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The Snowy Day, Corduroy, and Adaptions

(Excerpt/gif from Amazon)

(illustration by Ezra Jack Keats, in The Snowy Day)

The Snowy Day was one of my favorite books as a kid, even though I don’t remember us owning a copy. I loved (and still do) the illustrations and Peter’s small, happy personality. All he does is walk down the block to his grandmother’s but it’s a beautiful adventure. My grandmother lived right downstairs growing up, but on a snowy day like this I had to bundle up like Peter and trek down the back steps into the snow to shovel her stairs. Only then could I go inside and warm up on the couch with her. After the first snowfall of each winter I would sneak a snowball into my gram’s freezer and i didn’t know why until I was reading some of the scenes from this book just now and in one Peter puts a snowball in his pocket to wonder at later. Perhaps that’s where I picked it up from. 

The Snowy Day was a big deal when it was published in 1962; it was the first full color children’s book to feature a child of color. The book has since been both critically acclaimed and also criticized for not dealing with race directly, and also for having been written by a white author. I think these criticisms are very interesting and important, especially in the context of how books about children of color still face difficulties. Both of these comments make me think of another childhood favorite of mine, Corduroy, which was published in 1968, was also written by a white male author (Don Freeman), and didn’t directly address race. I didn’t notice the lack of blatant mentions of race in these books, rather I was drawn to the determined, caring little girl who looked like me, glimpsed briefly in the beginning and end of Corduroy, and the happy-go-lucky little boy in the city snow.

(illustration by Don Freeman, in Corduroy)

Amazon adapted and expanded the book in late 2016 into an animated feature, adding a longer storyline and other diverse characters who live on Peter’s block and celebrate the holidays with him and his family. 

Also in late 2016, CBS Films announced African American director Tim Story will be directing an upcoming adaption of Corduroy.

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Hair to Take the Gloom Away

A few weeks ago I was perusing bookstores in Northampton with my cousin and dear friend when I came across the above book and its companion, Be Boy Buzz, also written by bell hooks. I immediately put down all of my things and read through both twice because bell hooks and boards books. They both made me incredibly emotional (I nearly cried when I finished Be Boy Buzz) and if it wasn’t for my student bank account I would have purchased them both immediately. Happy to Be Nappy highlights the simple and beautiful pleasures of African American hair with beautiful, accessible illustrations and language. Oh, how I love this book.

In a study by (my new friends) Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair, Brooks and McNair look at images of African American hair and young girls of color as depicted in children’s picture books, and they specifically looked at books about girls in the US. The authors found three main themes in the picture books: the bonding that happens between girls as hair is combed/styled, that all hair = good hair, and the connection between African American hair and African American history. They quote a book titled I Love My Hair! by Natasha Tarpley: 

When it hurts and she begins to cry, her mother states: ‘‘Do you know why you’re so lucky to have this head of hair, Keyana?’’…’’Because it’s beautiful and you can wear it in any style you choose.’’ [pg. 7]

This brought back distinct memories of my own mother detangling and braiding my hair before school when I was growing up. Gosh it hurt, as my mother was also learning how to care for African American hair, but she always affirmed my hair’s beauty. This also mirrors the relationship built while African American hair is being cared for, which has its own lineage and roots in survival. didn’t realize until much later in life when I started caring for my own hair as part of the natural hair movement how stigmatized natural African American hair is. I’m thankful for my mom and for books like these which continue that affirmation for me as an adult and for little girls and boys of color. 

Brooks and McNair also discuss the deeply political nature of African American hair and how it carries history and survival of people of color, referencing a book titled Cornrows by Carole Byard Yarbrough:

Great-Grammaw in Cornrows goes on to tell her greatgrandchildren that slavery happened but that this didn’t kill the spirit. She states, ‘‘If you’re quiet you can…still feel the spirit in the air. Look around an you will see the old, old symbol that we now call cornrowed hair’.” [pg. 8]

(This reminds me of Amandla Stenberg’s video on cultural appropriation of African American hair styles, “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows”.)

Brooks and McNair continue and close:

Bishop (1990a) writes that children’s books should serve as mirrors and windows, therefore allowing children to see images of themselves and others in the books they read. For young Black girls, these books provide a context in which they can better understand the role of hair in their lives.... [pg. 10]

Children’s books are cultural products that reflect larger societal issues. Perhaps books such as those highlighted in this article can be utilized to challenge racism and white supremacy while helping Black children develop a healthy and positive image of themselves. [pg. 11]

Young girls and boys of color need to see themselves in books, in picture books, and to see themselves affirmed in every way, because they are not in society. 

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The Hate U Give - Diverse Books Grappling with Police Brutality

A booktuber I watch occasionally mentioned The Hate U Give in a book haul a while back, and it was the first I’d heard of this new YA fiction novel. My first thought was--a book on this?! Already? I keep forgetting that not only was Ferguson (which in many ways was my induction into this conversation) several years ago, but that the conversation about police brutality in the black community has a long and tragic history. Then I thought the book sounded fascinating and probably quite good, and it’s on my (very long) list of books to read after graduation. The Hate U Give is about a 16 year old girl, Starr, grappling with her world after her best friend is killed by the police. The novel, the first by author Angie Thomas, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and only a month after publication has over 100,000 copies in print. The film rights have been optioned by Fox 2000.

 Zetta Elliot, in an interview I talked about a few posts down, discusses how one of her goals as an author is to get kids to engage with an unjust reality. Angie Thomas continues this, speaking to the Guardian: 

“So many teenagers are affected by these cases. It’s usually young, unarmed black people who lose their lives...Trayvon Martin was 17, Mike Brown was young, Tamir Rice was 12. And so young people are affected by it, possibly the most affected, because they’re seeing themselves.”

Fiction is often a perfect space in which to work through an unjust, horrifying reality, and I cannot wait to read this book; however this is not remotely the first piece of YA fiction about police brutality, just the most recent. In many ways this is tragic in an of itself, that there is beautiful, engaging fiction written over time on an ongoing acts of violence. The New York Times put together a list of some which can be found here, and which interestingly, all pertain to the murder of young men of color. This leads me to question if the NYT was specifically listing only books about African American boys, or if there are simply no books or, worse somehow, no market for this sort of fiction which centers the death of young black women. It’s interesting and heartbreaking. Why is that there is such a dearth of diverse books for kids and teens, yet when they are published, and to acclaim, they’re about black death?

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Diverse Books I’ve Read & Want to Read

^I read Brown Girl Dreaming last spring (2016) for a 400 level Comm class. I was sort of skeptical at first for reasons I don’t understand. I never really warmed to prose poetry books/novels as a kid and that hadn’t really changed in adulthood despite loving prose poetry and novels (?!). We spent two or three weeks with the book and I was so amazed at the nuances my classmates noticed and the way my professor wove them into our conversation. This is a beautiful memoir that I would definitely recommend to middle readers. I had the opportunity to hear Woodson speak about this and her most recent book at Amherst college several weeks ago, and she reminded and reaffirmed for me the elements I had enjoyed about Brown Girl Dreaming. 

^ This book is on my to-read list primarily because Amandla Stenberg stars in the upcoming film adaption (and I love Amandla Stenberg). This book is written by an woman of color and is about a teenager who, due to a medical condition, cannot leave her house. And then one day she meets the boy next door.

Speaking of Amandla Stenberg, I’ve also been meaning for quite some time to get my hands on a copy of the comic series she co-wrote, Niobe: She is Life. I did not read any comic books growing up, and have only recently wandered into graphic novels. The description (my own paraphrase wouldn’t do it justice, I’m sure): “NIOBE: She is Life is a coming of age tale of love, betrayal, and ultimate sacrifice. Niobe Ayutami is an orphaned wild elf teenager and also the would-be savior of the vast and volatile fantasy world of Asunda. She is running from a past where the Devil himself would see her damned… toward an epic future that patiently waits for her to bind nations against the hordes of hell. The weight of prophecy is heavy upon her shoulders and the wolf is close on her heels.”

^ I read Chains many years ago, right after it came out. The library copy was hardcover and I was probably twelve or thirteen. I had already read Halse Anderson’s other well-known titles, Speak and Fever 1793, and I really liked her writing style. I grew more and more excited reading this book, as the heroine was not only a brown girl, not just a servant, but she becomes a spy. The heroine moves in a very different way than I was accustomed from the passive role to one of subversive agency. I really need to read the rest of this trilogy.

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Boys of Color & Critical Literacy

“I hate reading!”

Sean picks up a book, looks at the cover, and jams it back onto the shelf. "All these books are the same," he says, clearly frustrated. Kadir Nelson's

We Are the Ship

catches his eye, and he curls up with it on a bean bag chair, carefully examining each page. When his teacher calls the students to come to the reading carpet, Sean tucks the book under his arm and slips it inside his desk. "That one's different," he says to his teacher. "The cover looks like me." [p. 4]

Summer Wood and Robin Jocius take a closer look at practices that would benefit boys of color in the classroom, specifically in regards to literacy, offering several critical literacy strategies. One of these three strategies is the use of culturally relevant texts, “enabling texts”, as one of those quoted within (Tatum) calls them. Wood and Jocius also quote Walter Dean Myers, African American author of over one hundred children’s titles:

I loved books and I loved reading, but I never, ever came across books which had my family in it, or people who looked like my family. They never had my Harlem neighborhood. I understood that books transmitted values...I understood what was in the books was valuable and I was not in the books...I began to look at myself as being less valuable than the people I was reading about. (Myers, 2010) [p.5]

It is impossible for anyone to leave their bodies at the door, enter a classroom, and learn well, and yet that is what is often asked of marginalized and minority students. Children of color too often are asked to learn within and meet education standards that ask students to be a student and nothing further, as though children’s intersecting identities have no bearing in the classroom. Instead, these identities should be celebrated and incorporated into the learning process; the classroom/curriculum should be energized by and sensitive to different types of knowledge and the knowledge that comes from these personal histories.

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“What Are You Going to Do About it?” 1000 Black Girl Books

(photo by Andrea Cipriani Mecchi)

“HELLO EVERYONE, I AM MARLEY DIAS, AND I BELIEVE THAT BLACK GIRLS MATTER.”

This ^ is Marley Dias. Marley is a twelve-year-old activist from New Jersey who was unable to relate to books and stories assigned in her fifth grade classroom about “white boys or dogs ... or white boys and their dogs,”. She relayed this to her mother who replied: “What are you going to do about it?” Marley started a Twitter campaign, #1000BlackGirlBooks with a goal to collect 1000 books about black girls and to promote diverse stories about girls of color and distribute them to classrooms like hers. She ended up with 4000 books and counting and a book deal with Scholastic to write a non-fiction guide to activism and social media for young girls. 

Listening to this young woman speak inspires me. She is smart and passionate, and she, like Sidney King III, is taking matters into her own hands. She understands that representation is important and isn’t waiting for adults to sort out issues of diversity in publishing, or for teachers to include diverse books in their curriculum. Rather, she is demanding for this sort of change and creating it herself.

I’m excited by her energy and initiative and that I get to do this sort of work alongside woke children of color. However, it cannot solely be the responsibility or voices of children of color leading this necessary change. Those of us who care about the wellbeing and future of children--all children--must engage in this sort of action.

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Publishing Alternative & Diverse Books

So there are few roadblocks that I’ve mentioned already, themes that have sort of ghosted around previous posts. Such as:

It would be great for children of color to read books with black and brown protagonists. 

But.

~ 80% of children’s publishing industry is white.

And/therefore--

Only a small percentage of children’s books published every year are written by and feature black/brown kids. indeed, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that only 84 of 2640 titles in 2015 with black protagonists were written by people of color. 

Additionally,

even fewer of those books end up in school libraries and the hands of children.

Brilliant. One solution is self-publishing or going through indie publishing channels. African American author, of twenty-two titles, Zetta Elliott, self-publishes her children’s/YA fiction, which is a great alternative to the aforementioned publishing issues. However, she notes that a major downside is that many public schools and public libraries are far less likely to acquire her work due to self-publishing. In an interview with Amy Fish for issue 121 of Transition, Elliott details this dilemma and discusses the themes and goals of her work. One of these themes she terms as “Afro-urban magic”, which she describes in this giant quote that was too good to break up:

Most children think of wands and wizards when you talk about magic, but those traditions are European in origin. I wanted to develop a kind of magic that reflected the hybridity of the African diaspora (what Celestine Woo calls “the mythology of displacement”). Conventional fantasy fiction offers an escape from reality but my books try to get kids to engage more deeply with reality—especially when it’s unjust. Most black youths in the United States know very little about Africa, and what they do know reflects the media’s misrepresentation of African histories and cultures. So sometimes the magic in my books is hybrid and reflects the African religions or spiritual practices that traveled with enslaved people to the Americas and then migrated with them to large U.S. cities (like Vodou). But religions should be respected, so I also try to use new forms that still invoke the African roots of blacks in the U.S. The time travel device in A Wish after Midnight is never fully explained, but in The Door at the Crossroads (2016) I have my protagonist open a portal between worlds by recreating the elements of The Middle Passage (salt water, currency, terror, rage, blood). 

This sounds amazing to me. A Wish After Midnight, pictured above, is about a teenager in the early 2000′s in NYC who wakes up to find herself suddenly in the 19th century--that is a book that I would have read in a heartbeat. To see myself as still myself, my contemporary core, navigating what Claudia Rankine in Citizen calls my “historical self” within its historical setting would have been my favorite kind of book. 

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Girls of Color & Chapter Books

(One of the titles used in the study)

Chapter books have a really important role for young readers as they bridge the gap between picture books and other short, simple story books and the world of adult literature and complex stories and texts. Transitional chapter books do this very intentionally, guiding young readers gently, and are often categorized by reading level. They are often under one hundred pages and they may have larger type and include illustrations. 

I remember being really excited to start reading chapter books--my mom made a big deal about it. Books are extremely important to both of my parents and i took to reading right away. In fact, I did little else for most of my childhood. I also remember being very aggravated by the reading/age/grade levels assigned to transitional chapter books as my reading level was always above my grade level (insert pretentious shrug here). My early chapter books were (among many, many amazing books I’ve forgotten) copies of American Girl’s historical series that were handed down to me from an older cousin. I grew to love historical fiction and I chose at least two My America and Dear America books every week we went to library, as well as fanatically trying to read everything (everything) written by Ann Rinaldi. Subsequently, I was very well aware that if I were to live in the universe of the novels I read that I would be a slave, a maid, a runaway, etc., which was immensely frustrating. But not only was this my favorite genre, it felt like the only one which had regular representations of brown girls like me, and that was in the realm of chapter books targeting older readers.

A study by Jonda C. McNair and Wanda M. Brooks examined three series of transitional chapter books written by black women about young black girls. The authors use Black feminism as a lens through which to examine the stories/images in these books, as they look at the themes of friendship, morality, learning, and fitting in as displayed by the protagonists. They comment:

“Transitional readers often value the predictability of recognizing characters across time in different settings and plots (Fiore, 1987). In the same way we form deep relationships with others in our real lives, readers can really get to know the protagonists depicted in transitional chapter books.”

They authors were looking for and found (hooray!) positive, diverse images, both in the stories and the illustrations, of black women and girls. The authors were especially excited for the ways in which transitional chapter books by and about girls of color could be used in the classroom. They remark on the number of picture books featuring black children, but insist on the need for this in transitional chapter books, as the latter are used for continued development of literacy. 

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Diverse Books & the Publishing Industry

(infograph from Lee & Low)

I stumbled upon an article in Mother Jones’ Sep/Oct ‘16 issue which turned out to be only the tip of a massive iceberg of a conversation which centered around publishing statistics and diverse books. Some of the key players in this conversation were/are:

- A 2013-2014 statistics on children’s books from the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

- #WeNeedDiverseBooks, which was a 2014 Twitter campaign in response to a  BookCon panel on children’s authors which consisted solely of white men at #WeNeedDiverseBooks birthed an activist organization of the same name

- Walter Dean Myers, late African American children’s literature author of over one hundred titles, and his 2014 article in the New York Times

- a 2014 companion piece by his son, Christopher Myers, author/illustrator of children’s books. It opens with the following excerpt:

When I talk with kids like this, our conversations always seem to go the same way:

“So you’re telling me these are all the books published last year for kids?” they ask me. “That’s a lot of books. That’s more books than I could read in a year.”

“Yep, it’s a few thousand.”

“And in all of those thousands of books, I’m just not in them?”

“Well...um...yes.”

“Are there books about talking animals?”

“Oh, sure.”

“And crazy magical futures?”

“Absolutely.”

“And superpowers? And the olden days when people dressed funny? And all the combinations of those things? Like talking animals with superpowers in magical futures ... but no me?”

“No you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re brown.”

All of these elements came together in 2014, and many focused on the statistics report, which showed that only 93 of the 3200 children’s books published that year were about children of color. That is ludicrous. Mother Jones also further references statistics from publishing company Lee & Low out that almost 80% of those who work in publishing on children’s books are white (there’s another fantastic and colorful infograph there as well).

So. Why is this the case? Rumor has it multicultural, diverse books simply don’t sell; minorities/marginalized groups simply aren’t buying. Mother Jones and others make the excellent argument that not only do these books sell among their ‘target audience’, but, more importantly these books should be targeted to everyone, not only their target audience. In the US, the marginalized are taught about the dominant group, targeted as the audience for books, films, and other entertainment starring the dominant group, but this can’t go both ways? Mother Jones quotes blogger Amy Koester: “If we argue that only black youth will want to read about black youth we are really saying that the experiences of black youth have no relevance or meaning to youth of any other race." And that is simply not the case.

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Books N Bros

Meet Sidney King III! He is an ten-year-old from St. Louis who recently created Books N Bros, a book club specifically (though not exclusively) for young, African American boys ages 8-10. The club focuses on reading books by and for African American youth and is interested in promoting friendship, technology, and financial literacy. Club members can pay a monthly fee of $20, which goes toward purchase and distribution of that month’s book, supplemental worksheets, and a gift bag, and Books N Bros also offers the option for interested adults to sponsor a child that might not be able to cover the fee. One of my favorite features of this amazing program are the Big Bros, older boys and adults in the community who can volunteer to work with the club during different meetings as a role model/mentor figure. Books N Bros has partnered with Microsoft and a local bookstore dedicated to African American children’s books, EyeSeeMe, both of which host club meetings and events. 

I’ve encountered a lot of different spaces and groups doing this work--giving voices and stories of black children back to black children, but this is the first I’ve seen helmed by a African American child. Sidney’s instagram is full of pictures of his program, achievements, and everyday activities. I’m really excited about this program and wanted it to anchor the posts that will be forthcoming. Young boys of color have a lot working against them, both historically and at present, and Sidney has taken beautiful initiative in creating this group. He deserves a lot of recognition.