MAUDE HINES

“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 Jennifer 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 marginality 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 awakening trope variously described as the “stock scene of racial discovery” (Cooke 1984, 72), “becoming colored” (Wald 1990), or a “nigga wake-up call” (Gillota 2013, 28) is, when rendered in literary form,

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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 reframing 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 associate with racial awakening and other ways of introducing childhood into the juxtaposition—including the aesthetic juxtaposition of children’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 conversation with current work in critical childhood studies, theories of racial identity development, and a critical examination of the haunting 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 Johnson’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 Encounter, importing the power of childhood through personal memories of childhood trauma, fictional representations of childhood encounters 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 returning to Baldwin’s 1976 Little Man, Little Man and countering Boggs and Brody’s assessment. The lens of Encounter illuminates how Little 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 childhood—a strategy that addresses an old paradox of innocence in African American children’s literature.

DEFINING ENCOUNTER

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 capitalization 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 futurity. 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 “Nigrescence,” and its later elaboration by education psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum. An acceptance of white supremacy’s precepts characterizes 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 acknowledgment 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 adolescents, 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 childhood 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

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 cultural violence of white supremacy (a very old form) as a visitation upon an innocent child (a very new one).

Scenes of Encounter tend to hold gothic echoes: an encounter with white supremacy is an encounter with ghosts. If, as Avery F. Gordon 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 Encounter 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 distribution 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).

Encounter’s gothic reversal requires paradoxical innocence. A persistent 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 paradoxical innocence to expose the machinery of white supremacy, literary scenes of Encounter thus play on a standard horror trope: the child

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 children’s innocence: juxtaposing Black innocence and white supremacy emphasizes both, as white supremacy’s effects become more legible 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 childhood 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 protection for child characters and readers to reframe innocence of white supremacy’s ideology as monstrous.

Encounter’s temporal elasticity makes use of the multiple temporalities 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 construction of children” (18). Children have “a longer future in which to act,” while adults possess “a longer time past with its accumulated baggage 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 Encounter are thus related through temporal collapse and expansion: seeming 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 emotions 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 Katharine 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, encapsulating 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 negotiation 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, properly taught, would protect children from damaging social encounters 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 temporal 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 supremacy has been defeated.

The attributes childhood brings to literary scenes of Encounter—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 linear 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 forward 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 supremacy’s hold, opens space for resistance and reform, and imagines a different future.

READING ENCOUNTER

A full accounting of African American literary scenes of Encounter would begin with slave narratives and the trope of enslaved children learning to read—in terms of both literacy and social understanding. 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 twentieth-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 experience 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 particular type of childhood innocence—innocence maintained by not internalizing white supremacy (or pre-Encounter)—produces the desired paradoxical effect.

The familiar opening paragraphs of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk are paradigmatic in their constellation of childhood, didacticism,

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 experience and resilience and the structures that seek to repress and separate 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, mayhap, 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 exposure 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 manifestations 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 others 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 consciousness (seeing through a “twoness” that brings white supremacy’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 encounter between a small child (“a little thing”) and the haunting legacy of white supremacy collapses time into a moment of revelation (“all

in a day”; “suddenness”) in which the child understands his difference—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 schoolhouse” highlights its instructive nature. Temporal elasticity also characterizes 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 symbols of futurity.

While Cross’s 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 episode to reframe white supremacy as the problem.

Richard Wright uses the same mixture of innocence and didacticism 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 seeing 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 understand” (he is six years old), young Richard vows never to let anybody 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, valuing 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

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 identification 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).

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.” In a country where whiteness is associated 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 innocence, 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 Blackness through humiliating public exposure by his teacher and the principal. He loses his monstrous innocence together with his childish 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 incident 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 narration of the traumatic and formative effects of Encounter, suffusing

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.

Johnson’s protagonist then narrates his own whitetoBlack 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, allpervading idea which constantly increased in force and weight until I finally realized in it a great, tangible fact. 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 hallucinatory and confining, suggesting a grotesque bodily deformation that reflects his inhumanity under white supremacy. The funneled-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 supremacy’s “dwarfing, warping, distorting influence.”

While the scenes we’ve looked at so far insist on the child’s innocence 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 recollection 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

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 tragically 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, Hurston’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 racist 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 Encounters, 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 knowing 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 intertwined with acquired wisdom. More common is the kind of crushing 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

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 racism 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.

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 monster 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. Aesthetic markers of children’s literature in adult texts call upon readers’ associations with their own childhoods as they read disturbing 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:

Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight 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)

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 modernism, 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 “Baltimorean”—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 necessary 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 instantaneous 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

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 claustrophobic 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.

While the poem reduces and compresses time into a single “Incident” 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 retrospective 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.

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-encounter” 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 children renders him vulnerable to the epithet and its performativity. For the white child, experience is uncanny; for the African American 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

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 encounter 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 — ‘Nigger, nigger never die / Black face an’ shiny eye, / Nigger . . . nigger . . . 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 emphasizes the didactic nature of this lesson in white supremacy—indeed, this is the same one recited by Johnson’s protagonist in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

The poem’s successive stanzas describe the accomplishments of great men—Hannibal, Othello, Crispus Attucks, Toussaint L’Ouverture, 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 simultaneity 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 juxtaposition (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. DuPlessis calls the poem “a vaccine employing the ugly virus of this word to control—and expose—its effects” (2001, 132). Horne’s poem creates

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.

ENCOUNTERING READERS

Inoculation remains a useful metaphor for thinking about the role of literature for child readers as we move outside the text and consider 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 inoculating readers for the futures they represent. The inoculating structure 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-oriented emotions like hope (that they will protect children, or prepare them) and fear (that they will expose children to negative messages about themselves). Encounter’s temporal elasticity and metaphors of inoculation and contagion permeate criticism as well. Reading a more contemporary canon of African American children’s literature, 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 dreaming and new “national mythologies” reflect the temporal elasticity we associate with childhood, and extend it to children’s books. Johnson-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. Langston Hughes’s last book, Black Misery, illustrates the inequality of inherent notions of innocence. Accompanied by Arouni’s powerful

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 readership 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 Peanuts 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.), commiserating 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 realize 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

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 childhood 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.” 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 welcoming 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 didacticism 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.

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 Little 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 alcoholism, 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 readers 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

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 different 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, attention to Encounter helps discern gothic echoes. An interlude featuring 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.

Afraid of “bumping into” something in the room, TJ worries that whoever is hiding there will “jump out and tell what they saw.” This eruption of the gothic bears the hallmarks of Encounter—but readers aren’t sure with what, because the child’s gaze brings its outlines only dimly into focus.

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 People.” 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, bringing 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 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.

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, Baldwin’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 description 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 supremacy’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 “monstrous” innocents Baldwin had already warned of ten years earlier in “Stranger in the Village.” In Baldwin’s urgent message to teachers,

as in the texts explored throughout this essay, the scene of Encounter 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—recalling 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 conversation 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 television 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 something about it. Gordon uses the term “encounter” to describe transformative 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 guaranteed 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 literary Encounter and real-life identity development comes acutely into

focus. We can’t defer responsibility to the future. The future is now. And for all of our children, so is the past.

NOTES

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-contributors of this special issue, and to Cécile Accilien and the Colonialism

Seminar at the University of Kansas. 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). 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 adultlike). 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 showing a young girl apparently possessed by a very old woman is especially uncanny. See Karen J. Renner (2013) for more on this phenomenon. 3 Robin Bernstein (2011) notes a division between white and Black children in the American imaginary, a division whose emblem is the distinction 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 connections between whiteness and childhood innocence to current insistence on seeing Black children as adults. 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 introduction, but also as “an adult’s book for children,” as Boggs notes in an earlier essay. Despite acknowledging the antimetabole in the billing, Boggs goes on to call Little Man, Little Man “Baldwin’s adults’ book, in the subversive drag of children’s literature” (1999, 125).

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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, Gender, & 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.