| From
the May/June 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
“Now, why’s he got to come back to that?”
 hen
Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair arrived in the Horn
Book offices for review, the reaction was something like that of
those kids on the old TV cereal commercial: “I’m
not gonna try it. You try it.” We looked around the
place for a Mikey, someone who would try anything. There were no
takers.
It wasn’t that we didn’t like it. That
exuberant call-and-response text, Brenda’s willful head of
hair, the candid defiance of both words and pictures — what’s
not to like? Here’s the thing, though: we didn’t know
if we were allowed to like it.
Michelle Martin ably untangles the virtues of Nappy
Hair later in this issue (pp. 283–288); what I’m
after here is the way the book has uncovered a paradox in our thinking
about multiculturalism in books for the young. One would have thought
that the publication of Nappy Hair would have been cause
for unalloyed celebration. Here was a book by an African-American
writer speaking to African-American culture in an African-American
voice, published by a mainstream New York publisher. This is what
we thought we wanted. So why the protest from parents? They were
upset with Herron for putting the word nappy in the street,
out of a private African-American context. (As Brenda’s skittish
relatives might ask, “Now, why’s [she] got to come back
to that?”) Why the jitters in the (all-white) Horn Book offices?
We were uneasy about putting a toe in foreign, maybe dangerous waters.
Like the parents, we felt left out, ignored by the equation the
book represented. The parents felt that Herron was telling tales
out of school — and worse, in the person of a white teacher,
telling them in school, to a classroom of allegedly impressionable
children. At the Horn Book, we felt, well, white, and in
no position to evaluate something that so clearly had so little
to do with our experience. Librarians and reviewers, both intermediaries
of information and culture, need to find their place in the oft-fought
question of “do you need to be (fill in the blank) to write
about (same blank)?” Being neither writer, nor subject, nor,
ultimately, intended reader, how do those of us who evaluate books
for children keep to that middle — a place that in this instance
requires staying out of the way?
For one thing, we’re told to “listen.”
This is both sensitive and pragmatic advice, if prey to easy sentimentality
— one can listen till the cows come home and then simply settle
down with them for the night, oblivious to what’s been heard.
Just because you listen doesn’t mean you care. And Nappy
Hair provokes a further distinction: Listen to whom? The author?
The parents? In multicultural parlance, whose viewpoint is to be
privileged? In plain English, who gets to decide? It would be nice
if we could say, ”Just listen to the many voices,” but
that is difficult to do when words such as racist are flying, and
each side is claiming the ethical higher ground. And there is after
all a practical matter to be resolved: will the teacher be allowed
to use Nappy Hair in her classroom, or not?
Like the parents at P.S. 75, those of us who put
ourselves in the multicultural camp can get pretty touchy about
“our business.” We call ourselves a movement that celebrates
the spectrum of human experience — and here we are squabbling
over what the “proper” depiction of one aspect of that
experience shall be. So much for respecting differences. But to
encourage diversity of viewpoint is to admit conflict as well: this
is how we got Protestants. And any attempt to define a coherent,
ever-like-minded group will find you making it smaller and smaller,
shaving off the characteristics that don’t “fit,”
as you look for those people who agree to be what you were looking
for. Eventually, you’ll find yourself looking into a mirror,
reaching for a comb.
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