Children’s literature aims to amuse, engage and enlighten in the form of a good story. But all too often it has the effect of perpetuating a very old–and very American–bias.
On the surface, books like Virginia Sorensen’s “Miracles on Maple Hill” and Sarah Stewart’s “The Gardener” seem all sweetness and light. “Miracles” is about a troubled family that leaves Pittsburgh for the solace of rural Pennsylvania. Daddy is an ex-prisoner of war who comes home from Korea and finds he cannot put his life back together in the city. In order for him to find peace of mind, it seems necessary to return to the family’s rural roots.
In one passage, the books says: “At first she really thought a girl could (explore the city) and tried it once or twice. But in Pittsburgh she felt terribly little and worried, especially after one day when she got off the streetcar in the wrong place.”
“The Gardener” recounts the travails of plucky Lydia Grace Finch, forced off the family farm to live with her Uncle Jim in the city during the Depression. What could possibly be wrong with a story that ends with a little girl going home again? nothing, except it brims with pictures that represent the city as a dark, sooty place of fire escapes, clotheslines and pigeon-infested tenement roofs. Lydia Grace saves the day by creating luxuriant window boxes from seeds and bulbs sent to her by her family in the country. In the process, she cheers up Uncle Jim, who never smiles–presumably because he lives in the city.
The prejudice involves not people but their choice of residence, as J.H. Ingraham made clear. “Adam and Eve were created and placed in a garden,” wrote the 19th Century author. “Cities are a result of the fall.”
Or, as Mother says in “Miracles on Maple Hill,” “Grandma hated cities.”
Ingraham and Sorenson were merely giving voice to a great national dislike that came over on the Mayflower: Americans have always hated their cities, just as the English did theirs.
For Lord Byron, “Hell is a city much like London–a populous and smoky city,” while Thomas Jefferson dismissed cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” The Sage of Monticello wanted Americans to be just like him, urbane but never urban.
To be sure, some children’s classics wouldn’t be classics without their urban settings. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile lives in a brownstone on New York’s East 88th Street; Eloise enjoys a life of luxury at the Plaza; and a family of mice in New York’s old Metropolitan Opera House perform the Magic Flute in Don Freeman’s “Pet of the Met.” French cities also do quite nicely in “Madeline” and “The Story of Babar.”
But classic American folklore, which still delights children at bedtime, mostly took its cue from Jefferson. The likes of Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill did much and traveled far, all without nary a visit to the big city.
More contemporary, city-based folk tales are an endless variation on Jan Harold Brunvand’s book, “The Choking Doberman”–stories of social dysfunction which, in need of a name, are called “urban legends.” They do not get read at bedtime by parents who want their children to sleep that night.
Does location count?
What those adults are likely to do instead is look for books that have been awarded one of the American Library Association’s annual medals. The Caldecott Medal (begun in 1938) goes to the best illustration in an American picture book for younger children, while the Newberry (established in 1922) recognizes the best story in children’s literature and is aimed at slightly older readers.
It is here, in the realm of these coveted awards, that the American city as setting or subject receives the first of a thousand cuts.
Between them, the medals have generated 138 winners over the years. Of those, only six books have had contemporary urban settings.
A story is far more likely to begin, “Once upon a time there was a Little House way out in the country,” as does the 1943 Caldecott winner, “The Little House,” than “Once upon a time there was a Brick Bungalow on South Homan Avenue.”
Does it matter? Ellen Fader, youth services coordinator at the Multonomah County Library in Portland, Ore., chaired the 1998 Newberry selection committee, and she doesn’t think so. Fader warns against expecting any special interest in urban subject matter.
To do so, she says, “means trying to apply criteria to the Newberry Medal, and possibly to the Caldecott, that don’t exist.” The writing’s the thing, not the location: The book doesn’t even have to be set in the United States.”
Her Caldecott counterpart this year was John Warren Stewig, professor of curriculum in the school of education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Stewig distinguishes between two kinds of city settings. “First of all, there are settings such as you would find in Robert McCloskey’s `Make Way for Ducklings’ (the 1942 Caldecott winner), which is set specifically in Boston and in a specific location within the city, the Public Garden.
“There are very few books that deal that specifically with an urban setting. More books tend to deal with cities rather generically,” he said. If at all.
Again, the question is why? “I don’t know that it has anything to do with the publisher’s standpoint necessarily,” says Judy Carey, an assistant editor at Viking Children’s Books in New York, “because it depends on what is submitted to us. Although we can say we’re looking for more stories that have urban settings, ultimately it’s what we have to choose from.”
Laura Culberg, head of the Thomas Hughes Children’s Library at the Harold Washington Library Center, has two theories as to why publishers may not be getting more city stories. First, “possibly people think of childhood in country settings rather than in cities.” Add to that the likelihood that “there are more fears associated with the city.”
So, authors concoct stories about the birds, the bees and the possibly not-so-mad cows on the farm. Or they forget that, as 4-year-olds, they posed on a pony in front of that bungalow on Homan Avenue. Or, like Dorothy in “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” they find cities full of hot air and empty promises. Whatever, the news footage of all those Great Plains floods and tornadoes somehow bounces off the countryside while the bad stuff sticks to cities.
Fran Billingsley offers at least a partial defense of the writer’s decision-making process. A children’s book buyer for 57th Street Books in Hyde Park, as well as an author herself, Billingsley set her first children’s book, “Well Wished,” in a small town. She explains why:
“I think a lot of children’s books are about kids dealing with their own monsters on some level–they’re taming them or whatever, and to put it in a city setting doesn’t serve your story.” She cites Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” as an example.
What authors do, Billingsley says, is have their stories “set out of time and out of place.” This avoids “setting something in a place that becomes so real that you can’t deal with some of the stuff you want to deal with, and the city is too large a context for a lot of children’s books.”
Billingsley also notes that for older readers “there are many gritty urban novels out there.” Which is to say that, with books like those, the American city doesn’t need any enemies.
The gritty city
Two works, “Yolanda’s Genius” (Newberry honorable mention, 1994) and “Ben’s Trumpet” (Caldecott honorable mention, 1979), fit this category. Yolanda is an African-American girl who leaves Chicago after her 5th-grade boyfriend shoots and kills a classmate, and her 6-year-old brother is given a free packet of cocaine from someone who “had probably not been so big–fourth, fifth grade–and probably no stranger.” (Interestingly, the author of “Yolanda’s Genius” appears not to know Chicago very well, referring to the Art Institute vaguely as “the art museum,” and Buckingham Fountain as “the magnificent fountain in Grant Park).
In “Ben’s Trumpet,” Ben, an 8- or 9-year-old whose life is transformed when he encounters a trumpet, lives in a 1920s neighborhood situated culturally somewhere between New York’s Harlem of that period and Chicago’s underclass communities of today. One wonders whether an award would have gone to the book if Ben had come to love the trumpet as a middle-class child in our city’s Chatham or Pill Hill neighborhoods, places likewise central to the black urban experience.
While Chicago redeems itself, somewhat, in “Yolanda’s Genius” –Yolanda’s brother is a harmonica prodigy who makes a dazzling appearance at the city’s annual Blues Festival–Los Angeles fares considerably worse in the 1995 Caldecott winner, “Smoky Night.” The story tells of a mother and son burned out of their apartment one night during the 1992 riots. David Diaz’s artwork might best be described as Grunge Expressionism.
In her review for The New York Times, Selma G. Lanes criticized the story–by Eve Bunting–for the way “evil goes unpunished, undefined and almost unacknowledged.” John Warren Stewig, who served on the Caldecott committee that chose “Smoky Night,” begs to differ.
“The book is not about riots. The riot is the setting for the book. The book itself is about the power of love–the love between the boy and his mother, the love that sustains all of us when we care so much about people we want to protect.”
As to an unintended message about city life, Stewig says, “I think there’s an unintended message in the same way there’s an unintended message in something like `Miami Vice.’ Anything that is a visual artifact can have an intended and unintended consequence.”
But defenders of the book may need to consider those consequences more fully. “Smoky Night” can work with an adult reading it aloud. Take away the adult, and the target audience of ages 4 to 8 is left with stark pictures and probably the desire to live as far away as possible from a place where (alongside an illustration showing young black males toting away a television set while a black youth appears to be slugging someone with a baseball bat) the narrative reads: “Below us they are smashing everything. Windows, cars, streetlights . . . Two boys are carrying a TV from Morton’s Appliances. It’s hard for them because the TV is so heavy. `Are they stealing it?’ I ask. Mama nods.”
The question is less about subject matter than stereotypes. In “The Snowy Day” (Caldecott Medal, 1963), Ezra Jack Keats tells the story of Peter, who wakes up one morning to find that snow “covered everything as far as he could see.” By the end of the day, child, nature and city are one as a result of an transcendental urban experience.
This is a universalizing story (Peter is black, by the way).
A change of location
Don Freeman had that same universalizing ability in his “Corduroy” books.
Corduroy is a bear that once lived in the toy department of a big store. Eventually, Lisa buys him and takes him home. “She ran all the way up four flights of stairs, into her family’s apartment, and straight to her own room,” writes Freeman, a former jazz musician who got into writing children’s books after he absent-mindedly left his trumpet on a train.
Corduroy actually lives in the city, and his owner is African-American, at least she was until Freeman died in 1978. Corduroy carries on in new stories, only now he lives in what appears to be a suburban house, without Lisa. That message is nearly as disturbing as anything in “Smoky Night.”
Arthur Yorinks, at least, is not afraid of using the city for his subject matter. Yorinks has set several of his books there, including “Hey, Al,” which won the Caldecott for illustrator Richard Egielski in 1987.
Writing from experience
“Al, a nice man, a quiet man, a janitor, lived in one room on the West Side (in New York) with his faithful dog, Eddie,” begins the book. Eddie in particular doesn’t like crowded, urban life (“Look at this dump,” the dog growls; “Why can’t we have a house? A little back yard to run around in for a change?”) So they make a deal with a large bird that takes them to live on “an island in the sky.”
Life in Eden, though, comes at the cost of turning into a bird, so Al and Eddie gladly return to their one-room apartment. They realize, “Paradise lost is sometimes Heaven found.”
Yorinks writes from experience. “When I wrote `Hey, Al,’ I lived in a tiny apartment, I had a dog, I dreamed of living elsewhere.” Those elements were worked into a story about a man and his dog, an acceptance of who people are and “in a sense, an acceptance of New York.” The author first moved to Manhattan as a 16-year-old.
Yorinks believes, “There are so few books that people write for children that are based on either their own experiences or simply an attempt to be personal that it sort of makes sense to me that there are so few books written about or set in cities. People think kids don’t live in cities like people think dogs don’t live in cities, or that cities aren’t appropriate places for children to grow up in.”
To Yorinks, the city “is everything. The city is great things: It’s dangerous, it’s base, it’s wonderful, it’s dark, it’s light, it’s all of those things.”
And, not least of all, a good story setting.
