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Article Excerpt
This is the final installment of a three-part series begun with "How the Little House Gave Ground: The Beginnings of Multiculturalism in a New, Black Children's Literature" (November/December 2002 Horn Book) and continued with "Multiculturalism Takes Root" (March/April 2003 issue).
The African-American Resurgence
In his 1986 New York Times Book Review article, "I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry," Walter Dean Myers commented caustically that, unless black people swelled the market themselves, "we will simply have to wait for the next round of race riots, or the next interracial conflict, and the subsequent markets thus created." Flash forward to the videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the riots that swept south-central Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of his assailants, and Myers's words seem chillingly prophetic. Factor in the steady, then meteoric rise in children's book sales since the mid-1980s, and one might conclude that bad news made good business better. But the re-emergence of black children's books had begun in the mid-1980s without a blow being struck, a voice being raised.
"It was the fall of 1984," Dorothy Spruill Redford writes in Somerset Homecoming. "Ronald Reagan had been elected to a second presidential term. Civil rights had become a thinly disguised joke. But my focus was broader.... I was now looking back at centuries." The search for her ancestors that Redford had undertaken, inspired by Alex Haley's Roots, was turning into a search for all the slaves on the Somerset Place in Washington County, North Carolina, and their descendants. That historic homecoming, in 1986, made front-page news.
Disillusioned African Americans set out to retrieve and commemorate the recent, pre-integration past as well. In 1988 there also appeared Maggie's American Dream, the autobiography of Yale child psychiatrist James P. Comer. In the introduction, Charlayne Hunter-Gault writes that "the otherwise-limiting aspects of Jim Crow were more than amply overcome by the pillars of my childhood ... home, school, church ... separate, but never inferior in terms of the armor-building preparation for life." In Comer's story she sees promise for the "despairing ... today."
The new black children's books take us where Redford, Comer, and Hunter-Gault come from. They re-create the experiences, convey the emotional integument. Let Comer himself add another, built-in consideration. The extraordinary efforts of their parents, he writes, are "the reason so many black people speak with pride about 'the black family,' and so bitterly resent those who focus on its weaknesses."
From the outset, family pride courses through the work of one after another black children's writer. Historical pride is synonymous with Virginia Hamilton and Mildred Taylor. Tinged with nostalgia, it is beautifully captured in Lucille Clifton's The Times They Used to Be (1974) and forms the bedrock of Childtimes (1979), the three-generation memoir by Eloise Greenfield, her mother, and her grandmother. But writer-poets, like Clifton and Greenfield, are often the first to put unspoken feelings into words. The book that embodies tradition and regeneration outright--in a universal, metaphorical, easefully black form--is Valerie Flournoy's 1985 story of a grandmother's legacy and a granddaughter's dedication, The Patchwork Quilt, as illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.
Pinkney had given faces to Taylor's Logan family. He had done picture books of one sort and another, many capitalizing on his talent for drawing animals and depicting exotic locales. But The Patchwork Quilt is a story of people in pictures: realistic, detailed full-page and double-page scenes. Today, that description sounds banal. As recently as 1985, however, in a time of stylized, intrinsically decorative illustration (Van Allsburg, the Dillons), the realistic picture book story, realistically illustrated, was something new. A black innovation, indeed. Stories of children and their families had tended to consist of verbal and pictorial vignettes--incidents, bits of dialogue, represented visually by two or three figures and a few props. Even the book closest in tenor to The Patchwork Quilt, Helen V. Griffith's Georgia Music, illustrated by James Stevenson--published in 1986 and also about an aging grandparent--is by comparison a succession of separate, evocative, all-absorbing scenes. The everyday multi-character stories that black writers wanted to tell required, instead, the fullness and flow of a stage-play.
To Pinkney, The Patchwork Quilt was about "family-caring relationships," and it changed his way of working. Instead of simply posing models and photographing them, he sought out as models people "who responded to the text and ... knew and cared for each other." The characters are individuals, drawn with Pinkney's signature precision, in an abundant, timeless, watercolor world of his creation--as tangible as the world of Jessie Willcox Smith, say, but more elastic. With his style as the common language, it came to embrace the humanized animals of Uncle Remus, the heroic feats of John Henry, the never-never land of Sam-sam-sa-mara, home of Sam and the tigers. In its profusion, it seems to embody the rural South of Back Home, Pinkney's 1992 collaboration with his wife, Gloria. But the world of Pinkney's envisioning was not, in his mind, exclusively a black world. He'd begun to do "multi-cultural books," he wrote in 1991, books with "a very natural integration between African-Americans and whites." Such books addressed his concern, then, for "this country and the issue of racism." Later, he would think in universal terms.
The Patchwork Quilt has to do with tradition, heritage--the past joyously recaptured. Closely related, often intertwined, is folklore. For many black authors and illustrators the 1980s were a wasteland when folklore, African and African-American, displaced new writing and real life in the marketplace. It can certainly be argued that, in many cases, lip service was paid to multiculturalism by the publication and dissemination of ethnic folklore. But the folklore boom of the decade also produced Virginia Hamilton's The People Could Fly--thenceforth, everychild's book of black folklore--and four volumes of Uncle Remus tales by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney, rousing alternatives to the classic Joel Chandler Harris-A.B. Frost collections.
Folkloristic thinking had issue in Patricia McKissack's Mirandy and Brother Wind (1988), another picture book illustrated by Pinkney. And John Steptoe, a vocal critic of 1980s folklorism, veered off from his success with the Native American Story of Jumping Mouse (1984)--"where the reader can't tell whether I'm black or white"--to create a spectacular new African Cinderella tale, Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (1987). Correspondingly, Robert San Souci adapted (and Pinkney illustrated) a Creole tale with clear European parallels, The Talking Eggs (1989). In the search for nontraditional African-Americana, the body of available folklore was expanding.
As of 1988, the annual number of black-authored books had more than doubled from the 1985 low of eighteen. But all told, the gain in creative reach was even greater. In an increasingly visual culture, the work of black artists also took on heightened importance, both as illustration and as art per se: illustration of black people in a time-honored naturalistic mode and, conversely, painting by black artists in a folk or modern mode.
Since 1980 the nation had been mesmerized by one after another exhibition of black folk art--recent, highly original, often visionary work that was a natural, in certain cases, for children. In 1985 Amos Ferguson's spick-and-span paintings of life in his native Bahamas were exhibited at a Philadelphia gallery where they charmed Harper editor Linda Zuckerman, who then enlisted Eloise Greenfield to write poems to accompany them; in the ensuing book, Under the Sunday Tree (1988), her combination of affection and impudent wit matches his. Other writers found the expressive, enigmatic pictures of black folk artists a spur to storytelling of their own--viz. Black Elephant with a Brown Ear (in Alabama) (1996), pictures by Bill Traylor, stories by Barbara Ann Porte.
The dual idea of children's books as a place to showcase black art, and black art as a source of children's books, came to the fore in the conversion of mixed-media artist Faith Ringgold's 1988 story-quilt Tar Beach into the 1991 picture book of the same name--which led to Ringgold's visionary picture book Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992), and successive others. "Fine art," canonized art, figured in the examples of Jacob Lawrence as the foremost American narrative painter of the twentieth century, and Romare Bearden as the preeminent collagist. The impulse to paint historic scenes, as Lawrence had, in combination with the impulse to use a mix of real and simulated photographs, as Bearden had, led in time to the quasi-documentary illustrations of, most prominently, Bryan Collier. Tom Feelings, on the other hand, was his own model: The Middle Passage (1995), an eighty-page wordless flow of monochrome scenes from the slave trade, unprecedented in its ambitiousness as a "children's book," devolved from the identification of his heroic, brooding figures with the grimmer passages of African-American history. In essence, his artwork is both the book's source and its attraction--as, for example, Diego Rivera's murals of the Mexican Revolution are as much Rivera as Revolution.
On the domestic scene, facial expression and emotional tone are what matter in an artist's work. Greenfield's 1988 Grandpa's Face brings a story without adversity and fortitude--in contrast to her 1980 Grandmama's Joy--and introduces the rich, painterly illustration of Floyd Cooper. Tamika's...
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