Friday Footnote #1
An Afterthought on Monday's BookScapes Post
Hello and drum roll, please! The winner of this week’s drawing is Mary E Birnbaum! Mary, I’ll contact you to make arrangements to send your advance reading copy of Someone Always Nearby: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe and Maria Chabot, coming in early November.
Everyone: I enjoyed our book discussion this week—thanks to all who shared your childhood reading lists. The comments give us a glimpse of the reading history that so many of us share and that inevitably shaped our adult reading (and writing!) choices.
But those shared reading lists may also give us pause, and I think they should. For while our favorite books gave us comfort and a safe place to go when life got difficult, they also prescribed a world view that was decidedly WASP-ish.
In fact, as Louka points out in her comment, the books often show Others in clearly negative ways. She writes about her experience of re-reading one of the books much later: “As an adult, I was shocked to see that the unsavory, no-good villain in the story was named (get this) Bushy Trott, with an illustration showing him to be ugly and dark-skinned, with coarse features and kinky hair. Ugh.”
Yes, we get it. That is, we get, now, what we didn’t quite get, as kids: that while the Nancys and other similar series expanded the horizons of our possibilities, most of them narrowed those horizons to include People Just Like Us.
That’s why I invite us all to be aware of the flip side of the “comfort” coin. We need books that introduce us to People Other Than Ourselves. And we need to recognize and support the authors who have different stories to tell, the publishers who put that work out into the world, and the public and school librarians who insist on diversity as a book-selection principle.
Writing, publishing, buying, or shelving a book ought not to require a special courage. These days and in some places, it does. I know that many of you actively celebrate and support the brave people who stand up for the right to read. Some of you even sponsor or support little libraries of banned books. Thank you!
Climbing down from my soapbox to say that I’ll be back on Monday with a LifeScapes post. I want to tell you about MeadowKnoll, our Texas homestead. And spiders.
And as always, thanks for reading!
Susan
In junior high school I read Gypsy, the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee. Amazingly I found it in the school library. It did not make me want to grow up to be a stripper. But it did stay with me the rest of my life so far as a description of a strong, independent, fierce woman who didn’t take shit from anyone. I needed that at the time and always. I haven’t read it in many years and maybe ought to read it again for perspective. I imagine it was very Caucasian.
When you mention children's books that were stereotypically racist, a childhood favorite came to mind: Little Black Sambo. My mom even hooked a rug with the tiger from that book on it for one of my children. Written by a Scottish woman and published in 1899, it was hailed as a breakthrough because it featured a Black hero, albeit a little boy. It was mid-twentieth century before critics began to talk about the racist stereotypes, particularly of the drawings which one critic described as "pickaninny style." In one sense, Little Black Sambo taught us about "others," perhaps the way Rudyard Kipling did (there's a problem too, but this is going on too long). Literary guidelines are hard to draw and should never be cast in concrete. I am glad to see the revised versions of Little Black Sambo are available today.