Up the Down Staircase: Where Snoop and Shakespeare Meet

illiam Shakespeare asked, “To be, or not to be?” The Clash sang, “Should I stay or should I go?” Same conflict, different cadence. Charles Darwin posited the survival of the fittest. Snoop Dogg touts the dominance of the illest. Same attitude, different argot.

Brows come in high- and low-. And, unfortunately for artist Frida Kahlo, actor Josh Hartnett, and Bert the Muppet, they also come in uni-. Unlike unibrows on faces, however, unibrow literature — the union of academy and street into a work that enlightens and entertains — is a thing of beauty. It has the power to bring into the literary fold young adults who are not merely reluctant readers but those who are downright averse to the written word.

As a young adult novelist, I aim for the tale and the telling that together will convey, in the cultural vernacular of the reader, my intellectual values. The transmission of moral values I leave to the literati preachers. My books house teen mothers, high school dropouts, shoplifting homeboys, preppy drug dealers, and girl arsonists. A few characters are gay, others are straight. Most strive to achieve a positive goal; some seek little more than their idle, pointless status quo. But it is not only the down and nearly out who are represented. The cast also includes paralegals, college kids, teenage entrepreneurs, computer-savvy project girls, and budding artists.

I have been asked why the books I write don’t paint a clear, bright line of judgment with regard to situations I depict, such as teenage pregnancy, vandalism, or fistfights. Once, at a public reading I did, someone asked why I didn’t simply “get on a soapbox.” Well, soapboxes are for soap, and soap is for washing clean. Books give light, and light reveals the dirty, the clean, and the in-between. It is more important to me that young people read than that they behave well. Put more provocatively, closed legs are good, but an open mind is better.

I am not drawn to pulpit lit. At the very beginning of my career as a YA writer, I came face to face with my own shoddy moral code. A longtime young adult author and friend best known, ironically, for her heartwarming stories about friendship refused to write a heartwarming blurb for the jacket of Spellbound. Surprised, I asked for a reason. The story contained no sex, no violence, and very little profanity, and I’d been told that it was funny, fresh, and well written. But something was wrong. The answer came as a shock. The story gave the wrong message, she explained. What was my offense? My protagonist, a teen dropout with college dreams, leaves her child with grandma in order to attend a college prep course. My bad! I had not recognized that getting Raven squarely on the path to college failed to undo the wrong of obliging grandma to baby-sit during the school year. Clearly, I was blinded by the promising light of Raven’s intellectual development.

Which brings me to the point of this article. It is the podium that inspires me, not the pulpit. And from my podium I write up, not down, to readers. This may change in the future, as I believe a writer should be able to step imaginatively into any skin, but thus far I have written about, although obviously not exclusively for, black teenagers. And contrary to what appears to be conventional wisdom, I see no problem evoking both T. S. Eliot and Missy Elliott, lacrosse and basketball, buggin’ out and Sturm und Drang, pumpkin soup and BBQ spare ribs, and generally whipping up a rich unibrow mix of doo rags, private schools, collard greens, blazers, hoodies, Bill Clinton, rap music, Basquiat, ya mama jokes, Harlem redstones, violin adagios, housing projects, three-story colonials, baggy jeans, Dostoyevsky, graffiti, and flaming calla lilies.

Brother Hood opens with a black teenage boy on a train reading Crime and Punishment, prompting a major publishing figure to suggest that I stop “showing off.” My double bad, for being not only amoral but pretentious! I admit to having something close to a fetish for Fyodor and have read Crime and Punishment at least three times and his short story “The Double” a half dozen times. So naturally I want others to discover Dostoyevsky’s powerful and engrossing tales, which in my view remain contemporary. What should my character Nathaniel have been reading on that train ride to his Harlem home? The latest sex, drugs, and gang-banger literature aimed at black teenagers? VIBE magazine? Why not expose kids to the classics along with more contemporary writing? After all, these works have endured through the centuries for a reason — they capture the human experience at its essence and thus withstand time and transcend race.

I receive numerous e-mails from young readers. Many are self-described nonreaders who discovered a taste for literature through my books, summed up by one girl as depicting “the realness of the ghetto in the projects.” They identify with and can understand certain language and vocabulary, which reflects how they or their friends talk. They like the humor, which leaves them, as one girl put it, “on tha flo” laughing. They identify with my selection of music and movies (“Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood is my favorite movie too!”).

My fantasy is that some of those readers will be so delighted that they will follow with brimming curiosity the trails of crumbs I’ve dropped all along their path, right alongside the Ebonics wisecracks and rap lyrics. And they will read Crime and Punishment because Nathaniel Whitely made it sound thrilling. They will get a dictionary and look up doppelgänger, enigma, succubus, and xenophobia, words that filled Raven Jefferson’s head as she struggled to learn how to spell. Like Chill Wind’s Aisha Ingram, they will marvel at the fact that anyone would sell Manhattan for twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets. If ever they find themselves on the footpath walked by the Washington sisters in Twists and Turns, they will remember that the Brooklyn Bridge is 135 feet above the East River, that its wooden boards are a mere inch and a half thick.

But all that is just the beginning of my fantasy. Once people read my next book, Harlem Hustle, I hope they will be irresistibly drawn to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes and will become familiar with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. I hope that after reading my book they will never look at the sculpture atop Grand Central Terminal in quite the same way again and won’t be able to set foot in Central Park without thinking about Seneca Village, home to New York’s first community of African-American landowners. I hope that everyone will learn the French words that pop up throughout my books and will be so intrigued by my shameless and constant promotion of Paris as the place to be that reader after reader will come and knock at my door. Inside, we’ll dance to Snoop’s latest and, over dinner, discuss Hamlet.

How long will I live?, asks Snoop in “Murder Was the Case (Death After Visualizing Eternity).” Shakespeare gives the rapper an “hour upon the stage” to strut and fret. Their respective musings on mortality resonate and flow together like a Sunday sermon’s call and response. It is by offering both that young adult literature will enrich readers.

Janet McDonald writes novels for young adults, published by Foster/Farrar. She is both a graduate of public housing in Brooklyn and a member of Mensa, and holds degrees from Vassar College, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and New York University’s School of Law. She lives in Paris and can be contacted via her website, www.projectgirl.com.