From the November/December 2000 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Future Classics

like authors’ writings to challenge my thinking. And I have several favorite books that do: Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, Cormier’s Fade, and There Was Once a Slave . . . the Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass by Shirley Graham Du Bois. I wish I could be an artist like Tom Feelings, who created The Middle Passage, or Jacob Lawrence, who painted The Great Migration. I’m eternally grateful as well for Sam and the Tigers by Julius Lester, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Sam is revolutionary in its re-visioning of Little Black Sambo. Another, The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, stays with me always. Some will say it’s not a children’s book. Yet, what is a child book-reader after all? Children who read picture books at four, five, and six years old? The seven-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-year-olds who read a best-seller of seven-hundred-plus pages? One essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Meaning of Progress,” is about Du Bois himself. He’s only just out of a teaching institute and searching for a school and black children to teach in rural Georgia. A parent could easily read this section, and more, to a child. Souls is a slim volume of essays, alive with history and full of wisdom and wizardry. The older child can, and ought, to read it.

All of the books I’ve mentioned are my personal bouquet, from which I’m at a loss to choose a single flower. In order to find the One book — impossible? — I need to return to a favorite title from my childhood, out of a gift storybook. The tale has now grown into multi-cultural ubiquity.

On a Christmas day when I was little, I sat in a far corner with my walking, talking new dolly, and whispered over the pictures of hearth and cinders and the lovely lady in her shimmering ball gown. She rose from grit to glory, rags to riches, with a little help from her friends. Our modest Ohio “cottage” had no fireplace, no silks; no fairy godmother or evil sisters, either. (We did have pumpkins, and mice! And hope for prosperity.) Cinderella caught me and I’m still hooked; and like me, so are readers everywhere.

Today, “Cinderella” flourishes: we have Cajun, Cambodian, Egyptian, Chinese, Caribbean, Irish, and Korean “Cinderella” books. Some time ago, I discovered still another variant, “Catskinella,” an African-American “Cinderella” tale. Not to be overlooked is Cindy Ellen: A Wild Western Cinderella. So be it! It be She! Sweet Cinderella carries on her rites of passage. Nowadays and in all her ethnic variety, she stuns Princes Charming and delights earth’s children. I fondly embrace Her story as the One that befits us in a new century.

—Virginia Hamilton