and the one hundredth anni versary of the Underground Railroad, marked with the illustration of a memorial quilt and the figure of Harriet Tubman hugging the children who accompanied her on the journey. The literal connec tion made (the embrace), in addition to the familial address (Aunt Harriet), makes Black history personal for Cassie and Be Be at the same time that the commemorative quilt presents that history as a political statement about the sustained, ongoing struggle for Black freedom. As quilt-artist, Ringgold’s visual and verbal narratives for children invite them to claim, celebrate, and continue this struggle.
RINGGOLD AS COUNTER-STORYTELLER AND (RE)VISIONARY
If A Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks takes the readers on an intimate and interactive journey of the Civil Rights Movement by blending fantasy and nonfiction. The main character, Marcie, boards the historical Montgomery bus and hears the story of Rosa
Placing child characters at the center of the stories, Ringgold allows them not only to bear witness to but also to experience, interrogate, and shape history. In Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, Cassie’s ability to “fly” to freedom, to imagine herself as capable and brave, is the central theme. Similarly, Tar Beach highlights Cassie’s potential to reimagine the social order of the segregation era. In both picture books, the characters see themselves in a story of their own making—stories counter to the dominant stories of US history and Black possibility. Lisa Farrington notes that “seldom has [Ringgold] divorced the politics of art from its often-unacknowledged cultural base, reasoning that an activist approach in art matters is indeed an important course of action” (2004, v). Ringgold’s “activist approach” manifests in her picture books as child agency: as Bishop notes, the Black child characters experience pivotal moments of African Amer ican history not as observers but as active participants (2007, 185).
As quilt-artist and counter-storyteller, Ringgold weaves together the past, present, and future, blends genres of fantasy and nonfiction and presents readers with stunning visuals that counter negative images of Blackness that permeate popular culture. In Aunt Harri et’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, Cassie joins Harriet Tubman on a secret journey and brings enslaved Black people to freedom. She goes back in time to understand what it was like to be a slave and to appreciate the value of freedom, which includes the right to learn to read and write. With a fake pass (sewed into her undershirt “by a little girl my age”) and limited opportunities for shelter and rest (she hides in a graveyard), Cassie successfully covers the distance that separates her from her brother. Eight illustrations depict their route to the North and the various obstacles emerging on the way. The pictures create an atmosphere of terror as Cassie runs through the woods, swamps, or graveyards. She can hear strange voices and see White faces watching her, images suggesting an ever-present threat. But the negative imagery of danger is countered with the children’s colorful clothes and especially the circle of Black figures surround ing the child characters at the end of their journey, a powerful image suggesting Black people’s solidarity and strength.
Ewa Klęczaj-Siara | Essays 457 the Sky [1992]), civil rights ( My Dream of Martin Luther King [1995]; If A Bus Could Talk [1999]), and immigration (We Came to America [2016]).
Parks delivered by the talking bus. Marcie learns that Parks attended a segregated school and faced the attacks of the Ku Klux Klan in her childhood, and as an adult had problems finding a job. Although Marcie is not participating in the boycott, the story indicates her solidarity with Rosa and her willingness to learn how to resist lim its on what she can do and be. Marcie interrupts the biographical narrative by asking questions and making comments about Rosa’s courage and determination. In addition, the choral voices of the pas sengers saying “Amen! Amen! We know, we were there” (Ringgold 1992) in response to the story suggest that the protest, though set in motion by Parks’s act of defiance and subsequent arrest, was a com munal event. In this way, Ringgold counters the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement as a top-down, patriarchal story of solitary heroes (and a few heroines). In My Dream of Martin Luther King, another (unnamed) girl character follows the life of the Black leader in her dreams, which makes her believe that “we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” The book’s illustrations depict differ ent forms of racial discrimination, telling a richer, more complete story of this era. Significantly, the picture book depicts King as a child, thus suggesting that children can (and do) participate in the freedom struggle. We see young King being prevented from enter ing the local school or getting on the bus, juxtaposed with several illustrations of peaceful protest. While the police attack protestors with water hoses, dogs, and weapons, the demonstrators hold signs calling for freedom and justice, and they sing freedom songs. The powerful words of King’s grandmother, Mother Dear, included in several parts of the story, predict positive outcomes of the protests. She visits young King in jail, telling him: “Although you are only six years old, you can’t accept the way things are. You want to find a way to change things, and you will” (Ringgold 1995a). By “countering” standard Black history with a child’s perspective, the stories become less about historical icons and more about the “everyday” children who inherit a rich legacy and are expected to actively work toward a more liberatory future.
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Ringgold’s Black child characters learn about past racial injustices and methods of resistance, lessons in Black history typically ignored or distorted in standard textbooks. In Tar Beach, the father, an iron worker, is denied membership in the union because “he’s colored and a half-breed Indian.” Ironically, he is not allowed to even enter the new union building, which would not exist without his labor. How ever, within this context of racial inequalities, Ringgold presents
Cassie and her world as bursting with joy and possibilities. Ringgold based Tar Beach on her own experiences of growing up in Harlem, dedicating the book to her mother, “who took me to Tar Beach,” and to her three grandchildren: “They are all strong readers and can fly.” While spending a summer night on the tarred rooftop of her apartment building in Harlem, Cassie leaves behind her demarcated childhood experience and imagines a different existence for her family. While flying over the buildings and the George Washington Bridge, she casts herself in a fairy tale where her father will be rich and “Mommy won’t cry all winter when he goes to look for work and doesn’t come home” (Ringgold 1991). The visual narrative includes details of the girl’s dream: her father walking home from work in a fancy suit and tie, her mother sleeping under a wine-colored bed spread, her entire family seated in a gorgeous dining room eating ice cream. As Farrington observes, Cassie is “crossing over into a life of freedom and privilege” (2004, 78). The young girl’s dreams become an aspirational vision not just for the Black community but for a country striving to achieve a “more perfect” union.
While Ringgold seems to wholly embrace W. E. B. Du Bois’s doctrine of racial uplift via the “Talented Tenth” (2007, 33) in Tar Beach, the quilt-artist’s focus on the power and agency of girls sug gests a critique of any doctrine that marginalizes, subordinates, or underestimates the achievements of Black women. In Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House, she celebrates twelve African American female artists and activists who, with their creativity and courage, exceeded soci etal limitations based on their gender and race. Role models for the child characters (who listen to the women talking to them from their portraits), each of the storytellers brings history alive. The figure in the first picture, Rosa Parks, addresses the children in a way that underscores the autobiographical nature of Ringgold’s story: “Your aunt Connie created us to tell you the history of our struggle.” The other figures tell the children how their dreams made their success possible. Dorothy Dandridge introduces herself as “the first African American actress to become a Hollywood star,” Maria W. Stewart as “the first African American to lecture in defense of women’s rights,” and Madame C. J. Walker as “the first self-made millionaire” (Ring gold 1993). Pioneers of Black progress, these historical figures, like Cassie’s fictional ironworker father whom she imagines becoming a business executive, exemplify Du Bois’s prescription for racial uplift and equality. The most important African American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, Du Bois advocated for a
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460 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 model of education that focused on the arts, literature, and philos ophy. While Booker T. Washington promoted industrial training and “casting down your bucket,” Du Bois argued that the leaders of the race should be the guardians of Black culture and intellec tual development. Frequently criticized for patriarchal thinking, Du Bois repeatedly emphasized the importance of Black women in his vision for racial advancement. He believed educated Black women should serve as “other mothers,” passing essential cultural values on to younger generations and thereby empowering their communities.
The Black women in Aunt Connie’s paintings satisfy this expecta tion while achieving a type of success and notoriety that challenges and expands Du Bois’s vision.
Writing from the perspective of a Black woman who experienced race and gender discrimination in her own life, Ringgold creates a form of gender counter-storying, a term used by Jonda C. McNair to refer to narratives that present realities embedded with racism and serve as the basic tools to challenge the status quo of the social order (2008, 7). In Ringgold’s counter-stories, girls assert authority as lead ers and dreamers. Her female characters and their successes out number those of Black men and boys, and in this way, she counters a dominant narrative that discounts the capacities of Black women. If characters appear in pairs, the girl always leads the boy, which is most visible in the illustrations. In the first illustration that propels the plot forward in Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House, Ringgold presents the main characters running upstairs to the attic with the boy fol lowing the girl, who, except for the famous Black women, appears as the central figure in the story (Figure 3). The women in the por traits, while encouraging the children to enter the attic, address the girl rather than the boy: “Come in, Melody. We would like to talk to you” (Ringgold 1993). Aunt Connie, the artist who painted the portraits, hosts the family gathering, not her husband. Although his torically Black women have assumed leadership positions in their families and communities, Ringgold presents male characters— child and adult—accepting and appreciating women’s leadership. Be Be, a young boy accompanying Cassie in Tar Beach and Aunt Har riet’s Underground Railroad, adores his sister and eagerly follows her lead. Notably, Ringgold gives Be Be, not Cassie, the responsibility for the survival and safety of a child even younger than him. As Be Be flies through the sky with Aunt Harriet, “Baby Freedom,” pic tured as a Black infant, is tied to his back, an example which illus trates an inversion of gender roles—Be Be as caregiver rather than
follower. Similarly, in Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House, Ringgold seems to be inverting conventional gender roles: Lonnie is looking to opera singer Marian Anderson, and Melody to the president, a typically male figure. At the end of the story, after talking to twelve African American women, Lonnie remarks, “When I grow up, I want to sing in opera houses all over the world. I know it will be hard, but not as hard for me as it was for Marian Anderson,” and Melody responds, “I want to be president of the United States when I grow up so I can change some of the things that make people’s lives so sad. I know I can do it because of these women” (Ringgold 1993).
By celebrating the attainments of Black women, Ringgold passes on to her readers a sense of Black pride and joy. Throughout her artis tic career, which began in the 1960s, Ringgold faced numerous obsta cles as a Black female artist. In her autobiography, We Flew Over the Bridge, she writes about discrimination she experienced from New York’s museum authorities, for whom she was “too dark, too old, too ambitious, too political, or too well educated” (Ringgold 1995b, 57).
These negative memories are counterbalanced with the stories of Figure 3. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.
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I don’t want the story of my life to be about racism, though it has played a major role. I want my story to be about attainment, love of family, art, helping others, courage, values, dreams coming true.
Although my struggle to overcome may seem like a hard life, it is not as hard as it seems—in fact, struggle is as natural to me as walking.” (Ringgold 1995b, 270)
successful female characters included in her quilts and picture books, which should be read as provocative responses to larger social and political issues concerning Black female invisibility. Ringgold ends her autobiography with a perception that explains what seems to be the unqualified utopian “can-do” attitude of her picture books:
In the publication accompanying Ringgold’s retrospective exhibi tion of 2009, Tanya Sheehan uses the metaphor of a declaration of independence to describe Ringgold’s paintings. Sheehan believes her diverse artwork is “an expression of Ringgold’s own hard-won liberties as a Harlem-born female artist and an acknowledgment of the hopes and struggles for freedom and equality” (2009, 3). The same can be said about her picture books, except that she declares independence for Black children, insisting they have important roles to play as agents of change. Ringgold’s primary aim of writing her children’s books is to debunk stereotypes typically applied to Black girls and women.
An important aspect of Ringgold’s aesthetics, the motif of flying presents readers with positive, liberating, and joyous images of Black ness and Black possibility. She used the image for the first time in her series of quilts The Women on a Bridge (1988), including Tar Beach, which shows female figures flying over the bridges in New York and San Francisco—from sea to shining sea. In We Flew Over the Bridge (1995b), Ringgold writes about her involvement in the fight for equal rights for Black female artists in the 1960s, which she called “art pol itics.” She organized protests at the Whitney Museum, giving many Black women like herself the opportunity to show their works to the public. Despite the extensive descriptions of her troubled life as an artist, Ringgold’s autobiography is marked with optimism, hence her title. The flying motif reappears in Ringgold’s picture book, Tar Beach, which ends with her belief that “anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars” (Ringgold 1991). These words comprise Ringgold’s artistic motto: the picture of the flying girl, her logo. Children running along with their arms
Ringgold’s slogan “Anyone can fly,” just like contemporary hash tags in Black popular culture, implies resistance as well as healing.
Lu and Steele believe this strategy invokes the “historic legacy of storytelling as a resistance strategy” (2019, 831), in which the narra tives of Black people’s lives celebrate their cultural values and shared humanity. To describe the flying figures in her paintings, Ringgold uses the term “hover-flying,” which does not imply running away from the place but staying within its bounds. Melissa Jenkins writes that “hovering suggests attention and watchfulness on the part of those flying and a brand of Foucauldian surveillance practiced by those who remain on the ground” (2016, 344). The freedom to “fly” is thus tempered by an ever-watchful White majority. In Ringgold’s picture books, the children are the only people who can fly in their communities, but they do not abandon their families. By means of
spread out or drifting in the air are the most recognizable images of Ringgold’s art, featured prominently in both her museum pieces and her children’s picture books. Ringgold’s visuality is marked with the rhetoric of resistance. To use Gardner’s words, it is “freighted with numerous identity contexts including classed, racialized, and gen dered registers of affect,” which raise readers’ awareness of the issues and inspire attitudinal changes (2017, 129).
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In their study of online Black rhetorical strategies, Jessica H. Lu and Catherine Knight Steele discuss the use of hashtags as resistance. They point out that “Black communities often craft hashtags that require pre-existing knowledge of African American history and culture for full participation” (Lu and Steele 2019, 827). “Anyone can fly,” though created well before the prevalence of communication via social media, can be interpreted in a similar mode. Like #care freeblackkids or #freeblackchild, which are accompanied with vid eos and images of happy Black children, the statement “Anyone can fly” in Ringgold’s stories is accompanied by illustrations depicting Black life in a positive way. Cassie flies in the urban sky over the buildings of her Black community, which form a beautiful skyline. The pictures challenge dominant narratives of Black crime, poverty, and death, overwhelmingly visible in contemporary media. As Gard ner has argued, with a large number of African American children’s books focusing on historical narratives of Black suffering, there is a need to produce and analyze more picture books “portraying black imagination and futurity” (2017, 130). Interpreting Ringgold’s illus trations can have a significant affective impact on young readers who, inspired by the stories, can identify Black joy in their own lives.
“Our children will love the secret. We will have delicious family dinners, and they will be magical just like Aunt Connie’s, and our children, Lonnie, will be just like us.” (Ringgold 1993)
The literary critic who goes in search of Ringgold’s picture books will be richly rewarded and, also, challenged. As a visual artist
Informed by the past, the future the children will “fly to” requires literally going up—to an attic, where the young characters get educated about the “adult issues” hidden in the portraits. In fact, they must go back to go forward. Growing into adulthood and citizenship means knowing, understanding, and stepping into his tory that is both their inheritance and their inspiration. The uplift ing motif of the story empowers Black children, equipping them with the belief that they can achieve much in their lives. Inspired by the success stories of their ancestors, the children begin to talk about their future: “But what will our children think of Aunt Connie’s secret, Melody?”
KEEPING THE FAITH
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flying in secrecy, they hope to uplift their community, the act of flying serving both a personal and political function. In addition, Ringgold’s stories point to the difference between “flying from” and “flying to.” By entering an unknown reality, Cassie and Be Be get an important historical lesson about slavery that enriches their lives, giving them a sense of pride and resilience, which they will need as they navigate their way in a nation yet to practice what its founding documents preach about equality and freedom for all.
The children imagine a future where they will pass on their ances tors’ stories to their own children, and their children will in turn pass them on to their children. In Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky, the children go back in time, leaving their home in secret, without their parents’ permission. Cassie knows her parents will be angry with her for letting her brother tag along, and she is terrified when Be Be gets on the train without her. After she reunites with her brother, she chastises him. Be Be responds: “Freedom is more important than just staying together” (Ringgold 1992), which sug gests that, even at his very young age, the Black boy understands the cost of freedom and the nature of sacrifice in a country that denies freedom to Black Americans.
Ewa Klęczaj-Siara | Essays 465 whose work hangs in museums, Ringgold challenges ideas about who counts as a children’s writer as well as what kinds of cultural work picture books do—and for whom. Gardner argues that Afri can American children’s picture books should be recognized as “a significant form of visual culture that shapes the racial subjectivities of all children” (2017, 129). Published at the end of the twentieth cen tury, Ringgold’s picture books participate in a much longer tradition that affirms Blackness and resists racism. In “Uncertain Directions in Black Children’s Literature,” her 2019 article for The Lion and the Unicorn, Karen Chandler worries that this cultural history is in dan ger of being lost. Finding Ringgold’s picture books should prompt the literary critic not only to go in search of other visual artists and illustrators that warrant further study but also to imagine, in the era of Black Lives Matter and Black Girl Magic, a more broadly con ceived US children’s literary tradition.
WORKS CITED Bishop, Rudine Sims. 2007. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of Afri can American Children’s Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chandler, Karen. 2019. “Uncertain Directions in Black Children’s Litera ture.” The Lion and the Unicorn 43 (2): 172–81. Cruz, Kleaver. 2017. “Black Joy is Resistance: Why We Need a Movement to Balance Black Triumph with Trials.” Black Youth Project. Davis,-Black-triumph-trials/.Blackyouthproject.com/Black-joy-resistance-need-movement-balancehttp://OlgaI.1998.“TheRhetoricofQuilts:CreatingIdentityinAfrican-AmericanChildren’sLiterature.” African American Review 32 (1): 67–76. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2007. “The Talented Tenth.” In The Negro Problem, Booker T. Washington et al. New York: Kessinger Publishing. First published 1903. Dunn, Margaret M., and Ann R. Morris. 1992. “Narrative Quilts and Quilted Narratives: The Art of Faith Ringgold and Alice Walker.” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 15 (1): 27–32. Farrington, Lisa. 2004. Faith Ringgold. The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, vol. 3. San Francisco: Pomegranate. Gardner, Roberta Price. 2017. “Unforgivable Blackness: Visual Rhetoric, Reader Response, and Critical Racial Literacy.” Children’s Literature in Education, no. 48, 119–33. Hedges, Elaine. 1977. “Quilts and Women’s Culture.” The Radical Teacher, no 4, 7–10.
466 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Howe, Lawrence. 1997. “The AIDS Quilt and Its Traditions.” College Liter ature 24 (2): 109–24. Jenkins, Melissa. 2016. “‘The Next Thing You Know You’re Flying among the Stars’: Nostalgia, Heterotopia, and Mapping the City in African American Picture Books.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41 (4): 343–64. Lu, Jessica H., and Catherine Knight Steele. 2019. “‘Joy is Resistance’: Cross-Platform Resilience and (Re)Invention of Black Oral Culture Online.” Information, Communication & Society 22 (6): 823–37. Mazloomi, Carolyn. 1998. Spirits of the Cloth: Contemporary African American Quilts. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers. McNair, Jonda C. 2008. “A Comparative Analysis of The Brownies’ Book and Contemporary African American Children’s Literature Written by Patricia C. McKissack.” In Embracing, Evaluating, and Examining Afri can American Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair, 3–29. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Millman, Joyce. 2005. “Faith Ringgold’s Quilts and Picturebooks: Com parisons and Contributions.” Children’s Literature in Education 36 (4): Morris,381–94.Bob. 2020. “Faithy Ringgold Will Keep Fighting Back.” New York Times, June 11, 2020. Ringgold, Faith. 1991. Tar Beach. New York: Crown Publishers. . 1992. Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky. New York: Crown Publishers. . 1993. Dinner at Aunt Connie’s House. New York: Hyperion. . 1995a. My Dream of Martin Luther King. New York: Crown Publishers..1995b. We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold. New York: Little, Brown. . 1999. If A Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks. New York: Simon & Sheehan,Schuster.Tanya. 2009. “Faith Ringgold: Forging Freedom and Declaring Independence.” In A Declaration of Independence: Fifty Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, edited by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, 3–12. New Brunswick: Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers, The State Univer sity of New Jersey. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth, and Amy Stornaiuolo. 2016. “Restorying the Self: Bending Toward Textual Justice.” Harvard Educational Review 86 (3): 313–38. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-86.3.313. Wahlman, Maude S. 2001. Signs and Symbols: African Images in African Amer ican Quilts. Atlanta, GA: Tinwood Books. Walker, Alice. 1995. “Everyday Use.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fourth Edition, 2375–82, edited by Nina Baym. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. First published 1973.
Ewa Klęczaj-Siara | Essays 467 EWA KLE˛CZAJ-SIARA is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of English Philology, Casimir Pulaski University of Technology and Humanities in Radom, Poland. Her academic interests encompass ethnic American children’s literature. More currently, her research focuses on the intersection of race and place in contemporary Afri can American children’s picture books. She is the author of the book Pokochać czerń [Loving Blackness]. Her most recent articles have appeared in such journals as Polish Journal for American Studies and Res Rhetorica.
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 A BLUEPRINT FOR BLACK GIRLHOOD: BELL HOOKS’S HOMEMADE LOVE E. GALE GREENLEE
Morrison’s insistence that “those people were me ” (emphasis added) points to the importance of Black girl representation in lit erature. For Black communities, finding accurate representation
In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Black feminist writer, theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks proclaims, “one of my favorite nov els in the whole world is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Praising the Nobel Prize winner’s debut novel about a young Black girl who yearns for blue eyes and the social acceptance they ostensibly repre sent, hooks underscores Morrison’s identification with her protago nist as well as her desire as a novelist “to write about ‘the people who in all literature were always peripheral—little Black girls who were props, background; those people were never center stage, and those people were me’” (1996, xii). hooks does not unpack the semantics of Morrison’s personal directive, but the word choice is telling. Mor rison’s use of spatial metaphors such as “peripheral,” “props,” and “background” parallels the social location of Black girls in Ameri can society and the literary world: often invisible and marginalized. That Black girls are “never center stage” in books clarifies hooks’s glee upon discovering stories that spotlight girls (like Pecola Breed love and the McTeer sisters) forced to navigate worlds marked by race, class, and gender oppression.
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 469 has been difficult. Violet J. Harris’s “African American Children’s Literature: The First 100 Years” traces representations of Black ness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature, cit ing a troubling history of “stereotyped, pejorative and unauthentic” depictions (1990, 540). Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (2001) points to racist ideologies embedded in early children’s texts as reflective of the racial politics of adult literature and adult culture writ large. Michelle H. Martin’s Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004) provides another account, starting with books like A Coon Alphabet (1898) and The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) that circulated widely among white readers and perpetuated blatantly racist caricatures of Black people.1 In addition to W.E.B. Du Bois and Augustus Dill who launched The Brownie’s Book —a magazine for Black children published from 1920 to 1921—Black women also rallied to counter racist portrayals in children’s literature. Effie Lee Newsome, an editor for the NAACP’s Crisis and children’s poet during the Harlem Renaissance, worked tirelessly to craft nuanced and joyous portrayals of Black childhood through her whimsical verse and nature poetry. Augusta Baker, a popular storyteller and children’s librarian with the New York Pub lic Library, advocated for positive stories to challenge the warped images of Black life portrayed by white authors. She also authored Books about Negro Life for Children (1946), the first comprehensive ref erence of children’s books with “unbiased, accurate, well-rounded picture[s] of Negro life” (General Research Division, New York Public Library 1957, 6). Charlemae Hill Rollins, storyteller and chil dren’s librarian at the Chicago Public Library, also pushed for more authentic representations and compiled We Build Together: A Reader’s Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use (1941), an annotated bibliography of Black children’s books. Their advocacy laid the groundwork for literature that presents affirming and expansive views of Black life. Despite these efforts to put Black children center stage, progress has been painfully slow. In 1965, Nancy Larrick wrote “The AllWhite World of Children’s Books,” calling out the whiteness of the children’s book industry. Larrick reported that out of more than 5,200 children’s books published in the early 1960s, only 349 (or 6.7 percent) featured Black characters (1965, 63). Fifty years later, in 2014, The New York Times featured op-eds by father-son duo Wal ter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers. The elder Myers asked,
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“Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?,” and his son chided “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.” Six years later, and the literary landscape is not that different. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which tracks books by writers and illus trators of color, found that out of 3,115 children’s books published in the United States in 2020, 392 books (roughly 12 percent) were about Black people or people of African descent, and less than 8 percent were written or illustrated by someone Black. The numbers are abysmal.
Morrison’s attention to Black girls and hooks’s investment in girlhood narratives counter this invisibility and affirm Black girls’ humanity. Their work also reveals literary engagement in what has been a longstanding concern of Black women writers: the relation ship between Black females and space. How Black girls navigate the spaces that inform their relationships and social possibilities perme ates the Black women’s literary tradition. Early texts, such as Har riet E. Wilson’s Our Nig ; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall
For Black readers, the numbers reflect the difficulty of creating a healthy sense of self and mitigating the emotional and physical harm—the “spirit murder” (Love 2016)—perpetrated against Black children by an anti-Black culture and the institutions entrusted with their safety and care. Some scholars see the persistent exclusion of Black stories in children’s literature as further marginalizing Black life, pushing it to “the periphery of normal behavior and perspec tives’’ (Jackson and Boutte 2009, 108). Desiree Cueto and Wanda M. Brooks assert “Black children are, at once, invisible in the litera ture and hyper-visible in the broader society,” and they warn us that the implications of this exclusion and imbalance are “devastating” (2019, 41). We see the consequences in The African American Pol icy Forum’s Black Girls Matter report (Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda 2015), which details the harsh disciplinary policies inflicted upon Black girls in US schools. And all too often, news stories circulate about Black girls as victims of state violence, such as the nine-yearold girl handcuffed by police (Mallory 2021), or the sixteen-yearold girl body slammed by police—both in South Carolina schools (Aarthun and Yan 2015). Without stories that present the fullness of Black life and “challenge society norms that promulgate anti-Black ness through portrayal of Black children in unseen lights” (Cueto and Brooks 2019, 41), Black children will remain “dehumanized and criminalized” (Love 2016), and they learn they do not matter.
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Even There (1859), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) center Black girlhood or young womanhood and—in some cases given their titular refer ences to space—gesture to the spatial realities that constrict Black girls’ lives. Each text portrays nineteenth-century Black girlhood unfolding within the confines of domestic-cum-work spaces made oppressive by the patriarchal and racist ideologies undergirding the slave system. By interrogating Black girls’ social positions as female children—indentured or enslaved, and subject to sexual and physical violence as well as economic exploitation—each writer underscores the relationship among Black girlhood and the geographic and social realities that structure their oppression. These texts critique Black girls’ status as de facto noncitizens and effectively establish a liter ary precedent of examining Black girlhood as regulated in a legal or social sense, as well as a fundamentally spatial one. This literary mapping continues in contemporary narratives of Black girlhood.2 Whether a young adult novel or adult literary fic tion, whether situated in a disintegrating future social world, in the rural South, or in urban environments besieged by surveillance and police brutality, contemporary writers boldly center the experiences of Black girls in literature and real life. They explore what Tamara T. Butler calls “Black Girl Cartography,” which refers to “Black girls’ geopolitical and social locations” or how they are “physically and sociopolitically mapped” (2018, 29). Though Butler’s research con cerns real-life Black girls in educational spaces, fictional accounts can also illuminate how Black girls dwell at the intersection of race, class, sex, gender, power, and space. In this article, I consider one of hooks’s children’s books to examine how she maps Black girlhood and how her female character’s story reflects spatial possibilities for all Black girls.
INTRODUCING HOMEMADE LOVE Homemade Love is a bedtime story crafted with Black children in mind. The book features a young protagonist, affectionately nick named “Girlpie,”3 and the story follows Girlpie through a normal day at home. We do not see her attending school or spending time with friends, and other than the opening images of sunshine and the closing image of a night sky, there is no clear marker of time. Given the quotidian nature of the characters’ activities and the lack
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of a clearly defined plot, some may question the book’s narrative arc. Others may see hooks’s foray into children’s literature as curiously off-brand; after all, she is known for her incisive political gaze. Yet, this picture book is decidedly on point with hooks’s politics and her longstanding commitment to healthy and just communities. Girlpie is a valued member of her family. Even when she makes mis takes, her parents shower her with tenderness and love. Through hooks’s words and Shane W. Evans’s illustrations, Homemade Love conveys the importance of Black families and responds to the need for Black girls to see images of themselves and models of a loving, egalitarian home. Written for young children and their parents, Homemade Love establishes a geography of Black girlhood seldom highlighted in media and popular culture: a young Black girl raised within an affirm ing and unapologetically Black home. hooks contests pejorative and limited depictions of Black girlhood and Black family life by imagin ing a cis-gendered, hetero-normative family. The book thus engages in “restorying,” a process that “reframe[s] the dominant narratives about Black lives,” while making Black girls’ “humanity legible” for all readers (Thomas and Stornaiuolo 2019, 1). It does not focus on a young girl coming-of-age during a perilous voyage or within a treacherous social environment. Girlpie’s story is not one of police brutality as illustrated in Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story of Racial Injustice (2019), written by three Emory University psy chologists seeking to help children understand systemic racism and the spate of Black deaths at the hands of police. It does not paint a picture of the “geographies of domination” that have marked Black peoples’ lives due to the transatlantic slave trade and experiences of colonization and Jim Crow (McKittrick 2006, x). References to purported adult matters (such as sexual violence and racial discrim ination) and what hooks often lambastes as “imperialist white-su premacist capitalist patriarchy” (2004, 52) are absent. Picture books, after all, are geared toward young children, whom adults—including authors—often romanticize as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection from adult concerns. Even so, reading this children’s text along with hooks’s memoir and her theorizations of “homeplace,” “marginalization,” and “oppositional blackness” reveals that hooks creates a narrative terrain rooted in her radical Black feminist poli tics of liberation and intimately connected to her childhood home. hooks creates a quasi-imagined geography that merges her conceptualization of a homeplace with reflections of her own childhood
As a theoretical concept or metaphor, space is nimble, and in dif ferent disciplinary contexts, its meaning can shift. My analysis and decision to use the language of “space” (as opposed to “place”) is informed primarily by critical geography, children’s literary scholar ship, and Black feminist thought. Human geographer Tim Cresswell distinguishes between space and place, defining the latter as “spaces which people have made meaningful” or “spaces people are attached to in one way or another” (2015, 12). He borrows a framework from political geographer John Agnew that outlines three aspects of place: location (the coordinates on a map), locale (the “material set ting for social relations” or concrete form), and the nebulous sense of place that represents the “subjective and emotional attachment people have to a place” (13–14). I keep this framework in mind and lean toward considerations of the spatial as intimately connected to our social world, a recognition that the two are not only constructed but also mutually constitutive and reinforcing. This conceptualiza tion of the social and spatial walking hand in hand is notably theo rized by Edward W. Soja, who distinguishes between “space per se, space as a contextual given, and socially-based spatiality, the created space of social organization and production.” While space as a realm for human interaction may seem obvious, spaces are laden with the
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THE SPACES OF BLACK GIRLHOOD
negotiations of space, powerlessness, and agency unfolding in the Kentucky backwoods of the American South. 4 Understanding how hooks’s theorization of homeplace converges with her own girlhood geography is key to analyzing the imaginative terrain she fashions in her picture book. My work dances, then, between two narrative perspectives—that of the Black girl at the center of the story and that of hooks, whose representations of girlhood are rooted in her Black feminist standpoint and her memories of growing up in the “rich magical world of southern [B]lack culture that was sometimes paradisical and at other times terrifying” (hooks 1996, xi). Through her creative non-fiction as well as this picture book, hooks envisions a world where Black girls can express their subjectivity. In Home made Love, hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace is made mani fest and becomes central to a self-actualized Black girlhood. Read through this lens, Homemade Love resists Black girlhood invisibility while countering the racialized gender bias (or misogynoir)5 hurled at Black girls.
meanings that we assign to them over time. Soja recognizes the physical or material reality—which we may refer to as place and that “may be primordially given”—but he also stresses the importance of human agency and social interaction (1989, 79).
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Children’s geographies, as a discipline, often takes up the ques tion of how children move through space. The field recognizes that young people are embedded within social spaces and that chil dren can function as social actors (Holloway and Valentine 2000, 6), shaping the spaces in which they move and live, even if those spaces operate under adult control. Relationships between children and adults don’t exist simply ideologically; they are also organized spatially, particularly in places where children and adults interact (like homes and schools). Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine note “the importance of the different sites of everyday life and the spa tial imagery in [our] ideologies of childhood” (2001, 1). Research in children’s geographies typically concentrates on places such as the home, the school, and the city to consider “how each is dedicated to the control and regulation of the child’s body and mind” (James et al. cited in Holloway and Valentine 11). Adults, no matter how well-in tentioned, regulate children’s activities and discipline their bodies, especially in the home. Childhood studies scholars recognize the home as the quintessential site or material “locus for family rela tions” (Christensen, James, and Jenks 2000, 145), and we take it for granted that home is “where children should spend their time” (Hol loway and Valentine 2000, 15). But Soja reminds us to “be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (1989, 6). So, when I use the term “children’s geographies” (or think of Black girlhood geographies), I do so not only to signal the everyday sites that we readily associate with children (such as schools, playgrounds, and homes), but also to explore the hierarchical relations that unfold in those spaces and social-spatial ideologies of Black girlhood embedded in the text. How are Black girls positioned? This question guides my attention to the home as a space of control and regulation for Girlpie, but also one where hooks invests Girlpie with a burgeoning sense of “spa tial freedom” (Holloway and Valentine 2000, 13). The unassuming spatiality of Homemade Love warrants taking a closer look at Black girlhood as a space not simply of restriction, but one of movement, possibility, and freedom.
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Homemade Love extends hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace by creating a similar “space of care and nurturance” (hooks 1990c, 42) on the page. By considering the book’s textual geographies and the ways in which hooks offers an alternative to the oppres sive geopolitical realities located outside the text, we can see that her picture book theorizes, perhaps unexpectedly, about the social location and power of Black girls. The fictional space of Homemade
CREATING HOMEPLACE
Just as Morrison’s novels center Black life outside the realm of “the white gaze” (Greenfield-Sanders 2019, 00:08:18), hooks also val ues autonomous Black spaces. In Salvation: Black People and Love, hooks asserts that in order for “[B]lack girls to have a chance to build healthy self-esteem in an integrated colonizing environment, there must be oppositional strategies and places that promote decolonization” (2001b, 108), and she aligns those strategies and spatial interventions with Black women and the US South. Grow ing up in segregated Kentucky, hooks acknowledges that “much of the sweetness of life came from the tenderness of [B]lack women, often poor and working class” (111). She honors Black women whose homemaking and affective practices create a sense of community to counter even the most repressive racial environments. As a result, hooks reframes the home or domestic environment as encompass ing a “radical political dimension” whereby Black women create safe spaces, private spaces of refuge from the physical and psychological violence of the outside, white world (1990c, 42). She utilizes “home place,” a “Southern colloquial term” (Davis 2011, 380) to name this space, describing it as: the one site where one could freely confront the issue of human ization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all [B]lack people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to our selves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world. (hooks 1990c, 42) hooks comments on the association of women with domestic spaces by acknowledging that “sexism delegates to females the task of cre ating and sustaining a home environment” (42). Yet, she intention ally frames the domestic realm and intimate familial relationships in a way that politicizes women’s family-rooted labor as an act of resistance that shields Black people from white supremacy.
476 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Love, characterized by an ethic of love, is hooks’s articulation of a Black feminist geography, one that “signal[s] alternative patterns that work alongside and across traditional geographies” (McKittrick 2006, xiv). Homemade Love depicts a homeplace for Black girls and offers “a new location from which [they can] articulate [their] sense of the world” (hooks 1990b, 153). As such, this unassuming children’s books builds upon Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of inter sectionality, extending it to articulate the distinct social location and general marginalization of Black girls, who are situated in struc tures of oppression that include race, class, gender, as well as age and geopolitical location. Of course, children of all genders, races, and ethnicities inhabit a marginal position in American society until age eighteen, when they are deemed old enough to exercise some rights of citizenship. Until then, parents, guardians, and teachers act on their behalf in educational, political, and social realms. This fact, coupled with the racial and gender oppression produced within an “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” forces girls of color to occupy a social location that we can rightly position at “the margins” (hooks 2004, 52).
While popular conceptions of the margins, or “the marginalized,” are often pejorative, focusing on dire material conditions or the disenfranchisement of communities that occupy such social space, hooks usefully redefines the margin in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) and later in her essay, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” (1990b). She distinguishes between the marginality “imposed by oppressive structures” and the “marginal ity one chooses as a site of resistance” (1990b, 153), and she actively claims that location—a move Soja tags as a “simultaneously political and geographical act” (1996, 97). While she highlights the discrimi natory and oppressive practices that give rise to marginal spaces, she also views this location as “much more than a site of deprivation. . . . it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance ” (hooks 1990b, 149; emphasis added). For hooks, it is a creative locus.
hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace and marginalization par allels Soja’s conceptualization of “thirdspace” and Thadious Davis’s “southscape.” Soja defines “thirdspace” as “an-Other way of under standing and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality” (1996, 10; emphasis added). Simi larly, in her study of Black writers, Davis uses “southscape” “to call
What we further gain from hooks’s theorization of homeplace and marginality is that individuals who stand on the periphery develop “a particular way of seeing reality. . . . an oppositional world view—a mode of seeing unknown” to the dominant society (hooks, preface). Embracing an oppositional consciousness does not erase the violence facing marginalized communities. But her essay pur posely links social space to knowledge and action, which can lead to social change. She writes: “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and untold histories. Spaces can [also] be inter rupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary practice” (hooks 1990b, 152). Her picture book represents her artis tic and political practice. As an unexpected political terrain, her picture book transforms and disrupts damaging discourses about Black girlhood, “subvert[ing] narrowed ideas about who a Black girl is, where a Black girl can live, and who a Black girl can become” (Toliver 2018). In the imagined space of Homemade Love, hooks cultivates oppositional consciousness by challenging anti-Blackness
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 477 attention to the South as a social, political, cultural and economic construct” (2011, 2), as well as a geographic region. She explores “how Black writers from the Deep South use their spatial location to imagine, create, and define new and unproscribed subjectivities’’ (4). In particular, Davis views modern iterations of Black identity as “rooted in the South as a grounded manifestation of the ever-de sired formative homeplace,” and she argues that many Black writ ers embrace this homeplace, “claim[ing] the very space that would negate their humanity and devalue their worth” (19). Soja, who inter prets hooks’s homeplace as a kind of thirdspace, notes that “hooks’s consciousness is rooted in the everyday life experiences of youth, home and family” (1989, 99). Indeed, hooks consistently grapples with her Southern roots, writing that as “[B]lack Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality” (1984, preface). Interestingly, she arrives at this empowered vision of marginality by recounting her efforts as a young Black girl in Hopkinsville, Kentucky “to emerge as a critical thinker, artist, and writer, in a context of repression” (hooks 1990b, 147). While Kentucky does not explicitly appear in the picture book, her theorization of marginality and the birth of her liberatory vision depend on the refashioned southscape of her youth. We cannot fully appreciate Homemade Love as a radical political project without acknowledging the Black rural, southern context that undergirds the book’s creation.
478 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 and designing a blueprint “for liberation, offering generations [of Black girls] the gift of choice, freedom, wholeness of mind, body and being” (hooks 2015, xii).
Geography seems to take a back seat in Homemade Love. There are no maps etched on the inside covers. No cars, boats, or other modes of transportation grace the pages. Still, hooks constructs this domes tic space as an affective realm based upon an ethic of care that she regards as central to activating a radical love of Blackness and a sense of liberation. Linking love, oppositional consciousness, and liber ation to space, hooks’s work finds resonance in critical geography. Katherine McKittrick argues that dominant ideologies of geogra phy obscure the ways in which Black women throughout the African diaspora have responded to and navigated geographic terrains and spatial relationships marked by violence and tyranny. McKittrick reminds us that we do not live exclusively within safe spaces, point ing to the space of the slave ship as an “oppositional geography” or a site of resistance (2006, xi). She highlights Black women’s literary geographies (such as Harriet Jacobs’s garret in Edenton, North Car olina) and restricted spaces like the slave ship to argue that Black women have been central to geographic contestations. Homemade Love offers such a contestation, creating a literary space that roots Girlpie in a stable, autonomous, Black-identified home. By placing her character in this home, hooks embeds Girlpie in an affective geography that contests the race and gender-based marginalization that circumscribes Black girls’ lives. hooks disputes discourses of Black familial dysfunction and undertakes her own Black feminist space-making practice by cre ating a literary homeplace that celebrates Black families and affirms Black girls’ subjectivity. The story space is not a miniature barome ter of “real-world” injustice as we see with popular young adult nov els such as The Hate U Give (2017) or middle grade novels like Lisa Moore Ramée’s A Good Kind of Trouble (2019). It does not catalogue the traumas inflicted upon Black communities. But it certainly works against lingering perceptions of Black inferiority, particu larly those that gained traction following the publication of Senator David Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 The State of Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Dubbed “The Moynihan Report,” the publica tion railed against Black motherhood, attributing the feminization
TOWARDS A GEOGRAPHY OF HOME
The book’s textual geography is expressed visually and narratively, and like most children’s picture books, Homemade Love follows genre conventions by spreading the story across thirty-two pages. Since illustrations constitute the “meat” of most picture books, hooks tells Girlpie’s story in sparse language, often utilizing simple sentences or short phrases. Meanwhile, vivid, semi-cartoonish, semi-realistic images dominate each page to capture young readers’ attention. The illustrations and their placement on the page create a visual-spa tial narrative that establishes the setting to frame the protagonist’s story, whereas the text brings to life a social space or an imagined geography that exemplifies hooks’s conceptualization of a South ern-rooted, intimate Black homeplace.
REMAPPING BLACK GIRLHOOD (A BOOK WALK)
To understand how the book maps a new spatial terrain in chil dren’s literature, we have to consider that space operates on multi ple registers in the text. We can attend to the imaginary spaces, as rendered by Evans’s vibrant artwork. We can also consider how the book charts its own narrative geography, creating a sense of place.
The book downplays its adult presence from the first page, which opens with five short words: “My mama calls me GIRLPIE.”7 In this simple declarative statement, Girlpie’s mother functions as the gram matical subject, but Girlpie occupies the stress position, which ends the sentence and lends greater weight to her identity. Structurally, her name follows the first mention of her mother, but “GIRLPIE”
By constructing a home rooted in love, hooks gifts Girlpie with permission simply to be. She is afforded room to move and to live freely—in mind, body, and spirit. This vision of a free Black girl hood, rendered in clear but subtle geographic form, writes Black girls back into normative childhood spaces. This story world nour ishes the minds and spirits of Black children, and it provides a foun dation to cultivate independent and self-actualized Black girls. With Girlpie existing in such a spatial realm, Homemade Love challenges white supremacist images of Black life, while putting forth a radical re-visioning of Black girlhood for the public eye.
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 479 of Black families and the accompanying poverty to an inherent cul tural pathology, and in large part to what he regarded as the matriar chal structure of Black families. In Homemade Love, hooks launches a creative counterargument, dreaming of Black girlhood in a thriv ing Black home.6
For young readers, identifying the human character as central to the story is critical in recognizing who is valued. Children must learn to locate who stands at the center of the story. Nodelman calls this the “species-centricity” of the text—the idea that “what matters most about the picture” (and thus, the story) “is the human being in it” (2005, 132). But again, he approaches children’s books as a skilled reader. He explains that: young children tend to scan a picture with equal attention to all parts; that the ability to pick out and focus on the human at the center is therefore a learned activity; and that reading reinforces
Picture-word correspondence is an acquired skill, so Homemade Love presents a visual and spatial challenge for young children who are just learning the alphabet, letter-sound relationships, and grasping their own place in the world.
480 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 appears capitalized. This typography not only signals that this is the character’s name, but it also conveys that she is important, and readers should pay attention. The accompanying image depicts a smiling, milk chocolate-y girl who holds the brown hand of an adult who wears an apron—presumably, her mother. Their clasped hands and physical proximity suggest a level of intimacy. Spatially, Girlpie takes up the entire first page. Her face—the only one on the page— is privileged due to its singularity and sheer dimensions. By honing in on her face, emergent readers8 —who depend upon visual cues (and verbal translations from adult mediators who read the text)— see a Black girl occupying center stage. Girlpie’s position on the page is more complex than we might assume. Adult readers may be nonplussed by this visual placement and dismiss her centering as mere common sense. In “Decoding the Images: How Picture Books Work,”9 children’s literature scholar Perry Nodelman points out that while picture books appear easy to interpret, they are deceptively so. He reminds us of the inter pretative work that images require of readers and underscores that young readers must make a series of sophisticated cognitive moves to decipher these codes. According to Nodelman, even the most representational picture—where the image directly represents an object in reality—demands attention from an astute reader who is conversant in a set of pictorial conventions (2005, 128). Children, then, must approach the act of “reading” with a certain visual and intellectual acuity to connect language to images, even if an adult reads to them, simultaneously drawing attention to the illustrations.
Reading, then, entails deciphering language and decoding visual content—skills that young children develop over time. Most impor tantly, if the images and texts in Homemade Love reinforce—and I would add, challenge —cultural assumptions, then hooks’s young readers walk away seeing a “human at the center” who is young, Black, and female. Girlpie is the M.V.P. Scholars of Black girlhood literacies, though often focusing on tween and teenage girls, assert that representations of Black girls in literature and media are essential to identity development as “Black girls are in a constant battle of defining their lives in the midst of falsehood and dominant narratives that depict their lives in inaccu rate or incomplete ways” (Muhammad and Haddix 2016, 318). Ghol nescar E. Muhammad and Sherell A. McArthur’s work investigates how Black girls use writing to critique and protest negative media portrayals of Black women and girls and to gain a deeper under standing of their own identities as racialized and gendered individ uals (2015, 134). As for younger children, Roberta Price Gardner explains that visual representations of Blackness in children’s picture books constitute “a significant form of visual culture that shapes the racial subjectivities of all children” (2016, 129). Case in point: Gard ner shared picture books about Sojourner Truth with Black children and noticed their visceral and overwhelmingly negative responses to one of the representations (120–21). Clearly, images of Blackness cir culating as pop culture or on the printed page impact the self-iden tity and self-esteem of Black children. In centering Girlpie’s story and seeing her as a human who holds value, children learn that this Black girl—and by extension, Black girlhood—matters. As we turn the pages, Girlpie commands attention, the pictorial arrangement solidifying her star power by repeatedly emphasizing her presence as opposed to the adults in her world. Like the illustra tions with her mother, early scenes with her father curiously leave him mostly off the page. When the text metaphorically describes Girlpie as “Daddy’s honey bun chocolate dew drop,” she clings joy fully to an unidentified character’s pant leg. We can assume that she is hugging her father, given the stated reference to him on the page, but his face remains outside the frame. Then, in the centerfold, all
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 481 important cultural assumptions, not just about the value of particu lar objects but also about the general assumption that the objects do have different values and do therefore require different degrees of attention. (Nodelman 2005, 132)
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signs of adult characters disappear. Only Girlpie remains. She lies down, arms spread wide, her face and entire body facing readers. She sports a bright red dress adorned with white hearts. Two words mirror the book’s title: “Homemade Love.” What’s the message?
Girlpie is the personification, as well as the product, of her parents’ homemade love. The inner space of the story (not to be confused with the space of the page as a material object) offers interior views of Girlpie’s home. Apart from a few pictures depicting Girlpie in a limited natural landscape, the story unfolds indoors. Household items (like kitchen tools, a vase, a dresser, or a bed) mark the space. The actual location is unknown. There seems to be no real-word reference or “real frame” for Girlpie’s home (Hunt 2015, 31). Or is there? Readers may not see a physical structure or evidence of the locale. But the key is the affec tive reality (or sense of place) depicted on the pages. For Pauline Dewan, homes in children’s literature often represent a safety net, a place of emotional warmth or an environment characterized by a romanticized sense of affection.10 By juxtaposing the children’s book with hooks’s memoir and other autobiographical writings, we can detect shades of her own girlhood geography in Girlpie’s home. The inner space of Homemade Love mimics the intimate familial spaces that hooks experienced not necessarily in her own house, but in her grandparents’ homes. Those spaces, situated within a distinctly rural Black context, constitute critical sites in her personal Black girlhood geographies. They produce an invisible yet ever-present foundation for the text and contribute to an oppositional worldview that nur tures and respects Girlpie’s subjectivity.
“LEARNING TO BELONG IN SPACE”
Carme Manuel, one of the few scholars to critically engage hooks’s children’s books, describes them as “blueprints for a happy life in blackness” (2009, 95). The blueprint metaphor is apt because it sug gests that Black families and communities can construct spaces that nurture Black children. hooks’s ideological and political project (to fashion a world with a healthy regard for Black children) holds a real connection to our material world and the racial politics of the American South. In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, the specter of hooks’s girlhood home, where she lives with her parents and siblings, stands in stark contrast to the feel-good nature of Girlpie’s home. The memoir presents hooks’s girlhood home as one marked by
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 483 physical and emotional violence, and in Belonging: A Culture of Place, she describes feeling out of place and “alien” in the home where she experienced “soul murdering assault” (2009a, 217). Still, in the dedi cation of Homemade Love, she thanks her mother, Rosa Bell, for “cre at[ing] a world of taste and flavors/good food, good time/sustained pleasure.” Elsewhere, she credits her mother for providing “practical blueprints for liberation” (2015, xii), and hooks continues this legacy by creating her own blueprint for Black girls. Her memoir speaks most lovingly of two homes, that of her paternal great grandmother, Big Mama, and that of her maternal grandparents, Baba and Daddy Gus. She describes Big Mama as a “short and fat” woman who “does not read or write” (hooks 1996, 25). She “wears aprons over her clothes with big pockets”—like Girlpie’s mother—and she cooks, particularly sweets for hooks and her sib lings. In one instance, hooks recalls wanting to bake her father a cake but not being allowed in the kitchen. At Big Mama’s, however, “the kitchen is our home” (26). Big Mama’s house exemplifies the welcoming spirit of homeplace as it offers room to play and a sense of belonging. In addition to Big Mama’s house of delights, Baba and Daddy Gus offer a liberatory space in their home. She describes their home in “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Opposi tional,” writing that, “Our grandmother, Baba, made this house a living space. She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us. She was certain that we were shaped by space . . . Her house is a place where I am learning to look at things, where I am learning how to belong in space” (1990a, 103). Even though Daddy Gus lives there, hooks deems this a feminine space, and this designation acknowl edges the pivotal role Black women play as community builders, curating spaces of refuge and resistance. Curiously, hooks would later describe Baba as a cantankerous woman, “not an ally” of chil dren, a woman who “advocated harsh punishment” and “had no use for children who would not obey” (2009a, 141). Yet Baba is also the one to whom hooks credits her aesthetic sensibility: “Baba taught me to listen to my heart—to follow it” (139). She continues, “I learned to be courageous by seeing [Baba] act without fear. I learned to risk because she was daring” (141). Learning to be courageous is a neces sary life skill for a Black girl growing up in the segregated South. In “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” hooks references childhood fear as she describes her grandparents’ home “across town” beyond the spaces of “terrifying whiteness” (1990c, 41). The key details are not
MAPPING BLACK GIRL INNOCENCE
For example, various illustrations portray Girlpie occupying spaces independent of adults. On one page, we see her with her dog. On another, she plays in the yard with only flowers to keep her company. In both instances, her parents are out of view. Girlpie, as pictured, revels in her own world. She can move of her own accord without constant adult supervision. hooks and Evans give Girlpie mobility, an ability to move freely, of her own will.
The depiction of home in Homemade Love reflects the spatializa tion of childhood and the glorification of this stage as an inherently innocent period of human life. The opening flap reads, “Always loved, Girlpie is the sweet, sweet center of her parents’ heart. In
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This illustration of homeplace appears distinct from hooks’s childhood home, which she shared with her parents and siblings.
In All about Love, hooks remarks that her “family of origin provided a dysfunctional setting”; even so, she asserts that the setting is also one in which “affection, delight and care are present” (2001a, 7), and she links this care to her mother, whose love she finds “sustained and deep” (1996, 139). So, while there’s no one-to-one correspondence between hooks’s childhood and Homemade Love, juxtaposing these texts suggests that a homeplace may exist apart from one’s imme diate family, and even in multiple and complicated spaces. Young hooks finds such a homeplace in her grandparents’ homes, spaces that ground her in love and fortify her sense of self. As a creative reimagining of her homeplace, Homemade Love asserts that these spaces can exist within the pages of a picture book or even within readers’ homes.
the home’s physical structure or even its location, although relegat ing Black people to the other side of town speaks to spatialization practices (such as segregation) that reify race and power by creating boundaries of belonging and exclusion.
Most importantly, hooks refashions this southscape and pays tribute to the social space her grandparents provided for her and her siblings. Baba and Daddy Gus created a homeplace that is a haven from the racial terror that threatens Black lives on the white side of town. Their home also constitutes a social space with more egalitar ian adult-child relationships, where children have some degree of agency. With this inspirational backdrop, Homemade Love presents a similar model for how Black girls can belong in and take up space.
Homemade Love reproduces tropes of childhood innocence and conceptions of childhood as an unencumbered space by creating a protagonist who is carefree and who expresses a sense of wonder and curiosity. In one illustration, Girlpie kneels and hugs her dog. Opposite the spread, we see “All good GOOD” as if she’s rewarding her pet. And a newspaper sits, tossed to the side, as if the two just played fetch. In an earlier spread, her body hovers over the ground, with her blue shadow underneath; she seems to float in the air. As Girlpie bounces from room to room of the house, sometimes drift ing among the stars, readers witness a Black girl who knows no bounds. Young hooks also knew no bounds. Writing in “Kentucky Is My Fate,” hooks reflects that “In those hills, there was nowhere I felt I couldn’t roam, no where I could not go” (2009b, 8). Girlpie embodies a similar sense of freedom, and readers bear witness to her movement and exploration across narrative time and space. Girlpie’s depiction also oozes good vibes and levity, represent ing a radical departure from the public imagination which too often regards Black youth—and specifically Black girls—as unchildlike.
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 485 the paradise of childhood, all wrongs are forgiven and all the world made peace again. All children should live in such a world.” This blurb, crafted by the publisher but partially lifted from hooks’s own writing, reinforces these childhood tropes. Susan Honeyman addresses this spatialization and its attendant power imbalance in Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction. She notes, “Writers often utilize childhood as a ludic space through which to criticize the adult world. In doing so, they mimic social constructions of childhood, exposing the very constructedness of such representations, decentering the adult discourse that creates them” (2005, 5) and, I would add, revealing Romantic-era assump tions about childhood innocence and vulnerability.
In a New York Times op-ed, “Let Black Kids Just Be Kids,” Robin Bernstein (2017) responds to a study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty in which “a group of 325 adults viewed Black girls as needing less nurturing, support and protection than white girls, and as knowing more about sex and other adult topics.” Bernstein traces the development of innocence as a defining characteristic of child hood and one seen as inapplicable to Black youth. She pays particu lar attention to the work of “popular writers, playwrights, actors and visual artists” in crafting images of “innocent white children” com pared to depictions of Black children “as unconstrained imps” who were essentially “defined as non-children.” These depictions, she
hooks rejects the impossibility of Black girl innocence, and Evans’s
illustrations portray Girlpie as decidedly childlike to counter the adultification and vitriol that Black girls face. Girlpie’s innocence is consistent with the depiction of Black girls in hooks’s earlier picture book, Happy to Be Nappy. Likely inspired by her own youth and her siblings who “had differently colored skin and various hair textures and each . . . its own unique style and beauty” (hooks 2001b, 35), the book is a Black girl’s self-love manual, an ode to the textures, colors, and styles of Black girls’ natural hair. That book begins with “Girlpie hair smells clean and sweet.” Girlpie, a nickname that hooks remem bers her mother calling her daughters, stands for all little Black girls.
notes, “weaponized childhood innocence, transforming [innocence] into a tool of racial domination” that Black communities continue to fight. Arguing that “childhood innocence carries so much political force” and that these conceptions are “part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy,” Bernstein’s commentary points to the need for art and literature that moves ideas of childhood innocence from the “whites-only club” (2017; emphasis added).
Chris Raschka’s watercolor images show little Black girls, ranging from dark brown to peachy skin. Whether rocking braids, ponytails, short kinks, or flowy strands, Girlpie’s hair is praised for being “soft like cotton, flower petal billowy soft, full of frizz and fuzz.” Black mothers fix the little girls’ tresses in an intergenerational ritual that Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair found in many children’s picture books about Black hair (2015, 303). We see the girls jump and sway. In some pictures, they sport quizzical expressions. Sometimes, they smile and pose. They play as their “short tight naps or plaited strands all let girls go running free.” In a culminating celebration of Black girlhood, fourteen girls hold hands and dance in a circle, each wearing her own distinctive hairstyle. The illustrations, which reflect hooks’s conception of loving Blackness as political resistance (2001b, 65–66), opposes white supremacist social messaging that denigrates Black beauty. The book teaches Black girls to love their natural hair, “while making a strong political statement of resistance intended to reach young, even preverbal children” (Martin 2004, 68). Impor tantly, Happy to Be Nappy crafts Black girlhood as joyous and fun. In an interview about this book, hooks noted that “in children’s books that are oriented toward [B]lack kids, a lot of playfulness is taken out” (quoted in West 1999). hooks and Raschka bring the fun back to Black girls’ worlds, and Homemade Love continues this embrace of Black girl innocence. Evans’s illustrations deliberately depict Girlpie
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Homemade Love not only aligns Black girlhood with idyllic notions of childhood innocence and purity, it also re-spatializes Black girlhood by forging a connection between this Black girl and the outdoors. In this way, Girlpie’s depiction mimics that of classic chil dren’s texts, like Winnie the Pooh and Pippi Longstocking, that often set children in natural or wild spaces. Like Christopher Robin or Pippi, Girlpie romps and plays, not just in her home, but outdoors. We see her joyously bounce around, mid-cartwheel outside. Holloway and Valentine posit that this kind of positioning solidifies a child charac ter’s innocence “through their closeness with and to nature” (2000, 17). Thus, situating Girlpie in even limited natural spaces lifts Black girls from the stereotypical spatial narratives that relegate Black life to urban spaces and poverty-stricken communities. In doing so, hooks enters a contentious conversation surrounding the nature of childhood. The idea of childhood innocence is already fraught, given the obvious exclusion of Black children within the discourse. Real world examples further demonstrate how Black girls are treated with anything but kids’ gloves. Like the Black Girls Mat ter report, a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education points to the dispropor tionate impact of school suspensions and expulsions among Black students in thirteen states in the South; researchers note that Black girls were “severely and most disproportionately” impacted as they “comprised 56% of suspensions and 45% of expulsions” among girls (Smith and Harper 2015, 1). Instead of seeing Black girls as aggres sive, deviant, or unruly, Black girlhood studies scholar Ruth Nicole Brown asks, “What is necessary to envision Black girlhood as a space of freedom?” and identifies “the creative potential of Black girlhood” (or their unique inner resources) as the answer (2013, 3).
Aimee Meredith Cox’s ethnographic work with Black girls in a Detroit-area homeless shelter also highlights how Black girls’ creativity and embodied practices “shift the shape of social spaces that
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 487 as young. She wears afro puffs and hair barrettes, and she stands not much taller than her pet dog. In fact, the final four illustrations depict a girl who is small and young enough for her parents to carry and tuck in; her mother cradles Girlpie as she carries the sleepy child to her bed. Even the “imaginary materiality” (Cresswell 2015, 14) of Girlpie’s bedroom reinforces her youthfulness: she shares her bed with a Black baby doll, a teddy bear, and three other stuffed animal friends. In short, the book, like its predecessor, positions Girlpie as an innocent child.
488 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 restrict and punish them as well as those that offer care and sup port” (2015, 26). These scholars, and others documenting Black girls’ literacies (Muhammed and Haddix 2016; Sealey-Ruiz 2016), oblite rate narratives of Black girl badness and critique systems that render childhood innocence a fractured lens that only distorts our under standing of Black girlhood. Given this problematic history of child hood innocence, seeing Black girls as inherently innocent may not be the goal. But as romantic as it may be, the desire to see portrayals of Black girl innocence reflects a need to protect Black girls and end the racial and gendered violence that threatens their lives. hooks and Evans create a blueprint for such a world.
Assumptions of childhood innocence may offer a veil of protection for some children, but they do not mitigate the power that adults wield over young people. While Girlpie’s story may counter derog atory narratives of Black girlhood in America, hooks, like many of her literary foremothers, fashions Black girlhood in a decidedly domestic setting where Girlpie is still subject to adult guidance or rule. Even so, hooks’s sparse text and Evans’s vibrant illustrations converge to produce cheerful, if not outright saccharine, images of Girlpie and her family. hooks recognizes that American culture “holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement,” which can inflict emotional harm “when their family does not measure up to the standard” (2000, 77). Yet, she crafts this story, insisting upon a loving Black male presence in order to disabuse readers of the notion that the nuclear family is only a white enterprise (2003, 119–20). The book underscores the importance of a cohesive Black family before readers even open the cover. The brightly colored cover illus tration gives readers a full view of Girlpie and gestures to her home. She smiles and looks directly at viewers, while standing between two adults who each hold one of her hands. One person (presumably her father) wears a blue shirt, jeans, and a watch, and the other (presum ably her mother) dons a yellow dress and red apron. The cover vis ually conveys that Black families can embody the heteronormative, two-parent household norm. On the surface then, Homemade Love does not seem to be transgressive in its gender politics. In fact, prior to the picture book’s release, hooks acknowledged that in Ameri can culture, “the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized
FOCUS ON FAMILY
As tools for education and entertainment, books introduce chil dren to social and cultural mores. They also play a geopolitical role, influencing children’s understanding of themselves and the larger world. Darren Purcell defines geopolitics as “the linkage of space, power, and political practice” (2006, 184). For my purposes, Klaus Dodds offers a slightly different definition applicable to picture books. He explains that “geopolitics provides ways of looking at the world,” and these “geographical representations help to inform people’s understandings of the world,” making us all “geopolitical theorists” whose visions of the world “may differ radically and for a host of reasons—religious, ethnic, political, and so on” (2007, 4, 11).
Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1990) classic essay on mirrors and windows impressed upon children’s literature scholars, librarians, and educa tors that children’s books provide social and even global education: books help to shape children’s understanding of how to interact with others and how to navigate the world. Homemade Love performs this
GEOGRAPHY
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 489 sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic” (2001a, 20). Even so, hooks names the “feminist focus on children” as “a cen tral component of contemporary radical feminist movement,” main taining that “children need to be raised in loving environments” regardless of the configuration (2000, 71, 77). Love is the hook, and hooks and Evans infuse this home with symbols of love rather than evidence of Black familial dysfunction or patriarchal rule and abuse.
Although hooks’s book does not loosen the chain-like threads between girlhood and domestic space, it complicates this tradi tionally gendered space with an unapologetic embrace of egalitar ian parenting. In the book, Girlpie’s father is an active and loving parent. When she reaches to glue the last piece of the broken vase, her father appears in the frame. He smiles above the words “Peace again,” as if he speaks them to ease her concerns. The next spread shows mother and father expressing their love for Girlpie with a kiss. At the end of the book, an illustration depicts father and daughter laughing and playing outside. Girlpie’s father is present and openly affectionate like hooks’s grandfather, Daddy Gus. The adult-child power dynamic remains firmly in place, but in crafting Girlpie’s domestic world as such an openly loving space, even one that rei fies heteronormative conceptions of family, hooks concretizes a site where Black girl subjectivity can take root.
A OF BLACK GIRLHOOD
490 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 kind of geopolitical work. It exemplifies a space in which Black girl hood can develop in spite of racial and gender oppression, and in doing so, it gives Black girls a new “consciousness of spatiality” or a “critical geographical imagination” from which they can move in the world (Soja 1996 , 2). This conceptual-visual lens is necessary valida tion that Black girls, too, can exist in the US nation-state, despite persistent attacks against their bodies and spirits. What, then, does Homemade Love tell us about the social location of Black girls and the operation of power? Power may be subtle in the book, but it is normalized in Girlpie’s family. Girlpie may be the protagonist and narrator, but she is still a minor. For example, when Girlpie breaks a vase, she bows her head almost in shame. Her mother, whose size towers over Girlpie, stands in a reproving posture as she crosses her arms and taps her foot. The moment passes quickly with a page turn, and the story world returns to hooks’s homeplace. We see an image of both parents as Girlpie reflects, “But all the time any hurt can be healed. All wrongs forgiven. And all the world made Peace again.” Her parents help her to put the vase back together again, and they lend their assistance and support, which they seal with a “kiss kiss.” The two-page spread shows Girlpie flanked by her mother and father, illustrating her warm and supportive home. Fur thermore, her parents’ assistance and their role in helping Girlpie see the incident as an accident and nothing more points, metaphorically, to hooks’s conceptualization of spaces “where we begin the process of re-vision”—a reparative process that hooks locates in the margins (1990b, 145). The idea of marginality intrigues me because Girlpie is a dependent, and children’s literature, as a discipline, is often mar ginalized within the academy despite a long history of scholarship and an increasing number of academic conferences devoted to this body of literature. Just as hooks envisions the margin as a space of radical possibility, her children’s books offer a unique “radical crea tive space” (153) where hooks can reach a wide audience of adults and children with a story that provides “more accurate and humanizing representations of children of color” (Thomas 2016, 113). Homemade Love thus answers hooks’s call to re-vision. She speaks “from a place in the margins where I am different, where I see things differently” (1990b, 152). What she sees and what she creates in this story is a soft spot for Black girls. What readers ultimately experience is her intentional effort to “enter that [marginalized] space” (152) and look on Black girlhood lovingly.
hooks’s love letter to Black girls allows readers to see Black girls differently—as whole and human—and therefore, her story is a rad ical act. In “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” hooks discusses how the “traditional southern racially segregated Black community” of her youth saw art as “intrinsically serving a political function” (1990a, 105). Like the Black women before her who “were fashioning an aesthetic of being, struggling to create an oppositional world view for their children” (112), hooks creates a counter space to pass down the geopolitical lessons that she learned in her grandparents’ homes. It is Baba who teaches young bell, whom she calls “Glory,” about the integrity of one’s word and how she must learn “‘to stand up and speak up’ and not to give ‘a good goddamn’ what folk who ‘ain’t got a pot to pee in’ think” (2009a, 139). Baba teaches hooks how to relate to others, how to stand on her own in the world. Though abrasive and direct—which some might say of hooks’s own writerly voice—Baba is an adult who respects certain rights of children as thinking and independent beings. Inspired by her Black female kin, Homemade Love talks back to white suprema cist and patriarchal logics to offer a necessary model of what a home place feels like: a geography of the heart. This mapping carries important lessons, not only for parents, but especially for Black girls whose worldviews are shaped by the text. Catherine Renaud (2015)—in her discussion of Claude Ponti’s children’s texts—notes that the fictional worlds in children’s picture books work “beyond the book as a kind of carte de tendre, a map of imaginative possibilities for children.” This “spatial cohesion,” as she terms it, bridges the world of the text with children’s material real ity, and she remarks that “spaces can take on symbolic dimensions, identifiable for instance in [the] association of trees with concepts of home and belonging” (194). Homemade Love teems with such asso ciations; metaphors, for example, link sweetness to the emotional or psychological space of the home. Renaud also observes that Pon ti’s use of trees “mirror[s] the mental space of his characters” (211), and we see a similar correspondence between depictions of Girlpie’s attire and her emotional state or immediate environment. Evans’s illustrations match Girlpie’s emotions; the pictures change based on her encounters with her parents or as she moves through a shift ing landscape. For example, in the beginning of the book, when the protagonist says, “My mama calls me Girlpie,” readers see minia ture pies on her clothing. When she breaks the vase, frowny faces
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492 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 appear on her dress. When her parents help her repair the damage, the frowns switch to smiley faces. As her parents kiss her, puckered lips adorn her dress. Girlpie does cartwheels amidst flowers, and dai sies dot her dress. As she plays with her puppy, we see paw prints and dog bones on her clothes. The dress designs repeatedly reinforce the overall depiction of a home rooted in love, and they also give readers a window into Girlpie’s state of mind and emotions. Girlpie’s clothing forges a particularly powerful emotional con nection toward the end of the book. We see idyllic images of her sleeping, “Lost in deep dreams.” She dreams of “Memories of arms that hold me,” and a picture of her father tossing her up in the air accompanies the text. As Girlpie’s body presses against the blue sky with arms outstretched, she wears a blue dress emblazoned with planes and white clouds. Girlpie physically and metaphorically takes flight. Her father’s presence and the planes on her dress sug gest that with a solid family foundation beneath her, and a strong father-daughter bond, the sky’s the limit. As Girlpie coasts the air waves, readers feel a sense of possibility, and we have a glimpse of how she—and hooks—views her place in the world.
Homemade Love represents its own kind of homeplace, a culturally rooted and liberatory space devoted to nurturing this little Black girl’s life and her future.
The last spread takes us into Girlpie’s bedroom, an intimate set ting that merges her home with the larger world. The book closes with a picture of Girlpie curled up under her bed covers, fast asleep as her bed floats against a starry indigo sky. Her words assure her real-world peers that there’s “No need to fear the dark place. ’Cause everywhere is HOME.” This culminating statement extends the boundaries of her home beyond the confines of her bedroom to a wide, open space that appears peaceful and dreamy. The illustration and text exemplify Dewan’s contention that in story worlds and the real world, “Home is a place that provides roots for stability and provides wings for growth” (2004, 275). This final illustration, which functions as a meaningful paratext, depicts a young Black girl who is secure in her home. Those roots allow her to dream of the larger world as an equally secure space of possibility where she can soar.
In a country marked by virulent anti-Blackness and where Black girls are too often subjected to physical, emotional, and institutional harm, Homemade Love can be a balm and a necessary corrective against persistent media distortions about Black girls’ lives (Price-Dennis et al. 2017, 4). True, hooks’s narrative may be one tiny intervention.
1
For example, Michelle H. Martin cites Ten Little Niggers as having a surprisingly long shelf life, with “multiple versions” published from the 1860s to the 1980s (2004, 20).
NOTES
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Still, the story “[works] with space to make it livable” and sustaining for Black girls (hooks 1990a, 112). The book may not depict specific American towns or city streets, but Girlpie’s nondescript home is one that any child can enter. And what Black girls encounter when entering this story world is the very oppositional consciousness that hooks witnessed in the autonomous Black spaces of her Kentucky youth. As one of hooks’s “small echoes of protest,” Homemade Love is an unexpected “radical creative space which affirms and sustains [Black] subjectivity,” and “gives [Black girls] a new location from which to articulate [their] sense of the world” (1990b, 152, 153). Read ers open the book and see a blueprint of Black girlhood printed with confidence, freedom, and love, one that dismantles disparaging cul tural narratives about Black girls’ lives. Homemade Love puts forth a geopolitical vision that is subtle yet clear: there is no place or space where Black girls do not belong. The interplay of hooks’s text and Evans’s illustrations help Black girls picture a world where they can dream and explore, without fear of boundaries, limitations on their dreams, or assaults to their very beings. Idyllic? Absolutely. But as Brittany Cooper asserts, “[a] Black girl who moves through space on her own terms is a significant threat to white supremacy and patri archy. She is someone refusing the state access to her emotions, her dignity, or her fear” (2015). Girlpie may not subvert the adult-child power dynamic embedded in her storyworld, but she joyfully takes up space in the narrative and in her dreams. Her story demonstrates that with a nurturing environment, Black girls can develop a geo graphic imagination and orientation to the world that makes space for their personal freedom, a healthy sense of self, and peace. By illustrating what homeplace looks and feels like, Homemade Love treats Girlpie and her real-world counterparts as budding geopo litical actors who can construct their own mental maps of a world where even (or especially) for Black girls, only the sky’s the limit, and “everywhere is home.”
2 We see similar concerns in canonical works such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as award-winning middle grade novels including Rita Williams Garcia’s One Crazy Summer (2010) and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear
10 We know this is not always the case given the number of texts that depict physical, sexual, or emotional violence within the home. Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye readily comes to mind.
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WORKS CITED Aarthun, Sarah, and Holly Yan. 2015. “Student’s Violent Arrest Caught on Video; Officer Under Investigation.” CNN, October 27, 2015. Bailey,-student-video/index.html.www.cnn.com/2015/10/26/us/south-carolina-spring-valley-high-schoolhttps://Moya.2010.“TheyAren’tTalkingAboutMe.” Crunk Feminist Col lective. March 14, 2010. /03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/.http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010
3
5 Moya Bailey (2010) coined the term to describe the unique experience of anti-Blackness, racism, and misogyny targeting Black women.
9
My Cry (1975), and critically acclaimed young adult novels like Ibi Zoboi’s American Street (2017), Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), Jacqueline Woodson’s verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), and Elizabeth Ace vedo’s novel-in-verse, The Poet X (2018).
7 As is true of many picture books, Homemade Love lacks pagination.
6 In a 2014 interview with Kevin Quinn, hooks shared that Girlpie literally came to her in a dream.
8 Emergent readers (prekindergarten through first grade) are at the begin ning stages of the reading process. They are often familiar with concepts of print: understanding punctuation, that print carries meaning, that we read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom, that stories have a beginning, middle, and end, etc. They may have some mas tery of letter recognition and letter-sound correspondence.
An earlier version of this essay appears under the title “Decoding the Images: Illustration and Picture Books.”
4 Kentucky, often framed as only Appalachian, also exists geographically and socio-culturally in the American South. In “Kentucky Is My Fate” (2009), bell hooks writes of returning to her home state, noting that while schools routinely taught that “Kentucky was a border state . . . that did not take an absolute position on the issue of white supremacy, slavery and the continued domination of [B]lack folks by powerful whites,” she and other Black folk “saw little difference between the ways Black folks were exploited and oppressed in Kentucky and the lives of Black folks in other parts of the South, places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia” (2009b, 9).
Homemade Love was first released as a picture book in 2002 and reissued as a board book in 2017. The name “Girlpie” appears in hooks’s first pic ture book, Happy to Be Nappy (1999), which celebrates Black girls’ hair.
Analysis of Visual Images in Books for Young People, edited by Holly John son, Janelle Mathis, and Kathy G. Short , 41–58. New York: Routledge. Davis, Thadious. 2011. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 495 Bernstein, Robin. 2017. “Let Black Kids Just Be Kids.” New York Times. July 26, 2017. Bishop,-discrimination.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/black-kidsRudineSims.1990.“Mirrors,Windows,andSlidingGlassDoors.” Perspectives 6 (3): ix–xi. Brooks, Wanda M., and Jonda C. McNair. 2015. “‘Combing’ Through Rep resentations of Black Girls’ Hair in African American Children’s Liter ature.” Children’s Literature in Education, no 46, 296–307. Brown, Ruth Nicole. 2013. Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Butler, Tamara T. 2018. “Black Girl Cartography: Black Girlhood and Place Making in Education Research. Review of Research in Education, no. 42, 28–45. Cooper, Brittney. 2015. “She Was Guilty of Being a Black Girl: The Mun dane Terror of Police Violence in American Schools.” Salon. October 28, 2015. Cooperative_schools/._black_girl_the_mundane_terror_of_police_violence_in_americanhttps://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/she_was_guilty_of_being_aChildren’sBookCenter.2021.“BooksByand/oraboutBlack, Indigenous and People of Color 2018.” Last Modified March 4, 2022. Cox,-statistics/books-by-and-or-about-poc-2018/.https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversityAimeeMeredith.2015.
Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, W. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W., Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda. 2015. Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. New York: African American Policy Forum and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Christensen,Studies.Pia,Allison James, and Chris Jenks. 2000. “Home and Move ment: Children Constructing ‘Family Time.’” In Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, edited by Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Val entine, 139–55. London: Routledge. Cresswell, Tim. 2015. Place: A Short Introduction. West Sussex, UK: Wiley and Sons. Cueto, Desiree, and Wanda M. Brooks. 2019. “Drawing Humanity: How Picturebook Illustrations Counter Antiblackness.” In Critical Content
“African American Children’s Literature: The First One Hundred Years.” The Journal of Negro Education 59 (4): 540–55. Honeyman, Susan. 2005. Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press. . 1990a. “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” In Yearning, 103–14. Boston: South End Press. . 1990b. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” In Yearning, 145–53. Boston: South End Press. . 1990c. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” In Yearning, 41–49. Bos ton: South End Press. . 1996. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt and Company..1999. Happy to Be Nappy. New York: Jump at the Sun. . 2000. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Boston: South End Press. . 2001a. All about Love. New York: William Morrow. . 2001b. Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: HarperCollins. . 2002. Homemade Love. New York: Jump at the Sun. . 2003. “Searching at the Source.” In Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 119–34. New York: Atria Books. . 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Washington Square Press. . 2009a. “Inspired Eccentricity.” In Belonging: A Culture of Place, 135–142. New York: Routledge. . 2009b. “Kentucky Is My Fate.” In Belonging: A Culture of Place, 6–24. New York: Routledge. . 2014. “Conversations from St. Norbert College featuring bell hooks.” By Kevin Quinn. YouTube. August 30, 2014. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=yVuuP9zgshI.
Dewan, Pauline. 2004. The House as Setting, Symbol, and Structural Motif in Children’s Literature. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen. Dodds, Klaus. 2007. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Roberta Price. 2016. “Unforgivable Blackness: Visual Rhetoric, Reader Response, and Critical Racial Literacy.” Children’s Literature in Education, no. 48, 119–33. General Research Division, The New York Public Library. 1957. “Books about Negro Life for Children.” The New York Public Library Digital Col lections. Accessed October 16, 2021. /items/60c25230-5868-0135-57bd-2fc76efc7b60.https://digitalcollections.nypl.org Greenfield-Sanders, Timothy, dir. 2019. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Mag nolia Pictures. https://www.hulu.com/watch/8af70ef3-0707-482a-a0f8 Harris,-ab2d75112e04.VioletJ.1990.
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2001. White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Charac terizations of African Americans, 1830-1900. New York: Routledge. Mallory, Laurel. 2021. “SC Elementary Student with Special Needs Hand cuffed by Police, Activist Say.” WISTV, May 21, 2021. https://www.wistv .com/2021/05/20/sc-elementary-student-with-special-needs-handcuffed Manuel,-by-police/.Carme.
E. Gale Greenlee | Essays 497 . 2015. “Preface to The New Edition.” In Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, ix–xii. 2nd ed. New York. Routledge. Hunt, Peter. 2015. “Unstable Metaphors: Symbolic Spaces and Specific Places.” In Space and Place in Children’s Literature, 1789 to the Present, edited by Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Malini Roy, 23–38. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Jackson, Tambra O., and Gloria S. Boutte. 2009. “Liberation Literature: Positive Messages in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at Free dom Schools.” Language Arts 87 (2): 108–16. Larrick, Nancy. 1965. “The All-White World of Children’s Books.” The Saturday Review. September 11, 1965: 62. Love, Bettina. 2016. “Anti-Black State Violence, Classroom Edition: The Spirit Murdering of Black Children.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13 (1): MacCann,22–25.Donnarae.
2009. “bell hooks’s Children’s Literature: Writing to Transform the World at Its Root.” In Critical Perspectives on bell hooks, edited by Maria de Guadelupe Davidson and George Yancy, 95–108. New York: Routledge. Martin, Michelle H. 2004. Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Chil dren’s Picture Books, 1845 2002. New York: Routledge. McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Car tographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muhammad, Gholnecsar E., and Marcelle Haddix. 2016. “Centering Black Girl Literacies: A Review of Literature on the Multiple Ways of Know ing of Black Girls.” English Education 48 (4): 299–336. Muhammad, Gholnecsar E., and Sherrell A. McArthur. 2015. “‘Styled by Their Perceptions’: Black Adolescent Girls Interpret Representations of Black Females in Popular Culture.” Multicultural Perspectives 17 (3): Myers,133–40.Walter Dean. 2014. “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” New York Times. March 15, 2014. Nodelman,-books.html./2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-childrenshttps://www.nytimes.comPerry.2005.“DecodingtheImages:HowPictureBooksWork.”In Understanding Children’s Literature: Key Essays from the Second Edition of The International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, 128–39. New York: Routledge. Price-Dennis, Detra, Gholnecsar E. Muhammad, Erica Womack, Sher rell A. McArthur, and Marcelle Haddix. 2017. “Multiple Identities and
2016. “Why Black Girls’ Literacies Matter: New Literacies for a New Era. English Journal 48 (4): 290–98. Smith, E. J., and Harper, S. R. 2015. “Disproportionate Impact of K-12 School Suspension and Expulsion on Black students in Southern States.” Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. . 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. 2016. “Stories ‘Still’ Matter: Rethinking the Role of Diverse Children’s Literature Today.” Language Arts 94, no. 2, Thomas,112–119.Ebony Elizabeth, and Amy Stornaiuolo. 2019. “Race, Storying and Restorying: What Can We Learn from Black Fans?” Transformative Works and Cultures 29. Toliver, S. R. 2018. “Imagining New Hopescapes: Expanding Black Girls’ Windows and Mirrors.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 1 (1): Article 3. https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss1/3. West, Cassandra. 1999. “Turning a Negative Image on its Head.” Chicago Tribune. October 13, 1999. -1999-10-13-9910130317-story.html.https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm
498 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Literacies of Black Girlhood: A Conversation about Creating Spaces for Black Girl Voices.” Journal of Language and Literacy Education 13 (2): Purcell,1–18. Darren. 2006. “Geopolitics.” In The Encyclopedia of Human Geogra phy, edited by Barney Warf, 184–86. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Renaud, Catherine. 2015. “The Child’s Imaginary World: The Spaces of Claude Ponti’s Picture Books. In Space and Place in Children’s Litera ture, 1789 to the Present, edited by Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Malini Roy, 193–213. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Sealey-Ruiz,Publishing.Y.
E. GALE GREENLEE is an independent scholar of African American literature and the inaugural (2020–2021) ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Stud ies at The Ohio State University. While a visiting professor at Berea College, she taught courses in young adult literature and Black girl hood geographies, and she co-curated an installation for the new bell hooks center. Her writing and curricula have appeared in Amer ican National Biography, Carolina K-12, the National Humanities
E. Center’s Humanities in the Class digital library, Partnerships: Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, Southern Changes, and Southern Cultures. She recently served as a fellow with the African Ameri can Policy Forum’s Black Girls Matter project and contributed to an upcoming project on Black librarians for Libraries: Culture, History and Society.
Gale Greenlee | Essays 499
JASON REYNOLDS’S STAMPED : A YOUNG ADULT ADAPTATION FOR ALL AGES KAAVONIA HINTON I can’t thank [Jason Reynolds] enough for his willingness to produce this sophisticated remix that will impact generations of young and not so young people.
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022
—Ibram X. Kendi
Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning (2020) joins a centuries-long tradition of adapting adult books for children, and as Ibram X. Kendi notes in the epigraph, such adaptations often play an integral role in fostering crossover readership (Falconer 2009, 11). Yet, critics tend to consider adaptations inferior to the original, arguing that they insult youth, “dumb down” information, assume youth are innocent and unknowing, and include sanitized excerpts free of scenes, words, and points of view that might be deemed inap propriate (Thein, Sulzer, and Schmidt 2013, 52). Perhaps we would view adaptations differently if we examined them as separate texts with less regard to the original, as Linda Hutcheon suggests in A Theory of Adaptation (2012). Hutcheon argues against exploring the
Recent adaptations like Stamped introduce youth to narratives with mature themes such as race and racism. Instead of “dumbing down” or sanitizing Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Reynolds, influenced by his own purposes for writing, created a distinct, innovative, anti racist adaptation that recognizes and respects youth as adept and shrewd. Antiracists combat inequality in society by recognizing and challenging racist beliefs, practices, and policies. Stamped should be read within the tradition of antiracist literature, books that invite self-awareness, self-reflection, change, and action in readers, espe cially White readers, whom authors seek to educate about the reali ties of racism and antiblackness (Ali 2020).
KaaVonia Hinton | Essays
A DIFFERENT VERSION OF ITSELF Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning ’s subject matter, critical acclaim, and bestselling status, coupled with the social and political moment, made Kendi’s history text for an adult audience a prime candidate for a youth adaptation. Kendi traces ideas about Blacks from early artic ulations during the fifteenth century to current day—categorizing them as either segregationist, assimilationist, or antiracist—through
Sophisticated and unstable in response to growing interactivity, connectivity, and access afforded by the digital world, texts such as Stamped cannot be preserved for a single audience (Dresang 1999, 24; Hinton and Carnesi 2017, 80). Like many texts in a tradition of Black nonfiction such as Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave (1968) and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Stamped reveals the arbi trary distinction between children’s and adult literature, as racism is not restricted by age and impacts Blacks and nonblacks across generations. While To Be a Slave and The Fire Next Time represent a number of possible precursors, putting Reynolds in conversation with Lester and Baldwin underscores not only the specific historical context for Stamped and its antiracist intent, but also its pedagogical and aesthetic value. Written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Stamped educates and inspires twenty-first century read ers of all ages to join a freedom struggle that began more than four hundred years ago.
501 fidelity of adaptations and instead asserts adaptations should be studied in three overlapping ways—as product, process, and recep tion (7, 8). Texts in their own right, adaptations present the critic with the opportunity to examine the process and purpose of adap tation as well as its reception across time, locale, and culture (xviii).
1 In an interview Nikole Hannah-Jones conducted with Reynolds and Kendi for School Library Journal, Reynolds tells her that once he took on the task of adapting Kendi’s historical study Stamped from the Beginning, he asked himself, “How do I turn this into a different ver sion of itself? And make it something fresh at the same time” (2020, 38). He accomplished his goal by using his signature voice and style and by following the edict on his website: “Here’s what I plan to do: NOT WRITE BORING BOOKS” (Reynolds 2020). About half the length of the source text, Stamped follows the same thought leaders featured in Kendi’s text and classifies ideas and people as either anti racist or racist (assimilationist or segregationist). But that’s where the similarities end.
While pairing adult writers with well-known YA writers capital izes on the YA author’s established audience, it also suggests the YA author will adapt the text using an approach more closely aligned with the YA genre’s conventions, such as relatable voice, quick pace, relevant themes of identity formation, and social issues.
2 At first glance, this marketing move appears to emphasize boundaries
502 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 the times, intellectual lives, and oral and written expressions of five historical figures: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Kendi’s scholarly text quickly captured attention from an audience of predominantly White American historians and academics. Stamped from the Begin ning won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2016, appeared on numerous bestseller lists, and earned “Best Book” status by main stream publications such as The Boston Globe, Kirkus, and The Wash ington Post. It was also nominated for several awards, including the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Non fiction, 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction. Despite the book’s success, Reynolds initially declined Kendi’s request to adapt Stamped from the Beginning for youth. The only writer given the opportunity to extend his term as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for a third year (2020–2022), Reyn olds has published several books and short stories for youth; sold his first adult book, The Mouthless God and Jesus Number Two, to Scrib ner (Deahl 2020, 14); and won numerous awards, including Coretta Scott King, Michael Printz, and Newbery Honor citations. Despite his accolades, Reynolds admitted to feeling intimidated by the pros pect of adapting Stamped from the Beginning. But Kendi persisted and Stamped, the remix, appeared in 2020 as a co-authored book.
A text firmly rooted in a tradition of Black nonfiction, with obvi ous ties to its source, Reynolds’s Stamped is its own distinct product with both pedagogical and aesthetic value. As a YA writer, Reynolds brings characteristics of the YA genre to the process of transform ing a history book for academics into YA nonfiction. Assumptions about audience shape the choices a YA writer makes, and YA con ventions account for the crossover appeal of Stamped, or what Reyn olds calls a “not history history book” (2020, 3). In The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership, Rachel Fal coner argues that the audience for YA expanded at the turn of the twenty-first century (2009, 2). Books with considerable crossover appeal due to their accessible language, relevant issues and themes, innovative narrative style, postmodern formats, and reader-centric focus include JK Rowling’s Harry Potter (1997–2007) and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (2008–2012) series, as well as single novels like Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005). Katherine T. Bucher and I define YA as “prose or verse that has excellence of form or expres sion in its genre . . . provides a unique adolescent point of view and reflects the concerns, interests, and challenges of contemporary young adults. . . . In sum, it provides a roadmap for readers 12 to 20 years of age” (2014, 8). As this definition implies, the age of interest encompasses new adulthood, although many readers of Harry Potter and/or Twilight (well) above the age of twenty would probably insist those so-called YA books reflect their interests as well. Falconer’s work underscores the arbitrary nature of distinctions between texts for youth and texts for adults as well as between childhood and adulthood. She explains the relatively recent spate of YA books with crossover appeal in terms of shifting “reading tastes” that “reflect changing views of childhood, adulthood and the ambiguous spaces in between” (2009, 7). In Crossover Fiction, Sandra Beckett acknowl edges that youth’s texts that employ innovative topics, formats, and
KaaVonia Hinton | Essays 503 between adult and YA literature, but the recent widespread appeal of YA—Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give (2017)—suggests adaptations such as Stamped appeal to intergenerational readers. Stamped ’s crossover appeal becomes apparent when we read it as both YA literature and antiracist Black nonfiction.
A
NONTRADITIONAL TEXT IN AN ANTIRACIST TRADITION
504 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 techniques that complement the ways we read and interact with dig ital texts (such as white space, bold type, and various font sizes) are more likely to crossover to adults (2009, 260).
While Stamped follows the basic structure of Kendi’s text, using the same five historical figures and categorizing ideas as segrega tionist, assimilationist, and antiracist, Reynolds makes rhetorical choices and uses certain stylistic techniques to invigorate the his torical content for non-academic readers. Reynolds divides his table of contents into “sections” rather than “parts,” labeling them with dates rather than the names of individuals, thereby making it pos sible for readers, particularly youth, unfamiliar with the intellectu als featured to recall prior knowledge about the era. As we might expect, Stamped has fewer chapters, the majority of which Reyn olds retitled. He chose to keep “Uplift Suasion” and “Black Power,” phrases likely familiar (and still relevant) to Black readers. By cre ating entertaining and enticing headings such as “The Story of the World’s First Racist,” “Battle of the Black Brains,” and “Murder Was the Case,” Reynolds captures his readers’ attention and contempo rizes history. Some of the headings are reminiscent of popular pro grams and music. For example, the “Battle of the Brains” is an event at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) where students compete to create solutions to STEM and/or business-related problems, and “Murder Was the Case” is the title of a popular rap song. Typical of nonfic tion for youth, the backmatter contains a “Further Reading” section, highlighting both fiction and nonfiction published between 1845 and 2019, including classics like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), a YA short story collection, Black Enough (2019) edited by Ibi Zoboi, and other work by Reynolds and Kendi. The fact that over half the recommended books were originally marketed to adults suggests the dual audience for this text. How authors view the capabilities of youth readers determines how they write for them. Reynolds’s respect for his readers is evident in the multiple, complex stories, and characterizations of historical and contemporary individuals and events he presents in the text. By asking questions and evoking emotions, he conveys to his read ers his confidence in their ability to critically analyze and reflect on the information he provides. For instance, Reynolds says that after Abraham Lincoln lost a senate election to Stephen Douglas, his rationale for ending slavery failed to recognize the inhumanity of the institution and instead focused on slavery’s impact on poor
An oppositional text, Stamped is also a bridge builder, connecting multiple groups of readers. In Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues, Nancy D. Tolson argues that Black children’s literature cannot be placed solely in the world of children’s literature because much of it contains strong cultural understandings like that within Black literature [for adults]. And this literature is overlooked in much of Black “adult” literary venues
KaaVonia Hinton | Essays 505
Whites: “Because if labor was free, what exactly were poor White people expected to do to make money?” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 100). Reynolds goes on to explain that when Lincoln ran for pres ident, his views shifted even further away from supporting Black people, especially after Lincoln’s Republican party was dubbed the “Black Republicans.” Reynolds explains the significance of Lincoln’s stance: “There were still racists in the North. Still racists every where. And why would racists want to vote for the party ‘in support’ of Black people?” (101). Reynolds’s questions expose Lincoln’s racist ideas and raise readers’ ire, as they discover that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, heroically defending Black people’s right to liberty is a myth. Reynolds does not avoid difficult content in his adaptation. Reynolds’s direct and unflinching statements about rape and how it intersects with race and gender serve as an example: “Rape isn’t something to be taken lightly or to be turned back on the victim as a sharp blade of blame. But during this time, allegations of rape were often used as an excuse to lynch Black men, rooted in the stereotype of the slavery of the Black man and the preciousness of the White woman” (137). Reynolds is frank, concise, and sincere, neither dumb ing down nor sanitizing the text for young readers, thus simultane ously conveying information in a way adults, especially those who would not read an academic work such as Kendi’s, can understand andWhileuse.
Reynolds’s crossover text clearly speaks to the current political moment, seeking to inspire antiracism amid the latest rise of White nationalism, Stamped should be considered within a much larger tradition of Black literature that Rudine Sims Bishop, Violet J. Harris, and Dianne Johnson would call “oppositional.” Oppositional texts counter mainstream cultural stereotypes of Black people as lazy, immoral, unlawful, and/or unintelligent. Stamped teaches Black youth to resist internalizing racism so they can thrive in a racist country, a stance foundational to Black children’s literature as Du Bois and others have defined it (Bishop 2007, 35; Tolson 2008, 5; Har ris 1997, 24; Johnson 1990, 15; Phillips 2013, 592; McNair 2008, 4).
506 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 because it is written for children. So Black children’s literature sits between the two yet has the capability to connect to both. (Tolson 2008, 11) Stamped offers an example of a cross-generational text that draws on both the conventions of YA (considered an aspect of children’s literature) and Black nonfiction often considered as adult literature. Texts aimed at youth in Black American literature might be clas sified as antiracist, texts that seek to encourage readers to identify and oppose racism.
Honor book and an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children’s book, Lester’s To Be a Slave has been difficult to classify because of its organizational structure and sub ject matter. In Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom, Har ris suggests To Be a Slave is a text for adults (1997, 22). Curiously, in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), the entry devoted to Julius Lester, a crossover writer throughout his career, does not emphasize his contribution to children’s literature, though it does mention To Be a Slave (Bloom 1997, 434). These contradictory assessments stem from Lester’s decision to draw from a wide vari ety of texts, including interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project with former enslaved people. Lester kept the stark subject matter and voice in the narratives intact, offering an honest, real istic depiction of enslaved people’s lives from being sold and toil ing on plantations to planning insurrections and eventually being freed. Using italics, Lester inserted his own voice, which coupled with Tom Feelings’s stunning illustrations, creates a representation of a time and an institution, slavery, in US history that established the structural racism that exists today. Lester’s collated quotations from enslaved people, frank and insightful commentary, and Feel ings’ paintings make the book appealing to dual audiences. Lester’s impetus for writing To Be a Slave was initially fueled by childhood memories of his father explaining to him that his ancestors had been enslaved and by his desire to learn his heritage. But his objective evolved into a determination to convey enslaved peoples’ humanity
Lester’s To Be a Slave and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time —two examples of antiracist adaptations aimed at building bridges across audiences—serve as possible antecedents for Stamped. Like Stamped, both texts were created in response to highly fraught moments in the history of race relations in the US and offer his torical perspectives written for multigenerational and multiracial audiences.ANewbery
KaaVonia Hinton | Essays 507 and to inform children and adults of slavery’s atrocious impact on the enslaved and their descendants, Whites, and the nation (8).
A collection of two essays, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is also addressed to an intergenerational and multiracial audience. Though not written for youth, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time still has the poten tial to transcend artificial boundaries around the age and race of its readers, hence its use in secondary schools. Similar to Lester, Baldwin emphasizes racism’s effect on both Blacks and Whites, particularly the disastrous impact of Whiteness, a concept that was rarely dis cussed at that time (Forde 2014, 578). Both essays initially appeared in magazines, The Progressive and The New Yorker, periodicals read by intergenerational liberal Whites (575). “Letter to My Nephew” first appeared in The Progressive in 1962 before it was revised and renamed “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and published in The Fire Next Time. Baldwin begins his letter by comparing young James to his father and grandfather. Next, Baldwin warns his nephew about the importance of self-definition and decolonizing one’s mind before the text reverts back to the content published originally in “Let ter to My Nephew” printed in The Progressive (1962b). In addressing his nephew directly, using a conversational tone and sharing details about his own childhood, Baldwin connects with cross-generational readers and helps them identify racism and its pernicious power over generations of Black people.
Baldwin revised and retitled “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1962, for publication in The Fire Next Time (1963). “Down at the Cross” focuses on Baldwin’s youth, the hypocrisy of religion, especially Christianity, which is complicit in racism in the country, and on the pernicious effects of internalized racism: Negroes in this country . . . are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. . . . White peo ple hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innu merable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he
508 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. (Baldwin 1963, 39–40)
Steeped in oral and sermonic influences often found in Black lit erature, The Fire Next Time uses the stylistic device of the letter for effect/affect, particularly its conversational/personal tone. “My Dun geon Shook,” the first essay in the collection, uses the structure of a traditional letter; however, the second essay’s subtitle, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” suggests it is a letter while it actually begins with epigraphs and takes the form of a traditional essay, though its language, tone, and voice are emblematic of personal correspondence. Because Baldwin’s writing contains an engaging style, Kathy Roberts Forde notes, “Baldwin not only used narrative techniques (such as scene setting, emplotment, and dialogue) but also reported on contemporary events and engaged timely issues” (2014, 575). To Be a Slave, The Fire Next Time, and Stamped are all cross generational texts that use narrative techniques to shed light on racism and its adverse effects on the future of the nation. Stamped ’s timely subject matter, provocative style, and intrigu ing format appeals to youth and adults across race and ethnicity, prompting readers to think about how race, racism, and Whiteness require cross-generational awareness and action if we are to fulfill the country’s democratic promise. All three texts were published during pivotal movements in the US. The Fire Next Time appeared in 1963, the year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote one of the most persuasive letters ever written to White, liberal America, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; civil rights leader Medgar Evers was mur dered; four young girls were killed by the KKK at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place. To Be a Slave arrived in 1968 at the peak of the Black Power Movement. Protests erupted across the country after King was murdered that year, and Black Americans called for explorations of Black history and heritage alongside an emphasis on Black political, economic, aesthetic, and
Baldwin seeks to help readers see, through his depiction of power less children and adults psychologically harmed by racism, why they must confront bigotry and actively combat systemic racism. In doing so, Baldwin encourages reader empathy for the “Negro child” who slowly discovers he must learn to survive in a society where basic human dignities are denied, terror and trauma lurk, and protection is elusive (39).
(Kendi quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 40)
Navigating Black childhood and parenting in an anti-black soci ety is complex. Kendi suggests, just as Baldwin did, that explicit instruction about racism and antiracism can prevent Black youth from internalizing racialized violence such as police brutality. By
intellectual power. Reynolds’s Stamped was published in March of 2020, a year that would go on record as having the largest social justice protest effort in US history (Buchanan, Bui, and Patel 2020).
Two months later, in May, a video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck went viral, making it less possible for nonblacks to ignore contemporary racism and police brutality. For the first time, many nonblacks joined Black Lives Matter pro tests in streets across the US to demand an end to structural racism and violence against Black bodies. Each book—The Fire Next Time, To Be a Slave, and Stamped —inspired by its political moment, illus trates the stranglehold racism has had on the US since slavery. All three texts expand the national narrative to include Black history, educating readers of all ages about racism and inspiring them to becomeThoughantiracist.accessible to readers of all ages and races, Stamped speaks directly to Black children living in a country not substantially differ ent from the one Lester and Baldwin experienced. In the interview with Hannah-Jones mentioned earlier, Reynolds makes it clear he writes to affirm Black youth: “I want to write something that is for them, and about them, that speaks the language that they know, that does not need to be explained, [sort of a code] that is woven into swathes of our culture, to make sure that they feel emboldened, that they feel seen, and visible, and big, and human” (quoted in Han nah-Jones 2020, 37). Echoing Baldwin’s concerns about Black chil dren internalizing racism, Kendi insists on talking to Black youth about the reality of racism: Teaching young people about racism and antiracism protects them. So, that’s the irony. People think they’re protecting these young people by not teaching them. Can you imagine, you’re a 15-year-old Black boy, and you’re constantly harassed by police. And you don’t understand the [nature of police] brutality and harassment and pro filing. That then causes you to look in the mirror and think that they’re harassing you because there’s something wrong with you. But if you understand the way racism operates, you’ll know there’s nothing wrong with you and everything wrong with police brutality.
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affirming Black youth and teaching them how to recognize the sys temic nature of racism, as well as centuries of sustained efforts to combat it, Stamped participates in a long “oppositional” literary tra dition, preparing Black youth to live boldly in a racialized and racist world.While
Both Reynolds and Kendi assume that readers know racism is a problem but lack a critical framework for understanding how it manifests throughout US history as well as a vocabulary for talking about how it operates in our own era. In “A History Book That Isn’t: Finding A Way to Teach Racism to A New Generation,” a 2020 interview with Elissa Nadworny, Kendi makes clear the pedagogical intent of Stamped: “One of the things we’re trying to do with this book is provide people with the vocabulary of how to speak about and understand racism. Know what intimately racism is and how to identify it with language. What we’re trying to do is give people the ability to name what they see, what they experience, what they should be resisting” (quoted in Nadworny 2020). While the “people” Kendi refers to includes youth and adults, he and Reynolds assert that only one group is ready (and eager) to have candid conversations about race and racism. In the interview with Hannah-Jones, Reyn olds presents adults as an obstacle: “I think it’s incredibly arrogant for adults to believe that young people aren’t ready or don’t want to have this discussion. It’s the insecurity of adults that continues to be a blockade for kids who are dying to stretch themselves emotionally and mentally” (quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 39). Kendi agrees: “I think that you have older people who are scared to or don’t know how to teach the history of racism to young people. This book can
Stamped has the express purpose of uplifting and arming Black youth, it has an additional purpose—to educate White read ers. Beginning with its subtitle, the “you” beckons to the reader, who Reynolds views as an agentic potential antiracist open to the book’s prodding, “Something to get you excited about choosing your seat— the right seat —at the table” (2020, 3; emphasis added). Born out of an activist moment, Stamped seeks to foster an activist spirit or attitude in readers, particularly White readers, who might not know how to approach the table, let alone choose a seat. Reynolds also seeks to challenge White readers who might, consciously or not, consider themselves superior. Essentially, Stamped helps White readers under stand the basic concept behind the declaration, Black Lives Matter: Reynolds uses the history of racism to teach Whites living in the twenty-first century that Black people are human.
In “A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Social Studies, Civic Educa tion and Critical Race Theory,” Cynthia Tyson makes clear “Public schools were not designed to stimulate controversy, and classroom teachers are not expected to teach students to question and chal lenge authority” (2003, 21). Reynolds and Kendi hope Stamped gives teachers the courage and confidence to challenge the status quo.
Stamped ’s antiracist message must be embraced by teachers, a key audience, and, in too many cases, another blockade on that bridge Reynolds and Kendi seek to build. White teachers make up the majority of the teaching force and historically have had little interest in or incentive to have frank discussions about race and racism, as many believe the topic has nothing to do with them.
“THIS IS A PRESENT BOOK”: CALLING READERS OF ALL AGES TO ACTION Stamped offers readers an alternative to traditional history books. Reynolds’s use of humor, storytelling, and formatting sets Stamped apart from pseudo-objective texts found in schools. Book blurbs by YA authors Jacqueline Woodson and Renee Watson, on Stamped ’s back cover, serve marketing purposes, but they also shed light on the deficiencies of school-sanctioned history texts. Woodson and Watson both say they wished the history book would have been
Reimagining a text middle school teachers and librarians would likely adopt was a key motivation for adapting Stamped from the Beginning. In an interview with Sue Corbett, for Publishers Weekly, both writers identify middle-schoolers as their target audience: “I want them to have a clear-eyed sense of what the problem is. There are so many people whose journey doesn’t even begin until they get to college. Let’s arm them intellectually, beginning in middle school” (Kendi quoted in Corbett 2020, 12). Equipped with critical thinking and reading skills, youth can then examine racial/racist ideas and codes in other texts, including media and popular cul ture and in the world around them. Acquiring critical racial literacy will, Reynolds and Kendi argue, prepare readers of all ages not just to have meaningful conversations about race but to take a public antiracist stance.
KaaVonia Hinton | Essays 511 show how they can have these conversations and, simultaneously, help them to overcome their fears” (quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 39). Both writers imagine their audience to be youth and adults and their purpose to be building a bridge between them.
512 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 available to them during their youth. Their comments pertain as much to Stamped ’s content as its style, drawing attention to the ageold problem with impersonal, dull, and rigid nonfiction, particularly historical accounts, found mostly, but not exclusively, in textbooks or curriculum supplements intended for young readers. Not only are classroom reading materials often boring, but traditional textbooks are ripe with antiblackness, from misrepresentations of Blacks to ignoring Black people’s historical contributions altogether (Brown and Brown 2010, 140). Reynolds creates a YA nonfiction book that (correctly) assumes its readers have negative ideas about the reada bility of history texts and possess insufficient knowledge of Black history and race/racism in the US. Reynolds describes his text as a new type of history book, “a book that contains history. A history directly connected to our lives as we live them right this minute. This is a present book” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 1–2). Stamped revises standard history textbooks in both content and form, pro viding young as well as adult readers historical knowledge, a critical framework, and a way of thinking and talking about race and racism that they can use.
While Lester uses italics and Baldwin foregrounds his challenging childhood, Reynolds uses a varied language register and other stylistic devices to boldly establish his own presence in the text. He employs a mix of informal and formal diction: “Oh! And there are three words I want you to keep in mind” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 3). Though
Reynolds acknowledges that some readers might be apprehensive about his subject matter, so he proceeds cautiously: Uh-oh. The R-word. Which for many of us still feels rated R. Or can be matched only with another R word— run. But don’t. Let’s all just take a deep breath. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale and breathe out: R A C E . (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 2; emphasis original)
He puts readers at ease by not only suggesting he and they share this anxiety and are therefore connected, but also by convincing readers that they have the tools needed to speak out against racist ideas. By using first person inclusive pronouns, he also suggests he will accom pany them through the difficult parts of the YA book. Is Reynolds coddling readers? No, he is treading carefully, cognizant of the var ying levels of experience readers might have with such difficult and disturbing topics while attempting to establish the trust needed to inspire readers to consider antiracism.
Reynolds uses a directive to invite readers to participate in the text, he uses an interjection to humorously imply what comes next is an afterthought, though a great deal of the premise of the book rests on classifying racist ideas relying on the labels he will define. He presents the complexity of human beings and of what it means to be racist or antiracist while insisting that concepts such as the three used in the book to describe people, ideas, and actions are compli cated, and individuals are full of contradictions. He admits “seri ous definitions” of the terms exist, but “I’m going to give you mine. Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. . . . Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks. . . . [and anti racists] love you because you’re like you” (3–4; emphasis original).
Informal language, friendly tone, and references to air quotes, as understood contemporarily as a form of a wink and a nod, not only work together to define the terms, but these stylistic choices also make terms relatable, amusing, and memorable all while conveying solidarity with the reader. Reynolds also makes fun of himself and pseudoscience when he claims to rebuff comments about his “big head” by embracing the idea that it correlates with having a “big brain ” (91; emphasis original). These self-effacing moves, along with references to his mother throughout the text and the use of first person, build trust with the reader and also lighten the mood of an otherwise weighty and complex topic.
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Reynolds uses asides—text set off parenthetically—on nearly every page, creating a visually appealing, lively, and relatable text. He also uses asides to great effect for humorous and/or ironic pur poses: “Voluntary slaves? Richard Baxter was clearly out of his mind” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 22); “cue the scary music” (32); “gross” (91); “Nooooooooooooo!” (186); “Vote for Hate! ” (191). Reyn olds wants his readers to understand the absurdity of arguing that slavery made Black people savages, so, in an aside, he compares it to telling someone they are attractive: “for a (insert physical attribute that shouldn’t be used as an insult but is definitely being used as an insult. . . . )” (46). Some asides, however, are formally labeled notes; they tend to convey the kind of factual information contained in traditional textbooks, but in a conversational style: “Note: This was the start of the shift, where the Democratic and Republican par ties start transforming into the ones we have today” (152). Reynolds shows his personality as well as his knowledge and investment in his subject matter via these asides, drawing readers into the book and
helping them recognize inequality in society in the past (and pres ent), one of the first steps toward antiracism.
In a discussion of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Reynolds poses a rhetorical question to his readers: “The film was based on a book called The Clansman. Can you guess what this movie was about?” (136). After refuting Benjamin Rush’s claim that Phillis Wheatley was intelligent because she had not been a slave, Reynolds directs his rhetorical question to Rush: “See how that works, Mr. Rush? Mr. Enlightened ? Huh?” (47). Reynolds also often uses rhetor ical questions to emphasize a point and urge the reader to think about what racism and antiracism look like. For instance, activism made Angela Davis a target for politicians who tried to get her fired from her teaching job at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reynolds poses a series of questions in response to Davis’s situation: “But how could she be a threat while at the same time Republicans were claiming racism was over? What would she be threatening? What would she still be fighting? Why would she need to be fired?” (221). The questions, in rapid succession, encourage readers to do two things—interrogate so-called colorblind ideology and imagine themselves as Davis, taking a stand against racism. Reynolds’s rhe torical questions add humor, convey information, advance the nar rative, and engage readers in a living history, one that impacts their everydayReynolds’slives. use of music and language enlivens historical con tent, making his text accessible to a wide audience. Reynolds uses musical references to revitalize interpretations of historical events and figures, adding a performative element long established in Black American literature (Gates 1988, 89; Wiggins, Jr. 1997, 564). Reynolds uses references to music in Stamped in analogies and other creative expressions to contextualize the modern era: “beat drop,”
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Unlike authors of traditional history textbooks, Reynolds uses rhetorical questions to establish a conversational tone, build readers’ trust, and critique historical figures. In the section about Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Prince Henry of Portugal’s biographer, Reynolds asks, “Seems like Zurara was just a liar, right? A fiction writer? So, what makes him the world’s first racist?” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 7). Later, Reynolds points out the absurd and paternalistic nature of arguments against granting land to formerly enslaved Black people by imagining what lawmakers were thinking: “How will they know how to care for the land if it’s just given to them? ” To evoke a chuckle, Reynolds responds to this imagined thought, “Um . . . really?” (109).
“Record scratch,” and “breakbeats of racism—looped samples puls ing on and on” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, x, 46, 92). Entire pas sages of Stamped resemble rap, defined by Gerard Early as a “highly stylized form of chanting, derivative of toasts and aspects of black sermonic recitation” that contains “explicit political content that is meant to express the concerns and preoccupations of young blacks living in urban areas today” (1997, 519). With his references to music, Reynolds further establishes a sense of familiarity and com fort in readers while underscoring the connection between art and activism. Similarly, he uses informal language to establish famil iarity and comfort in readers. When Reynolds discusses Gabriel Prosser’s botched attempt to orchestrate a slave revolt, he puts it this way, “Gabriel Prosser was eventually caught and hanged. Game over. Well, not completely. More like, game changer” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 70). He then goes on to recount the fear Pross er’s attempt evoked which resulted in colonization efforts, includ ing Thomas Jefferson’s idea that enslaved people should be sent to Africa or to the Caribbean. Reynolds’s style helps capture readers’ attention, establish a conversational tone, intimacy, and trust with the reader, and leads readers to interpret events in a way that might lead to Reynoldsactivism.makes creative choices with regard to formatting that further distinguish his text from standard history books. Bold, large fonts, and white space work together to express and evoke emotion, action, and response. Words such as “race” and “privilege,” for example, appear in large, bold font surrounded by white space, demanding attention to content and reminding readers of the un ease and fear the mention of such words invoke in some people (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 2, 27). Creative use of white space and bold font type add to the book’s visual appeal, and the use of white space indicates consideration for intergenerational white readers Reynolds assumes might be encountering frank, historical perspec tives on race/racism for the first time and require a break in the text to process their thoughts and emotions. A blank, grey page prefaces each chapter, and between some chapters and sections, blank, grey pages are accompanied by a page with a small silhouette of either a boy or girl surrounded by whiteness. While digital readers require white space to “pause and reflect” (Dresang 1999, 24), white space in Stamped allows time for processing information and feelings de picted most vividly with periodic uses of the word “ P A U S E ” with space between each letter, visually suggesting inhale and exhale.
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However, “ P A U S E ” written in this way throughout the book serves multiple purposes. Sometimes Reynolds uses it to suggest a reader stop and reflect; other times, he uses it to clarify, change the subject, or emphasize the complexity and contradictions of a historical figure’s actions or words. An example of the latter, com bined with repetition, takes place during Reynolds’s discussion of Thomas He’dJefferson:apologized for slavery— P A U S E. He’d apologized for slavery. U N P A U S E. He’d retired and returned to Monticello, so he could . run his plantation— P A U S E. So he could run his plantation? U N P A U S E . (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 73)
While traditional history books appear to be objective and have pre sented Jefferson as a revered statesman and founding father who was a champion of democracy and proclaimed, “all men are created equal,” Reynolds uses techniques to encourage readers to think critically about Jefferson’s paradoxical statements and actions. At Reynolds’s urging, readers reflect on Jefferson’s apology for slavery alongside his decision to return to Monticello, where his comfort and livelihood were made possible through the toil of enslaved people. Reynolds trusts readers to conclude that Jefferson was more complex and con troversial than traditional history books suggest. Employing formatting devices such as all caps and italics (and occasionally humor), Reynolds writes history that speaks loudly and clearly to his readers. Reynolds combines white space, all caps, and bold text on a page to capture the reader’s attention and to empha size an important, jarring, and often erroneous, anti-black thought. For example, all caps help produce humor, “And in 1776, before anyone could spell W-E W-A-N-T S-L-A-V-E-R-Y, Thomas Jeffer son . . . sat down to pen the Declaration of Independence” (Reyn olds and Kendi 2020, 55–56). Reynolds arranges the final text of a passage that expresses negative views of enslaved Africans on the page as if it is a stanza, the last line, “Africans couldn’t be loved,” is followed by “EVEN BY GOD” (19), connoting both the danger ousness and the absurdity of such a claim. Another example occurs
The placement of the text, the font size, and the repetition prompt readers to slow down, pay attention, and process the contradiction.
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when Reynolds points out that philosopher Lucilio Vanini altered perspectives about Africans: “Like Africans went from savages to SAVAGES, which revved up the necessity for Christian conversion and civilizing” (23). Although the bold font serves to mock and rid icule such a claim, Reynolds skillfully implies that the claim was taken seriously and had grave implications for Black lives. Reynolds uses white space coupled with diction and font size and type not only to encourage pondering and interacting with the written word, but also to emphatically express an idea he hopes to sear into the readers’ minds. Chapter seven, for example, contains one sentence in all caps: “AFRICANS ARE NOT SAVAGES” (53). With one fourword sentence in all caps, Reynolds rejects racism and affirms Black humanity. Reading the text aloud, a reader might feel compelled to add,ThePERIOD.authorof several free verse novels for youth, Reynolds’s pen chant for poetry writing comes through in Stamped, a nonfiction text with both pedagogical and aesthetic value. Reynolds initially con sidered himself a poet before children’s author Christopher Myers convinced him to try writing YA (Biedenharn 2017, 57). In Stamped, Reynolds arranges words and lines like poetry, varying the format of the text and thereby challenging, in dramatic fashion, expecta tions of standard history books. Reynolds’s unconventional method enhances the pedagogical value of his work. For example, when Reynolds offers an example of assimilationist thought, he presents it as poetry:Makeyourself small, make yourself unthreatening, make yourself the same, make yourself safe, make yourself quiet, to make White people comfortable with your existence. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 66)
517
Presenting his argument against assimilation in poetic form, Reyn olds captures the attention of his readers, whose eyes will follow the shifting left margins to the ultimate (and insidious) purpose of assimilation—to placate White people. In another example of text arranged on the page like poetry, Reynolds uses white space, repe tition, and parallel constructions to set the scene for Jonathan Jack son’s attempt to free his brother in the 1960s:
Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin HeCounty.washolding three guns. He took the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors Hehostage.freed
three inmates who were on trial. He led the hostages to a van parked outside. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 194) Reynolds describes the action in a way his readers can see, invoking a sense of Reynoldsurgency.incorporates numerous lists in Stamped, creating an interactive, accessible resource for his readers. Some lists distill a significant amount of information such as the one that sums up hun dreds of years of racist theories about Black people (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 49–50). Other lists provide plot summaries of books and movies such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (94–95) and Planet of the Apes (186) or statements, such as the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Platform” (183–84). These lists allow readers to control their experience with the text: They can either quickly scan information (as many readers do with online resources) or slowly take it in, perhaps in a way that prompts further research of their own. Texts with varied font size and types, bold print, and white space complement a highly stimu lated world, using fonts and graphics to provide the feel of hypertext and multisensory stimulation that allows the reader to determine the extent to which they interact with a given text (Dresang 1999, 12). This type of control is important when readers encounter texts with complex and controversial subject matter such as Stamped. As opposed to traditional history books that encourage rote memoriza tion of dates, people, and events, Stamped promotes critical thinking and a way of talking about race/racism that readers can use in their everydayReynoldslives.personalizes as well as historicizes and contemporizes racism, resisting the dominant impulse to relegate racism to the past. Reynolds explains, for example, that the stances—segrega tionist, assimilationist, and antiracist—can apply to the reader and to him: “And, actually, these aren’t just the words we’ll be using to describe the people in this book. They’re also the words we’ll be using to describe you. And me. All of us” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 4). Reynolds’s suggestion of self-reflection, self-critique, courage, and comradery puts him in direct conversation with Baldwin. At
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While referencing currency and Jordans might suggest the com modification of antiracism, Reynolds is alluding to sneaker culture and using it, as he did with music and other pop culture references in his “present” book, to make his point relatable. Jordans are valuable among “sneakerheads,” and within the sneaker community, opinions on social media can seem trendy, but they can also be quite influen tial, changing the rankings, social status, and resale price of sneakers.
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To attract readers of all ages who might be interested in taking “the right seat” by opposing segregation and assimilation, Reynolds adapted Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning using style, formatting, and techniques absent from standard history books. In his interview with Nadworny, Reynolds reflects on his creative process in a way that erases the arbitrary line between childhood and adulthood: Can I make this something cool? Because there’s currency in cool. There always has been, there always will be. It matters to them. It mattered to me. It still matters to me, right? If it ain’t cool I’m prob ably not gonna rock with it. This is how I am. I’m still that per son . . . how do I take it and make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans.
Writing in the era of challenges to Confederate monuments and Black Lives Matter, Reynolds wants readers to join him and become that “handful” that will change society.
(Quoted in Nadworny 2020)
MAKING ANTIRACISM COOL
the end of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin makes a plea that resonates today, more than fifty years later: If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the rel atively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. (Baldwin 1963, 119)
Sneaker culture references aside, Reynolds aims to be transforma tional. On one hand, the “this” in “make this something cool” is Kendi’s long, scholarly text. Reynolds wanted to take Stamped from the Beginning and “make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans.” Clearly, Reynolds aimed to write an attractive book about a challenging topic readers would want to obtain, read, learn from, and talk about. He also suggests young people gravitate toward things they consider
The author would like to thank the co-editors of this special issue, Laura Dubek and Ellen Butler Donovan, for their insightful comments and keen editing.
NOTES
“cool” and similar qualities continue to attract us aesthetically despite maturity, so why wouldn’t innovative formatting, style, and humor be valued by youth and adult readers alike? On the other hand, the “this” in “make this something cool” is antiracism. Reynolds defines an antiracist as “someone who truly loves,” and he wishes to encour age readers to adopt antiracism in order to rally them to become activists committed to eradicating White supremacy during a time when overt White supremacist ideas and actions in schools, curric ulum, politics, and public spaces like the US Capitol Building are gaining more visibility and viciousness daily. Reynolds asks readers to consider, as Baldwin did before him, what the US would be like if simply loving people as they are became cool. He admits working toward antiracism is challenging and warns readers to move beyond social media activism, telling them to “fight against performance and lean into participation” and “learn all there is to know about the tree of racism. . . . [and] actively chop it down” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 253). Because of Reynolds’s understanding of audience and genre, he created an adaptation that views youth as capable and knowledgeable and that presents race, racism, and power as serious threats to human life, but he does so in a humorous, hopeful, and conversational tone that entertains, encourages, politicizes, and educates readers of all ages. Having an adaptation of Stamped from the Beginning just might take the history in the book to places that only a cool YA “remix” like Stamped can go.
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1 When adapting texts for youth, authorship is typically shared between the author of the original text and the author who adapts it.
2 Stamped is one of many adaptations that involve pairing the adult writ er(s) with a well-known YA writer. In 2019, noted YA nonfiction author Tonya Bolden adapted Carol Anderson’s nonfiction book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (2018), for young adults. In some cases, YA adaptations also have peritext such as fore words written by popular YA writers. For example, White Rage (2016) by Anderson became We Are Not Yet Equal (2018) when Bolden adapted it, and its foreword is written by Nic Stone, bestselling YA author of Dear Martin (2017), an antiracist novel.
The New Yorker, Nov. 17, 1962, 59–144. /letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind.https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17.1962b.“LettertoMyNephew.”
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The Progressive, December 19–20, 1962, 19–20. https://progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew/. . 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial. Beckett, Sandra. 2009. Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Biedenharn, Isabella. 2017. “Young Adult’s Bright Prince.” Entertainment Weekly 14 (38): 56–57. Bishop, Rudine Sims. 2007. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of Afri can American Children’s Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bloom, Karen R. 1997. “Lester, Julius.” In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Fos ter, and Trudier Harris, 434. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Keffrelyn D., and Anthony L. Brown. 2010. “Silenced Memories: An Examination of the Sociocultural Knowledge on Race and Racial Violence in Official School Curriculum.” Equity & Excellence in Education 43 (2): Buchanan,139–54.Larry, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. 2020. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” New York Times. July 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us /george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.
Bucher, Katherine T., and KaaVonia Hinton. 2014. Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson. Corbett, Sue. 2020. “Unearthing the Roots of Racism with Jason Reyn olds and Ibram X. Kendi.” Publishers Weekly 267 (2): 12. Deahl, Rachel. 2020. “Deals.” Publishers Weekly 267 (30): 14–15. Dresang, Eliza T. 1999. Radical Change: Books for Youth in the Digital Age. New York: H. W. Wilson. Early, Gerard. 1997. “Music.” In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 517–19. New York: Oxford University Press. Falconer, Rachel. 2009. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge. Forde, Kathy Roberts. 2014. “The Fire Next Time in the Civil Sphere: Lit erary Journalism and Justice in America 1963.” Journalism 15 (5): 573–88. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
522 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 2020. “Remixing it Up: Jason Reynolds Recast Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and It Is Not a History Book.” School Library Journal 66 (3): 37–41. Harris, Violet J. 1997. “Children’s Literature Depicting Blacks.” In Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom, edited by Violet J. Harris, 21–58. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers. Hinton, KaaVonia, and Sabrina Carnesi. 2017. “On the Street: A ‘Radi cal Change’ in Urban Fiction Featuring Youth.” The Dragon Lode 35 (2): Hutcheon,79–88. Linda. 2012. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Taylor & Fran cis Group. ProQuest Ebook Central. Johnson, Dianne. 1990. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. McNair, Jonda C. 2008. “Comparative Analysis of The Brownies’ Book and Contemporary African American Children’s Literature Written by Patricia C. McKissack.” In Embracing, Evaluating, and Examining Afri can American Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair, 3–29. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Nadworny, Elissa. 2020. “A History Book That Isn’t: Finding A Way to Teach Racism To A New Generation.” NPR. March 14, 2020. https:// www.npr.org/2020/03/14/814630039/a-history-book-that-isnt-finding Phillips,-a-way-to-teach-racism-to-a-new-generation.MichelleH.2013.“TheChildrenofDouble Consciousness: From ‘The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book.’” PMLA 128 (3): 590–607. Reynolds, Jason. 2020. “About.” Jason Reynolds. https://www.jasonwrites books.com/about. Accessed Sept. 15, 2020. Reynolds, Jason, and Ibram X. Kendi. 2020. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Thein, Amanda Haertling, Mark Sulzer, and Renita Schmidt. 2013. “Engaging Students in Democracy through Adolescent Literature: Les sons from Two Versions of Wes Moore’s Memoir.” English Journal 103 (2): Tolson,52–59.Nancy. D. 2008. Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues: The Creativ ity of Black Writers and Illustrators. New York: Peter Lang. Tyson, Cynthia. 2003. “A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Social Studies, Civic Education and Critical Race Theory.” In Critical Race Theory Per spectives on Social Studies: The Profession, Policies and Curriculum, edited by Gloria Ladson-Billings, 15–25. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Wiggins,Publishing.William H., Jr. 1997. “Performance and Pageants.” In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews,
Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 564–65. New York: Oxford University Press.
KAAVONIA HINTON is a professor in the Teaching & Learning Department at Old Dominion University and the author of several articles and books, including Angela Johnson: Poetic Prose (2006), Inte grating Multicultural Literature in Libraries and Classrooms in Secondary Schools (with Gail K. Dickinson, 2007), Sharon M. Draper: Embracing Literacy (2009), and Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation, 3rd ed. (with Katherine T. Bucher, 2013). She is also the co-editor of the book series, Life Writing in Education (Informa tion Age Publishing).
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COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 DREAM KEEPERS ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK
When Langston Hughes made his literary debut in the pages of The Brownies Book and The Crisis in 1921, the nineteen-year-old could not have imagined the incredible impact he would have on generations of writers. This section contains profiles of artists of that next gen eration and their work for children and young adults. Drawing from existing scholarship scattered among various monographs, reference works, articles, reviews, and interviews, we present these biographi cal sketches alphabetically, without regard to whether the artist has been recognized as a writer for children or adults. Our intent is to prompt scholars and teachers of American literature, African Amer ican literature, and children’s/YA literature to commit to a fully integrated canon where Black children, too, sing America.
Since its publication in 1970, Maya Angelou’s first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has garnered praise and generated controversy. A Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Best Book for Young Adults (1970) and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book (1971), Angelou’s frank and lyrical accounting of her traumatic coming-of-age raises questions about appropriate content for young readers, content that often prompts book banning campaigns. The
MAYA ANGELOU (1928–2014)
In Caged Bird, Angelou credits two women with provid ing her the stability and love she needed to thrive: her grandmother and Mrs. Flowers, a teacher in Stamps who gave her poetry to read and recite. Angelou spent her adolescence living in San Francisco with her mother. At age sixteen, one month after graduating from Mission High School, she gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson. In the six autobiographies that follow Caged Bird, Angelou chronicles a rich and full life of artistry and political activism. She married and divorced three times, the first marriage to Tosh Angelos (1949–1952), whose name she changed and made her own. From 1981 to her death in 2014, Angelou served as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. A prolific writer, Angelou produced autobiographies, poetry, pic turebooks, and various media for young people. Her second autobi ography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), focuses on her life from
American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Free dom (OIF) has collected data on challenges to books since 1990. The reasons cited for challenging Caged Bird include offensive language, sexually explicit content, violence, and unsuited for age group. In an interview published in Journal of Reading, Joyce Graham asks Angelou to specify the appropriate age for Caged Bird, something the writer refuses to do. Angelou does, however, offer a response that suggests her faith in adolescents’ ability to tackle tough subjects: “I think a young man or woman of 14 . . . by the age of 14 and certainly by 15, an American child should have read The Grapes of Wrath, Intruder in the Dust, Main Street, American Dilemma, Armies of the Night, The Amer ican Way of Death, Woman Warrior, and The Fire Next Time so that they will know what their country is made of” (quoted in Graham 1991, 409). James Baldwin, the author of the last text on Angelou’s reading list, suggested the power of Angelou’s work for both young and adult readers: “I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved” (1970).
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Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou spent most of her childhood with her grandmother, Annie Hender son, in Stamps, Arkansas. The child of divorced parents, she also spent time in St. Louis with her mother, Vivian Baxter. Baxter’s boy friend raped eight-year-old Maya, the poet who would grow up to pen “And Still I Rise” (1978) responding to her trauma by refusing to speak for five years. (Her uncles responded to her rape by murdering the rapist.)
Ellen Butler Donovan and
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age seventeen to nineteen. In the 1980s, she published Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, illustrated by Etienne Delessert (1986); Maya Angelou: Poems (1986); and Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), a response to drawings of Black women by Tom Feelings. In her literary history of Black children’s literature, Rudine Sims Bishop notes that Sheba is “not a tribute to children, but a powerful and sensuous celebration of Black womanhood. As such, its primary audience is likely to be found among teenagers and adults” (2007, 100). In the 1990s, Ange lou published a poetry collection, I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), as well as three picturebooks illustrated by Margaret Courtney-Clarke: And My Best Friend is a Chicken (1994), My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996). Kofi introduces children to an Ashanti boy and his life in a West African village. In 2002, a picturebook series promoting cultural diversity called “Maya’s World” launched with Angelina of Italy, followed by Izak of Lapland (2004), Renee Marie of France (2004), Mikale of Hawaii (2004), and Cedric of Jamaica (2005). Angelou’s work has provided inspiration for other artists. In Life Doesn’t Frighten Me: Poem (1993), Sara Jane Boyers presents Ange lou’s poem, published in 1978, alongside paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, produced during the 1980s, in a stunning picturebook. Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem (2005) became a picturebook in 2008, with mixed-media illustrations by Steve Johnson and Lou Fan cher. Amazing Peace was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Children. Readers of all ages have various opportunities to learn about Angelou. In 1979 CBS produced a television adaptation of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (screenplay by Angelou). Her work appears in multiple collections, including My Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1983), illustrated by Tom Feelings; Who Do You Think You Are?: Stories of Friends and Enemies (1993); and Read and Rise (2006). Her profile in the picturebook series, Poetry for Young People, was named a Best Book by School Library Journal Book Review Stars (2007), Middle and Junior High School Library Catalog (2008), and Best Children’s Books of the Year (2008). Many of her books have sound recordings and/or video adaptations, and she narrates for other artists’ work, including Mark Bozzuti-Jones’s Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, illustrated by Romare Bearden (2003) and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.
Angelou is featured in several reference volumes devoted to YA writers: Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers (St. James Press),
Writers for Young Adults (Scribner’s), and Authors & Artists for Young Adults (Gale).
James Baldwin’s niece remembers exactly how she felt when her famous uncle’s book for children arrived at her house in 1976: “It was just magical,” she tells Alexandra Alter. “It showed how much we meant to him, and how sacred and precious our young lives were to him” (A. Karefa-Smart quoted in Alter 2018). Alter interviewed Aisha Karefa-Smart and her brother Tejan Karefa-Smart for a New York Times story about the reissue of Baldwin’s Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood by Duke University Press in 2018. Aisha and Tejan were the inspirations for two of the book’s characters: eightyear-old Blinky and four-year-old TJ.
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Originally published in 1976 by Dial Press, Baldwin’s book about Black childhood has, until recently, been largely if not completely ignored. A towering figure in the African American literary tradi tion, Baldwin merits mention in encyclopedias focusing on World Biography, US History, Twentieth-Century Literature, African American Literature, and Theater. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Amer ica Literature (2005) contains the most comprehensive biographical essay on Baldwin and his work, and yet even that essay includes no mention of his children’s book; Little Man Little Man does not even appear in the list of Baldwin’s Selected Works. The lack of critical attention to Little Man reflects, in part, the perception that the book stands alone and apart from Baldwin’s other work. Nicholas Boggs, the scholar largely responsible for its reissue, underscores this point, arguing that the book’s consignment “to the footnotes of Baldwin’s career and to the margins of both the African-American literary tradition and the field of children’s literature” should not surprise us because “there is simply no other book quite like it” (2015, 131).
While granting a measure of originality to Baldwin’s children book, a more convincing explanation for why Little Man has been ignored is the apartheid in and of (Black) children’s literature that this Spe cial Issue calls on critics to end.
In his dismissive reading of Little Man Little Man for The New York Times Book Review in 1977, Julius Lester, a Newbery Award Winner,
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JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987)
Beginning in January 2022, she will appear on a series of commemorative quarters, part of an effort to represent women on US currency. Nearly all of Angelou’s work remains in print or acces sible in sound recordings and/or video.
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Lester’s view about established writers for adults venturing into the world of children’s books is often shared by reviewers, who serve as gatekeepers for which books get purchased, read, and written about.
In a review of Little Man Little Man for School Library Jour nal, Linda Silver, an Ohio librarian, declares Baldwin’s book a fail ure because child readers will be “forced to reconcile their point of view with TJ’s, with the author’s, and with the illustrator’s, which is sometimes grotesque.” While not specifying such grotesqueness, Silver includes an illustration that features the alcoholic Miss Lee descending the stairs with text not included in Baldwin’s book: “Tipsy and tantalizing, Miss Lee lets TJ feel like a ‘Little Man.’”
For Silver, the fatal flaw of the book seems to be that it is all just too real, the world TJ experiencing too complex for his young mind to process. She concludes that “Baldwin writes through children to other adults” (Silver 1979, 29).
Little Man Little Man does seem different from Baldwin’s other, more familiar work, but in many ways the book is quintessential Baldwin—fearless, prescient, lyrical, compelling, and full of com passion for its characters. The watercolor illustrations by Yoran Cazac complement a story that seeks to portray the realities of Black urban life through the perspective of four-year-old TJ. The subject matter engages directly with debates in children’s literary studies about childhood innocence and race as TJ witnesses drug use, police brutality, and alcoholism. The book’s theme—the redemptive power of love—resonates throughout Baldwin’s complete oeuvre, and its insistence on the necessity and power of literacy strikes the domi nant chord in the African American literary tradition.
Reading Baldwin’s children’s book within the context of his rela tionship with Richard Wright makes visible a through line otherwise
betrays a preference for one aspect of children’s literary apart heid: “Children’s literature is a genre unto itself,” Lester insists, “as demanding in its way as that more generally knighted as ‘literature.’ Literary figures seldom recognize this, and their attempts to write for children are often embarrassing.” While acknowledging that Lit tle Man shares features of books written for young readers, Lester uses his review to protest what he views as one artist’s encroachment on another’s territory: “Children’s literature is a province of its own, a fact which the literati do not take seriously enough” (1977). Bald win would probably agree with both those assertions while avoiding the conclusion that writers should limit their work to certain genres, subjects, and audiences.
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ARNA BONTEMPS (1902–1973)
The reissue of Little Man Little Man gives scholars new opportu nities not only to discuss Baldwin’s work and legacy but to challenge common perspectives and prejudices related to his spectacular and arresting work for children.
obscured by a critic’s preoccupation with genre and audience. Bald win made his writing debut in 1949 with a contentious essay in Par tisan Review. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” marks the beginning of a series of writings in which Baldwin responds to Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), the first novel by a Black writer chosen for the Book-of-the-Month club. In that oft-cited article, Baldwin critiques Wright for presenting Black people in ways that deny the complex ities and joys of Black identity and life. While Boggs points out that Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood signifies on Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood (1945), he puts more emphasis on the setting of the final scene (a basement apartment) and thus the book’s connection to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Given TJ’s age, Mr. Man’s occupation (super of the build ing), and Miss Beanpole’s penchant for watching at her window, a more apt connection may be to Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). Like Baldwin, Petry also published works for children as well as featured child characters in her adult novels. Connections could also be made between the Black urban childhood in Little Man and works by June Jordan, Walter Dean Myers, and others.
Arna Bontemps was the first Black author to be recognized by the American Library Association with a Newbery Honor for his his tory for children, The Story of the Negro (1948). He and Langston Hughes were the first Black writers for children to be published by mainstreamBontempspresses.wasborn in Alexandria, Louisiana, where his family had deep roots. Before Bontemps started school, racial violence and persistent outbreaks of tuberculosis prompted the extended family to migrate to Southern California where they settled in a semi- rural community that would eventually become Watts. His parents con verted to Seventh Day Adventism from their childhood religious training (his father was raised a Catholic and his mother a Method ist), his father eventually becoming a minister. The denomination enforced strict rules about exposure to secularism, practices which shaped Bontemps’s education and career. His mother died from
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tuberculosis when he was eleven. His father sent Bontemps to live with his maternal grandmother on her farm in a nearby rural area where he was exposed to Black folk culture through his grandmoth er’s brother who served as a source of stories, family history, songs, and connection to remaining family members in Louisiana. In part to separate Arna from this influence and culture, which his father repudiated, the senior Bontemps sent him to a Seventh Day Advent ist boarding high school. Arna subsequently attend Pacific Union College, also associated with the denomination. At each institution he was the only or one of the only Black students. Arna’s relationship with Seventh Day Adventism became increasingly conflicted: read ing fiction was prohibited, and his father never accepted his deci sion to become a writer. Yet, Arna taught at Seventh Day Adventist schools in New York, Alabama, and Chicago to support himself and his family for over a decade. After graduating from Pacific Union, Bontemps determined to build a career as a poet. Returning to his father’s home, he took sev eral jobs to earn his keep while he wrote. In 1924, his first published poem, “Hope,” appeared in Crisis. This achievement prompted him to move to New York City where he soon met Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the other young writers who would become illustrious in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926 and 1927, Bontemps received further accolades in the form of the Alexander Pushkin Award for Poetry offered by Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life and a first prize for poetry from Crisis. Bontemps’s participation in the inner circle of Harlem Renaissance writers diminished when he married Alberta Johnson in 1926 and they started a family. Bontemps’s family respon sibilities shaped his career: he scrambled for teaching and other jobs to supplement his writing income and even after he took the posi tion of Chief Librarian at Fisk in 1943, he bemoaned the lack of time he could devote to writing. Bontemps began his career writing for adults, publishing poetry and novels. But in 1931, he invited Hughes to collaborate on a story for children based on Hughes’s observations of Haitian life collected during his trip to the island in 1931. The result, Popo and Fifina, Chil dren of Haiti, illustrated by E. Campbell Simms (1932), was commer cially successful. It was followed by You Can’t Pet a Possum, illustrated by Ilse Bischoff (1934), written when Bontemps and his family lived outside of Huntsville, Alabama. The story follows eight-year-old Shine Boy’s widening experiences in his Black rural neighborhood, including his adoption of a stray dog, meeting new friends, and a
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek trip to Birmingham to visit his uncle. The novel concludes with Shine Boy celebrating his ninth birthday, his birthday wish before he blows out the candles on his cake expressing a continuation of the joys and pleasures of his life. Though the illustrations reinforce neg ative stereotypes, the story depicts a close-knit joyful community.
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Like many Black authors of his generation, Bontemps wrote for children to remedy the absence of literature that reflected Black cul ture, identity, and language. He recounts that as a twelve-year-old he scoured the local library for information about Black history and found nothing. His writing for children includes tall tales, realis tic fiction, biography, and historical fiction and was written for a range of childhood readers. He produced the first comprehensive collection of Black poetry for children, Golden Slippers: An Anthol ogy of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, illustrated by Henrietta Bruce Sharon (1941). The anthology includes not only work by his contem poraries such as Hughes and Effie Lee Newsom and respected poets of the previous generation such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, but also traditional rhymes, folk songs, and ballads. Sad-Faced Boy (1937), illus trated by Virginia Lee Burton, the first children’s story set in Har lem, and Lonesome Boy (1955), illustrated by Felixs Topolski, depict the complexity of Black childhood with sensitivity and humor. In addition to writing biographies of famous figures such as Fred erick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver, Bontemps profiled contemporary individuals who success fully pursued careers previously unavailable to Blacks in We Have Tomorrow, written with Maria Palfi (1945). Tomorrow, designed for adolescents on the cusp of making plans regarding the course of their own lives, is an early example of young adult nonfiction. Bon temps won a Newbery Honor for The Story of the Negro, illustrated by Raymond Lufkin (1948; rev. 1955), his history of Africa and the Black diaspora, written in his characteristic intimate and friendly narra tive voice. In Chariot in the Sky, illustrated by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge (1951), Bontemps introduces readers to the history of the Fisk Jubi lee Singers in a novel about an enslaved teen who gains his freedom after the Civil War and, when he hears of the new school that will admit Blacks, travels to Nashville in hopes of furthering his edu cation. Chariot is among the first historical novels for children that features the Black experience.
Bontemps collaborated with Jack Conroy to write a number of tall tales in the 1940s and 1950s: The Fast Sooner Hound, illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton (1942); Slappy Hooper, the Wonderful Sign Painter,
illustrated by Ursula Koering (1946); and Sam Patch, the High, Wide & Handsome Jumper, illustrated by Paul Brown (1951). He also wrote a history of Black migration in the US: They Seek a City (1945; reis sued in 1967 as Anyplace But Here). A number of Bontemps’s stories were published posthumously, including two collaborations with Hughes—The Pasteboard Bandit, illustrated by Peggy Turley (1997) and Boy of the Border, illustrated by Antonio Castro L. (2009), both of which feature a Mexican boy as the protagonist—as well as his fantastical Bubber Goes to Heaven (written in 1932 or 1933; pub. 1998) depicting heaven as an idealized Black community.
Despite minimal recognition during his lifetime, Bontemps’s contribution to the tradition of Black children’s literature is signif icant. In addition to his ground-breaking work in providing books, stories, and poems to young Black readers, Bontemps, like Hughes, celebrated Black folk culture and Black language in the face of derogatory stereotypes, and he presented Black vernacular to young readers in an easy-to-read manner and without caricature.
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The biographical headnote for Gwendolyn Brooks in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature urges readers to consider Brooks’s novel, Maud Martha (1953), alongside the poetry for which she is much better known. Indeed, the coming-of-age novel, com prised of thirty-four vignettes, develops themes and sounds notes similar to those found in much of Brooks’s award-winning poetry. The same could be said for the work Brooks wrote specifically for children: Bronzeville Boys and Girls, illustrated by Ronni Solbert (1956); Family Pictures (1970); Aloneness (1971); The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, illustrated by Timothy Jones (1974); Beckonings (1975); Young Poet’s Primer (1980); Very Young Poets (1983); Winnie (1991); and Children Coming Home (1991). For eighty-three years, Brooks called Chicago home. The South Side was the inspiration for and the focus of much of her work. Keziah Corinne Wims, her mother, taught elementary school in Kansas before moving to Illinois with her husband and newborn daughter. David Anderson Brooks worked as a janitor and filled the family home with books. Keziah made sure Gwendolyn and her brother had library cards. At age seven, young Brooks wrote her first verses, and at age thirteen, she saw her poem “Eventide” published in American Childhood, a magazine for young readers. She met James
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000)
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Brooks published her first work specifically for children seven years after she won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949). In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Lit erature, Rudine Sims Bishop puts Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) in company with work by Countee Cullen and Effie Lee Newsome, noting that several of the poems in Bronzeville are widely anthol ogized and “after a half century, can be considered classics among contemporary American poetry” (Bishop 2007, 56). In 2007, Amistad/HarperCollins reissued Brooks’s Bronzeville with illustrations by Faith Ringgold. The book earned a Parents’ Choice Award in Poetry, and several publications named it a Best Book, including Booklist, Children’s Catalog, Choices, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly.
Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936 and married Henry Blakely three years later. She had two children: Henry (1940) and Nora (1951).
Reviewers called attention to the timeless quality of Brooks’s poems as well as Ringgold’s stunning and vibrant illustrations, which, com pared to the pencil sketches of the original 1956 version, leave no doubt as to the racial identity of the children whose urban lives Brooks and Ringgold both celebrate. In 1969, Brooks left her publisher, Harper & Brothers, making a conscious choice to publish in, and thus support small Black presses: the Detroit based Broadside, Chicago’s Third World Press, and her own Brooks Press and the David Company, both launched in 1982. From 1969 until her death in 2000, Brooks served as poet laure ate of Illinois, establishing yearly awards for young people that she funded herself. She lectured at colleges and gave countless readings at schools, prisons, and hospitals. In 1983 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and in 1989 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Brooks considered the Jefferson Lecturer Award, which she received in 1994, to be her greatest honor.
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Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, each of whom encouraged her to keep writing. And she did, becoming a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender at age seventeen; more than seventy-five of her poems appeared in the Black newspaper’s “Lights and Shadow” column.
Brooks warrants mention in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, Nancy L. Huse calling her “innovative and exacting in depicting the social construction of childhood” (2006). Haki R. Madhubuti, who had a close personal relationship with Brooks,
The second of six children of parents who emigrated from Anti gua, Bryan grew up in the vibrant immigrant community of the Bronx. He made books beginning in kindergarten where, as part of the process of learning the alphabet, the students drew pictures to illustrate each letter and the teacher provided the materials to bind the pictures together into a book. He credited that experience with his desire to make books, a hobby that continued throughout his childhood. At the age of sixteen, he graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School and compiled a portfolio to serve as an appli cation for a scholarship to art school. Despite fine praise for the quality of his portfolio, he was told a scholarship to a “colored” stu dent would be a “waste.” Bryan describes this experience as his first confrontation with racism (Virtual Maine Arts 2020). On the advice of his high school teachers, he enrolled in a semester long postgradu ate program at his high school and the following summer sat for the entrance exam to Cooper Union College of Art and Architecture, which did not require an interview and which offered (until 2012) a tuition-free art program. He was accepted into that program, but his education was interrupted by World War II. Bryan continued to draw throughout his war service (which included the invasion at
ASHLEY BRYAN (1923–2022)
describes her legacy as “that of poet, teacher, advocate for children and ‘little people’ and a person who lived a life promoting kindness and quality” (2000, 15). Known for his participation in the Black Arts Movement, Madhubuti founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Creative Writing and Black Literature at Chicago State University in 1990. At the time of Brooks’s death in 2000, he served as director emeritus, honoring the legacy of the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize, a writer whose career spanned more than fifty years and continues to find expression in the work of others. Jan Spivey Gilchrist illustrated Brooks’s poem in We Are Shining (2017), and the first volume of Graphic Gwendolyn (2021), an illustrated poetry series, features two of Brooks’s poems in comic book form—“Tommy” and “The Boy Died In My Alley.”
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Bryan described himself as an artist-teacher, a description that remained true to his artistic commitment until the end of his life. As a storyteller, illustrator, and artist, Bryan viewed his body of work as engaging his audience of adults and children with “Black contribu tions to our world” (Virtual Maine Arts 2020).
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Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek Omaha Beach), keeping his sketchbook in his gas mask and sending home his drawings for safe keeping. His war experience profoundly affected him, prompting him to enroll as a philosophy major at Columbia University. After his graduation in 1950, he studied paint ing in France, returned to the Bronx where he taught art to children for a few years, and then received a Fulbright to study painting in Germany.When he returned to the US from Germany, he built a career combining teaching with making art, particularly illustration, using his income to help raise his sister’s five children. He taught art at Queens College, The Dalton School, Lafayette College, after school programs for children, and Dartmouth University (1974–1988). Prior to his entrance into the children’s publishing market, Bryan produced the drawings for the first illustrated version of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1950). In 1962 Jean Karl, an editor at Atheneum, offered him a contract to produce the illustrations for Rabindranath Tagore’s Mood, For What Do You Wait?, a collection of poems. That book launched his career as an illustrator and author for children.
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Bryan’s work for children is marked by three gravitational centers: African tales, African American spirituals, and Black American poetry. He sought to make this cultural production accessible to a broad audience unfamiliar with African and Black American creativ ity. His illustrated versions of African tales are based on his research in anthropological and linguistic accounts of oral storytelling which he then adapts in his own storytelling style. As a storyteller, he is par ticularly interested in the aurality of tales, drawing on the sonic tech niques of poetry (rhythm, rhyme, syncopation, onomatopoeia) for his prose retellings. He believed that readers will better engage with a text if they can hear the “voice of the printed word” (Reading Rock ets 2011). His illustrated tales include The Ox of the Wonderful Horns and Other African Folktales (1971); The Dancing Granny (1978), adapted as a stage play in 2017; Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (1987); Ashley Bryan’s African Tales, Uh Huh (1998); and Beautiful Blackbird (2003).
Bryan’s interest in African American spirituals was motivated by the fact that these ubiquitous songs are not credited as Black cultural production. Bryan noted that though songs like “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” are well known and sung around the world, they are often described or categorized as American traditional songs, thereby appropriating the contribution of Black Americans. By creating illustrated versions of these songs, including beautiful wood-cut illustrations of the music, he intended to make
Other notable accomplishments include his illustrations for an edition of How God Fix Jonah by Lorenz Graham (2000) and Freedom Over Me (2016), imagined first-person free verse poems based on the Fairchild’s Appraisement of the Estate document dated July 5, 1828, which lists for sale eleven enslaved persons as well as livestock and cotton.Bryan won numerous awards. He received the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement given by the Amer ican Library Association and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for Lifetime Achievement (known as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) given by the Association of Library Service to Children. Three of Bryan’s books have received the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award: Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (1987); Beau tiful Blackbird (2003); and Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals (2007).
Bryan’s illustrated books of Black American poets include I Greet the Dawn. Poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1978); Ashley Bryan’s ABC of African American Poetry (1997); Sail Away. Poems by Langston Hughes (2015); and I am Loved by Nikki Giovanni (2018).
Bryan was awarded Coretta Scott King Honor designations for five books: What a Morning!: The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals (1987); Ashley Bryan’s ABC of African American Poetry (1997); All Day, All Night: A Child’s First Book of African American Spirituals (1991); Free dom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought Back to Life (2016); and Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to PeaceUntil(2019).just before his death in 2022, Bryan continued to participate in storytelling and making art, including toys, stained glass panels
536 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 them available to children as the legacy of the Black experience of slavery and religious faith. His illustrated collections of spirituals include Walk Together Children. Black American Spirituals, Vol. 1 (1974); I’m Going to Sing. Black American Spirituals, Vol. 2 (1982); All Night. All Day. A Child’s First Book of African-American Spirituals (1991); and Let It Shine. Three Favorite Spirituals (2007). A number of these collec tions have been reissued multiple times.
Bryan’s interest in Black American poetry resulted in picture books which illustrate poems by Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Paul Laurence Dunbar and illustrations for larger multi-author collections anthologized by others. Bryan’s lifelong career as a sto ryteller is also shaped by his love of the poetry of Black Americans. He began every storytelling performance, whether with children or adults, with a call-and-response rendition of Hughes’s “My People.”
The year after Clifton published Good Times (1969), her first collection of poetry, she published the first in what would be an eight-book, critically acclaimed series for young readers revolving around the ordinary adventures of six-year-old Everett Anderson. In the 1970s, Clifton also produced fourteen picturebooks, giving Rudine Sims Bishop cause to call her “the predominant voice in African American picturebooks of that decade” (2007, 120). Young Adult writer Walter Dean Myers remembers the 1970s as a time when “things were looking up. I believed that my children and their contemporaries would not only escape the demeaning images I had experienced but would have strong, positive images as well” (1986, 50). Clifton’s publications for children provided cause for such optimism.WhenClifton began writing, she had six children under the age of ten. Their questions, as well as the lack of Black history in school curricula, motivated her to write books that instilled cultural pride in young Black readers. The Black BC’s, illustrated by Don Miller (1970), is an alphabet book and primer on Black history. All Us Come Cross the Water, illustrated by John Steptoe (1973), follows young Uja maa as he researches his family history for a school assignment. Uja maa’s great-grandmother, the family griot, tells him that her roots go back to 1855 Whydah in Dahomey (just as Clifton’s do). Ujamaa then visits the Panther Book Shop, where he gets a lesson in slavery
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 537 made with sea glass, puppets made from beach detritus, paintings, illustration, and books. Bryan’s art has been featured in museums and galleries, and the Ashley Bryan Center (a digital space) seeks to further his educational goals and artistic legacy. His material archive is housed at The Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania.
LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936–2010)
Lucille Clifton has the distinction of being recognized in both The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (though her entry is scant) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Her poetry appears in a wide range of anthologies and collections, indicating her range, versatility, and popularity. In biographical headnotes and essays, critics typically highlight aspects of Clifton’s writing for adults—economical language, affirmation of Black urban life, a focus on family history and relationships, optimism, and resilience in the face of adversity—that can be found, in equal measure, in her more than twenty books for children.
538 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 and naming from Tweezer. Both elders—Big Mama and Tweezer— contrast the ignorance and insensitivity of the Black school teacher, who calls Ujamaa “Jim.”
Clifton tackles serious issues in her books for young readers, often presenting the lives of children living in poverty. Good, Says Jerome (1973) features a dialogue between siblings: a young boy voices his fears about a range of issues, from monsters to death, and his older sister responds with reassurances and affirmations. The Times They Used to Be (1974) deals with menstruation, a father on a chain gang, and PTSD—a Vietnam vet jumps off a bridge and drowns. In Don’t You Remember? (1974), named a Coretta Scott King Honor book, a fifteen-year-old boy drops out of school to care for his four-year-old sister while their parents work. The younger sibling in My Brother Fine with Me (1975) runs away, leaving his older sister Johnetta, the narrator, to consider how much she actually cares about him. In these books, Clifton employs the Black vernacular, honoring the type of speech many Black children would hear at home and in their neighborhoods.Cliftonisperhaps best known for her Everett Anderson series. Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970) introduces readers to a sixyear-old boy who lives in an urban housing project. Over the course of the series, Clifton affirms Everett’s feelings and authenticates his quotidian experiences, including the joyful anticipation of celebrat ing Christmas in the city in Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming (1971). She addresses the young boy’s longing for his father and his jealousy as his mother remarries and has another child. In Everett Anderson’s Goodbye, illustrated by Ann Grifalconi (1983), Clifton chronicles the five stages of grief as Everett struggles with his father’s death. Good bye won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984. In the last book in the series, One of the Problems of Everett Anderson (2001), Everett wor ries about his friend who may be a victim of child abuse: “A room can be lonely / when a boy not grown, / sees his new friend Greg / with a scar or bruise mark on his leg.”
In the most comprehensive survey of the Black children’s liter ary tradition to date, Free Within Ourselves: The Development of Afri can American Children’s Literature, Bishop underscores the pivotal role Clifton played as one of a small group of Black poets writing specifi cally for young readers in the final decades of the twentieth century. Bishop posits that Clifton, along with Eloise Greenfield, “essentially defined contemporary African American children’s poetry” (2007, 95). She puts Clifton and Greenfield in company with Sonia Sanchez,
Bishop honors Clifton in the concluding section of Free Within Ourselves, taking for her epigraph lines from the poet’s memoir Gen erations (1976): “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept” (2007, 273). These “lines,” Bishop argues, constitute a rich tradition of Black children’s literature, defined by an overriding concern evident in all of Clifton’s work: authentication.
539 Nikki Giovanni, Tom Feelings, and Nikki Grimes (all of whom pub lished in the 1970s) as well as Joyce Carol Thomas, Angela John son, Ashley Bryan, and Walter Dean Myers (all of whom published poems for children in the 1990s).
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In her entry for Clifton in Black Women in America, Darlene Clark Hine notes Clifton’s “almost palpable concern with writing and with books and literacy.” Hine underscores this theme in Clifton’s work in order to make a larger point: “Black children’s literature should be considered part and parcel of the larger Afri can American literary canon, in which literature and literacy have always been treasure chests” (2005).
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ALEXIS DE VEAUX (1948–)
A writer of fiction and poetry for adults and children, a playwright, essayist, and performance artist, Alexis De Veaux’s career as a chil dren’s author features incessant experimentation and genre-bending and blending. Her work for children confronts racial and economic inequities and celebrates the strength and resilience of her characters.
Born and raised in Harlem, De Veaux pursued various avenues of art and activism. Her identity as a writer was formed in Harlem in response to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, her awareness of other Black women writers working in New York such as Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, her experience of the masculinist ethos of the Black Arts Movement, and the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. After graduating from high school, De Veaux worked in New York City for a number of organizations as a teacher of creative writing, including the New York Urban League, the Fred erick Douglass Creative Arts Center, and Project Create, in addition to a stint as a community worker with the Bronx Office of Proba tions and the cultural coordinator of Black Expo for the Black Coa lition of Greater New Haven, Connecticut. She engaged in artistic and feminist activism in the cofounding of the Coeur de l’Unicorne Gallery, the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (1977–1984), and
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the Gap Tooth Girlfriends Writing Workshop (1980–1984). She worked as a contributing editor and Editor-at-Large for Essence from 1978–1990, holding short teaching stints in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, Vermont College, and Wabash. Several of her plays were staged during these decades. In 1992 she earned a PhD in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo. De Veaux’s work for children illustrates her commitment to experimentation and independence. Her first book, the self-illus trated na-ni (1973), portrays a young girl’s dreams of the bicycle her mother will buy her with the welfare check due in the mail that day. When a junkie steals the check from their apartment mailbox, na-ni and her mother try but fail to track him down. Her mother’s comment, “a snake don’t care who he bite,” is followed by na-ni’s poetic response, written in her “special blue book”: after conveying her grief at the loss of her unfulfilled dreams, na-ni asks, “dont that man know / I am his sister he steal from?” (De Veaux 1973). The picturebook is radically experimental in both form and treatment of a child’s experience when compared to contemporary picturebooks: the use of almost abstract line-drawings of geometric shapes to represent the characters, the prose poem narrative, the blending of realistic features of the Harlem neighborhood with na-ni’s fantasies of riding her bike through the sky, the absence of any shame associ ated with receiving welfare, and the child’s resilience—all combine to create a moving and innovative book. na-ni received an Art Books for Children Award from the Brooklyn Museum. Each of De Veaux’s children’s books experiments with tech niques and challenges conventions regarding genre and content. Using the rhythms of jazz, De Veaux wrote a fictionalized biography of Billie Holiday for young readers, Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Hol iday (1980). In addition to the aural qualities of the prose poem, De Veaux used an unusual typeface and interspersed photographs and images of sheet music. De Veaux neither whitewashes nor condemns the complicated story of Holiday’s short life. She includes informa tion about childhood sexual abuse, the singer’s struggles with drugs and alcohol, her prison stint for drug possession, and the racism that shaped Holiday’s career.
An Enchanted Hair Tale, illustrated by Cheryl Hanna (1987), shares with the previous books a poetic narrative voice. Though the book won a Coretta Scott King honor from the American Library Asso ciation, reviews of the book were mixed in part because of shifts in narrative voice which signal the movement from the realistic Harlem
The Dillons’s career as illustrators of children’s books features beautifully designed images of Africans, West Indians, and Black Americans depicted in a warm palette. They are best known for their award-winning picturebooks Why Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears, written by Verna Aardema (1975) and based on a West Afri can folktale, and Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions (1976), for which they won back-to-back Caldecott Medals. Leo Dillon was the first Black illustrator to receive the Caldecott Medal, and the Dillons are the only illustrators to win two consecutive medals. Ashanti to Zulu, written by Margaret Musgrove, established the Dillons as impor tant illustrators of the Black experience. It features a very brief description of a cultural practice characteristic of one of the twen ty-six featured African societies, accompanied by a large scale (12.5 x 10 inches) image that typically includes a man, a woman, a child, typical living quarters, an artifact, a local animal, and a glimpse of the landscape, though, as a note from the book indicates, all these
Diane,projects.bornin California, and Leo, born in New York City to Trinidadian immigrant parents, met at the Parsons School of Design where, according to their own accounts, they competed ferociously. After graduating in 1956, they married in 1957 and began their careers producing advertising art, album covers, and adult book covers primarily for the science fiction market, winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Art in 1971. They turned their attention to children’s books after their son was born. According to Diane, the couple “surreptitiously colored the skin of characters in the pic turebooks they bought him, recasting them as black, Hispanic and Asian” (Fox 2012, A27).
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 541 neighborhood of the main character to the fantasy world just around the block from the character’s apartment. The book tackles the prej udice within the Black community against dreadlocks as a hairstyle, but the story enables the main character to recognize his hair as an element that links him to Africa.
DIANE (1933–) AND LEO (1933–2012) DILLON
The Dillons, an interracial couple, have produced more than sixty children’s books. Their thoroughly collaborative process, which they dubbed “The Third Artist,” has resulted in almost a dozen awards and accolades. The Dillons are also noteworthy for the wide variety of styles, techniques, and media they draw on to create pictures for various
542 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 elements would not likely be seen together. Furthermore, each image includes typical modes of dress, decoration, facial features, and skin tones. The picturebook celebrates the abundant variety of life in Africa. The Dillons continued to underscore the variety of Black life by documenting the hairstyles, garments, jewelry, housing, and land scape typical of the Masai in the illustrations for Verna Aardema’s Masai folktale, Who’s in Rabbit’s House? (1977) and in their depictions of patterned textiles in Virginia Hamilton’s The Girl Who Spun Gold (2000), a West Indian version of Rumpelstiltskin. In addition to their Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks, the Dillons illustrated several works by Virginia Hamilton, including the collections of folk tales The People Could Fly (2005) and Her Sto ries (1996), both of which garnered Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors, and Many Thousand Gone (1993). Other works that have garnered Coretta Scott King accolades include Aïda (1990) with Leontyne Price; their self-written and -illustrated Rap A Tap Tap: Here’s Bojangles—Think of That (2002); and Jazz on a Saturday Night (2007). The Dillons illustrated books by other authors featured in this collection of Dream Keepers: Eloise Greenfield’s collection of poetry for children, Honey I Love, and Other Poems (1978), Sharon Bell Mathis’s The Hundred Penny Box (1975), and Lorenz Graham’s The Song of the Boat (1975).
MARI EVANS (1919–2017) Near the end of her life, Mari Evans sat for an interview in which she insisted she be read within the context of the Black Arts Movement and the struggle “over the power to define” while also insisting on a more complex understanding of the artistic diversity that charac terized the post-1965 era of Black writing. Recalling her thwarted desire to be an FBI agent, Evans explains that racism is either shined and polished up, or it is just blatant, like the N-word over and over. It’s a system. It’s more than a word with a consonant in front of it—it’s a system, a national way of being that is bigger than just one person using an epithet. To write about living in this nation, one can’t help but write politically. That was what the Black Arts Movement addressed and that is what my work has continued to address. (Evans quoted in Matthews 2016, 552) Evans was born in Toledo, Ohio. A self-described loner, she lost her mother at age seven. Shortly after the two had gone downtown, her mother saw a storm brewing. Lacking money for two fares, Mary
Jane Jacobs walked home after putting her daughter on the street car. She caught pneumonia and died soon after. William Reed Evans had a third-grade education and encouraged his daughter both in writing and at the piano. When a story his daughter had written in the fourth grade appeared in the school’s newspaper, he consid ered it a significant family event. Evans remembers reading Lang ston Hughes’s Weary Blues as a youngster, and she identifies Hughes, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin as writers whose work inspired her.
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Although Evans studied fashion design at the University of Toledo, she pursued a career as a jazz musician before moving to Indianap olis in 1947 and working for the Indiana Housing Authority. She became a published author while working as an assistant editor for a manufacturing firm and raising two children in an Indianapolis Housing project. Where Is All the Music? (1968), her first volume of poetry, marks the beginning of a writing career spanning more than fortyFromyears.1973 to 2006, Evans published six children’s books and wrote a children’s musical. In an interview published in Crisis, Evans tells Herb Boyd that she gets the most reaction from her children’s books: “some say they are encouraged, inspired, that they learn a lot from what I have to say, and that gives me greater incentive and encouragement” (quoted in Boyd 2007, 34). Evans adapts existing children’s stories by using Black idiom. Singing Black: Nursery Rhymes for Children (1976), for example, is a revised and updated version of Mother Goose: “Sing a song of sixpence” becomes “Sing a song of brothers / Whistle all day long.” Other works include J.D. (stories), illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (1973); I Look at Me! (1974); Jim Flying High (fiction), illustrated by Ashley Bryan (1979); New World, a chil dren’s musical (1984); and Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book about Secrets (1999). In the latter work, Evans tackles the issue of child abuse as Annie and her mother discover Corinne’s secret and help the young girl break her silence. In I’m Late: The Story of LaNeese and Moonlight and Alisha Who Didn’t Have Anyone of Her Own (2006), Evans explores teen pregnancy and what can be tragic consequences of Black girls’ loneliness. Her work for children invites comparison to the work of June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton.
Mari Evans’s life’s work has been to “speak truth to the people”: “We need to teach our students and young people to think outside of their world. We need to do like the mission statement of my church says—work to make all feel included and welcome because all have been marginalized at some point” (quoted in Matthews 2016, 560).
Tom Feelings illustrated more than twenty books for young readers, focusing on African heritage and Black American history, break ing ground as a Black illustrator and serving as a mentor to younger artists.Feelings grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brook lyn and was interested in drawing and painting from childhood. He attended George Westinghouse Vocational High School where he studied art. He received a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts where his education was interrupted by his service in the Air Force, during which he served as a staff illustrator. After his term of service, he returned to the School of Visual Arts and completed his studies.Aswas true for many Dream Keepers, Feelings chose to illustrate books for children based on the lack of books that celebrated the Black experience in all its diversity. His choice was solidified at the beginning of his career, when, as a freelancer, he sketched people in rural southern Black communities. He reports an affecting encoun ter he had with an eight-year-old girl: “I tried to explain to her that my drawings were of ‘pretty little Black children, like you.’ The girl replied, ‘Ain’t nothin’ Black pretty’” (Rockman 2000).
TOM FEELINGS (1933–2003)
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She has been on the faculty of numerous universities, including the State University of New York at Albany, Northwestern, Purdue University, Cornell, Spelman, and Indiana University.
In 1964 when he determined that he could not support himself by freelancing, Feelings moved to Ghana and worked for the Ghana Gov ernment Publishing House for two years where he produced illustra tions for the African Review and local newspapers. He described his time in Ghana as transformational, giving him a pride in his identity as part of the African diaspora and influencing his artistic technique. He returned to the US in 1966 at a time when Black illustrators were in demand. In the next few years, he illustrated a dozen books for children, including Julius Lester’s To Be A Slave (1969). From 1972 to 1974, Feelings headed the Guayanese Ministry of Education’s children’s book program. In that role he produced illustrations and trained illustrators. From 1989–1995, he taught book illustration at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Central to all of Feelings’s best work is the richness of African culture as the inheritance of Black America. Two books created in
The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (1995), Feelings’s most ambitious and admired book, is also his most controversial. The six ty-four-page wordless picturebook tells the story of the brutality of that journey and the strength and resilience of the individuals who survived it. Two decades in the making and, according to Feelings, emotionally difficult to produce, the book captures the “opposing forces of joy and pain . . . characteristic of black life and culture in America” (Bishop 1996, 436). Given the subject matter and the lack of a mediating narrative voice, the book prompted controversy as to whether it should be considered a children’s book. Feelings was awarded a Caldecott Honor for Moja Means One, becoming the first Black illustrator to win a Caldecott Honor, and again for Jambo Means Hello. He also earned the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Illustrator Award for Something on My Mind, Soul Looks Back in Wonder, and The Middle Passage. He won a CSK Honor for Daydreamers. In addition to his work as an illustrator, Feelings was also an important behind-the-scenes figure in the development of Black children’s literature. He initiated a group of likeminded New York City Black authors, illustrators, editors, and designers. This group became Black Creators for Children and met regularly. The group hosted book fairs and art shows for the Harlem community, net worked, and “formulat[ed] ‘the criteria’ for writing and illustrating children’s books by, for, and about African Americans” (Ford and
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collaboration with his first wife, Muriel Feelings, Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book (1971) and Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alpha bet Book (1974), begin with an Author’s Note that includes a map of Africa that outlines the countries where Swahili is spoken. Both books offer a pronunciation guide to the Swahili word featured, and each word is illustrated with images that convey the work, crafts, commerce, social practices, play, and landscape of East Africa. The dedication to Moja Means One states, “To all Black children living in the Western Hemisphere, hoping you will one day speak the lan guage—in Africa.” In The Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1983), a collec tion of poems by Black writers compiled and illustrated by Feelings, he connects Black Americans to their African heritage. The pictures feature a close-up illustration of an individual with a background that evokes the African landscape or artifacts. His collaborations with Nikki Grimes ( Something on My Mind 1978) and Eloise Green field ( Daydreamers 1981) express the dreams and reflections of urban Black American children and feature expressive and sensitive por traits of individual children.
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Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, Jones “Gus” Giovanni, was a probation officer; her mother, Yolande Cornelia Watson, was a social worker. Nikki spent summers with her grand parents in Appalachia. In her teen years, she convinced her parents to allow her to live with her grandparents and attend high school in Knoxville. Later in life, she divulged that her father physically abused her mother. Giovanni attributes her fierce commitment to self-determination to her grandmother, Emma Louvenia Watson. After being expelled from Fisk during her freshman year (for leaving campus without permission), Giovanni returned in 1964, taking cre ative writing classes taught by John O. Killens, editing the campus literary magazine, and graduating with a degree in history. In 1968, she moved to New York, where she taught at Rutgers’ Livingstone College and had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni. For nearly fifty years, Giovanni has been publishing books and producing sound recordings and video for young people. Two of her early poems became picturebooks in the 1990s: Knoxville, Tennessee, illustrated by Larry Johnson (1994) and The Genie in the Jar, a tribute to Nina Simone illustrated by Chris Raschka (1996). Much of her recent work for children focuses on history and historical figures, including On My Journey: Looking at African American History Through the Spirituals (2007); Rosa, a picturebook biography of Rosa Parks, illustrated by Bryan Collier (2005), with translations in Korean and Japanese (2005); and Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship, also illustrated by Bryan Collier (2008). Rosa won multiple awards: Amer ican Library Association (ALA) Notable Book (2006), Coretta Scott King Illustrator Medal (2006), Parents’ Choice Award, Caldecott
Ford 2004, 70). Feelings’s significant influence and contribution to Black children’s literature is clearly evident in the next generation of creators.
NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943–) Nikki Giovanni is represented in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by three poems, including the autobiographi cal “Nikki-Rosa” (1968), which ends with the insistence that Black childhood is full of joy: “and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me / because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and / they’ll / probably talk about my hard childhood and never quite understand that / all the while I was quite happy.”
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 547 Honor (2006), and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Award (2006).
Lincoln and Douglass won a Carter G. Woodson Book Award
Giovanni’s(2009).collections
Giovanni has been a lifelong advocate for children’s literature. She consistently challenges the notion that writing for children is less important or easier than other types of writing: “People think children books are easy. It’s a discipline as hard as poetry. You’re teaching to read and reaching to children” (quoted in Bonner 1984, 30). In a short autobiographical sketch for Obsidian III focused on childhood reading, Giovanni insists on a broad definition of liter ature: “I love children’s literature because it really isn’t children’s literature[;] it is folk literature. It is stories for people to carry to each other.” She implicitly argues for more diverse books for chil dren: “My only regret about living in a visual era is that when the pictures no longer match our faces we feel excluded. In an oral age we drew our own pictures in our own minds and everyone looked like us” (Giovanni 2001, 46). As recently as 2021, Giovanni spoke out about the value of children’s reading, choosing as her topic for the 21st Annual Mary Frances Early Lecture—The Power of Chil dren’s Literature and Spirituals. Giovanni told her audience at the University of Georgia: “I’m a big fan of children’s literature because it’s literature that begins for us to understand—for the children to understand—how important they are” (Giovanni 2021).
of poetry for children, many illustrated by winners of the prestigious Caldecott, include Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, illustrated by Charles Bible (1971); Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, illustrated by George Ford (1974); The Reasons I Like Chocolate: And Other Children’s Poems (Smithsonian Folkways Records 1976); Vacation Time: Poems for Children, illustrated by Marisabina Russo (1980); Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences and Short Stories About the Keepers of our Traditions (1994); Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes and Photos of the Keepers of our Traditions (1999); Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Har lem Renaissance Through Poems (1995); The Sun is So Quiet, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (1996); Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems (2003); Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (2008); and I Am Loved, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (2018).
Giovanni’s work celebrates the sounds and rhythms of Black cul ture as well as Black children and Black childhood. She is the recip ient of multiple NAACP Image awards, the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding
LORENZ GRAHAM (1902–1989)
In How God Fix Jonah, Graham uses the spoken language of Libe rians that he heard while teaching school in Monrovia. Borrowing from English, Portuguese, Spanish, and languages of the Mandin gos, Krus, and Golahs, this contact language is conveyed with great respect and energy, rendering the stories from the bible as fascinating
548 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 Poetry. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Vir ginia Tech.
Graham credits his time in Liberia for his decision to become a writer. In a presentation to the National Conference of Language Arts in the Elementary School, he explained that prior to travelling to Liberia, he “had accepted an image of African people which had been presented in the form of moving pictures and the books which I had read” (Graham 1973, 186). In an autobiographical sketch, he explained: Popular writing had described savages, people who were at best stupid, lazy and amusing, at worst vicious, depraved and beastly. I concluded that the world needed books which described Africans honestly. Such books would make readers understand that different though they might be in custom and appearance, and in environ ment, Africans are people and they share with others around the world the same basic needs and drives and emotions, and the great est of these is love. (Graham 1972, 108)
Because Lorenz Graham had a wife and five children to support, he worked as a teacher, CCC educational camp advisor, social worker, probation officer, and public housing manager while pursuing a career as a writer for children. His first book, How God Fix Jonah (1946; individual stories published as picturebooks in the 1970s), was a collection of bible stories in the idiom and dialect of Liberia, where he taught at a mission school, Monrovia College, from 1924–1928. He continued to use his experience in Liberia for his second book, I, Momolu (1966), a realistic story about a young Liberian boy. His most celebrated works are his quartet of realistic novels about dis crimination and racial prejudice in its many forms in the American South and North: South Town (1958), North Town (1965), Whose Town? (1969), and Return to South Town (1976). Graham’s body of work for children is groundbreaking in providing complex realistic characters facing racial discrimination in both the American rural South and urban North. He is also one of the first writers for children to por tray contemporary African culture and idiom for younger readers.
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When Graham returned to the US, he recognized that writing popular literature could help dismantle the stereotypes of Blacks in the US as well. Later in his life, he noted, “There were precious few books which described black people as people” and explained this problem as an outcome of the universal resistance to accepting others: “We know it with the head; none would deny it, but most of us feel that we are people and the others are something else. We are people but they are foreigners, or they are Africans or they are communists, or they are Negroes or they are honkies. We willfully get away from acceptance of the fact within our full consciousness” (Graham 1973, 187). As a result, Graham takes care to individual ize his characters, addressing both differences and similarities that cross racial differences: “Each character is unique. They are shown with different ideas, and with different ideals, and with differences of ability. They are from one another different in many ways but the differences are not merely that of skin.” By carefully individualizing his characters, Graham skillfully avoids blanket assimilationist and militant positions. His constant refrain, an idea so important to him that it was featured on his letterhead, is a quotation from his own character, David Williams: “I’ve learned that whatever happens you don’t just quit! You keep going forward, pushing, driving, you don’t quit” (1973, 187). While his emphasis on determination, struggle, and courage to reach goals might appear to be an acceptance or inter nalization of the status quo, in the novels, self-respect prevents the characters from tolerating the status quo that holds sway, even if their solutions are not aimed at systemic problems.
Ellen Donovan and and entertaining versions rather than the products of an exoticized or caricatured storyteller.
Graham’s insistence on the individuality of characters results in complex depictions of conflicts in his novels featuring David Wil liams (the Town novels). When David’s father is blackballed in South Town for refusing to accept wages less than the White car mechan ics receive, the family moves North for greater economic and edu cational opportunity. When David enters an integrated school in North Town, he must learn to recognize that not all White people are prejudiced, and not all Black people are supportive friends. In Whose Town?, a story set in the aftermath of the Watts riots, Gra ham presents a range of responses available to the Black characters that answer the title question. David weighs the militant response offered by Reverend Moshombo, the non-violent response of his own minister, and the accommodationist response of his friends
Eloise Greenfield’s motivation to write came from two distinct sources: the pleasure and play of language and a desire to accurately represent Black history and life experience. Pervading her body of work is a commitment to Black family relations.
Born Eloise Glynn Little, Greenfield lived only a few months in Parmalee, North Carolina, before her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking self-determination and more economic opportunity. On her ninth birthday, her family moved into Langston Terrace, a low-rent housing project in northeast Washington D.C. named after John Mercer Langston (great uncle of Langston Hughes), which pro vided a vibrant community for the residents. After graduation, she attended Miner Teachers College for two years and then took a posi tion as a clerical worker in the US Patent Office.
Greenfield turned to writing after her marriage to Robert Green field in 1950 and the birth of her children. Though she had attempted a writing career as a young woman, she knew little about the craft of writing. When her first stories were rejected, she assumed that
Graham’s strategy—to underscore the power of individuals to effect change—is particularly notable given that prior narratives for African American children and teens consisted primarily of biog raphies of notable Black figures in American history. By addressing contemporary social issues rather than historical events, by including a broad range of Black experiences and perspectives, by portraying events with plausible realism through David’s experiences, and by a strict control of his own didactic impulses, Graham set the stand ard for honest and sympathetic realism. Despite his balanced and careful treatment of the issues of racism however, publishers were unwilling to produce a book that did not conform to the standard (racist) depictions of Black people. After twelve years and numerous rejections by publishers, South Town was published by Follett. Gra ham faced similar difficulties with North Town.
550 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 and their families. David’s own involvement in an incident infused with racialized violence sets the stage for the riot that takes place in North Town. The focus on David’s personal involvement allows Graham to portray the pragmatic ramifications of each response. By focusing on David and his relationships, progress in racial and social justice is defined not as a task of political leaders but the work of otherwise unknown individuals.
ELOISE GREENFIELD (1929–2021)
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek she had no talent. However, she began to read books about the craft and marketing of writing. She turned her attention to writing for children when she was unable to find books in which her own young children could see themselves. In 1971 she joined the Washington D.C. Black Writer’s Workshop, the purpose of which was to support and critique the work of the members. She later became the head of the Children’s Literature Division of that organization until it dis banded in 1975. Through connections Greenfield established within the workshop network, she published a biography of Rosa Parks for young readers (1973). That breakthrough led to other biographies, including Mary McLeod Bethune (1977) and Paul Robeson (1975) for the Crowell Biography Series.
Families are central to Greenfield’s work. The families in her nov els illustrate both the strong love she sees as characteristic of Black families as well as the problems and stresses that shape family rela tionships. In Sister (1974) Dorothea, the central character, copes with the sudden death of her father and experiences the various forms of grief of her mother and sister, but she manages to find support through a community organization. In Koya DeLaney and the Good Girl Blues (1992), Koya reluctantly shares her famous singing cousin with everyone in her school. In the picturebook She Come Bringing Me that Little Baby Girl, illustrated by John Steptoe (1974), Kevin, the narrator, is initially disappointed that his baby sister has dis rupted his life but eventually recognizes the value of his new role as a big brother. Though these topics and situations are conventional in children’s literature, most treatments of these themes and incidents in the twentieth century did not feature Black children. Greenfield
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Greenfield’s foray into biography was an expression of her commitment to recovering Black history for Black youth. As she explained, “I want to give children a true knowledge of Black heritage, including both the African and the American experiences. The distortions of Black history have been manifold and ceaseless. A true history must be the concern of every Black writer” (Greenfield 1975, 625). In addition to biographies, she wrote other works focused on history: The Great Migration: Journey to the North, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist (2011), that draws on her own family history; Childtime: A Three-Generation Memoir (1979), written in collaboration with her mother, Lessie Jones Little, and including written accounts by her maternal grandmother; and, most recently, a history told through poems, The Women Who Caught the Babies: A History of Afri can-American Midwives (2019).
Rosa Guy turned the difficult circumstances of her young life into novels for young adults. She was born Rosa Cuthbert in Trinidad, but when she was still quite young her parents immigrated to New York City, leaving Rosa and her older sister Ameze in the care of relatives. When Rosa was about eight years old, she and her sister joined their parents in Harlem. Shortly after their arrival, their mother died. Their father sent them to live in the Bronx with cous ins who were followers of Marcus Garvey. In this household, Rosa
Even before she attempted a career as a writer, Greenfield was playing with language. Music had a significant role in her life, and from her childhood, she enjoyed the sounds and rhythms of words. When her children were young, she began writing rhymes, and she declared as one of her goals in writing to evoke “word madness”—the pleasure of words—in her readers: “I want to be one of those who can choose and order words that children will want to celebrate. I want to make them shout and laugh and blink back tears and care about themselves” (Greenfield 1975). Greenfield produced several poetry collections including Honey, I Love, and Other Love Poems, enjoyed by a multi-generational audience, Night on Neighborhood Street (1991), and Nathaniel Talking (1988). Her poems are marked by influences of jazz, blues, and rap, and characterized by strong rhythms and clear, strong child voices. Her individual poems have been re-issued as pic turebooks, and her work is frequently anthologized in collections of poems for children and in language arts textbooks.
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presents such common events of children’s lives within the context of the Black experience—with settings in urban, suburban, and rural spaces and with a mix of family organizations: single parents, blended families, multi-generational families. Her work operates as an important counter narrative to the legacy of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965).
Greenfield has won numerous awards. In addition to repeated “notable,” “outstanding” or “recommended” citations, she was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Book Award from the National Council for the Social Studies for Rosa Parks (1974), the Council on Interracial Books for Children Award for her body of work (1977), the Coretta Scott King Author Award for Africa Dream (2008) and for The Great Migration: Journey to the North (2012), and the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement (2018).
ROSA GUY (1922–2012)
In 1951 through her relationships within the Committee, Guy and others founded Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), a support group and critical forum for writers. HWG provided Guy with the edu cation she needed to become a writer, particularly since her own formal education had been curtailed. HWG also integrated her into the civil rights movement in New York City. Though Guy was writ ing during the time of the Black Arts Movement and agreed with its principles, she was not a member of its inner circle of writers.
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Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura was first exposed to political thought, and she credits that initia tion for her political activism as an adult. The sisters’ stay in that household was brief. They returned to live with their father after he remarried. However, the marriage was brief and Rosa’s father sub sequently died. Rosa and her sister were shuffled through a number of foster homes and institutions. Ameze fell ill when Rosa was four teen. In order to care for her sister, she left school (an experience she did not enjoy due to persistent bullying) and worked in a brassiere factory in the Bronx. Guy drew upon these experiences when she turned to writing for young adults in the 1960s.
In 1968 Guy traveled the South, compiling essays by and inter views with young people who had witnessed violence related to the civil rights struggle. The result, Children of Longing (1970), allowed Guy’s activism to coalesce with her writing. It also turned her atten tion to writing for young people. Her Friends trilogy—Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978)—established her as a significant voice in young adult fiction. The trilogy follows the relationships of a small group of young high school girls united in the face of family problems, poverty, and the difficulties of living in a deteriorating Har lem during the 1970s. Her portrayal of a lesbian relationship in Ruby is thought to be the first in YA literature. Her second series—The Disappearance (1979) and New Guys Around the Block (1983)—focuses
At the age of sixteen, Rosa married Warner Guy and continued to work in the brassiere factory while Guy was away on military ser vice. Through a co-worker, she was introduced to American Negro Theatre (ANT) and began to take acting lessons in hope of becom ing an actress. However, when her husband returned from military service, they moved to Connecticut where she was fully occupied by her roles as wife and mother. When her marriage dissolved in 1950, Guy returned to New York City and actively pursued her artistic ambitions. By this point ANT had dissolved and Guy became active in another organization that had arisen to fill the gap left by ANT— Committee for the Negro in the Arts.
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on Imamu Jones, a sixteen-year-old on probation who briefly joins a middle-class family where he discovers that the problems he was trying to escape from in Harlem are similar to the problems, albeit hidden, on the streets of White neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In the second volume, he returns to his alcoholic mother and home in Harlem.Guy’s novels for young people are set in 1970s Harlem. Her descriptions are gritty, documenting the deterioration of buildings and neighborhoods, the presence of drug addiction and alcohol ism, and the pervasive effects of poverty. In the midst of this diffi cult setting, Guy offers the perspective of the outsider—the West Indian immigrant who is ostracized by residents of Harlem (Ruby and Phyllisia Cathey from the Friends trilogy), the orphan who is unable to find a family or place (Edith Jackson), or the child who faces discrimination because of poverty (Edith Jackson, Imamu Jones). Her characters are not one-dimensional, simple figures that allow her to depict social problems. Rather, each character is com plex, often flawed and initially unlikeable. At the same time, each is deeply reflective, and Guy’s decision to focus on the interior lives of her characters evokes readers’ sympathy. Despite the difficulties the characters face, they have stamina and resilience and by the ends of the novels, find that their experiences provide them with unique strengths and purposes that lend them agency. In addition to complex characters and an unwavering focus on the realistic lives of young people living in Harlem, Guy’s novels feature a lively play of spoken language—the West Indian dialect of some characters balanced against the Black English of native Harlemites. Guy’s contribution to young adult writing has been recognized with a number of awards. The Friends trilogy won three American Library Association citations as Best Books of the Year for Young Adults, and Friends was selected for the School Library Journal ’s “Best of the Best 1966–1976” list as well as named a New York Times Out standing Book of the Year in 1976. The Disappearance was named Out standing Book of the Year by the New York Times in 1979. Its sequel, New Guys Around the Block, won a Parents’ Choice Award in 1983.
VIRGINIA HAMILTON (1934–2002)
Over the course of her thirty-five-year career, Virginia Hamilton published a body of work which she called “liberation literature” about individuals, some famous and some ordinary, who pursue
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 555 their freedom, a pursuit which often results in characters’ embracing their identity and agency to survive a cultural or social environment which seeks to diminish them.
Hamilton was born and raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small rural community between Dayton and Springfield. After college, she spent some time in New York City where she worked as a night club singer while also trying to write. There she met her husband, Arnold Adoff, and they started a family. When her children were young, Hamilton and Adoff returned to Yellow Springs to live on the property that has been in her family for five generations. Ham ilton readily identified herself as a rural writer. Most of her novels take place in rural settings, thereby distinguishing her work from the majority of novels about Black children of the 1960s and 1970s which depicted urban life.
Hamilton’s commitment to grounding her readers in Black heritage is a central aspect of her aesthetic, combining her respect for her family background, her commitment to her readers, and her position as a Black writer vis-à-vis the American literary tradi tion. She delineates these relationships in her 1981 essay “Changing Woman, Working”: “My fictions for children, young people, descend directly from the progress of black adults and their children across the American hopescape. Specifically, they derive from my eccen tric family” (Hamilton 2010, 104). In her descriptions of her family background, beginning with her maternal grandfather’s account of his escape from slavery in Virginia and including the tall tales and embroidered accounts of events in the lives of her aunts, uncles, and cousins, Hamilton gained a strong sense of identity and empower ment. Her writing seeks to replicate that sense of pride and history for younger readers: I am convinced that it is important to reveal that the life of the darker peoples is and always has been different in a significant respect from the life of the majority. It has been made eccentric by slavery, escape, fear of capture, by discrimination and constant despair. But it has held tight within it happiness, a subtle humor, a fierce pride in leadership and progress, love of life and family, and a longing for peace and freedom. Nevertheless, there is an uneasy, ideological difference with the American majority basic to black thought. (Hamilton 2010, 104–5) The difference Hamilton identifies has further implications for the role of Black storytelling and writing in American culture. Hamilton
Hamilton’s commitment to Black heritage takes many forms. She draws upon folk practices and beliefs, folk tales, and historical accounts of Black individuals and deeply embeds them in her nov els. Her first novel, Zeely (1967), depicts a young girl’s fascination with a farm laborer who looks like the African queen she has seen in an issue of National Geographic. She weaves myth, paranormal or supernatural elements such as ghosts and conjure, in novels that are otherwise considered “naturalistic”: The House of Dies Drear (1968), The Mystery of Drear House (1987), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), and Arilla Sun Down (1976).
Arguably the most respected and admired writer of her genera tion, Hamilton has a slew of awards. She was the first Black writer to win the National Book Award for Young People and the New bery Medal in 1975 for M. C. Higgins, the Great. She subsequently was awarded three Newbery Honor designations, four Coretta Scott King Author Awards, and three Coretta Scott King Honors. She was the first children’s author to be named a MacArthur Fellow (1995).
Hamilton also believed that Black folk tales should be reinvig orated for a contemporary audience so as to serve as metaphors for contemporary struggles (The People Could Fly, 1985). She published compilations of plantation era folktales for younger readers, collabo rated with important illustrators for retellings of individual folktales in picturebook formats, and created contemporary trickster tales that feature her character Jahdu: Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu, illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian (1969); Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu, illus trated by Ray Prather (1973); Jahdu, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (1980); and The All Jahdu Storybook, illustrated by Barry Moser (1991). As her career progressed, Hamilton became especially attentive to the fact that folk heroes are mostly male. She sought to remedy that imbalance, particularly with her fantasy, The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1986) and her collection Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995). The first writer to feature African American children in science fiction and fantasy novels, Hamilton’s science fiction trilogy—Justice and Her Brothers (1978), Dustland (1980), and The Gathering (1980)—features siblings who use their telepathic powers to travel through space to a distant planet.
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persistently refused the term “minority literature,” arguing that such terminology diminished the value of non-European cultural tradi tions. Instead, she argued that American literature should exist as the confluence of many parallel cultures, with European cultural background as only one of the tributaries.
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She has won several lifetime achievement awards including, the Regina Medal in 1991; the Hans Christian Anderson Medal, an international award, in 1992; and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (known as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) in 1995. She has held positions as a distinguished visiting professor at three universities and four other universities conferred honorary degrees upon her. No other writer for children has been so honored.
In her memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), Jordan divulges painful details about her younger years. Her father physically abused
In a short autobiographical essay written for Fourth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators, June Jordan describes herself as a cross-writer, someone who writes for children and also for adults. Her explana tion for why she has chosen a dual audience privileges the needs of youngChildrenpeople:
Jordan tells her young readers that she is “first and essentially” a poet, locating her “obsessive dependency on and interest in words— as a means of creating a desirable, wished-for reality” in a Harlem childhood where her mother, Mildred, took her to the Universal Truth Center on Sundays, a place that reveled in and celebrated words. She shares that at age twelve, she skipped two grades in school and became the only Black student (out of 1500) at Midwood High before transferring to Northfield School for Girls, a Chris tian preparatory school in Massachusetts. In 1953, while enrolled at Barnard College, Jordan met Michael Meyer, a White student at Columbia. They married in 1955, when interracial marriage was illegal in forty-three states, and in 1958, the couple had a son, Chris topher. Jordan tells her readers that although her marriage ended, the couple parted amicably and took pride in parenting Christopher.
have always seemed to me the most vulnerable, willing and beautiful of all people. And so I have persistently undertaken the writing of poetry and stories and even history that could be acces sible and helpful to these most beautiful, open lives, to the best of my understanding and capacity. But, clearly, the power of good and evil conduct and consequences rests with the grown-up folk of the world. And so it has seemed necessary, in the continuing spirit of my wish to serve children, to undertake poems and stories and essays and whatever else might reach and move my peers, for the sake of the younger ones among us. (deMontreville and Hill 1978b)
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JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002)
In 1970, Jordan edited two anthologies: The Voice of the Children, a collection of her students’ writing, and Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, another ALA Notable book. She also spent time in Rome after winning a prestigious award, the Prix de Rome in Environmen tal Design, a subject that informs His Own Where, her first Young
558 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 her. A postal worker with Chinese and West Indian heritage, Gran ville Ivanhoe also referred to his precocious daughter as “he” and made derogatory remarks about the darkness of young June and her mother Mildred’s skin. Jordan’s mother would later die by suicide. In “A Feminist Survivor with the Eyes of a Child,” her review of Soldier for The New York Times, Felicia R. Lee calls attention to Jordan’s choice to write the memoir “with the consciousness of a child, with out the filter of adult perceptions and judgements.” After noting the writer’s accomplishments as a poet and essayist, Lee declares that Jordan “has now ventured into the territory of childhood”—an odd pronouncement that only makes sense if we ignore Jordan’s works for children, or we assess her only with regard to her works for adults (LeeJordan2000).began her writing career in the 1960s, publishing under the name June Meyer. Her poems and stories appeared in Esquire, The Nation, Partisan Review, Essence, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Magazine. She wrote speeches for James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), taking her young son with her on a Freedom Ride. She worked in city planning, for youth social programs, and as a film assistant. In 1967 she began teaching Black and Puerto Rican youth as part of a Teachers and Writers Collab orative. She would spend a lifetime running workshops in creative writing for both children and adults.
In 1969 Jordan published Who Look at Me, poetry for young read ers. An American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book, Who finished a project Langston Hughes left unfinished at his death. Katharine Capshaw calls attention to Jordan’s use of photography in Who, heralding the work as “a masterpiece of children’s his tory” (2014, 157). In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of Afri can American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop presents Who as a precursor to Tom Feelings’s poetry and visual art. The poems accompany twenty-seven paintings by Black and White artists, pro viding a brief history of Black life. Bishop compares Jordan’s work to Walter Dean Myers’ Brown Angels (1993) and Nikki Grimes’ It’s Raining Laughter (1997), two examples of poetry responding to visual art in the post-Black Arts Movement era.
Jordan is represented in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by five of her poems, including the widely anthologized “Poem About my Rights” (about her rape) and one essay, “A New Politics of Sexuality.” In the latter, Jordan deconstructs Dr. Benja min Spocks’s advice to new mothers regarding “not wearing miniskirts or provocative clothing, especially if your child happens to be a boy.” Despite her lifelong commitment to children’s education and
Jordan maintained a lifelong commitment to teaching, taking positions at Sarah Lawrence, Yale, and City College of New York before earning tenure at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1989 and launched the Poetry for the People project. She also started writing a political column for the Progressive. Jordan’s first column, “Finding the Way Home,” demonstrates how her concerns about children inform her thinking. She begins the essay describing Lisa Steinberg, a six-yearold victim of child abuse. Jordan connects Lisa’s right to “sanctuary on this planet” to the rights of Palestinians: “I believe that the issue of a home for Lisa Steinberg and the issue of a home for the Pales tinian people is one and the same. The question is whether non-Eu ropeans, and whether children, everywhere, possess a human right to sanctuary on this planet” (2014, 15).
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Adult novel. In Civil Wars, a collection of essays, Jordan explains that she wrote the novel “as a means of familiarizing kids with activ ist principles of urban redesign or, in other words, activist habits of response to environment. I thought to present these ideas within the guise of a Black love story, written entirely in Black English—in these ways I might hope to interest teenagers in reading it” (1981, 70). Set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant where Jordan grew up, His Own Where was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times ’ Outstanding Young Adult Novels of 1971. Bishop calls Where an “urban novel,” putting it in conversation with Rosa Guy’s The Friends (1973) and Alice Chil dress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973). The Feminist Press reissued His Own Where in 2010. In 1972, Jordan published her second YA novel, Dry Victories. In Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photo books, Capshaw calls the novel “a brilliant and courageous pastiche of narrative and visual forms,” discussing it in the context of Black Arts Movement visual art (2014, 194). During this period, Jordan also published two picturebooks: New Life: New Room (1975), an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Kimako’s Story (1981).
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Julius Lester had a rich and complicated career. After growing up in Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University in 1960. He subsequently moved to New York City where he became an activist in the civil rights movement. He worked as a musician, playing at civil rights rallies in the South (with Pete Seeger), and he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordi nating Committee (SNCC), eventually heading up its photography division. Under SNCC’s auspices, Lester went to North Vietnam to document the effects of the US bombing missions. In 1982 Lester converted to Judaism, a decision that shaped his career as a writer and as a public intellectual. As noted below, Lester regularly pub lished in Jewish periodicals and chose Jewish folktales and subjects for his children’s books.
JULIUS LESTER (1939–2018)
literature, Jordan elicits only two sentences in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, which mentions Who Look at Me (1969) and Their Own Where (1971).
From 1968 to 1975 Lester worked as a television and radio show host and producer in New York City. In that role he did not avoid controversy. As part of an ongoing dispute between the United Fed eration of Teachers and the Black residents of Ocean Hill-Browns ville section of Brooklyn, he allowed a Black teacher to read on his show a poem that included anti-Semitic rhetoric. In an interview that appeared in American Jewish Life Magazine in 2007, Lester com mented about the incident, comparing it to his subsequent critique of Andrew Young in 1979 when Young secretly met with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization: “in 1969 I thought Jews were being racist and said so. In 1979 I thought blacks were being racist and said so. In my mind these controversies were never about black-Jewish relations; they were about being true to myself and speaking out against racism” (quoted in Pilcher 2007).
Lester’s work in broadcast media coincided with the beginning of his teaching career. In 1968 he began teaching classes in Afro-Amer ican Studies at what became the New School for Social Research. In 1971 he joined the faculty at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, teaching in African American Studies and later in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. He maintained a media presence by producing book reviews and essays for The New York Times Book Review, New Repub lic, Cineaste, Nation, National Review, and various Jewish magazines.
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Lester’s other work for children documents Black culture and history in the US and adapts African and Jewish folktales often in collaboration with well-respected illustrators. From the beginning of his writing career, Lester identified folktales as central to identity formation: “Folktales are stories that give people a way of commu nicating with each other about each other—their fears, their hopes, their dreams, their fantasies, giving their explanations of why the world is the way it is. It is in stories like these that a child learns who his parents are and who he will become” (1969, vii). His explicitly Black contemporary storytelling idiom signals the significance of the Black experience and provides a Black consciousness of history
Lester’s second book, Black Folktales (1969), retells twelve tales from the African and Black American folk traditions. Dedicated to Zora Neale Hurston and H. Rap Brown, Lester makes clear in his Foreword the audience he seeks for this collection: “The sto ries in this book are told in the cities and villages of Africa and on the street corners, stoops, porches, in bars, barber shops, and wher ever else in America black people gather” (1969, vii–viii). He is best known for his collaboration with highly respected Black illustrator Jerry Pinkney to produce a four-volume collection of the Uncle Remus tales. Controversy followed him here as well: in a New York Times review June Jordan considered the content—the stories them selves— unworthy of the abilities of the author and the illustrator.
Lester’s writing career began with books for adults, one of which has the wonderfully provocative title Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (1968). His direct and unadorned writing style was brought to the attention of Phyllis Fogelman, the editor of the juvenile department at Dial and an important figure in children’s publishing, who thought it would work well in a children’s book. His first children’s book, To Be a Slave (1969), weaves together first-person accounts of enslavement and resistance, concluding with emancipa tion. Lester broke new ground by not only introducing documentary records of enslavement into childhood reading, but also highlighting the range of responses of enslaved persons. Lester includes various accounts of militant and/or psychological resistance, explaining how those enslaved subtly resisted oppression. In addition to accounts of resistance, Lester includes accounts of enslaved persons’ inter nalizing the ideology of White supremacy. As a whole, the volume balances the horror of enslavement with the admirable strategies enslaved Blacks employed to defend themselves. The volume earned a Newbery Honor recognition.
Sharon Bell Mathis asserts that she writes to salute Black children, that they are her audience: “Black children will leave my books with a feeling that I know they live ” (quoted in Conmire 1990, 132).
562 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 and culture. In addition to the Newbery honor designation for To Be a Slave, Lester was a National Book Award finalist for Long Jour ney Home: Stories from Black History (1972), won a Coretta Scott King Author Award for Day of Tears (2005) and Coretta Scott King hon ors for This Strange New Feeling (1982) and Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (1987).
Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Mathis lived at multiple addresses in New York City until she graduated from St. Michael’s Academy. She graduated from Morgan State College in Baltimore, and for much of her adult life she has lived in the greater Washing ton D.C. area. In addition to writing, she taught school and served as a school librarian. She credits her mother, in particular, for provid ing a home life that afforded her time, space, and support for reading andMathiswriting.established her reputation as a children’s author in the 1970s. She served as the initial director of the Children’s Literature division of the D.C. Black Writers Workshop when the organization was founded by Annie R. Crittenden. She also edited a column in Ebony, Jr. Mathis struggled with writer’s block throughout the 1980s and published again for children in the 1990s. Mathis’s work has much in common with the gritty realism that characterized young adult fiction of the 1970s. Her most acclaimed YA novel, Teacup Full of Roses (1972), depicts the struggles of a fam ily whose eldest son has succumbed to heroin addiction. Told from the perspective of the middle child who has left school to help sup port the family, the novel portrays both inter-generational family dynamics and a complex street culture comprised of support, pro tection, gang affiliations, and criminal activity. Mathis’s stories for younger readers depict children in urban settings facing hardships but managing to overcome them with the support of family and the community. Her early biography for children, Ray Charles, illus trated by George Ford (1973), may have established this pattern. In the biography, Mathis relates the causes of Charles’s loss of vision but emphasizes his remarkable talent and fortitude to become suc cessful. Similarly, in Listen for the Fig Tree (1974), Muffin, the central
SHARON BELL MATHIS (1937—)
memorating
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 563 character, is blind, but her blindness is not the focus of her difficul ties. Muffin’s problems arise from her mother’s grief at the loss of her husband, a taxi driver who was beaten and then allowed to bleed out by the police as they investigated the crime. In addition to this refer ence to police brutality, described as racist by the mother and never contradicted by any other character, this book includes a depiction of a diverse Black community that supports Muffin and her mother, including a gay Black bar owner, a store front preacher, and neigh bors in the apartment building. The book includes an important scene at the first night celebration of Kwanza, possibly the first such scene in a YA novel.
Lilly Etta’s efforts, while not completely successful, do prompt a gathering of support that repairs the situation: the single mother of the family of seven children is offered a job, a nursery school offers child-care at an affordable rate, and a larger, more affordable apartment is offered to the family.
TONI MORRISON (1931–2019)
Mathis also writes stories which depict children aware of injus tice and working to correct it. In The Hundred Penny Box, illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon (1975), Michael, the young protagonist, understands the importance of hundred-year-old Aunt Dew’s penny box, and resists his mother’s attempts to replace it with something smaller and more convenient. The book depicts both a respect for elders and their stories and the frustrations of caring for elders. In The Sidewalk Story, illustrated by Leo Carty (1971), Lilly Etta refuses to acquiesce to the eviction of her best friend’s family. Her mother, while sad, does not see any recourse, and the neighbors’ only action is a series of ineffective insults directed at the marshal and those hired to remove the family’s belongings.
Teacup Full of Roses received several accolades, including a New York Times Best Books of the Year. Mathis’s biography of Ray Charles won the Coretta Scott King Award, and The Hundred Penny Box was designated a Newbery Honor.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison is the most celebrated writer in the African American literary tradi tion. Her impressive oeuvre includes nine children’s picturebooks; Dreaming Emmett, a play about the fourteen-year-old boy from Chi cago lynched in Mississippi in 1955; and a civil rights photobook com the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education,
Morrison began her writing life as an editor for Random House, promoting Black writers such as June Jordan as part of her concerted effort to establish a canon of Black work. In the documentary All the Pieces I Am (2019), Morrison distinguishes between work written by Blacks for a White audience, such as Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, and work written by Blacks for Blacks. Morrison’s own writing focuses on Black characters and communities, on the rich, expressive culture of a people under assault in a racist country unaware of its history and mostly apathetic, if not openly hostile, to ward its Black citizens.
Morrisonunconstitutional.isthesubject of several books written for young readers: Barbara Kramer’s Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning Author (African American Biographies series 1996); Jean F. Blashfield’s Toni Morrison (Women of Achievement series 2000); Douglas Century’s Toni Mor rison (Black Americans of Achievement series 2001); James Haskins’s Toni Morrison: The Magic of Words (Gateway Biography series 2001); and Richard Andersen’s Toni Morrison (Writers and Their Works series 2006). Heralded for her literary achievements, the focus of countless scholarly books, dissertations, and articles, Morrison has only recently been recognized as contributing to the US children’s literary tradition. In her obituary for Morrison published in The New York Times, Margalit Fox suggests the appropriate approach to hon oring Morrison’s body of work: “Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony” (2019).
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the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring segregation in schools
The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s first novel, engages directly with the Dick and Jane basal reader, a popular primer that taught gener ations of American children to read while advancing the ideology of White supremacy. This ideology, which includes standards of beauty, proves lethal to the novel’s adolescent protagonist, fourteen year old Pecola Breedlove. Two of Morrison’s other early novels— Sula (1974) and Beloved (1987), for which Morrison won the Pulitzer prize—routinely appear on required or optional reading lists for sec ondary education students.
Beginning in 1999, Morrison collaborated with her son Slade to produce nine picturebooks: The Big Box, illustrated by Giselle Pot ter (1999); The Book of Mean People, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre (2002); The Lion or the Mouse?, The Ant or the Grasshopper? and Poppy or the Snake? —three books in the Who Got Game? series, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre (2003); Peeny Butter Fudge, illustrated by Joe Cepeda
WALTER MOSLEY (1952–)
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 565 (2009); The Tortoise or the Hare?, illustrated by Joe Cepeda (2010); Lit tle Cloud and Lady Wind, illustrated by Sean Qualls (2010); and Please Louise, illustrated by Shadra Strickland (2013). Morrison’s picture books accomplish her goal of passing on the stories and life lessons she heard growing up in Lorain, Ohio. The books in the Who Got Game? series retell Aesop’s Fables in a contemporary, hip-hop style that both instructs and delights. A masterful storyteller, in 2004 Morrison took up the challenge of writing historical fiction for young people, producing Remember: The Journey to School Integration. While the book’s unique blend of archival photographs and fictional narration frustrated reviewers, Morrison’s commemoration of Brown vs. Board won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award. In her book-length study, Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (2014), Katharine Capshaw discusses Remember alongside photobooks by Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Walter Dean Myers, Carole Boston Weatherford, and others.
In 2020 Walter Mosley became the first Black man to win the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), an award presented by the National Book Foundation and established in 1988. Previous DCAL recipients who have published work for young readers include Gwendolyn Brooks, Judy Blume, and Toni Morrison.Mosley grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, the son of working-class parents. Ella Slatkin, his Jewish Russian immi grant mother, worked as a personnel clerk. His Black father LeRoy Mosley came from Louisiana and worked as a custodian. Denied a marriage license in 1951, Ella and LeRoy married several years after Walter’s birth. Mosley attended Victory Baptist Day School, a Black private elementary school. After graduating from Alexander Hamil ton High School, Mosley enrolled and was eventually expelled from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, for poor attendance and
Reviewers of Morrison’s children’s books have typically ap proached her as a critically acclaimed novelist and Black intellectual who, after establishing a reputation for her adult fiction, turned to children’s literature. This view dismisses Morrison’s deep invest ment in Black childhood and adolescence and, ironically, denies (or at least obscures) what Morrison would call “all the pieces I am.”
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When Mosely finished his first novel, written while he worked for Mobil Oil, a slew of editors told him the book was well done but not commercially viable. He remembers being told that “White peo ple don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men, and black men don’t read” (Werbe 2000, 33). In 1997, after having established himself as a commercial success, Mosley returned to this early work, a coming-of-age prequel to the Easy Rawlins series that explores literacy, fathers and sons, guilt, and sin. He decided to pub lish Gone Fishin’ with Black Classic Press (BCP), a small publishing house in Baltimore (W. W. Norton published his prior work). The following year, he established The Publishing Certificate Program with the City University of New York to increase diversity in pub lishing. Mosley’s efforts reflect his understanding of the racism of a White-dominated publishing world.
While Mosley has enjoyed commercial success as a genre writer, he considers genre to be an extremely limiting way to describe and talk about books. Upon the publication of his tenth and final novel in the Easy Rawlins series, Mosley sounded a note that reverberates throughout the interviews he gives about his work: “One of the issues in America and in the modern world in general is that people
substandard work. In 1977, he earned a bachelor’s degree in politi cal science from Johnson State College in Vermont. He completed some post-graduate work in political science at the University of Minnesota, moved to Boston and then New York, where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM and Mobil Oil. In 1985, Mos ley enrolled in City University of New York’s (CUNY) writing pro gram. Five years later, he became a published author. Mosley’s reputation rests primarily on his crime fiction. Most readers know him for his mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins and for The Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first publication in the series, made into a major motion picture in 1995 starring Den zel Washington as Rawlins. While his detective series puts him in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, Mosley identifies Langston Hughes as his “paradigm,” a Black man who loved all Black people and loved writing about them. Mosley particularly loves writing about Black men “and the way we deal with life in America, the way that we understand, the way that we pass through things” (Sherman 1995, 34). Mosley also credits Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which he read while working for Mobil Oil, for reigniting his interest in writing and giving him an example of a narrative voice he recognized as his own.
Florence Dean used romance magazines to teach Walter to read before he entered school. This early exposure to reading sig naled Myers’s sensitivity to language and began his obsession with reading and writing. However, Myers also struggled with a speech difficulty which made him the target of bullies both on the street and at school. Myers responded to the taunts of bullies by fighting
Walter Milton Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and was raised in Harlem. His mother died when he was three years old and his father, George Myers, with eight children to raise on his own, agreed that Florence and Herbert Dean would raise Walter as well as his two half siblings (children of Florence and George, from a previous marriage). Though this adoption was never formalized, Walter considered the Deans his primary family (even after George Myers moved his new wife and children to a home around the corner from the Deans’s home in Harlem) and honored the care and raising the Deans provided by adopting their name as part of his pen name.
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In 2005 Mosley published 47 with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. He describes the work as “a young adult novel about slaves in the 1830s, about a young boy who is chosen by an extraterrestrial intelligence for a specific task” (quoted in Bancroft 2004). Mosley intended the book to spark interest in history among Black kids who do not want to read stories about slavery that portray Blacks as victims. Reviewers highlighted how Mosley blends various genres, his unique slave narrative containing elements of African American folklore, history, science fiction, and fantasy. Ossie Davis narrates 47 for Listening Library Audio. Several of Mosley’s books are available as audiobooks and marketed to high school students and adults. Reviews typically contain advisory warnings about explicit, strong or “earthy” language, racial slurs, and sexual encounters.
| Essays feel they have to specialize. I think a fuller person is going to want to do all different kinds of work” (quoted in Hahn 2007). A prolific writer, including for television and film, Mosley has written myster ies, science fiction, erotica, short stories, plays, young adult fiction, and nonfiction. In 2005 he collaborated with Stan Lee on Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics.
Since 1979, Mosley has lived in Greenwich Village in New York City. He has a wide range of interests, including pottery and comic books.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek
WALTER DEAN MYERS (1937–2014)
Myers turned his attention almost exclusively to writing for young readers when he won a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1968 for his picturebook manu script, Where Does the Day Go? (1969). Over the course of his career, Myers wrote over a hundred books for young readers, including pic turebooks, novels, short stories, poetry, adventure, historical fiction, biography, and history. He is best known for his young adult fiction which is infused with the theme of personal responsibility. His nov els are most often set in Harlem, not the robust Harlem of his youth but the post-1960s Harlem of economically fragile families, drugs, abandoned buildings, gangs, and strong church communities.
Myers emphasized the role of Black heritage and tradition as the foundation of Black identity in his nonfiction. He wrote biog raphies of both famous and less familiar Black figures, such as Mal colm X, Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L’Overture, Ida B. Wells, Harlem Hellfighters, and Biddy Owens of the Negro Baseball League. His account of the Black freedom struggle, Now is Your Time (1991), and the photo albums, One More River to Cross (1995)
and repeatedly was in trouble for poor conduct at school. Nonethe less, Myers was recognized as a bright child and participated in an experimental school program condensing seventh and eighth grades into one academic year and was admitted to the selective Stuyve sant High School. His behavior problems at school continued, and he eventually stopped attending. In his memoir, Bad Boy (2001), he describes his isolation from his peers due to his speech difficulties, his interest in literature and writing in contrast to the heavy focus on science in Stuyvesant’s curriculum, and his family’s scant finan cial resources which prevented him from attending college.
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Myers’s path to a writing career took several turns. While a stu dent, Myers’s program of reading included popular literature he found on his own as well as British literary masterpieces introduced to him at school. Myers wrote continuously as a student, imitating Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Bar rett Browning, Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. When he returned from service in the Army, he took a series of low-wage jobs until he determined that he wanted more for himself. He began to write daily, sending his poems and short stories to lit erary magazines with minimal success. Only after discovering James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” did he recognize that his own Black urban experience was worthy subject matter. He discovered other Black writers and joined the Harlem Writers Guild.
Ellen Donovan and and Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse (1993), inform read ers of the recent past.
In his YA novels Myers is concerned with the immediate pres ent, capturing the dilemmas experienced by children, mostly boys, in their teen years when they are seeking to establish an individual identity. Myers’s novels serve as a mirror to his contemporary read ers. In Scorpions (1989), the main character, Jamal, deals with a host of complicated circumstances: his older brother is incarcerated, his single mother struggles to find the money to finance legal fees for an appeal, and he is offered a coercive “invitation” to join a gang to earn that money quickly. Scorpions captures the issues, setting, and circumstances of its time period and allows readers to live briefly in Jamal’s shoes. In contrast, Monster (1999) offers readers a character, Steve, who goes to a selective high school where he participates in an afterschool film club. But he also has relationships on the street that involve him in a burglary which results in a murder. Steve’s experience making movies prompts him to write a screenplay of his trial which contrasts with the more personal journal he is keep ing. Though the novels acknowledge the racism the characters face, Myers’s focus on the interior life and choices of the characters shifts attention away from the role that race plays in their identity. This focus on personal responsibility and the secondary emphasis on race may account for Myers’s widespread appeal among White readers.
Butler
Myers received many accolades over the course of his lifetime from different organizations and publications: Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2012–2014); Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for lifetime achieve ment (inaugural prize, 2010); the Coretta Scott King Author Award (for Fallen Angels) and an additional ten honor designations; the Michael J. Printz Award from the American Library Association for Monster (the inaugural award); two Newbery honor designations for Scorpions and Somewhere in the Darkness (1992 ); two honor designa tions and a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People; many “Best Book” designations by organizations such as the Amer ican Library Association, Parent’s Choice, the NAACP, specific libraries such as the New York Public Library, teaching organiza tions, and publications such as The Horn Book Magazine and Kirkus.
Myers had a ground-breaking role within children’s literature by including depictions of incarceration in Monster and Lockdown (2010) and unglamorous war experiences in Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam (2002), Fallen Angels (1988), and Sunrise Over Fallujah (2008).
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Petry grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where her family lived above her father’s pharmacy. The only Black student in her class, Petry experienced harassment as well as low expectations on the part of White teachers. She graduated from the College of Phar macy of the University of Connecticut and worked for nine years in that profession before marriage took her to Harlem in 1938. She worked as a reporter, publishing her first short story in Baltimore’s Afro-American. A member of the American Negro Theater (ANT), Petry also wrote children’s plays and appeared in amateur produc tions. In 1942 Crisis published her second story, “On Saturday Night the Sirens Sound,” about children left home by themselves (Petry calls them “doorkey kids”). Impressed by this story, an editor at Houghton Mifflin asked Petry if she had plans for a novel.
A literary fellowship in 1945 allowed Petry to complete what would become her best-known work. Too often compared to Rich ard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Petry’s The Street (1946) stands on its own as a searing critique of what the author would call environmen tal factors (race, gender, class) limiting an individual’s possibilities. The protagonist is a single mother of an eight-year-old boy, Bub, whom she must leave alone in their drab apartment while searching for work. The novel’s shocking ending asks readers to consider why, despite embodying the can-do attitude of the post-World War II era, Lutie Johnson does not succeed in her pursuit of the American dream.The tragic climax also leaves us to consider the fate of young Bub and the ways in which environmental factors (including pol icy decisions) define and delimit an urban Black childhood. In an interview with The New York Times upon the reissue of The Street,
ANN PETRY (1908–1997)
Since its publication in 1955, Ann Petry’s Harriet Tubman: Conduc tor on the Underground Railroad has been reissued multiple times. An American Library Association’s (ALA) Notable Book Award-win ner, Harriet has been translated into Dutch and Japanese. Oxford University Press published a recorded version in 2006. In 2018, Jason Reynolds wrote the foreword for the Amistad (HarperCol lins) edition, Harper and Hachette both producing audio versions. Named the National Ambassador for Young People’s literature in 2020, Reynolds’s investment in Petry’s work models a type of critical crossover that expands the canons of both US children’s literature and African American literature.
In addition to writing two more novels marketed to adults as well as short fiction collected in Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971) and featuring adolescent narrators, Petry published four works marketed to children: The Drugstore Cat (1949); Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955); Tituba of Salem Village (1964); and Leg ends of the Saints (1970). Unlike many Black writers known primarily, if not exclusively, for their work marketed to adults, Petry receives recognition in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Her brief entry mentions only Tituba of Salem Village, noting its focus on a Bar badian slave accused in the seventeenth-century Salem Massachu setts witch trials. In an autobiographical sketch written for Third Book of Junior Authors, Petry expressed displeasure in the demand for historical accuracy in books such as Tituba: “It seems to me that the necessity for accuracy of details, the constant checking of the facts, serves as a kind of cage which holds the imagination captive” (1972).
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When a youngster, Jerry Pinkney did not know that anyone, espe cially a Black person, could make a living by creating art. He grew up in the Black Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in a work ing-class family. He had difficulty in school (diagnosed as dyslexic as an adult), but drawing came naturally to him. He recognized that his skill made him exceptional, which gave him self-confidence. At the age of twelve Pinkney was employed at a newsstand at a busy intersection in Philadelphia and would sketch in his free moments. A regular customer, John Liney, who was at that time cre ating the Henry comic strip, saw his work and invited him to his studio. Pinkney went on to enroll in the commercial art program at the Dobbins Vocational [High] School in Philadelphia. When his teacher encouraged a number of White students to apply for scholarships to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, Pinkney independently requested scholarship applications for himself and the two other Black students in his class. He and one of his Black
an eighty-four-year-old Petry remembers working as a teacher in Harlem: “I worked at P.S. 10 on St. Nicholas and 116th Street in an after-school program for door-key kids [ . . . ] Although I had been aware of Harlem, this was [my] first realization of the impact of that kind of hard life on kids. I lived my whole life without paying any attention. It wasn’t my life. But once I became aware, I couldn’t see anything but” (quoted in Fein 1992).
JERRY PINKNEY (1939–2021)
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classmates were two of the three scholarship winners that year.
Between 1964 (when he illustrated his first book, The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales) and 2018, Pinkney illustrated over a hundred books for children on subjects such as folk tales from Afri can, Native American, and European traditions; Aesop’s fables; con temporary stories; historical fiction; biographies of significant Black figures; bible stories; and nursery rhymes for very young children.
Pinkney attended the College of Art for two and a half years but left school when his wife, Gloria Jean, became pregnant with their first child. He was employed by a series of commercial art firms and studios before turning his attention to illustrating children’s books.
Pinkney’s contributions to children’s literature have been recog nized with many accolades. He received multiple lifetime achieve ment awards, including The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (known
Pinkney’s work is characterized by energetic lines and vibrant watercolor—especially necessary for the feeling of immediacy that he strives for in his pictures—as well as exceptional page design. His goal in creating illustrations “has always been to awaken the emotional palette—to make viewers laugh, cry, ponder, and, most of all, feel compassion” (Pinkney 2016, 33). His pictures are lauded for realistic depictions of anthropomorphized animals, detailed and vibrant natural scenes, and attractive portraits of Black people. His depictions of Black characters are based on his use of live models, often his own family members. His collaboration with Julius Lester to retell the Little Black Sambo story in Sam and the Tigers (1996) replaced stereotypes and caricatures with attractive and joyful rep resentations of the characters.
He collaborated with some of the notable Black authors of his gen eration, including Julius Lester, Marilyn Nelson, and Patricia McKissack, and he illustrated texts written by Mildred Taylor, Robert San Souci, Eloise Greenfield, and Virginia Hamilton, among others.
In addition to illustrating children’s books, Pinkney provided illustrations for reprints of over a dozen classic adult novels. He was commissioned to produce paintings by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the White House, the US National Park Service, the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center in Manhat tan, the US Postal Service (Black Heritage series of postal stamps), the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Ohio), and National Geographic. From 2008 to 2009, he served on the National Endowment for the Arts. His artwork has been featured in more than thirty one man shows in museums and other cultural venues.
He earned ten Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards (or honor des ignations): Count on Your Fingers African Style (by Claudia Zaslavsky, 1981, honor); The Patchwork Quilt (by Valerie Flournoy, 1986); Half a Moon and One Whole Star (by Crescent Dragonwagon, 1987); Mirandy and Brother Wind (by Patricia McKissack, 1989); The Talking Eggs (by Robert San Souci, 1990, honor); Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tub man (by Alan Schroeder, 1997); Goin’ Someplace Special (by Patricia McKissack, 2002); God Bless the Child (by Billie Holiday, 2005, honor); The Moon Over Star (by Dianna Hutts Aston, 2009, honor); and In Plain Sight (by Richard Jackson, 2017, honor). Pinkney’s Caldecott awards include Mirandy and Brother Wind (by Patricia McKissack, 1988, honor); The Talking Eggs (by Robert San Souci, 1989, honor); John Henry (by Julius Lester, 1995, honor), The Ugly Duckling (by Hans Christian Anderson, 2000, honor); Noah’s Ark (2003, honor); and The Lion and the Mouse (2010). He has been awarded many medals from the Society of Illustrators and has received numerous “Best Book” accolades from publications such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) given by the American Library Association, Coretta Scott King-Virginia Ham ilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, also awarded by American Library Association, and the Society of Illustrator’s Hall of Fame.
SONIA SANCHEZ (1934–) In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Chil dren’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop honors Sonia Sanchez in her chapter on African American Poetry for children, noting that the genre “took a more serious turn” in the late 1960s when its “dom inant impulse” became affirming “the worth and beauty of Black children and their lives” (Bishop 2007, 95). Bishop puts Sanchez in company with Nikki Giovanni and Tom Feelings, writers that pro duced a small but significant amount of poetry for young Black read ers in the post-1965 era.
Born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, Sanchez moved to Harlem at the age of nine. Wilson L. Driver, her father, was a musician and teacher. Lena Jones Driver, her mother, died when she was a baby. When her beloved grandmother died five years later, Sanchez began writing poetry, an activity she relates to the development of a stutter. She remembers going to the library on 145th Street every day and having a Black librarian hand her anthologies
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Sanchez’s poetry collection It’s a New Day: For Young Brothas and Sis tuhs (1971) captures not only the political mission and “revolutionary rhetoric” of the Black Arts Movement but also the investment of BAM writers in children.
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of Black poetry, including a collection by Langston Hughes. After graduating from Hunter College in 1955 with a degree in political science, Sanchez began working for Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She married and divorced Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican poet, before marrying and divorcing Eldridge Cleaver, with whom she has three children. Cleaver and Sanchez, together with Haki R. Madhubuti and Nikki Giovanni, comprise the “Broadside Quartet,” the four poets publishing their work with Dudley Randall’s Broad side Press, an independent Detroit-based Black publishing company.
Sanchez’s work can be found in a wide range of anthologies, a clear indication of her range and broad appeal. My Black Me: A Begin ning Book of Black Poetry (1974) contains fifty poems by twenty-six poets, including Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Nikki Giovanni. Republished in 1994, My Black Me was named a Best Book by Children’s Catalog in 2001. Other anthologies with selec tions by Sanchez include Listen Children: An Anthology of Black Litera ture (1982); Make a Joyful Sound: Poems for Children by African-American Poets (1996); In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers (1997); I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1997); Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry (1998); The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children’s Poems (1999); and Poetry From the Masters: The Black Arts Movement: An Introduction to African-American Poets (2009).
Sanchez has published verse, drama, essays, and children’s books. She credits her experience working for Muhammed Speaks, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, for her start in the world of children’s books. As director of Culture, she wrote a women’s page and a children’s page, telling Susan Kelly, “That’s how I started writing children’s stories” (Kelly 2000, 684). In addition to It’s a New Day, her work marketed specifically to young readers includes The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head and Square Head (1973); A Sound Investment: Short Stories for Young Readers (1980); and Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), the latter collection winning an American Book Award. In Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Sanchez tackles issues of rac ism, sexism, sex, rape, and drug addiction. Her works celebrate the Black vernacular, Black music, and Black pride.
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Sanchez has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia. At San Francisco State, from 1967–1969, she helped establish the first Black Studies program. In 1969, while a single mother, she taught the first course in African American Women’s Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She taught briefly at Manhattan Com munity College and then for three years, she spearheaded the Afri can American Studies program at Amherst. In 1977 she accepted a position at Temple University, from which she retired in 1999. In retirement, she took up residency at Columbia. From 2012–2014, Sanchez served as Philadelphia’s poet laureate. In 2018, she received the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award.
John Steptoe was born and raised in a working-class family in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan which he left just three months shy of graduation in an effort to free himself from the emphasis on commercial art that he saw as the central concern of the curriculum and to provide more time to develop his skills as a painter. Though Steptoe never publicly identified with the Black Arts Movement, his work reflects the Black aesthetic of the era. In the Life magazine reprint of his first picturebook, Stevie (1969), the nineteen-year-old Steptoe comments: I have been taught Western ideas of what a painter is, what painting is, and that stifles me because I am not a Western man. I have never felt I was a citizen of the U.S.A.—this country doesn’t speak to me. To be a black man in this society means finding out who I am. So I have got to stay on my own, get out from under the induced values and discover who I am at the base. One thing I know: at the base there is blackness. (Steptoe 1969, 59) In addition to his art training in high school, he participated in an afternoon art program sponsored by Harlem Youth Opportunity and attended an eight-week summer program for minority artists at VermontBeforeAcademy.Steptoeleft school, one of his teachers encouraged him to take his portfolio to Harper & Row to seek employment as an illustrator. Ursula Nordstrom, the publisher’s influential children’s book editor, encouraged him to write and illustrate his own work. Two years later Steptoe published Stevie, his first book, and the first picturebook for very young readers told from a distinctly Black
JOHN STEPTOE (1950–1989)
Steptoe’s artistic style developed over the two decades in which he worked. His early books depict characters in bold color with heavy black outline which lends a sculptural presence to the figures. As he experimented with different media and styles, his palette grew more delicate and his style more painterly. His pictures for The Story
Just prior to its appearance in bookstores, the book appeared in its entirety in Life magazine (August 1969), a highly unusual event. Some reviewers noted that its appearance in Life sig naled a new development in children’s books. Another signal that Stevie was a “new” kind of book was inclusion of the story on Sesame Street : the entire book was read by the character Gordon. Later in life, Steptoe implied that political motivations may have also been at work: “at that particular point society was very anxious to say to black folks, we’re doing something” (quoted in Natov and DeLuca 1987,Many123). of the books that Steptoe produced in the next ten years were distinctive: he was the first to use the language and perspectives of working-class Black children in a picturebook. By using Black children as the narrators of his stories, he made visible children who had been absent from children’s books. In comments included in Life ’s reprint of Stevie, Steptoe remarks, “The story, the language, is not directed at white children. I wanted it to be something black children could read without translating the language, something real which would relate to what a black child would know” (Steptoe 1969, 59). His books following Stevie, including Uptown (1970) and Train Ride (1971), document the experience of urban Black children as they dream about their futures or expand their horizons, narra tives that reflect the political situation at the time.
Steptoe provided intimate and frank representations of family relationships that countered prevailing ideas about dysfunctional families. Though sibling rivalry is conveyed in Stevie and She Come Bringing Me that Little Baby Girl, written by Eloise Greenfield (1984), the illustrations feature cohesive and warm family relationships. He developed My Special Best Words (1974), Daddy Is a Monster Sometimes (1980), and Baby Says (1988) based on his experiences as a single father raising his son and daughter. Later in his career Step toe expanded his material beyond family relationships and his own neighborhood, illustrating Rosa Guy’s adaptation of Birago Diop’s Mother Crocodile=Maman Caiman (1981), writing his own adaptation of a Native American tale in The Story of the Jumping Mouse (1984) and of an East African tale in Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (1987).
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perspective.
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek Essays 577 of Jumping Mouse were done with pencil in black and white, and the pictures in Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters are lush, full color images in a naturalistic style. Despite the brevity of his career, Steptoe earned major awards: a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Stevie, the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Mother Crocodile and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, a Caldecott Honor for The Story of Jumping Mouse and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Illustration for Mufaro’s Beau tiful Daughters.
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Alice Walker has always had an interest in childhood, and espe cially Black girlhood. Her first publication, written while she was a student at Sarah Lawrence, appeared in The Best Stories by Negro Writers (1967), edited by Langston Hughes. In 1988, her story became a picturebook, illustrated by Catherine Deeter. To Hell With Dying tells the story of Mr. Sweet and a sister and brother with the power to bring him back from the brink of death. It begins, “Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and lived down the road from us on a neglected cotton farm.” At the end, the sister has returned from college upon the news that Mr. Sweet is, once again, dying. But this time, the young woman’s kisses do not revive him, and she must say good-bye. The final page pictures sister, who resembles a late 1960s Alice Walker, holding what Mr. Sweet has left her—aWalker’sguitar.work for children emphasizes empathy and an ethics of care. Finding the Green Stone, illustrated by Catherine Deeter (1991), features another brother and sister, but in this story, Walker focuses on the boy. Johnny speaks and behaves in a negative and hurtful way that dims his light, separating him from his family and community, all of whom have possession of their green stones. Walker dedicated this book “to all children / everywhere / & / to the eternal / child / within myself / & you.” Walker’s eternal child seeks connection to others and to the natural world. In 2006 Walker published There is a Flower at the End of My Nose and in 2007, Why War is Never a Good Idea, both picturebooks illustrated by Stefano Vitale. The latter is based on Walker’s poem of the same title, written in the aftermath of 9/11 and published in 2003. Recently, Tra Publishing, a subsid iary of Simon and Schuster with a focus on design and an ethics
ALICE WALKER (1944–)
578 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 of environmental sustainability, produced one of Walker’s poems as a picturebook: Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021) features art by QuimReviewersTorres. of children’s books have been hard on Walker. When HarperCollins reprinted Walker’s biography of Hughes in 2002— Langston Hughes, American Poet, illustrated by Catherine Deeter (1974)—Kirkus described the text as “lackluster,” positing that “Walker has simply succumbed to the ‘dumbing-down’ syndrome that afflicts so many writers for adults when they turn their pens to children’s books.” The reviewer concludes that Hughes “deserves better than this” (2001). While praising the illustrations in Find ing the Green Stone, a book for “all ages,” Publishers Weekly calls it “a strange story” with “a forced message” and a writing style “stiff and didactic”; the reviewer finds particular fault with Walker’s dialogue, a strange criticism considering Walker grew up among the people who populate her fictional world (1991). The bulk of the Publishers Weekly review of War is Never a Good Idea focuses on the stunning artwork of Stefano Vitale while undermining the power of Walk er’s text by predicting it will make kids more aware of their own helplessness. Having established herself as a successful novelist for adults, Walker seems to be faulted for having trust in her young readers’ abilities to tackle difficult subjects.
Walker’s best-known work won the Pulitzer prize and has been made into an Oscar-nominated film and a Tony Award-winning musical. The Color Purple (1982) begins with Celie, a fourteen-yearold girl in the rural south, writing to God because the man she believes to be her father warns her against telling anyone that he has raped her. Walker’s bildungsroman ends with Celie meeting her adult children and her daughter-in-law Tashi. A member of the Olinka tribe, Tashi reappears in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). That novel’s focus on female genital mutilation brought Walker back into the critical crosshairs of scholars who charged her with cultural insen sitivity, with writing about African girlhood with a Western bias.
Walker’s contribution to the US children’s literary tradition includes criticism as well as primary texts. She grew up in Eatonton, Georgia—the same rural community that produced, and memori alized with a museum, Joel Chandler Harris. In a 1981 speech, “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus,” Walker denounces Harris for cultural theft and distortion. Exploring Harris’s work within the context of a chil dren’s literary tradition dominated by White authors, who write
Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek | Essays 579
SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS (1944–1999)
In Working Cotton, Williams draws from her own experience growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of migrant work ers. The text is based on two selections in Williams’ Peacock Poems (1975). Shelan, the Black girl who tells the story, is a migrant worker who picks cotton with her family. Shelan’s description of a day-inthe-life of a child laborer draws attention to the family’s strength, especially the father’s, without romanticizing the difficulties of a migrant life: “It’s a long time to night.”
Williams dedicated her second picturebook to “my sister, Ruby Louise: we were girls together.” The narrator, Ruise’s sister, tells a story about leaving their house early in the morning to meet up with three other girls: “Hattie Jean, ViLee, and Lois live down the Project from Ruise and me. We almost like stairsteps.” After play ing “dress-up” at Hattie Jean’s and taking turns on the two bicycles between the five of them, the girls decide to leave their neighbor hood so they can climb trees. Williams describes their journey in language that exemplifies the blues aesthetic identified by Hender son: “We leave out the Project, all us girls together. Hey, hey, we say, and link arms when we walk.” The urban landscape (a vacant lot, a truck company, abandoned buildings, a dance club) gives way to suburbia: “It all look like a picture to me—gingerbread houses, grass green as crayon and so thick it about cover up your feet when you step on it, all these trees a fairy-tale forest.”
predominantly for and about White children, raises provocative questions about author/readership, cultural authenticity, construc tions of race, and the ways in which White supremacy reconsti tutes itself.
In her personal tribute to Sherley Anne Williams, published in Callaloo, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson links the writer to her muse, Bessie Smith, arguing that our literary inheritance is richer thanks to Williams’s fiction and poetry, work Henderson describes as “sac ramental expressions of a secular blues ethic and aesthetic” (1999, 764). That inheritance includes two works marketed to children: Working Cotton (1992) and Girls Together (1999).
Reviewers praised Williams’s lyrical language and Carole M. Byard’s acrylic impressionist paint ings. Working Cotton was named a Caldecott Honor Book, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book.
The narrator is curious
In her review of Girls Together for Booklist, Hazel Rochman com pares the book’s “simplicity” to Ezra Jack Keats’ Snowy Day. The vibrant illustrations by Synthia Saint James suggest perhaps a more appropriate comparison to John Steptoe’s Stevie (1969) and Jacob Lawrence’s The Great Migration: An American Story (1995)—both crit ically-acclaimed picturebooks by Black artists. The setting of Girls Together, a California housing project, and its language—“The flower tree she call magnolia, blossoms big and white on shiny dark-green leave”—as well as the book’s exploration of gender, play, and place should also prompt comparisons to James Baldwin’s Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood, set in Harlem. Both Little Man and Girls Together foreground color, with each “black” character a different shade of brown, Williams describing Lois as “so dark she look black, her face as pretty as any doll’s.” Lois must stay inside until her par ents return home, so the five girls bring a magnolia flower back to her. The final page of Girls Together features Lois in glorious profile, posed like a “movie star,” as the other girls had done: “Lois look real pretty in a white flower hair barrette.”
Alter, Alexandra. 2018. “A James Baldwin Book, Forgotten and Overlooked for Four Decades, Gets Another Life.” The New York Times. August 20, 2018. Bancroft,win-little-man-picture-book.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/books/review/james-baldColette.2004.“TheGrayDivideBetweenPopularandLiterary.”
WORKS CITED
The St. Petersburg Times. January 24, 2004. Gale in Context: Oppos ing Viewpoints.
580 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 about this world: “Seem like it could be some story behind even a plain brown door” (Williams 1999).
The entry for Williams in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature emphasizes her participation in the Black folk tradition of call-and-response. Mildred R. Mickle, the writer of this brief sketch, gives equal attention to Williams’s accomplishments in criticism (literary history), poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. Mickle presents Working Cotton as a continuation of Williams’s com mitment to folk traditions and history, arguing that the picturebook “addresses perhaps the most important aspect that gives the folk community life and meaning: the children” (Mickle 2001, 440). Tak ing Williams’s commitment to folk traditions seriously means work ing together, across two fields of study, to give her picturebooks about Black childhood a richer context and thus a wider audience.
Something About the Author, no. 58, 123–132. Gale. Fein, Esther. 1992. “An Author’s Look at 1940’s Harlem is Reissued.”
The Norton Anthol ogy of African American Literature. New York: Norton. Giovanni, Nikki. 2001. “Literature.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora 3 (1): 45–47. . 2021. “Giovanni Talks Power of Children’s Literature.” States News Service, February 5, 2021. Gale Academic OneFile. Graham, Joyce. 1991. “Making Language Sing: An Interview with Maya Angelou.” Journal of Reading 34 (2): 406–10. Graham, Lorenz. 1973. “An Author Speaks” Elementary Education 50 (2): 185–88. Greenfield, Eloise. 1975. “Something to Shout About.” The Horn Book Mag azine 51: 624–26. Hahn, Robert C. 2007. “PW Talks with Walter Mosley: The End of Easy?” Publishers Weekly 254 (52). December 31, 2007.
The New York Times. August 6, 2019. Gates,/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html?searchResultPosition=5.https://www.nytimes.com/2019HenryLouisJr.,andNellieY.McKay,eds.1997.
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| Essays 581 Bishop, Rudine Sims. 1996. “Tom Feelings and ‘The Middle Passage.’” The Horn Book Magazine 72 (4): 436–42. Gale Literature Resource Center . 2007. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Boggs, Nicholas. 2015. “Baldwin and Yoran Cazac’s ‘Child’s Story for Adults.’” In The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, edited by Michele Elam, 118–32. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bonner, Carrington. 1984. “An Interview with Nikki Giovanni.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (1): 29–30. Boyd, Herb. 2007. “Acclaimed Poet Mari Evans on Being a Black Writer.” Crisis 114 (2): 34–35. Capshaw, Katharine. 2014. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in Afri can American Photobooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chambers, Victoria. 2020. “Published More Than 50 Years Ago, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ Launched a Revolution.” Smithsonian Mag azine. Conmire,-ago-i-know-why-caged-bird-sings-launched-revolution-180973719/.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/published-50-yearsAnne,eds.1990.“Mathis,SharonBell.”
The New York Times. January 8, 1992. Ford,/books/an-author-s-look-at-1940-s-harlem-is-being-reissued.html.https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/08Bernette,andGeorgeFord.2004.“TomFeelings,Visionary.” Black Issues Book Review (1): 70–71. Fox, Margalit. 2012. “Leo Dillon, Celebrated Children’s Illustrator, Is Dead at 79.” The New York Times. May 31, 2012. -at-79.html?searchResultPosition=1..com/2012/05/31/books/leo-dillon-illustrator-of-childrens-books-dieshttps://www.nytimes.2019.“ToniMorrison,ToweringNovelistoftheBlackExperience.”
Black Folktales. New York: R. W. Baron. . 1977. “Little Man, Little Man.” New York Times Book Review. Sep tember 4, 1977. Madhubuti, Haki R. 2000. “Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000).” Black Issues in Higher Education 17 (22): 15. Matthews, Kristin L. 2016. “Renaissance Woman: An Interview with Mari Evans.” Callaloo 39 (3): 551–60. Mickle, Mildred R. 2001. “Williams, Sherley Anne.” In The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 439–440. Oxford: Oxford University deMontreville,Press.Doris, and Donna Hill, eds. 1972. “Graham, Lorenz.” In Third Book of Junior Authors, 108–109. New York: H. W. Wilson. . 1978a. “John Steptoe.” Fourth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators. New York: H. W. Wilson. . 1978b. “June Jordan.” Fourth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators. New York: H. W. Wilson. Myers, Walter Dean. 1986. “I Actually Thought We Would Revolution ize the Industry.” The New York Times. November 9, 1986. Natov,-we-would-revolutionize-the-industry.html.nytimes.com/1986/11/09/books/children-s-books-i-actually-thoughthttps://Roni,andGeraldineDeLuca.1987.“AnInterviewwithJohnStep toe.” The Lion & the Unicorn 11 (1): 122–29.
Hamilton, Virginia. 2010. “Changing Woman, Working.” In Virginia Ham ilton: Speeches, Essays and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, 102–8. New York: Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. First published 1981. Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. 1999. “In Memory of Sherley Anne Wil liams: ‘Some One Sweet Angel Chile.’” Callaloo 22 (4): 763–67. Herb, Boyd. 2007. “Acclaimed Poet Mari Evans on Being a Black Writer.” Crisis 114 (2): 34–5. Hine, Darlene Clark. 2005. “Clifton, Lucille.” Black Women in America, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huse, Nancy L. 2006. “Brooks, Gwendolyn.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. www.oxfordreference.com. Jordan, June. 1981. Civil Wars: A Meditation on the Private and Public Fault Lines which Divide American Society. Boston: Beacon Press. . 2014. Life as Activism: June Jordan’s Writings from The Progressive Sacramento, California: Litwin Books. Kelly, Susan. 2000. “Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.” African American Review 34 (4): 679–37. Lee, Felicia R. 2000. “A Feminist Survivor with the Eyes of a Child.” The New York Times. July 4, 2000. Lester,/books/a-feminist-survivor-with-the-eyes-of-a-child.html.https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/04Julius.1969.Foreword.
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| Essays 583 Petry, Ann. 1972. “Ann Lane Petry.” Third Book of Junior Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson. Pilcher, Brad. 2007. “Not the Face in the Mirror: An Interview with Julius Lester.” American Jewish Life Magazine. Gale General One File. Accessed July 1, 2021. Pinkney, Jerry. 2016. “Drawing My Dream: Wilder Medal Acceptance.” The Horn Book Magazine 92 (4): 28–36. Reading Rockets. 2011. “Ashley Bryan.” April 20, 2011. YouTube video. Rockman,www.youtube.com/watch?v=7REBumHUzPM.Connie,ed.2000.“Feelings,Tom.”
Eighth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators. New York: H. W. Wilson. Biography Reference Bank. Sherman, Charlotte Watson. 1995. “Walter Mosley on the Black Male Hero.” American Visions, no. 10, 34–37. Silver, Linda. 1979. “From Baldwin to Singer: Authors for Kids and Adults.” School Library Journal, no. 25, 27–29. Steptoe, John (1969). Stevie Life Magazine 67 (9): 54–59. Virtual Maine Arts. 2020. “Maine Arts Stories—Featuring Ashley Bryan.” July 15, 2020. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALV Walker,H4Jpd9u4.Alice. 1991. Review of Finding the Green Stone Publishers Weekly https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-15-227538-9..2001.Reviewof Langston Hughes, An American Poet. Kirkus. Novem ber 15, 2001. /langston-hughes.https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/alice-walker
Werbe, Peter. 2000. “Hard-boiled: A Profile of Walter Mosley.” Progressive 64 (4): 32–34. Williams, Sherley Ann. 1999. Girls Together. New York: Harcourt Chil dren’s Books.
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If, as Robin Bernstein (2017) argues, “It’s time to create language that values justice over innocence” when considering how Black chil dren are seen by adults, then Taylor’s text offers a brilliant blueprint for how we can begin to do this work as literary scholars too.
In early 2022, in the lead up to the London stage premiere of Mock ingbird, the production team asked me comment on Mockingbird ’s
Given how frequently I reach for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature in my university teaching, it is shocking and a bit embarrassing to learn that it includes “not one author or illustrator who produced work exclusively for young readers” as Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek, the editors of this special issue, discuss in their introduction. My scholarly interest in the representation of Black children in modern African American literature written for adults has drawn me into the adjacent worlds of children’s literature and the scholarship of age. In this Afterword, I attempt a response to Donovan and Dubek’s call to traverse the boundaries, the “apart heid,” that keeps many scholars of African American literature oblivious to the rich conceptual and discursive terrain comprised by children’s and YA fiction by Black American writers. Specifically, I offer a brief intertextual reading of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thun der, Hear My Cry (1976) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022 AFTERWORD: WRITING BLACK CHILDREN, WRITING “BLACK ALIVENESS” NICOLE KING
Nicole King | Essays 585 enduring legacy and popularity. Although the key characters Scout and Atticus Finch were familiar to me, many details of the story and its construction presented themselves anew. For instance, I was surprised at how engaging I found Scout as a narrator, and I felt sure I would have loved her in my own childhood, proto-feminist that she is. Reading as an academic, however, other attributes came to the fore that I would surely not have been aware of as a child reader. Scout’s mix of self-belief and vulnerability, for example, called to mind Toni Cade Bambara’s portraits of young Black girls in her collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972). More than anything, however, I was struck by Lee’s nuanced representations of Whiteness. Notwithstanding Scout’s narration, Mockingbird is a veritable festival of White maleness: Lee’s varied depictions of White masculinity function as the through line of the plot and standpoint of the text. In this respect, and in reading recent schol arship on Mockingbird, I quickly grasped its profound popularity within the dominant Anglophone cultures of the US and the UK.1 Finally, and most relevantly for this Afterword, I was gripped but not surprised by the thinness of Mockingbird ’s portrayal of Black life. Not only is Black life peripheral to the plot and the world of Lee’s small town in Alabama, it is presented in the faintest of out lines, without any Black children to speak of. As Jennifer Murray points out, Black life is “geographically distanced” as well as the matically marginal in the text (2010, 86). To write Black children is to write what Kevin Quashie calls “black aliveness,” a means to evoke complex worlds of being. Evoking complex worlds of Black being is not Lee’s project in Mockingbird. Rather, it is a text that centers both childhood and Whiteness, refuses to see Black chil dren, and infantilizes Black adults. Yet, Lee’s text is beloved: it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the 1962 film won three Oscars, and it consistently reaches new generations because it is widely taught around the world. Most recently, the London stage version, like its Broadway predecessor that opened in 2018, is attracting sell-out audiences. The incredible popularity of the story—then and now—suggests a White investment in stories that marginal ize Blacks yet present themselves as racially liberal if not overtly anti-racist. There is excellent scholarship on To Kill a Mockingbird that draws out its particular ideal of White American liberalism (Jay 2015), compounded by its structural weaknesses and narrative complexities (Chura 2000), and the ways in which its various inter nal contradictions have been misread (Murray 2010). Rather than
displacing the text’s enduring fan base however, this academic dis course exists in parallel with it. Mockingbird ’s key plot points are Scout’s adventures with her brother, Jem, and friend Dill, their fascination with their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, and their father’s involvement in a sensa tional trial in which a Black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused and then convicted of raping a White woman, Mayella Ewell. Scout’s father, Atticus, serves as Tom Robinson’s lawyer, making him abhorrent to many of the White citizens of the town and a hero to the town’s Black citizens. Tom Robinson’s characterization and the related oblique discussion of his children was of most inter est to me. Twenty-five years old, married, and a father of three, Mr. Robinson is a “boy” to his White employer. Although father hood is a central theme in the text, Robinson’s own children are illegible: they do not appear and they are not named. Rather, when Scout inquires about them and their mother the narrative assumes a detached anthropological tone to offer its most extensive though decidedly generic commentary on Black children: “It was custom ary for field Negroes with tiny children to deposit them in whatever shade there was while their parents worked—usually the babies sat in the shade between two rows of cotton. Those unable to sit were strapped papoose-style on their mother’s backs, or resided in extra cotton bags” (Lee 2010, 134). In this description of sharecropping, Black babies merge with their parents, “strapped to their backs,” or with the commodities that their parents harvest, “sat between two rows of cotton” or “resided in extra cotton bags.” Black babies in this scene—a scene all the more significant for its matter-of-fact ness—are less human than thing. Bernstein (2011) links the cultural embeddedness of the idea of Black children as “things” to the por trayal of Topsy and Eva in the nineteenth-century bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: In many cases, angelic white children were contrasted with pick anninies so grotesque as to suggest that only white children were children. This is the flip side of the well-known libel of the “child like Negro”: the equally libellous, equally damaging, but hereto fore underanalyzed exclusion of black youth from the category of childhood. Topsy was written within Stowe’s argument that black children are innocent, but her reconstructed progeny defined back children out of innocence and therefore out of childhood itself. (Bernstein 2011, 16)
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Published sixteen years after Mockingbird, Roll of Thunder is less well known but fortunately remains in print and available for suc cessive generations of readers to encounter. Much connects these two texts in both form and theme. Both texts trace the contours of a local community across friendships, conflicts, and crises. Both texts are set in small American southern towns during the 1930s. Both use retrospective narrators who reflect on happy girlhoods and the events that initiated the end of their own and their brothers’ innocence. Both narrators have a strong sense of self and revere their fathers, who themselves earn sustained respect in their community. To varying degrees, both texts are attentive to White racism and antiblack violence and each text, albeit in starkly different registers, makes apparent (White) nostalgia for the era of chattel slavery. Yet Roll of Thunder offers a formidable contrast to Mockingbird by placing an African American family, the Logans, at its center and telling their story of connection to the land, to justice, and to resistance. Roll of Thunder transpires across a particularly significant year for narrator Cassie and her family, a year in which adults as well as chil dren demonstrate and enact modes of active living and learning, rather than just survival, in spite of White racism, aggression, and violence. Unlike the rest of their Black neighbors who are share croppers, the Logans own two hundred acres and farm their own land. Their economic independence, and Cassie’s mother’s job as a teacher who promotes intellectual independence in her students, makes the Logans targets of White ire, not least of which is a desire to divest them of their farmland. Where Mockingbird embeds narra tives of White humanity as complex and capable of redemption, Roll of Thunder centers the multiplicity and complexity of Black aliveness (Quashie 2021). Roll of Thunder achieves this, in part, through ful some representations of Black childhood that include stages of inno cence, acquired maturity, and radical agency. Black children in Roll of Thunder learn to assert their own power. We can read Roll of Thun der as a refusal of and a rewriting of the consistent attempts to deny Black maturity and Black childhood. Extending Quashie’s tracing of Black aliveness through an aesthetic and affective examination of Black American verse, I see Roll of Thunder as a novel that represents
Mockingbird demonstrates Bernstein’s thesis exactly, whereby Scout’s innocence of the ways of the world is a driving force of the narrative alongside Tom Robinson’s abject dependency upon Atticus to navi gate the racist justice system.
Nicole King | Essays 587
While not denying the possibility of interracial friendship, Mr. Logan presents a pragmatic view based on history. That Jeremy might turn on Stacey “in a minute” is a factor to consider in their one-to-one relationship and also alludes to the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction reforms that another character, Mr. Morrison, recounts when discussing the obliteration of his family by “Night riders” one Christmas: “Reconstruction was just about over then, and them Northern soldiers was tired of being in the South and they didn’t hardly care about no black folks in no shantytown. And them Southern whites, they was tired of the Northern soldiers and free Negroes, and they was trying to turn things back ’round to how they used to be” (Taylor 1997, 147–48). As this passage shows, Roll of Thunder excels in its own consideration of history—it reiterates
588 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 and theorizes Black aliveness in its particular blend of first-person narration, storytelling, and setting. As Kelly McDowell emphasizes, in Roll of Thunder, “enabling child agency becomes a necessary part of resistance” (2002, 224).
Roll of Thunder offers a counternarrative to the liberal racial dis course through which US culture (still) imagines the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights era. Rather than parroting narratives about the brotherhood of man, Roll of Thunder is profoundly skep tical of the viability of interracial friendships due to the inequality embedded in concepts of racial difference and specifically in White power’s unwavering commitment to itself.2 In a pivotal scene, Roll of Thunder elaborates the hazards and limits of interracial friendship by showing them to be a function of the relentless drive of White ness and White power. Cassie’s father directly and frankly advises Cassie’s older brother, Stacey, to be wary of the friendship offered by a White schoolmate, Jeremy Simms. Although Jeremy’s siblings and parents are actively dangerous and racist, Jeremy’s character is developed and nuanced to the degree that the reader understands why Stacey would desire his friendship. However, Mr. Logan pre sents this argument: Far as I’m concerned, friendship between black and white don’t mean that much ’cause it usually ain’t on an equal basis. Right now you and Jeremy might get along fine, but in a few years he’ll think of himself as a man but you’ll probably still be a boy to him. And if he feels that way, he’ll turn on you in a minute. . . . Maybe one day whites and blacks can be real friends, but right now the country ain’t built that way. (Taylor 1997, 157–58)
how important it is for Black people (young and old) to have a sense of history, and in its plot line, the novel delivers an often obscured history to its readers. By focusing on a year in the life of the Logans, it also offers a counter history to (White) America’s self-narrative of progress. The “right now” of Mr. Logan’s advice to Stacey invites, I believe, a broad consideration of historical time, up to and including the 1970s context of writing and publication: the post-Civil War and Reconstruction era, the Great Depression, and the modern Civil Rights movement. A critical interrogation of these periods of his tory, Roll of Thunder suggests, can be achieved by decentering White masculinity as the narrative spine for understanding Americanness and replacing it with empowered, differentiated Black points of view. As Quashie writes, “We can’t will the violent reality away, nor can we not incorporate its impact. We have to live in the world and also live in the world of imagine” (2021, 146–47). Key scenes in Roll of Thunder do just that.
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As a final example, I turn to a scene that, like Mockingbird ’s aside about Black babies, is powerful not just because of what is repre sented but because the scene is subordinate to the main narrative action. Mr. Granger, one of the most powerful and wealthiest of White plantation owners in the community, insults Cassie’s Uncle Hammer, who lives and works in the North and makes a point of dressing well and driving a nice car. Granger remarks, “You right cit ified, ain’t you? Course you always did think you was too good to work in the field like other folks.” Uncle Hammer’s retort is emblematic of how Taylor’s characters know and assert their worth as humans: “Naw, that ain’t it . . . I just ain’t never figured fifty cents a day was worth a child’s time, let alone a man’s wages” (Taylor 1997, 166). Uncle Hammer’s deft linguistic sparring reveals a self-awareness that for mal education, local and national politics, and everyday encounters are designed to erode and undermine. Furthermore, in his response Uncle Hammer pointedly asserts and distinguishes between child hood and adulthood, even though Granger does not. Uncle Hammer differentiates the work that adults and children might do in order to earn a wage. He implies that he is paid according to the worth of his skills, and that such skills are commensurate with his status as an adult. Slavery, as Hortense J. Spillers (2000) delineates so elo quently, seeks to “forcefully homogenize” Blackness when it comes to age and labor. Indeed, Cassie’s narrative voice explains how that ideology persists in the sharecropping, de facto plantocracy of their Mississippi town: “Everyone knew that fifty cents was the top price
590 COLLEGE LITERATURE | 49.3 Summer 2022 paid to any day labourer, man, woman, or child, hired to work in the Granger fields” (Taylor 1997, 167). Uncle Hammer’s words cut across that collective knowledge—“everyone knew”—of the status quo designed to diminish and restrict his, and indeed any Black person’s, aspirations. His words and powerful sense of self have a counteract ing power that neutralizes Granger’s attempt to delimit and belittle his existence. As Hyun-Joo Yoo asserts, “In Roll of Thunder, the black people are portrayed not as totally knowable and controllable, but as the subversive disrupters who can destabilize the hierarchal binaries needed to maintain white power and authority” (2018, 339). More over, Uncle Hammer’s disruptive claim on space and being is posed to the children in the text and to the readers of the text as a viable stance to take. As witness to this exchange, Cassie builds and forti fies her knowledge, her epistemological and ontological frameworks of self, and her repertoire of how to be alive. Uncle Hammer’s clarity about his identity and self-worth is replicated across the character izations of Black adults in this text.3 Knowing and asserting one’s self-worth is repeatedly taught to the children, and is the key peda gogical imperative conveyed to Cassie and her brothers.
Reading Roll of Thunder was a joy and a revelation. When I teach it next year, I will take the opportunity to contextualize it within other significant contemporaneous literary and cultural consid erations of American history that assert the central humanity of Black children, Black families, and Black generations. Possibilities that immediately come to mind are the broadcast sensation that was Alex Haley’s Roots (1977), novels such as Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974). To these I would add Louise Meriweth er’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), Rosa Guy’s The Friends (1973), and Walter Dean Myers’ Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975). For, like Roll of Thunder, collectively these African American texts for adults and for children boldly “make the world anew” as Langston Hughes writes in his poem “To You.” They also push back against what Habiba Ibrahim identifies as “the historical process of alienat ing black subjects from their own age,” noting that this “continues to be felt throughout the twentieth century and into the present” (2021, 4). Cassie begins to practice a way of living that she learns explicitly from her father. Woven throughout the text, this modus operandi is enacted by different characters, including Cassie’s brother, Stacey, her mother, and her uncle. In her father’s words, it is both an empir ical philosophy, drawing on his own experience, and theoretical
Nicole King | Essays 591 proposition as it suggests the power that Cassie has to shape her place in the world:
Mockingbird, unsurprisingly, reserves the full embodiment of a sim ilar philosophy for its adult White male savior character, Atticus Finch, and, to a lesser extent, Boo Radley, who saves Jem (Scout’s older brother) in the final scene of the novel.
There are things you can’t back down on, things you gotta take a stand on. But it’s up to you to decide what them things are. You have to demand respect in this world, ain’t nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for—that’s how you gain respect. But, little one, ain’t nobody’s respect worth more than your own. You understand that? (Taylor 1997, 176)
In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021), Quashie responds to Lucille Clifton’s 1991 poem “reply” in a way that connects to the essential differences I have briefly sketched between Roll of Thunder and Mockingbird. Taylor’s novel presents and contests the violent era sure and marginalization of Black life, for children and adults, whilst Lee’s novel uses similar circumstances of Black erasure and margin alization to bolster White identities. Quashie’s reading of Clifton’s poem models an inclusive practice for the self-recognition of Black ness that resonates with Mr. Logan’s philosophy for living in a racist world. What Quashie calls “antiblackness” Mr. Logan encapsulates in “things you gotta take a stand on,” but both agree that the phe nomenon, whatever it is called, is deeply rooted. Thus, Quashie’s interpretative framework for “reply” is both relevant to and poten tially generative of further engagement with Roll of Thunder and, by contrast, Mockingbird: We are supposed to not-see ourselves or to see ourselves through not-seeing; we are, indeed, supposed to fear—and hate—our black selves. But Clifton’s poem invites us into a practice of encountering black being as it is, in its beingness, in its terribleness and wonder and particularity. . . . A racist happening prefaces the poem, and rac ist happenings surely linger in every indicative verb in the verse. But in a black world, the racist thing is not the beginning or the end of being, and what matters is not only what is done to the subject but also how the subject is. Antiblackness is part of blackness but not all of how or what blackness is. Antiblackness is total in the world, but it is not total in the black world. (Quashie 2021, 5) In Roll of Thunder, the many “racist things” that occur do not become the totality of Blackness and this fundamental difference with
Similarly, in her 2021 book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, Ibrahim offers theoretical frameworks that are applicable to an expanded study of Roll of Thunder. She considers the impact of the transatlantic slave trade as well as liberal humanist discourses that link humanity and Whiteness and how these have shaped Black literary representations of age—adulthood as well as youth. Ibrahim writes, “Black age is the prism through which the abuses of liberal humanist dispossession, as well as black cultural, political, and historical reclamation, are visible” (2021, 3), and we could find no better set of examples of this linked phenomena than in Mockingbird and Roll of Thunder. The mutually constitutive idea of Black adulthood and Black childhood examined from multiple angles in Roll of Thunder is extraneous to Mockingbird. If the work of figuring Black children critically begins with seeing Black children, then Mockingbird remains a very useful text for its example of con ceptual blindness. In Roll of Thunder, multifaceted acts of resistance are co-articulated through the presentation of fully embodied Black adulthood and Black childhood whereby robust claims on the dis tinction of age are made. Such difference signifies beyond just resistance to antiblackness but rather extends to the entitlement of “black aliveness,” an embeddedness within and a symbiotic relation to the landscape, and an investment in the very schema of age, whereby Black pasts, presents, and futures are not just possible but known.
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Mockingbird is anchored in the relative visibility of Black children within each text. While Quashie sees “a world of heterogeneity” in Clifton’s poem, I see how a similar world is evoked from multiple perspectives in Roll of Thunder. From the opening images of “rusty Mississippi dust” with which each of the Logan children has a dif ferent relationship, to the forest sanctuary where important conver sations take place and emotions are shared, to learning about the political and economic imperative that the Logans do all that they can to keep hold of their two hundred acres of farmland, Cassie and her siblings are presented in their heterogeneity, their innocence, and their evolving maturity.
NOTES 1 In addition to feminist readings, another avenue of contemporary To Kill a Mockingbird research explores its queer epistemologies; see Gregory S. Jay (2015).
Nicole King | Essays 593 2 Enlightenment ideologies of race, such those presented in Thomas Jef ferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1787) or David Hume’s “Of National Characters” (1754) are but two examples of ideologies of the intrinsic superiority of Whiteness and how this ideology, fundamental to the birth of the American nation and the transatlantic slave trade, effortlessly reproduces itself within politics, economics, and culture.
WORKS CITED Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence. New York: NYU Press. . 2017. “Let Black Kids Be Kids.” New York Times, July 26, 2017. Chura, Patrick. 2000. “Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmett Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Southern Literary Journal 32 (2): Ibrahim,1–26. Habiba. 2021. Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life. New York: NYU Press. Jay, Gregory S. 2015. “Queer Children and Representative Men: Harper Lee, Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemma of To Kill a Mockingbird.” American Literary History 27 (3): 487–522. Lee, Harper. 2010. To Kill a Mockingbird. London: Arrow Books. First pub lished McDowell,1960.Kelly. 2002. “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Culturally Spe cific, Subversive Concept of Child Agency.” Children’s Literature in Edu cation 33 (3): 213–25. Murray, Jennifer. 2010. “More Than One Way to (Mis)Read a Mockingbird.”
The Southern Literary Journal 43 (1): 75–91. Quashie, Kevin. 2021. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sargent, Andrew. 2018. “To Counter a Mockingbird: Black Sacrifice, White Heroism, and Racial Innocence in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” African American Review 51 (1): 37–54. Spillers, Hortense J. 2000. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In The Black Feminist Reader, edited by Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 57–87. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Taylor, Mildred D. 1997. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Puffin. First published 1976. Yoo, Hyun-Joo. 2018. “Rewriting American History in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the Return of the Repressed.” Children’s Literature in Education 50 (3): 333–46.
3 Andrew Sargent contrasts William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 novel A Dif ferent Drummer with Mockingbird to highlight a similar rejection of the necessity of “black sacrifice” and “white heroism” that I see evident in Roll of Thunder (2018, 38).
DR. NICOLE KING was lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London until the summer of 2022 when she joined Exeter College and the Faculty of English at Oxford University as Associate Professor. She is the author of C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (2001) and her sec ond monograph, Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. She is a scholar of African American, Caribbean, and Black British literatures.
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COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES SPECIAL ISSUE | 49.3 SUMMER 2022 In this INTRODUCTION:issue: CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA RESPECTABLE MOTHERHOOD AND THE TROPE OF CHILDHOOD IN LARSEN’S PASSING ILLUMINATING HURSTON’S “DRENCHED IN LIGHT” CHILDHOOD IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY SCENE OF ENCOUNTER IN SEARCH OF RINGGOLD’S PICTURE BOOKS HOOKS’S HOMEMADE LOVE REYNOLDS’S STAMPED DREAM WRITINGKEEPERSBLACK CHILDREN, WRITING “BLACK ALIVENESS”
