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| From
the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Nobody Knows . . . Trouble come upon you when you have your eyes shut;
Folklore is a good place to start this rumination because it’s not only full of trouble, as all good stories are, but also forever in trouble. Witches, demons, and tricksters, on the one hand, and angels, gods, and heaven itself, on the other — all slip from folktale to children’s literature and variously evoke delight or provoke the wrath of pious or protective adults. Little Red Riding Hood takes a bottle of wine to Grandma . . . uh-oh, make that grape juice. Sleeping Beauty had what? Twins, you say? . . . well, we’ll just end the story with a chaste kiss. Meanwhile, mythical figures sneak into fantasy like undercover agents, taking over vast swaths of juvenile mindset; He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is obviously a six-word moni-ker for the character whom Natalie Babbitt featured long ago in her ever-so-dangerous Devil’s Storybook.
Just don’t make the devil’s wife African American (see — if you can find a copy — Mary Calhoun and Trina Schart Hyman’s Big Sixteen, roundly trounced by, among others, the Horn Book). And, for that matter, don’t make heaven African American unless you as author and/or illustrator are African American (see, in the literary courts of justice, Jake and Honeybunch Go to Heaven by Margot Zemach vs. What a Truly Cool World by Julius Lester). I myself have been accused of joining the folklore police in suggesting that the appropriation of stories from oral to print traditions can be a problem for historically oppressed minorities such as Native Americans, whose lore has been systematically ripped off by authors and illustrators with or without knowledge of the tales’ origins. Appropriation is in this case another word for theft, as in a pickpocket appropriating someone else’s wallet, and involves individual copyright of others’ communal property, along with profits and power derived from others’ cultural heritage. A heterogeneous society cannot avoid controversy over the value systems to which its youth are exposed. Most of us have a list of books that parents, teachers, or even colleagues have objected to because of sociopolitical controversy, sex, violence, obscenity, supernatural elements, and so forth. (Few of us, I suspect, could come up with a list of titles that children have objected to, unless adults put them up to it.) In the four decades since I wrote my first review at Booklist in 1968, I have often been taken by surprise at protests over children’s books that I innocently recommended, whether as a librarian, critic, professor, author, parent, or grandparent. Perhaps my favorite objection was to Margaret Mahy and Steven Kellogg’s picture book The Boy Who Was Followed Home — for, among other things, its representation of substance abuse. The plot involves a proliferating pod of hippopotami who are banished by means of a pill (first strike) administered by a witch (second strike) who is easy to find in the telephone directory (third strike, and it’s out). The would-be censors were right, of course: since that book was published, myriad children, I’m sure, have tracked down witches through their local telephone directories, and none has lived to tell the tale, which is why we don’t hear about it. I learned from a long list of objections not only that every Halloween book is suspect but also that readers must beware of reality in all its guises. Bare bottoms and nappy hair obviously have no place in children’s literature. Penguins belong in twos, but gay people don’t. The Snowy Day is sometimes okay and sometimes not, depending on cycles of cultural climate change. Beware of irony: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Slave Dancer, some say, clearly commend slavery to uncritical youth. It’s easy to make fun of what others construe as trouble, less so to deal with your own inner red light. After consistently championing the position of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, I encountered a middle-grade book, Louise Moeri’s The Girl Who Lived on the Ferris Wheel, that had some strong characterization and suspense but that I found hard to sanction for children’s reading. Near the climax, an abused eleven-year-old finds the dinner table set with butcher knives and realizes that her psychotic mother plans to kill her. Out the window went my professional perspective and in the front door came my maternal guardian instincts. Conversely (and more famously), I criticized The Chocolate War not for its bleak content, as some supposed, but for stereotyping bad guys without developing their motivation — something few critics would accept in serious adult literature, though it’s rampant in “genre literature” such as detective series, fantasies, and Westerns. Maybe I was taking serious young adult literature too seriously and not recognizing that any villainy of such scope was justified as a breakthrough in this relatively new genre. Most trouble over books is deceptively reductive. Harriet the Spy never generated the junior CIA that its detractors feared, and children had certainly indulged in lying their way out of trouble long before Harriet did. However, the issues of spying and lying were easier to target than the vividly rendered isolation/alienation among Louise Fitzhugh’s child characters, the convincingly irresponsible nature of the parents, the sarcastic tone of the text and illustrations, and the portrayal of a protagonist as less than a model of good behavior. Similarly, the idea that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are might scare children, as claimed by an outraged children’s librarian to whom I was assistant when the book came out, was easier to express than the idea that children’s harboring powerful anger might scare adults. In the same rush of 1960s subversion, authors such as Nat Hentoff, Paul Zindel, and S. E. Hinton challenged the very heart of authority with, respectively, police who beat up an innocent black musician, teenagers who betrayed a trusted friend, and a society that visited class warfare upon its youth. Not that trouble started in the 1960s. Since children’s literature became a recognized art/industry in the first quarter of the twentieth century, our foremothers have recounted any number of troublesome incidents. One of the most entertaining is editor Margaret McElderry’s description of Will Lipkind and Nicolas Mordvinoff’s 1951 Caldecott Honor–winning The Two Reds being pulled from FAO Schwarz’s store windows because of suspicious Communist overtones! (It’s about the friendship between a red-haired boy and red-haired cat.) And, of course, the nineteenth century saw multiple attacks on dime novels as corrupters of youth. Throughout both centuries, fantasy and realism caused trouble for the way they might affect readers. Mother Goose has suffered many revisions created by adult arbiters of morality and/or feminism. Children, meanwhile, had their own playground versions, which inclined to subvert all the official versions. Alison Lurie’s Don’t Tell the Grownups cites subversive elements in children’s books that have lasted as “classics.” But it was grownups who had the money and power to make them last, so there must be some childish element of subversion that survives as we get older — and that often increases as we enter the elder years. Age may limit us physically but can free us to do and say what we damn well please; age, after all, frees us from the fear and anticipation of what will happen next. We know, ultimately, what will happen next. Despite its troublesome demeanor, death gives life a lot of spice. And of course death has always populated children’s literature, from seventeenth-century puritanical books like James Janeway’s A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children . . . to Markus Zusak’s twenty-first-century novel The Book Thief, whose narrator is a cynical Death. Death is an especially popular feature of Newbery winners, giving them the gravitas that proves children’s literature is real literature but often depriving children of a good laugh. That is not to say that literature for youth has not moved beyond trying to prove itself equal to adult literature, nor even to say that literature for youth has not grown up itself. We now sport nearly as flamboyant a set of celebrity authors as adult books do, with similarly capitalistic bottom lines and revolving-door publishing dynamics. Academics “trouble” each other’s critical theories. Young listeners are disillusioned to discover that the adorable protagonist Arlene Sardine has been netted, cooked, canned, and eaten; older readers find that heroes they’ve accompanied through His Dark Materials have been the tools of institutionalized religion. Vampires run loose. Battles and love scenes decorously described in print are subsequently projected in Technicolor blood-and-lust on screen and advertised along with franchised products. Multitasking and online hypertexts alter the dynamics of reading. With the Second Coming of economic depression, bookstores close, libraries cut budgets, review journals lose subscribers, risky books fail marketing directors’ surveys, and promising manuscripts return unopened. Literature for youth is in big trouble, but it has been there before — on a regular basis — and will survive trouble in the present to cause trouble in the future. Nobody knows what that trouble will be, though we can make an educated guess: literature cannot go through life without giving us glimpses of the variously scary dark.
From the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
ome people dread trouble, others find it irresistible, a few bump into it accidentally. There are even folks who, like Brer Alligator, seem eager to meet trouble without really knowing what it is. In Gator’s case, Brer Rabbit arranges an introduction by trapping him in a burning field, which accounts for Gator’s lumpy skin and unfortunate disposition. (You can find Julius Lester’s resonant version of the full story in More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies, and Others.) 
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