EWA KLE ˛CZAJ-SIARA

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 painting 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 Morris 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 narrative or story quilts—Ringgold also wrote and illustrated more

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

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.

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 racism. 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.” 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.

RINGGOLD AS “QUILT-ARTIST”

The search for Ringgold’s picture books begins with the art of quilting 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. 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. Originally 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

of 9/11. The Covid Memorial Quilt, started as a school project in California in 2020 to recognize those who did not survive the pandemic, 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 artists 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 community, 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 identity by fusing the private and the public, the personal and the political, 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 American 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 Ringgold 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 narratives,” 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 artwork or, to use Dunn and Morris’s words, a “whole cloth” (30). Putting 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”

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 contributed 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 Serpentine Galleries, Sweden’s Bildmuseet, and the United States’s Glenstone 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art. Comprised of three pieces of fabric representing the same Harlem façade at different moments, Street tells the story of a Black boy orphaned after his family dies in a fire. Having 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).

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 story quilts.

While 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

continues as well as extends the African American quilting tradition 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 version 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 illustrations 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 children lying on the mattress and gazing up at the sky, the bridge, and the urban landscape. The picture books also digress from the original 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 carrying 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 members sitting at the table and, as we learn from the accompanying narrative, talking about the achievements of Black women, the picture 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 characters 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.

Figure 1. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

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 dining 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 illustrations go beyond the motif of the original painting, foregrounding the children’s imaginary vision of dining with their ancestors. The

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:

“I never thought my wife and the mother of our children would be the president of the United States,” Lonnie whispered in my ear.

“And I never thought I would marry an African American opera singer with red hair and green eyes,” I whispered back. (Ringgold 1993)

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.

The artistic quality of Ringgold’s picture books—strong colors, repetitive background patterns, schematic figures of the main characters, and page borders with a variety of flowery patterns—incorporates 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 continues. In an essay for Children’s Literature in Education, Joyce Millman 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 anthologized short story “Everyday Use” (1973), the central conflict revolves around the purpose and value of a quilt. Mama and one of her daughters, 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]. . . . 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 storytelling—create and transmit Black culture and values, providing knowledge and a sense of connection, belonging, and joy. Similarly,

Figure 2. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

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 culture, 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 driving 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

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 (Figure 2). After reaching Niagara Falls, the siblings come back to their home in Harlem. It is the year 1949 and the one hundredth anniversary 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 connection 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

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” conventional 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 strategy 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 picture 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: slavery (The Invisible Princess [1998]; Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in

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]). 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 American 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 Harriet’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 surrounding the child characters at the end of their journey, a powerful image suggesting Black people’s solidarity and strength.

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

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 limits 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 passengers 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 communal 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 different 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 entering 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.

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 ironworker, 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. However, 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 bedspread, 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 suggests 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 societal 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” (Ringgold 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

model of education that focused on the arts, literature, and philosophy. 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 intellectual 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 expectation 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 leaders and dreamers. Her female characters and their successes outnumber 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 following the girl, who, except for the famous Black women, appears as the central figure in the story (Figure 3). The women in the portraits, 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 historically 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 Harriet’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,” pictured as a Black infant, is tied to his back, an example which illustrates an inversion of gender roles—Be Be as caregiver rather than

Figure 3. © 2022 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York.

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 artistic career, which began in the 1960s, Ringgold faced numerous obstacles 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

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:

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)

In the publication accompanying Ringgold’s retrospective exhibition 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 Blackness 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 politics.” 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

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 gendered registers of affect,” which raise readers’ awareness of the issues and inspire attitudinal changes (2017, 129).

Ringgold’s slogan “Anyone can fly,” just like contemporary hashtags in Black popular culture, implies resistance as well as healing. 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 #carefreeblackkids or #freeblackchild, which are accompanied with videos 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 Gardner 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 illustrations can have a significant affective impact on young readers who, inspired by the stories, can identify Black joy in their own lives. Lu and Steele believe this strategy invokes the “historic legacy of storytelling as a resistance strategy” (2019, 831), in which the narratives 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

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.

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 history that is both their inheritance and their inspiration. The uplifting 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?” “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 children imagine a future where they will pass on their ancestors’ 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 suggests 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.

KEEPING THE FAITH

The literary critic who goes in search of Ringgold’s picture books will be richly rewarded and, also, challenged. As a visual artist

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 African 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 century, 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 danger 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 conceived US children’s literary tradition.

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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 African 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.