How the Little House Gave Ground

ooking backward, it takes no deep thought to name Little House in the Big Woods as the most important American children’s book of the first half of the twentieth century — the work of fiction that, with its sequels, made the largest imprint on the national consciousness. Here was a vividly detailed, quietly stirring personal story of covered wagon days and log cabin nights that moved westward with the frontier and embodied, stage by stage, the experience of growing up with the country. From the hard times of the Depression, when the books began to appear, to the good times of historical tourism, the Little House — in the big woods, on the prairie, at the end of the railroad line — turned into the all-American mobile homestead.

By contrast, a grove of treasured and endangered trees is the symbolic core, and if you will the seed, of the children’s book that is arguably the most important of the century’s second half, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Mildred Taylor, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, was writing family history. Her chronicle of the Logans is also a story of struggle and survival — and, even more, a story of triumph of will. With the means at hand, Pa Ingalls and others of his hardy breed could over time break the sod, plant crops, and “conquer” the frontier. The brutalities of segregation in the rural South of the 1930s could only be resisted — and then only with the kind of moral courage Taylor prized in her father and grandfather and the sort of desperate trickery that David Logan, alter ego of her grandfather, has recourse to.

There are other differences between what Wilder and Taylor wrought. The Little House books are textbook history — mainstream history, as it were — infused with the rigors of everyday life. The fruited plain, with grasshoppers. The Logan family saga is not only the history that textbooks left out, it illumines the underside of the American past that only black people can take pride in, because they overcame it. For the rest of us, the book is a challenge: to admire the Logans’ courage and tenacity is not enough. Would we, in their place, have done as well? Harder still, would we as nonblacks have extended help like Mr. Jamison, the steadfast lawyer-ally, or even shown the sympathy of young Jeremy Simms, the book’s most pitiable character? Scorned by his bigoted white family, fended off by wary Stacey Logan, Jeremy is the ultimate outsider, at home only in his tree house.

Or do I identify so keenly with Jeremy’s abject good intentions because I too am white? By 1976, when Roll of Thunder was published, it was no longer a novelty in children’s books for white readers to see themselves through black eyes, and be found wanting. Ten years earlier, the integration ethos would have called for parity: the white boy and the black boy would have been hesitant, hopeful friends. Twenty years earlier, the white boy would have been the saving of the black boy. The transformation, in step with the civil rights/black power revolution, was fueled by government policy and economic interest, by black militance and white conscience. And, inescapably, by the presence, the centrality, of children.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in language of “simple justice” that gave all groups moral leverage and a claim to educational equality. In 1955, after Rosa Parks sat tight, the black citizens of Montgomery walked to work rather than ride the segregated buses any longer. The civil rights movement was underway.

Ten years of protests and demonstrations followed — years of sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and face-offs at the schoolhouse door. “For the first time in American history,” the historian Eric Foner has written, “the young became active agents of social change.” Through the March on Washington in August 1963, hopes for progress through nonviolent action and moral suasion persisted; they crumbled the next month with the death of four young black girls in the Sunday bombing of a Birmingham church. For many in the movement, it was time to stop demonstrating, and organize. The next summer, 1964, local and national civil rights leaders launched the Mississippi Freedom Project to register black voters, establish “freedom schools” to teach reading and math, and open community centers to provide medical and legal assistance. Recruiters traveled to elite Northern colleges to sign up volunteers, the majority perforce white. Well-off white students were wanted for the publicity they would bring, the eyes they would open.

Some of those eyes, by chance, were in the children’s publishing community, where the response to the civil rights movement had been earnest, well-intended, and largely uninspired. A certain number of school integration stories had appeared, most auspiciously Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane, and the production of biographies of notable African Americans had been stepped up; Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, black authors and old hands, had more commissions than they could handle. Milton Meltzer, co-author with Hughes of A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, was bringing out his three-volume compendium In Their Own Words: A History of the American Negro, 1619–1966, which does rate as applied scholarship for young front-liners.

A single book by a black writer, Lorenz Graham’s 1958 South Town, does give an unvarnished picture of black life in the South on the eve of desegregation, but it was not a success. Graham writes a stiff, flat prose and, in the absence of a dramatic thrust, white readers at least may not have been ready to absorb his message of callous, unremitting racism. The one true innovation, indeed, was the color-blind picture book. In the first of the type, Lorraine and Jerrold Beim’s Two Is a Team (1945), two prototypical boys, colored light and dark, discover the value of working together; racial differences, we’re meant to conclude, don’t matter. But over the years the focus shifted from denying differences to emphasizing similarities. In The Snowy Day (1962), Ezra Jack Keats’s joyous celebration of boyhood in winter, the race of lively, brown-skinned Peter doesn’t matter, is immaterial. In its warmth, in the enthusiasm with which it was received, The Snowy Day is the children’s book equivalent of the March on Washington. And like Martin Luther King’s dream of untroubled, unclouded childhood, it was vulnerable to the aftereffects of Mississippi Summer 1964 — the Project itself and the ensuing upheaval.

One Project volunteer, the stepson of children’s book author and Scholastic book club editor Lilian Moore, was struck by the absence of black faces in the books that Mississippi black children had, and set a fire under her, too. “Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing nothing,” Moore expostulates forty years later. She raised the matter with her support group of children’s book writers, which included the political activist and Western specialist Franklin Folsom, and together Moore, Folsom, and civil rights lawyer Stanley Faulkner organized the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC). Folsom became chairman.

With a star-studded list of black and white sponsors, the Council was up and running in time to capitalize on the furor raised by Nancy Larrick’s September 1965 article in the Saturday Review of Literature, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” which reported the infinitesimal percentage of children’s books about contemporary African-American life — “four-fifths of one percent” — published in the previous three years. Finding few black faces even in group pictures, Larrick applauded the Council’s program to increase nonwhite representation.

It may have occurred to some readers, in the course of the two previous paragraphs, that the paucity of black faces in children’s books could have been noted as readily in Harlem as in Mississippi, and the scarcity of true-to-life stories would not have been news to black librarians Augusta Baker and Charlemae Rollins or to anyone familiar with their booklists. Recognition and remedial action, as the organizers of the Freedom Project knew, waited upon compelling events.

In the case of children’s books, action quickly followed recognition. The prime mover, however, was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed explicitly to aid the “educationally deprived” and to bolster the resources of school libraries, a relatively new and growing factor in American education. Its dual theme, unmistakably, was equality and diversity. In the government booklet outlining the program, on a par with the faces of white children, are the faces of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American children that Larrick and others found lacking in the run of children’s books. The funds allocated for book purchase were enormous, unprecedented; publishers had the opportunity to make amends and at the same time make money.

But amends on what terms? With what kinds of books? Would better representation do it, more Snowy Days? Not much longer. In June 1966, on the Memphis-to-Jackson March Against Fear, Stokely Carmichael raised the cry, Black Power — and the twin precepts of nationalism and separatism propounded by Malcolm X supplanted the ideal of integration that Martin Luther King and other old-line civil rights leaders stood for. Two years of disorder and disillusion followed: King was assassinated; a white backlash set in. Black people, taking African names and wearing natural hairstyles, were radicalized by Black Pride.

In that explosive period the Council on Interracial Books for Children changed course toward greater militance almost from issue to issue of its quarterly bulletin, Interracial Books for Children — raising questions that resonate to this day. (Publication of the Bulletin, it should be noted, was somewhat irregular, and double issues were common.) In the first issue, dated Summer 1966, Atheneum children’s book editor Jean Karl discusses some of the problems of publishing culturally diverse books, and the reasons to persist; veteran children’s book writer Phyllis Whitney, author of several books on interracial themes, broaches the need for non-white authors to express non-white perspectives, as she can’t; brief reviews endorse The Snowy Day and other color-blind picture books of the time.

The next issue, dated Winter 1967, brings an article by Isabelle Suhl, librarian of the progressive Elisabeth Irwin School, damning The Story of Doctor Dolittle, just then being filmed, and its sequels. “Shouldn’t they all be reread and reevaluated . . . ? How can a new generation of children be protected from their chauvinism and racism?” Two issues later, in the spring of 1968, Suhl enlarges upon her objections to Doctor Dolittle in detail, and notes both the many lists on which the book still appears and the two listmakers, Larrick and the Child Study Association’s Josette Frank, who had dropped the book from their latest compilations.

Behind the scenes a battle was raging between founding chairman Folsom and his new co-chairman Bradford Chambers — student militant, editorial freelance, nonfiction editor at Parents’ Magazine Press; and like the founders, white. Laying out his differences with Chambers in a letter to Stanley Faulkner in January 1969, Folsom writes: “It is a matter of simple fact that the Council has never asked teachers or librarians to drop any titles from their lists of recommended books.” To analyze racist books like Doctor Dolittle, Folsom continues, is an educational service. “But if we were to ask teachers and librarians to [drop] the material we don’t approve of, we would be actively urging book-burning.”

For five closely argued pages, Folsom pleads that the Council maintain the “broad coalition” of forces, including publishers and others of diverse views, who now support its “positive aims.” He warns against the threat to freedom of the press. “The Council itself certainly needs the freedom to write and to publish. It should not be among the repressive institutions which would try to dictate to people what they should exclude from their publications.” He himself, he states, cannot administer such a policy.

Folsom lost, and withdrew. As of Summer 1969, Chambers was chairman and undisputed leader, a post he held until his early death in 1984. The Council went ahead with its annual contests for new African-American writers for children, promoted its efforts widely, and netted three newcomers to boast of: Walter Dean Myers, 1968 winner in the picture book category; and Sharon Bell Mathis and Mildred Taylor, 1969 and 1973 winners, respectively, in the 8–12 category. (Kristin Hunter, 1968 winner in the 12–16 category for The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, was not a discovery; she wrote the book under contract to Scribners, publisher of her two adult novels.) In 1970 separate contests were added for other ethnic groups, and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve and Traveler Bird were among the Native American winners, while Minfong Ho was an Asian winner.

The contests apart, the Council operated all-out as a pressure group, under the banner “Fight Racism and Sexism in Book Publishing” — and reflexively, the contest rules were amended to call for manuscripts relating to “liberation struggles.” The Bulletin featured denunciations of William Armstrong’s Sounder, the 1970 Newbery winner, and Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, winner of the Jane Addams Award and many other honors, for their white authorship, inauthenticity, and inherent racism. Ezra Jack Keats, yesterday’s hero, took a steady drubbing — for the idealized world of Snowy Day and Whistle for Willie and the inner-city images of Goggles! and Hi, Cat! alike. Proactively, Chambers asked editors to pledge not to sign white writers to write about black life, and urged white writers to back off from black subjects themselves; he petitioned commercial publishers to provide financial backing for the new “minority” houses, and pressed “minority” authors — individually as well as collectively — to switch from commercial publishers to the “minority” firms. In public and person-to-person, the heat was always on.

Some provisional judgment is called for. The objections to Sounder and The Cay that the Council publicized were well founded and had gone largely unnoticed by white reviewers and judges; at a distance, the books are indefensible. The campaign against Keats, on the other hand, had a lot to do with temporal concerns — the paucity of black-illustrated picture books, a desire for naturalistic figure drawing, resentment at a white illustrator’s runaway success with black subjects. Keats himself bore up, and so have his books. Still, the issue of white writers and artists depicting black life was worth pursuing at a time when there were few writers and artists of color in the field. The denigration of Sounder and The Cay, along with other white-authored and -illustrated books, was not confined to analysis, however. Chambers and others affiliated with the Council made an active effort to keep the books off recommended lists and, in concert with other groups, out of institutions. By any traditional definition, by former chairman Folsom’s standards, this was censorship: the issue would be joined on those terms in the course of the 1970s.

It was vital to have black writers writing about black life also, and more importantly, for the difference black experience and language and creativity would make — to African Americans, of course, and to other Americans, too. What sustained the political momentum, and compensated for other setbacks, was the books that began to appear during the course of the struggle. Black-authored books, with an exhilarating sense of black culture.

Virginia Hamilton confided her disappointment at the rejection of an adult novel to her old friend Janet Schulman, director of children’s book marketing at Macmillan. Recalling a story that Hamilton had written in college about a tall, stately pig-keeper taken for a Watutsi princess, Schulman suggested that it would make a good, and needed, story for children. Hamilton was dubious. But under the editorial guidance of Dick Jackson, then hardly more than an apprentice himself, she turned the story of an apparition in work boots into a short novel firmly grounded in the personality and imagination of a single impressionable girl. On its appearance in 1967 in a suitably tall, slender volume, with a heart-stopping jacket by Symeon Shimin, Zeely turned heads and opened vistas. There is no sign of white society in Zeely, and no murmur of racial conflict. In a field swarming with “problem books,” this could stand as the first piece of liberated children’s literature from what Hamilton was soon to call a “parallel culture.”

None of Hamilton’s subsequent fiction was as close in form and content to a conventional children’s book. It is not just that each book was different from the last — House of Dies Drear from Zeely, Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu from House of Dies Drear — but that, beginning with The Planet of Junior Brown, the books were different from anyone else’s books, too. The teacher and social activist Herbert Kohl, a great admirer of Planet, settled on calling it “social-realistic-fantasy with poetic and biblical resonances.” Hamilton sometimes spoke of herself as a symbolist. The British critic John Rowe Townsend found in her work a marked difference from most of her white American contemporaries: “dream, myth, legend and ancient story can be sensed again and again in the background of naturalistically-described present-day events.” In this respect, and in its very elusiveness, Hamilton’s work resembles that of certain eminent British children’s writers, like William Mayne and Alan Garner. Yet it could not be more deep-dyed American.

If Zeely was the first book of a new dispensation, Stevie was the second.

John Steptoe took a group of his paintings to Harper & Row, at the instigation of his high-school art teacher, and wowed Ursula Nordstrom, editorial eminence and perennial enthusiast. “We have no one who can write a story for pictures like these,” she told him. “You’ll have to do it yourself.” When Steptoe protested that he wasn’t a writer, she asked him about his boyhood, learned that his mother had taken care of other children and that he had hated them. “All of them?” Well, said Steptoe, there was one little fellow . . . . Nordstrom, who had been scribbling furiously, handed him her notes. “There’s your story,” she said, “just fill it in.” Stevie, previewed in full in Life magazine, came out in 1969.

“I am a painter and not yet an artist,” Steptoe said then, and he never stopped growing. But small children remained his touchstone subject. His last book, the simple, luminous Baby Says, is a Renaissance master’s Stevie.

Enter the new revolutionary writing.

Julius Lester went into the sixties emulating William Faulkner et al. and studying Bach, metamorphosed by mid-decade into a folksinger, social critic, and civil rights worker, and shortly
wrote Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!, a blistering recap of the Black Power movement. Then, a bend in the road. His editor at Dial noted that Lester, like other successful practitioners of agitprop, had a simple, forceful style. She alerted a receptive colleague, children’s book editor Phyllis Fogelman, and while Look Out, Whitey! was still in manuscript, To Be a Slave was underway. And before either came out, in July and November of 1968 respectively, Lester was at work on additional books for young adults, most notably Black Folktales.

Look Out, Whitey! was new, incendiary, and transient. The contents of To Be a Slave and Black Folktales were not new or unknown, and they are by nature imperishable. Lester, in essence, restored their black voice. To Be a Slave weaves excerpts from antebellum slave narratives and 1930s Federal Writers’ Project interviews with ex-slaves into a powerful and damning portrait of slavery; after the echoing horrors of 1968, it was a natural for a Newbery honor. Black Folktales gives a snappy, larky, contemporary edge — unsparing, at times, of white people — to a mix of classic African and African-American folktales; it met some resistance. Similarly jacketed and illustrated by Tom Feelings, the two books had an air of gravity, even of momentousness; as a pair, they were mutually reinforcing. They also started Lester on the reclamation of black oral and written literature that was to become a lifework for the man-of-letters cum revolutionary.

The recognized need and the ready market opened doors, and some of the best and brightest black talent found a niche in children’s books. Toni Morrison, perhaps wisely, declined. June
Jordan, Alice Childress, and Lucille Clifton took up the challenge.

Jordan was a promising young poet when Milton Meltzer interested her in writing poetry to accompany paintings of black American life — to give them voice or, in actuality, many different voices: passionate, gentle, measuring, acute. Who Look at Me, Jordan’s first book, is also an achievement in bookmaking, a word-and-picture experience. To paraphrase Julius Lester, “it makes you feel, without yelling, what blackness is all about.” Equally unusual in its own way is what Jordan called her “teenage romance” and others would call a poignant, indelible love story, His Own Where — written from the viewpoint of a sixteen-year-old black boy in strong, poetic black English. Jordan couldn’t do anything run-of-the-mill: a later breath of a book, Kimako’s Story, is snugly in the voice of a thoughtful seven-year-old as she makes her way safely, with a big dog to walk, through a summer week in Harlem. From a writer who turned out political essays regularly for four decades, published several collections of poetry, wrote plays and compiled anthologies, a bare handful of books may not seem like much; but a handful of exceptional books can be a legacy.

The right book can cap a headline. Alice Childress was a more-than-promising off-Broadway playwright when she was recruited to write for teenagers, and A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich is as much a dramatist’s book as Who Look at Me and His Own Where are the books of a poet. In a succession of monologues, thirteen-year-old addict Benjie, his best friend, his mother, his stepfather, and the pusher report and reflect on Benjie’s ongoing struggle with heroin. At a time of national hysteria about heroin in the ghetto, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich was honest and tart and suspenseful. And in the suspense, there is hope.

Lucille Clifton had six children in a six-and-a-half-year period before her career as a poet took off in 1969 with the publication of her first book of poems, Good Times, which begins: “In the inner city / or / like we call it / home . . . ” The following year she made her children’s book debut with two complementary picture books, The Black BCs and Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, and in the next dozen years she would write sixteen additional books, seven of them about Everett Anderson and the others as assorted as a handful of pebbles. A small, variegated body of work, unmatched as a meditative response to a quarter-century of seismic change.

Some of the Days of Everett Anderson was an event in 1970 — so good in itself, so right for the time: the soaring first lines of Good Times incarnate. All Us Come Cross the Water, brilliantly illustrated by John Steptoe, dramatizes the reconnection of black people with their African roots and African-American enslavement in the person of the boy Ujamaa — not, he tells his obtuse black teacher, Jim. The Times They Used to Be, recently reissued with new illustrations by E. B. Lewis, takes us back to the summer of 1948 — to the sweetness and richness of black life before integration, to the coexistence of ghostly sightings, religious images, and episodes of black history: themes central to black writers in succeeding years.

History and biography expanded exponentially. What W. E. B. DuBois and Carter Woodson knew about African and African-American history at the beginning of the twentieth century finally reached the ears of young Americans with the publication by Doubleday, beginning in 1965, of Zenith Books, a series for which John Hope Franklin, Woodson’s successor as the foremost authority on African-American history, was the principal consultant. A savvy children’s writer and an eminent black historian (or, in one case, an eminent white specialist in black history) worked together on each book; under the title Lift Every Voice, for instance, Dorothy Sterling and Benjamin Quarles profiled political leaders DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, and James Weldon Johnson. Books on other “important but overlooked . . . minority groups” — Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans — made the series broadly inclusive.

But it is the Crowell Biography series — pictorial biographies, for six-to-eight-year-olds — launched in 1970 with nine titles, that best exemplifies the historical moment and foretells the future. Billed only as “outstanding modern Americans,” with no reference to any category of any kind, the nine subjects are (in alphabetical order): Leonard Bernstein, Wilt Chamberlain, César Chávez, Samuel Clemens, Charles Drew, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maria Tallchief, Jim Thorpe, and Malcolm X. To wit: a Jewish composer and conductor, a black basketball player, a Chicano labor leader, a white writer renowned for his portrayal of black characters, a black medical scientist, a white woman who championed human rights, a Native American ballet dancer, a Native American football player, a black political leader. The three black subjects were a fresh, diverse group in 1970, and one of them — Malcolm X, profiled by Arnold Adoff and pictured by John Wilson — was highly controversial. Equally crucial was the lineup of authors and illustrators. In succeeding years June Jordan, Eloise Greenfield, Sharon Bell Mathis, Alice Walker, and Kenneth Rudeen tackled the black subjects, and Jerry Pinkney, George Ford, and Albert Williams were among the books’ illustrators.

Jordan’s subject is Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil rights leader whose emergence as a political force was the capstone of Free-dom Summer. The resulting book — thirty-two pages in a series for second and third graders — is lyrical and trenchant. At the close, Hamer is singing Gospel songs at home with a gathering of friends: “Her strong voice reaches down to the end of the block,” Jordan writes, “and out into the world.” These “outstanding modern Americans,” with their extraordinary struggles and triumphs, were the emerging heroes of young Americans of all backgrounds. And Martin Luther King doesn’t even appear in the series — there were already six or seven simple biographies of him.

Sharon Bell Mathis qualifies as a happening. In 1968 she won a Council on Interracial Books contest for the manuscript of Sidewalk Story, a Harlem fairy tale — scrappy young girl, with white reporter’s aid, brings happy ending to eviction of best friend’s big, hard-up family — except for the fierceness, the defiance of almost-ten Lilly Etta Allen. In five novels in five years in the early 1970s — years of black outrage and self-assertion — Mathis burned a hole with characters that give no quarter, conflicts that (usually) have no resolution. Two titles stand out. Teacup Full of Roses ranks with A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich as a story of heroin addiction — addiction so hopeless, in this case, that seventeen-year-old Joe, a decent, responsible kid, is forced to give up on his older addict-brother Paul, a sometime-artist and still their mother’s favorite. Cast out, Paul precipitates yet another tragedy. Among the many stories of alliance between the very young and the very old, The Hundred Penny Box is singular for the vehemence, the fearlessness with which young Michael protects his great-great-aunt Dew’s hundred penny box, repository of her memories — and, implicitly, hundred-year-old Aunt Dew herself — from his mother’s velvet-glove hostility. Outwardly Aunt Dew is wobbly, even dotty; inwardly, like Michael, she is unshakable. Fiction apart, Mathis wrote about Ray Charles with empathy and fervor for the Crowell Biography series; illustrated by George Ford in his usual vigorous, ebullient style, the book has staying power — certified by its re-issue, of late, on the multicultural Lee & Low list.

Eloise Greenfield’s big break was the opportunity to write a Crowell biography. She and Sharon Bell Mathis were both members of the children’s literature division of the Washington D.C. Black Writers Workshop, and Mathis, the division’s head, prevailed upon Crowell to let some members of her group try to write biographies on spec. Among the subjects Crowell had chosen were Rosa Parks and Ray Charles; Greenfield elected to try Parks, Mathis picked Charles. The Parks biography was successful, and Greenfield was asked to write about Mary McLeod Bethune and Paul Robeson. On Bethune, Greenfield speaks with basic eloquence: “They wanted to learn and she wanted to teach them.”

Greenfield had written children’s stories (and general articles) for Negro Digest and other black magazines before the Crowell opening came, and she published her first picture book with the black Drum and Spear Press in Washington, in 1972, the year before Rosa Parks appeared. Originally called Bubbles (and illustrated by Eric Marlow, the illustrator of Rosa Parks), the book was reissued in 1977 as Good News (with illustrations by Pat Cummings). I keep wanting to call it I Can Read. But by any name it is full-fledged Eloise Greenfield in its thrust and a classroom example of picture book structuring: in short, all there. The book is also a clear sign, all the more so for its low profile, of what Steptoe, Clifton, and Greenfield herself, as black writers writing about black children, were adding to the picture book literature at large: real stories about real children, told in their own words or wholly from their point of view.

James Edward comes home from school with the good news that he has learned to read that day; tucked in his pocket is a paper with three words to prove it. But his mother, who has to leave for work soon, is too busy preparing the family dinner to listen to him, and he has to help by taking care of baby Deedee. This is where the tremor comes: madder and madder, James Edward is mean to Deedee; she begins to cry and, to cheer her up, James Edward sticks his nose in her playpen and whispers, “I can read.” She giggles, he giggles, and taking out his paper he whispers his three words . . . “Maybe tomorrow his mama would have time to hear him read. By then he might know four words, or five. Or even six.”

In one way or another, the message of Greenfield stories is acceptance. Understanding, acceptance, growth: counsel for black children, appropriate to all children. In She Come Bringing Me That Little Baby Girl, radiantly illustrated by John Steptoe, Kevin reconciles himself to having a baby sister, and to sharing his parents with her, when his mama says, “I used to be a baby girl . . . And my big brother used to help take care of me.” There, beaming, stands Uncle Roy — bespectacled, mustachioed, half-bald. In the short novel Talk about a Family — a megadrama in sixty loose pages — Genny is certain that big brother Larry, coming home from the army for good, can patch up the trouble between their parents. But he can’t. And Genny, seeing circles of lamplight overlap, envisions her family post-divorce as two overlapping circles. This is the girl who, on the first page, decided that a brown leaf falling on her shoulder had to mean good luck, though nobody ever told her so. It doesn’t, not in the way she’d like, but the image of eager hopefulness stays with the reader, just as does the later reassuring image of an undivisive divorce. Between those two poetic metaphors hangs the tale.

Hence also Greenfield’s Honey, I Love and Nathaniel Talking, two books of poems that speak confidently in children’s voices — black children’s expressive voices. Hence, on home ground, the intimacies of Childtimes, the three-generation memoir Greenfield wrote with her mother Lessie Jones Little, to which her grandmother also contributed. Was “childtimes” a word she had always known, she was asked. A word black people used? No, she said, it was her word. That figures: her word for a subject especially hers.

In 1977 Greenfield wrote Africa Dream, an imaginary picture book journey to long-ago Africa dedicated “With love / To all children of African descent / May they find in their past the strength / to shape their future.” Black-and-white wash drawings by Carole Byard evoke opulent cities and trees of magical fecundity. The Afrocentrism that had swept into children’s books in the early 1970s was not exclusively a picture book phenomenon, but it had its fullest expression there — in Muriel and Tom Feelings’s Swahili counting and alphabet books, Moja Means One and Jambo Means Hello; in Ashanti to Zulu, the Margaret Musgrove alphabet of African cultures illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon; and in the Dillons’ illustrations for the Verna Aardema adaptations of African tales, Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and Who’s in Rabbit’s House? Moja and Jambo took Caldecott honors for Tom Feelings; Ashanti to Zulu and Why Mosquitoes Buzz were back-to-back Caldecott winners for the Dillons; and by the end of the 1970s an image of African beauty — Ashanti or Zulu or Masai — was as fixed in the minds of many American youngsters as the Greek, or European, ideal. The African folklore boom, later decried as a distraction from matters at hand, can also be attributed to the broad new interest in Africana.

As artist, folklorist, and storyteller, Ashley Bryan had made Africa a second home and his Bronx studio a workshop of pan-African arts. Atheneum children’s book editor Jean Karl also learned, when she visited, that Bryan had been making books by hand since childhood — writing and illustrating them, all-of-a-piece. And to a large extent what Karl did, abetted by designer Harriet Barton, was to preserve in commercial publishing the signature, all-of-a-piece Ashley Bryan book, and make it an exhibit of book art. The Ox of the Wonderful Horns, published in 1971, anticipates the work of decades. A variety of pictures match the text in detail and sly humor — a matter not of literal illustration but of witty, inventive design. Three dancing figures, as fresh today as they were thirty years ago, conjure up an array of African masks, Picasso’s three cubist musicians, the rhythms of Harlem swing. Ashley Bryan, bless him, is an original.

Southern black storytelling, and its continuation up north, has given children’s books a lot to be thankful for — most prominently, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its progeny.

Mildred Taylor had tried to write parts of her family history over and over again before she heard about the Council on Interracial Books contest in 1973. She had tried to tell the story that became Song of the Trees from the perspective of her father, the original of the boy Stacey, but she had trouble speaking in a boy’s voice. Then, with four days to go before the contest deadline, she made his sister Cassie the narrator — or, as she says, “the storyteller.”

The Taylor story and the Logan story are, it would seem, inextricable. Heading home to California after the award ceremony in New York, with a publishing contract for Song of the Trees to boot, Taylor stopped off in Toledo to visit her family and, around the dinner table, heard her father and uncle tell the story of the black boy who broke into a store, and how he was saved from lynching, that provides the climax to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Taylor didn’t think of the book as a story for children, she says, but rather as an adult novel along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird. No, editor Phyllis Fogelman told her, it would be “more recognized” as a children’s book. In the event, those words rank as a major understatement: Roll of Thunder took almost every available prize including the erratic Newbery, which assures a book of maximum attention and puts the rare, very fine winner over the top.

Presentation of the 1977 Newbery Medal to Taylor for Roll of Thunder, with thirty “essential” family members in attendance, stands as a culmination of sorts, an extra-Newbery occasion. One can imagine the thunderous applause as she saluted those family members in her acceptance speech — applause also for their people before them and for the other, numberless Cassie and Stacey Logans and their offspring who overcame discrimination and brutality and made the revolution that this one children’s book thrillingly, implicitly foretells. “It would not pass,” thinks Cassie at the close. The added stress on the word not comes unthinkingly to the reader.

The winds had shifted, however. The previous year the Council on Interracial Books for Children had found a marked decline in the number of books on “minority” and feminist themes. Books about black life, as many noticed, were particularly hard hit. Book funds were scarce; interests had changed; conservatism was on the rise. From the Supreme Court to the local school district, gains were being lost.

In children’s books, bulwarks existed against any rollbacks. There was now an African-American children’s literature to build on, to add to, to expand in new directions. Walter Dean Myers was doing just that with his first teen capers. Jerry Pinkney, meanwhile, was giving Myers’s Harlem teenagers, the determined Logan brood, and heroic figures like Mary McLeod Bethune — black Americans, historic and contemporary — a distinctive visual presence. On the political front, black librarians and their allies were mobilized; the Council on Interracial Books for Children held firm; cultural diversity was more and more a classroom staple. And even before the immigration reform act of l965 brought a flood of newcomers from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia in the l980s and l990s, nonblack people of color began to speak in their own voices, inspired by the black example. Like African Americans, they too wanted their children to be proud of who they were.

The first, revolutionary breakthrough, a black achievement, was followed by an increasingly diverse, genuinely multicultural eruption of political awareness and individual talent, which will be the subject of another article.

Barbara Bader has written two previous articles on aspects of black children’s literature for the Horn Book — “Sambo, Babaji, and Sam” (September/October 1996), about the history of Little Black Sambo and its recent reincarnations; and “History Changes Color” (January/February 1997), about the work of Carter Woodson and Arna Bontemps.