Tag Archives: Black Children’s Literature

The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963

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I was so struck by the language that I heard black parents using to explain Trayvon Martin’s murder and Zimmerman’s acquittal to their children this summer.  It’s not like these were new explanations for the parents of black children, surely.  Nonetheless, it was the sheer poetry, metaphorical wizardry, and rhetorical intensity that just made me stop dead in my listening tracks.  It’s the same kind of language that just sings off the page when many black authors write YAL (young adult literature) and children’s literature for and about young people of African descent.  That’s why I read African American YAL and children’s literature so voraciously, especially when those texts are trying to creatively offer explanatory models for the past and present of racial violence and an alternative image of humanity that can sustain you.

zora-and-me-208x300There’s just something about the language.  My colleague, Victoria Bond, and her co-author, T.R. Simon, is a case example. I don’t want to spoil their wonderful book, Zora and Me, so I’ll just say that the story revolves around a set of friends who learn about the saga of a woman who is passing as white.  The woman’s husband and lifestyle unleash a level of disrespect and violence onto black communities that is unforgivable.  What Bond and Simon do so beautifully is unpack that violence from the perspective and discourse of young adults who are learning to do better by their people (with one of these friends being the young Zora Neale Hurston).  While this book is, of course, a story that sociologically interrogates the politics of passing, it is also just brilliant in showing how violent this decision is for black communities… and all in a way that is understandable for 12 year olds.  Like I said, the language is just wonderful.

watsonsThat language is also the reason why I have cherished The Watsons Go To Birmingham-1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis since it came out in 1995.  He shows you the love, dignity, and warmth of a black family while also showing how a young boy deals with and understands the bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  There is no happy ending to the book, just an ending that lets you know that black love will sustain this family and community.  When you value the language and experience of these kinds of tellings, then you just can’t help but feel real slighted when you see a Hollywood adaptation.  I finally watched the movie version of The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 on the Hallmark channel this weekend.  Mostly, I was just curious to see if the film achieves the brilliance that I think Curtis’s book achieves.  I suspected it wouldn’t and I was right.

The brilliance that Curtis crafted with Kenny’s sorrow and mourning after the church bombing was simply lost.  The plot was there but not the significance, meaning, and historical impact.  What has astonished me is that so many reviews excuse the film’s domestication of Civil Rights protests in Birmingham because the movie is for children.  But the movie is based on a BOOK… a book that did NOT domesticate racist violence in order to hurry up and celebrate the triumph of the North American family (nor did the book ever offer the North as a Promised Land in relation to the Evil South like the movie does).  These tropes are so tired and played out that I sympathized with the wonderful actors in the movie who had to re-play these tropes. I found myself wondering who these domesticated images were for.  Surely, not for those parents who had to explain Trayvon Martin’s murder to their children this summer…or for the children who look like Trayvon!

Freedman_Bureau_Richmond_VAI knew I was traveling down a slippery slope when I first turned on the movie because Hallmark didn’t air the movie on the actual anniversary.  Maybe it’s because I don’t watch too much television but I also found it quite difficult to view this movie when every single commercial was white.  I have never seen so many middle class white women shopping at Walmart as I did in the commercial breaks.  No single commercial with a black family?  A black mother?  A black woman? They did, however, play the infamous Cheerios commercial where the little biracial girl pours cereal over her father’s heart many, many times. Now don’t get me wrong.  I was outraged at the racism this commercial unleashed against that adorable little girl.  But I was equally outraged when those same folk who were posting their comments and links to this commercial on youtube, facebook, twitter, or google+ have not been similarly enraged at the events with Tiana Parker or Quvenzhane Wallis.   It was as if the network just couldn’t let America see too much of two black parents raising black children.  When only biracial children are your source of attention, the hierarchy of value is clear.  I can’t help but be reminded of the white teachers who went to the south to teach black children after emancipation in the late 1800s and wrote long, tearful laments when they saw so many almost-white, mulatto children forced to share in the same racial misery as all those dark Negroes (they saw it as shameful to leave children with so much white in them with black people).  The movie may not have been historically accurate but Hallmark’s messages during the commercial breaks surely were.

As for me, I’m going to stick with African American YAL and children’s literature.  That language!  Those messages!  That’s what the U.S. still needs aired.

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“The Snowy Day” in Brooklyn 50 Years Later… Visual Emancipations Continued

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Though I do not like cold weather or shoveling, spooning away the snow so that I could open up my iron gate and shoveling out my stoop and sidewalk to get myself out of the house today was, I confess, a little fun.  This is the first, real snow in Brooklyn this year and it seems to have brought calm and quiet (there are no power outages or serious emergencies nearby).  No one is driving, honking, walking, working, hustling, or hammering at the factories across the way.  So there’s really nothing to do but stay indoors or go out and play in the snow.   Of all things, snow like this makes me think about one of the cutest, little black boys I know.  His name is Peter and you can see him in Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day (there is an online version at this link).  This Snowy Day today comes exactly 50 years after this children’s book was first awarded the Caldecott with Keats using his own hometown of Brooklyn as the inspiration for the book’s setting.

The book is about a child’s experience of wonderment after waking up from a night’s sleep to a world blanketed in snow.  What made this book such a landmark was that this child is black!  In 1962, a children’s book with a black male child as the subject was unheard of.  In fact, most people never even realized that Ezra Jack Keats was white, a Jewish artist who grew up poor in New York feeling the results of invisibility and ethnic hostility himself.SnowyDay

As Jerry Pinkney, award-winning African American illustrator of children’s books, reminds us (himself inspired by Keats’s depiction of Peter), in 1962, a children’s book about a little black boy would never have been published by a black author and illustrator. Keats faced some deserved criticism for never explicitly referencing the race and culture of the child in his written text.  We don’t really see or know much about Peter’s neighborhood, his family, or his (cultural) context.  What is striking though is that the book still upturned the children’s literary world anyway with just one thing: the visual rhetoric of a little, black boy who simply plays and smiles and looks out the window and wonders.  Keats himself was inspired to create the book after seeing a photo essay of a little boy in 1940 in Life magazine who he thought deserved to be the center of a really innocent child’s tale about joyfully playing.  Keats may not have understood cultural context, but he certainly saw the aesthetic beauty in black children. 41mVs1m7wPL._SL500_AA300_I myself have the book in three, different iterations and I even have the doll that was made a few years ago.  What Keats missed in cultural context, he captured in visual rhetoric by creating the cutest, little black boy in a red snowsuit who is absolutely mesmerized by seeing his footprints in the snow, finding a stick to shake snow off of a tree, feeling snow plop on his head after he shakes the tree, and making snow angels.  Yes, absolutely adorable!

I don’t think enough of us realize that the children’s literature that we have today that features (non-Sambo-typed) children and stories related to people of African descent was a result of Black Freedom Struggles related to the Civil Rights/Black Power Movements.  Before that, only white children counted as children/human in this literary world (not that this isn’t still the case given the fascination with Harry Potter, fairy tales, and the likes). The context of these Black Freedom Struggles explains not only why we have Black Children’s Literature now but also why so many prominent African American writers and visual artists, people who you would normally think would focus their attention only on adults and the world of art galleries, have always been involved with children’s literature.  I have always been mesmerized that artists like Tom Feelings turned their aesthetic gaze toward depicting beautiful and powerful images of black children rather than only toward the fine arts world.  The work of presenting an alternative, aesthetic and ideological world to black children will always be deeply political under structured inequalities.  We need only think back to how nervous Hoover and COINTELPRO became by the Breakfast Program for children that the Black Panther Party ran— this was what Hoover saw as most dangerous, as dangerous as guns.  This is worth noting, especially for those of us who think the images, contexts, and experiences that we serve up to black children can ever be racially neutralized.

Honey-I-Love-and-Other-Love-Poems-9780808567431While Keats introduced me to the cutest little black boy ever, it was the Dillons, as illustrators, and Eloise Greenfield, as writer, that gave me little black girls so that I could better see myself and the little girls I played with.  That book is Honey, I Love published in 1978.  In Rudine Sim Bishop’s interview, Greenfield tells Bishop, a noted historian and scholar of African American children’s literature:

I liked that phrase, “Honey, let me tell you.” It was a phrase that was used a lot by African American people, but it had not reached the point where it had become stereotyped. So I wanted to use that, and that’s where the title came from. And I wanted to write about things that children love, about childhoods where there may or may not be much money, but there’s so much fun.

I have owned many copies of this book in my day— all replicas of the original, small pocket version, pictured above, that I would stuff in my purse when I was trying to imitate the grown-up ladies, stuffing it, also of course with nothing but small toys and candies (I also, however, have the equally stunning later 1995 version illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist).  greenfield 2These little girls with hair/afros that come alive and dance all over the page as much as their arms and legs are absolutely stunning. Honey, I Love, just like The Snowy Day, offers us counter-hegemonic and revolutionary visual images of black children; but where Honey diverges is that we get a Black Story, a Black Girl story, a series of poems no less, to go along with the visual emancipation of what Greenfield calls “sweet little gingerbread girls” (see the poem, Keepsake).  In the book, you can find one of these little, black girls trying on her momma’s clothes and learning to stuff things in a pocketbook too; while yet another is dancing to Earth Wind and Fire and The Jackson Five!

As someone who studies, thinks and write about literacies and composition studies, these books— or, rather, these AfroVisual manifestoes— offer me an important reminder: radical texts do not simply offer us new, powerful ways to read and write and do language.  They also help us SEE.  After all my shoveling and playing in the snow today, this is what I will be thinking about.

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Black Girlhood Stories: “Queen of the Scene”

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queen-scene-book-cd-latifah-hardcover-cover-artLast year, I realized something on a level I had not fully problematized before: my black female students want to be princesses.

This revelation came very early in the semester last spring in my black women’s rhetoric class. We were reading excerpts from bell hooks’s Sisters of the Yam (see Sariane Leigh’s inspiring discussion of the personal impact of this text) and somewhere in a sentence that wasn’t even the focus of the piece, hooks criticizes princess-fairy-tales, the kind of indoctrination of female subordination that Disney (and the media) sustain. The sentence was, for me, so obvious so I really didn’t flinch when I read it but that is what many of my students focused in on.  They disagreed with hooks because, yes, they want to be princesses and find a rich, wealthy prince to sweep them off of their feet and there’s nothing wrong with that.  I was stunned, though I should not have been.  I have come to expect this sentiment from what I would call my domesticated female students, which often includes women of color, especially lighter-skinned women who often identify (or want to) as white [and, for some reason, flipping or twirling one’s straight(ened) hair seems to be a kinesthetic hallmark]: women who marry right out of college at 21 or 22, plan a big wedding with 22 bridesmaids, buy as big of a home as possible with a 2-to-3-car garage, work until they have children which is when their bread-winning husband takes over finances (and pretty much all decision-making).  There are variations of this but this is still the main storyline.  Many of the women on this chosen path love Disney and/or everything pink and princess-y and argue for it quite vociferously in my classes.  This little, neat, domestic map often gets unmapped fairly quickly and/or “messily” though in real life because it requires women’s subservience and, thus, manifests divorce, infidelity, financial trouble, resentment, intellectual/general boredom, or general unhappiness, part of what hooks, in fact, argues in her Love Trilogy.  However, the women desperately clinging to their prince-charming fairy tale last spring were young, conscious black women on the way to becoming artists, lawyers, doctors, professors, organizers, researchers, writers, and activists (none of whom, by the way, had boyfriends or even patience for the young black men they met in college).  It’s not like my college days weren’t filled with young black women who were looking for Prince Charming.  I was perplexed, even then, that black women who have become some of the nation’s top surgeons, CEOs, CFOs, and attorneys would only date men in college who looked as if they would be professional athletes or movie stars— Prince Charming on a whole other nightmarish level.  Yet and still, these women didn’t explicitly and publicly call themselves aspiring princesses back then.  I think it just wasn’t the discursive currency like in today’s media campaigns under Disney/Basketball Wives/Real Housewives.  Given the current and future successes and high drive of the black women in my classes that I am describing, their embrace of patriarchy is a contradiction since they are not likely to subsume their minds, time, and desires according to a man’s dictates and ego.  I think they simply need to see and hear an alternative model, one that matches the patriarchy they are not inscribing anyway.

So, at some point this spring 2013 semester and thereafter, on at least one day in the semester, I am planning to present an anti-princess campaign for young black women and I am going to do that with African American children’s literature, the kind of visual texts that should be part of every black girl’s life as an alternative to the Media Empire of White Femininity.  I am not suggesting that non-black women do not need to rupture patriarchy under the Disney empire and, thereby, Western culture.  However, I am not going to subsume the supra-alienation that brown and darker-brown-skinned women experience in the white liberalist, color-blind mantra of helping “all girls.”  To riff of Fanon, we start at the bottom and, thereby, liberate the whole.  I am intentionally turning to this space of children’s literature rather than popular culture where I don’t think we can expect media moguls like Beyonce to ever fully (or consistently) depart from the gendered prescriptions that a capitalist system pays her for.  I won’t assume that the young black women in my classes had access to these stories as children either… but it’s not too late.  The point will be to ask students:

  • What kind of world(s) do these stories, most often written by black women, create for black girls and why?  
  • What are these stories countering in the Disney empire? How? And what do these stories create instead,  for black girls especially?

I have many books in mind and I will be building that library for the rest of this month as I finalize the syllabus for this class that first meets January 24. (I will discuss many of these books here and will use this space to think aloud for this part of this course, so to speak.)

image2073932j The first book in my arsenal is Queen Latifah’s Queen of the Scene.  I am often (well, always) confused by the kind of media portrayals Dana Owens takes on but when she is really doing it up as “Queen La,” I can be down with her.  Despite her political choices in Hollywood roles, I really like this book and all of what it entails: Queen Latifah’s black girl rhyme; Frank Morrison’s 21st century art that seems to revive Ernie Barnes’s “Sugar Shack” (the infamous painting on “Good Times”); and the focus on a little black girl who is Queen (NOT princess) because she can hop scotch, jump double dutch, run, play handball/ stickball/ basketball/ tennis/ soccer, make sandcastles, swing high, walk tall.  Here are my favorites lines:

You don’t want to race me–

I’m fast as spinning dice

if it looks like I’m just catching up

I really passed you twice.

The-Games-Black-Girls-PlayI am especially drawn to this book given how many parents and teachers, mostly white and/or middle class minorities, have denounced the book because the little girl at the center of the story is too confident, claiming the book to be unrealistic and dangerous for girls.  I can’t imagine such a thing as being too confident as a black girl; it also becomes revealing to call this book unrealistic while staying silent on the cultural embrace of Disney princesses, as if THAT is realistic.  Most importantly, the book works, rhetorically and stylistically, as black-girl-speak, in the sense of the words and rhyming that you hear in double dutch games and black girls’ songs/games like Kyra Gaunt has so brilliantly discussed in her book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip Hop.

This rhetoric and style are also linked to what Daryl Cumber Dance calls the “baad-women,” the female counterparts to the more commonly known African American male folk-heroes such as Shine, Stagolee, and John Henry.  The purpose of these women’s discourse is to show superhuman exploits which are, basically, the makings of an imagination and creativity you will surely need in white supremacist, capitalistic, patriarchal contexts.  These baad-women quite willfully show the ways that they succeed at exactly those goals (both sacred and very secular) imagined to be outside of what women can do and, in the case of Latifah’s Queen of the Scene, what blackgirls can do.  Courageous, aggressive, and guile, it seems like only their words and quick wit can keep up with them given the ways that they rhyme, signify, and sass (a word, which, as Dance shows, is a West African derivation.)  Although white male or female, black male, and other unsympathetic women of color do not often understand or approve, the stories and discursive styles of baad-women provide immense pleasure and vision to black female audiences.

When I have students look at the black girl story of Queen of the Scene, I will ask them to read the words and look at the visual images of black girlhood through the lens that Gaunt offers about the games black girls play and the baad-women traditions that Dance has chronicled.    Most importantly, I want to look at the ways that, in this case, African American “folkore/orature” has long provided alternative identities and rhetorics to the gendered hierarchies and institutions that inscribe us: from the plantations under slavery/JimCrow to the indoctrination under Disney.  Baad-women always offer us an alternative world(view).

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