DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208-2
Children’s literature contains experiences that are different from children’s everyday worlds. It offers a window into society and creates a space where children can meet people across lines of social difference (e.g., cultural, class, language, sexuality, age, ability, and geography), providing vantage points from which readers can view multiple lives. Critical multicultural analysis invites children to examine the social construction of difference, linking their experiences to broader sociopolitical practices (Lystad, 1980; McGillis, 1996).
Like ideology, socialization can be coercive or collaborative, constructive or destructive. If, on the one hand, peers, parents, and teachers pressure children, or the community serves to smooth down edges, capitulate to stereotypes, and/or cut off thought and debate, then this kind of socialization is harmful. If, on the other hand, children’s exposure to diversity and the opening up to new ideas or to varying and even conflicting perspectives raises awareness of different rules, conduct, and thought, then this type of socialization is advantageous. This is not a question of deciding whether or not to engage in socialization; it is the process of examining how to “do” society, and in this doing or participation, everyone is an active partner.
A historical backdrop is one of the filters that we have chosen through which to examine children’s literature and its development in the United States from the mid-1900s to the present. We will, however, also look at how some British influences have contributed to the shaping of U.S. children’s book publishing.
The development of children’s literature parallels the development of the concept of childhood as a social construction. In examining both the history of childhood and children’s literature, we link the literature aimed at children with the social, political, and economic ideologies of the time. Definitions of childhood vary throughout history, from culture to culture, and across socioeconomic class. Karen Lesnic-Oberstein (1999) builds on the work of the French social historian, Philippe Ariés, to argue that “childhood” and “family” “function within cultural and social frameworks as carriers of changeable social, moral, and ethical values and motives” (Lesnik-Oberstein, 1999: 17).
How childhood is defined greatly influences what adults want children to know, learn, and experience through literature. These definitions have evolved based on the socioeconomic position of the child and family. Even in the days of the bards and their wanderings through medieval towns and villages, there was a distinction between stories for the upper and lower classes. The reality was that the rich stayed rich and the poor remained poor. It was this understanding that sparked the stories about virtuous poor people and the greedy, avaricious, wicked rich (Leeson, 1985: 24–25). Literature, especially in the form of ballads, often glorified robbers and rebels, thus serving as a subversive element, paving the way for later tales such as Robin Hood, which challenged the social hierarchy of the times.
Published stories (the record of the times) take us to England after the Renaissance. In the 1400s, literature for children existed as instructional text; the words rendered in print were meant to teach skills, concepts, and cultural norms. Early books (hornbooks) were made of wood and covered with animal skin to help them endure wear. They contained alphabets, numbers, and prayers that adults selected and deemed “good” for children to know. But the children who learned from these books were few in number, relegated to the classes of families who could afford to purchase them, and to those who did not have to labor all day and had the time and means to devote to education.
In the late 1400s, William Caxton, a prominent and successful publisher, realized that literature based on the oral tradition would sell to those people who could read and who could afford to buy books. Reynard the Fox, The Fables of Aesop, Robin Hood, and King Arthur were among the first books he published. Although they were not labeled as children’s books, they soon found their way to this audience.
By the 1500s, we see the advent of “chapbooks” which were small books constructed out of paper. Peddlers sold these “cheap” books from their wagons and at fairs, markets, and festivals. Chapbook stories were written forms of legends, ballads, and brief histories of the times. They remained popular in the United States through the 1700s.
Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1646) was the first book written for children in the United States. The first primer, New England Primer, was published in 1687. John Locke (1693), rejecting Puritans’ belief in original sin, theorized how children learn, theories that further appeared in the development of children’s literature. He believed that children were rational and pliable, and were tabulae rasae or blank slates. He argued that children should enjoy learning through games and picture books, instead of mundane lists of letters, syllables and words. He believed that this joyful early childhood education was crucial for their character formation. John Newbery, a publisher and author, was greatly influenced by Locke’s theories (Murray, 1998).
Starting in 1744, John Newbery pioneered in the publishing and selling of books for children. He wrote books that were entertaining and unthreatening to children and contained useful information for parents. He included brief essays in the introductions of his books with instructions to parents on how to raise their children. The field of book selling proliferated at this time. The spread of literacy had great influence in the development of the concept of childhood and children’s literature (Morgenstern, 2001).
It was during this time that the social myth of the American Dream was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. It was greatly to the benefit of the upper class to hold out the view that, if a child who was poor was passive, obedient, deferential, and played by social rules, he or she would rise out of poverty and reap great rewards.
In the American colonies as well as in England in the early 18th century, versions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and his “noble savage” helper, Friday, circulated to adults and children. The portrayal of people of color was rare, and when it occurred was filled with stereotypes. Another example of this phenomenon is James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, which fueled the notion that no living Native Americans existed in the United States, a misconception that continues to this century.
This was a time of rapid growth of the middle class. It was also a time when books were used to serve the particular needs of the different classes. Reformers admonished the rich to eschew idleness, and sang the praises of the virtuous poor. Deliberately didactic stories were popular and authors’ intentions were recognized and praised as “so godly, so rational, so unreservedly good for their select audience” (Leeson, 1985: 57).
Especially given the phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, Leeson goes on to report that in the early nineteenth century the middle and upper classes in England were anxious about the possibilities of the rise of the lower class and were particularly concerned that their learning to read might cause trouble. To address this problem, a number of religious reformers (like Hannah More) on both sides of the Atlantic produced pamphlet-sized books, called “Tracts,” designed for the sole purpose of communicating morals, and aimed at the lower classes, particularly children. These tracts were distributed among the poor in order to persuade them of their respectful and rightful positions as servants to the upper classes (Leeson, 1985: 58–59).
Material wealth was the goal of the middle class. Children’s books helped to support this goal for the children of the affluent. “The question was how could one develop a system of education which would do that for the children of the middle class, while simultaneously teaching the children of the poor not to aspire to the same things? Given these middle class attitudes and the total hostility of the ruling class, education for the poor barely developed…. Even the more enlightened felt a limit must be put on the education of the working classes” (Leeson, 1985: 64).
Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare appeared in 1806. In the early 19th century a number of juvenile magazines were published, largely containing Christian moral instruction, but occasionally addressing the issue of slavery. They were generally short-lived, and aimed at the affluent White population. In her overview of these publications, Phyllis Settecase Barton (1998), referring to one particular magazine, comments: “In general, the tone of the magazine was benevolent—reminding children to obey their mothers and to be kind to animals; however, stories written about Indian, Eskimo, and Negro minority [sic] children were thoughtlessly patronizing” (Barton, 1998: 11). Another inexpensive weekly newspaper-magazine, “… was filled with vengeance, violent justice, and racial slurs. Indians were savages and Negroes Dimwitted” (Barton 1998: 11). This sort of treatment was the rule in the many inexpensive magazines made available for children to read.
An outspokenly anti-slavery periodical, The Juvenile Magazine, appeared in 1811, and it ceased publication after four issues in 1813. It was the product of Arthur Donaldson who founded a free school in Philadelphia for Black children. He wanted the periodical “to supplement the textbooks and lessons used in his school, to publicize his efforts and his educational philosophy, and to provide a forum for condemning slavery, for describing the achievements of blacks, and for arguing the need to educate black children” (Kelly, 1984: 256). Donaldson printed a sketch of the Black poet, Phyllis Wheatley, in his last issue, as well as a chronology of slavery in the South. Unfortunately, the financial needs of the school forced the premature cessation of the periodical.
In the mid-to-late 1800s, Puritan primers were still used to teach children religious beliefs and morals, as well as to show children how they should conduct themselves according to their socioeconomic group mores. But alongside the deliberately didactic volumes were retold versions of folk tales, legends, and fairy tales of the European writers Charles Perrault, Jacob and Wilhem Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. It is notable that the versions were not of the English folk, but of an imported and refined variety.
Meanwhile, the primary audience for books for young readers was the children of the middle class. Although some writers forecasted the end of the Empire and even called attention to the treatment of the poor and of people of color, for the most part these populations were ignored in print.
The American Anti-Slavery Society published a pointedly anti-slavery journal aimed at children in 1833. The Slave’s Friend contained a variety of genres to show children the appalling conditions of slaves in the United States. According to Kelly (1984: 408), the journal “took pains to show the wickedness of slave-holders, the nobility of the black race, and the hypocrisy of a nation that called itself Christian but permitted one human being to won another.” This journal first printed The Black Man’s Lament; or How to Make Sugar, by Amelia Opie. This journal for children called attention to the cruelty of the African slave trade. This periodical also succumbed to financial stress, as well as to the threatening disapproval of the anti-abolitionist movements.
By the middle of the 19th century, conditions for the working poor had worsened and the children of the poor barely had any schooling available to them. Nevertheless, Sunday schools and a few day and factory schools somehow managed to teach more and more poor children how to read. Inexpensive magazines began to circulate with stories snatched from established authors, as well as others with radical messages, morals that were gentler than the strict religious tenets bound up with the Puritans, mounting to a large group of what many people called “trash.”
Children eventually were part of the audience who read these “penny dreadfuls” and their literacy skills developed more extensively. Then, in 1850, a law was passed in England to support the setting up of free libraries. There was enough of a supply of children’s literature in these institutions to make a difference to the young working class child.
Our Young Folks, which circulated from 1865 to 1873, combined an anti-slavery stance with a strong middle-to-upper middle class Protestant morality. Readers were encouraged “to pity those less fortunate and to exercise appropriate charity” (Kelly, 1984: 331). High aesthetic quality was its hallmark, for example, Winslow Homer’s illustrations appeared frequently, as did music by Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann (Kelly, 1984: 332). The magazine printed many genres including nonfiction, with a number of pieces staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union. However, much of the writing was somewhat patronizing in terms of the representation of Black characters. Similarly, Native Americans were represented with condescension, as were Jews.
Both in England and the United States the middle to late 19th century saw such milestones in children’s literature as Lewis Carroll’s (1865) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Louisa May Alcott’s (1868) Little Women, George Macdonald’s (1872) The Princess and the Goblin, Mark Twain’s (1876) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Joel Chandler Harris’s (1880) Uncle Remus tales, Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1883; 1885) Treasure Island and A Child’s Garden of Verses, Rudyard Kipling’s (1894) The Jungle Book, and Helen Bannerman’s (1899) controversial Little Black Sambo.
Although some of these books contained characters that were other than White, Protestant, and middle class, the audience was largely from that group, and in general the plots and characterization reflected the lack of concern for “the other” as anything more than an oddity or an exceptional character out of place in a relatively homogeneous society.
In the United States at the end of the 19th century, Andrew Carnegie played an important role in making books accessible to the children of the poor. The first library children’s department was created with the opening of the main branch of The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh (CLP) on November 5, 1895. According to Michael Lorenzen (2002), Carnegie had no access to education because he worked long hours as a laborer. However, Colonel Anderson, his benefactor, started a small library of 400 books, which he lent on Saturday afternoons to local boys. This is how Carnegie educated himself.
Carnegie wrote in his 1920 Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie: This is but a slight tribute and gives only a faint idea of the depth of gratitude, which I feel for what, he did for me and my companions. It was from my own early experience that I decided there was no use to which money could be applied so productive of good to boys and girls who have good within them and ability and ambition to develop it, as the founding of a public library in a community….
(Carnegie, 1920/1986: 47)
Further, Carnegie is quoted as saying, “In a public library men could at least share cultural opportunities on a basis of equality” (New York Times, Jan. 8, 1903: 1). His libraries made it more possible for children of the poor to acquire and practice their literacy skills by gaining access to real books as more and more were published for child audiences.
Nevertheless, despite the opportunities the libraries gave to children who were poor, schools were still inadequate places for their education, and the industrialization of the United States and Britain made their education a low priority.
Partly to counteract the stereotyping of Black children, and mostly to change Black people’s attitudes about themselves, Black adults designed the first children’s periodical for Black children in 1919. The Brownies’ Book (1921–1922) was produced by the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, under the auspices of W.E.B. DuBois, Jessie Redmond Fauset, literary editor, and Augustus Granville Dill, business manager, (Kelly, 1984). The magazine was 15 cents a copy and was produced monthly. Its focus was on African American children. It contained short stories, poems, biographies of prominent Black people, and news items. Five issues had contributions by Langston Hughes. The cover illustrations as well as those inside the book were by African-American artists. Many photographs were used as illustrations.
The published material represented the diversity of the Black population in appearance, settings, class affiliations, and attitudes. The Brownies’ Book was canceled after only two years. In its last edition, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “We have had an unusually enthusiastic set of subscribers. But the magazine was begun just at the time of industrial depression following the war, and the fault of our suspension therefore is rather in the times, which are so out of joint, than in our constituency.” (Kelly, 1984: 354). The last issue was released in December 1921. In 1996, Diane Johnson-Feelings wrote a book called The Best of Brownies, thus bringing to the attention of contemporary children some of the material from the original publication.
In her dissertation, Violet Harris (1986) reports that the founders had a number of objectives in creating this periodical. These included familiarizing Black children with their own history, helping them to realize the normalcy and appreciate the beauty of being “colored.” It included the hope that Black children would be exposed to “models of behavior” that would support individual and group participation in a racist society. According to Harris, the magazine’s editors created a publication that would contribute to shaping the “refined colored person” through a diverse assortment of genres like biographical sketches, monthly columns, fiction, and poetry.
Barton (1998: 14) is of the opinion that “gradually the stereotypical view of the Negro in children’s books was replaced with a more factual and truthful literature.” She cites as an example the publication of textbooks such as Negro Boys and Girls, by Emma E. Akin, and The Child’s Story of the Negro, by Jane Dabney Shackelford.
This perceived progress notwithstanding, Nancy Larrick stunned the publishing world with her article: “The All-white World of Children’s Books” in the September 11, 1965 Saturday Review. In it she reported on a study she conducted that led to the conclusion that there were very few children’s books written, illustrated by, or containing people of color. Dorothy Broderick (1973), in her groundbreaking book, Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction, analyzes the treatment of Black characters in various ways and raises many serious points.
Although by the 1950s, teachers, librarians, and other professionals were beginning to understand the problems caused by the great gaps in children’s knowledge base and representation, it was becoming clear that the needs of modern children were not being met. The audiences for most of the books were primarily White children reading about White worlds. Even today, when approximately 5,000 new titles of children’s books are published annually, people of color are represented in less than 10 percent of the books. However, a growing number of writers and artists of color are being acknowledged and rewarded for their talents.
Literary scholars over the years have opened readers’ minds to different ways of looking at literature. Some of these focus strictly on the text; others admit to ideologies that drive them socially as well as cognitively. Teachers and librarians have a wealth of topics and themes to offer their readers. Sometimes the subject matter is sensitive and controversial. Sometimes what one group deems constructive is judged to be harmful, dangerous, and inappropriate by another. Over the years many books (such as Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor, Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig) that have won awards have also been challenged and/or banned. Certainly, selection plays a role in accumulating a library, but one person’s selection is another person’s censorship, and the reasons for selection or rejection vary as widely as the ideologies of the people in charge of selection.
The American Library Association annually lists the books that were banned across the United States, and ascribes such reasons as “offensive language,” “promotes religious viewpoint,” “sexually explicit,” “violent,” “homosexuality,” “challenging authority,” “age appropriateness,” and “occult,” among a long list. These challenges occur locally and are attended to in various ways by local librarians and teachers. Sometimes the books are removed from the shelves or placed on a “secured” shelf with special permission required for young readers to borrow.
Selection depends on many different perspectives and often would benefit from multiple readings in order to make the decision of whether or not to purchase a book, and how to offer it to young readers once it has been selected. Some adults may fear that children below a certain age level will not be able to handle painful material and, therefore, may withhold the book from potential readers.
We have chosen Leon’s Story, by Leon Walter Tillage, to demonstrate some of the possibilities attendant upon multiple readings through several lenses, because different ways of reading lead to different interpretations of texts. Because this story brings the reader up close to the dehumanizing social practices endured by Leon’s family and the African American community, questions about the “appropriate” age of the readership may arise.
Leon Walter Tillage is the son and grandson of sharecroppers. He has been employed as school custodian at The Park School, Baltimore, Maryland for the past thirty years. During an annual school assembly, he shares his story with the seventh graders. Although she is not indicated as co-author on the book cover, Susan Roth, a parent of one of the students in the school and a published author, persuaded Mr. Tillage to tape record his story so that she could set it into print. Leon’s narrative provides a window into the life of the African American community in rural North Carolina during the pre- and early Civil Rights era.
What follows is a multi-layered analysis of Leon’s Story to demonstrate how different lenses shape the interpretation of the text. In juxtaposing literary, developmental, reader response, feminist, multicultural, and critical multicultural analysis, we pose critical questions about how the reader, the text, and society are positioned.
The literary approach focuses on the aesthetic aspects of the text (e.g., plot, character development, setting, length and complexity of sentences, word choice, word order, figures of speech, and illustrations). Although the emotional impact of the piece of literature is an important component of the aesthetic analysis, implicit in this approach is that literary works should transcend race, class, and gender and should, in essence, retain a fixed meaning over time and despite contexts.
Focusing on the stylistics of the text, most of the reviewers of Leon’s Story 1 foreground the use of concise and unadorned language as the key ingredient of the book, remarking on the “spare language,” “quiet restraint,” “uplifting you-are-there narrative,” “no rhetoric, no commentary, no bitterness … none of the rambling oral history,” “poignant first-person account,” “simply and straightforwardly told,” “documentary-style clarity that adds to its effectiveness,” and “moving personal narrative.”
The understated language is certainly one of the compelling features of the writing. To examine this quality using a critical multicultural analysis, one might interpret it as a deliberate avoidance of artificiality, a sign of not succumbing to membership in the established group of professional authors. Or conversely, this style could serve to empower the reader and narrator at the same time, by inviting the reader to reject those details and extensions that might have been included by a more verbose author. This could have the effect of the reader’s joining the writer in constructing the narrative by means of the author’s particular discourse community.
One message conveyed by Leon’s lack of detail about atrocities and resistance might be that Leon does not want to offend privileged readers by laying blame. However, a possible implication could also be that the facts are strong enough to make readers confront their own privilege and complicity in acts of racism. Leon’s mother attempted to obtain redress through legal action, demonstrating that the family tried to appeal the father’s murder through the system of justice. The fact that this attempt failed miserably is expressed in low-key commentary: “Now it would be different, but in those days it didn’t matter what you felt about the crime, because what could you do about it? It’s not that we accepted my father’s death, we cared, but we just minded our own business and stayed out of the spotlight because nothing was going to be done about it anyway” (Tillage, 1997: 70).
On the other hand, Leon is explicit about the possibilities afforded African Americans by education, even though his father is skeptical of the benefits. Perhaps he is influenced by his audience of young scholars at The Park School; it may be, however, that his ability to read and write constituted a significant personal achievement to him.
For the most part, the story is told in standard English. But sometimes, in rare instances, Leon uses the double negative construction of vernacular Black English. For some readers, that might be jarring and confusing. What is the impact of his code switching? Does he use it for emphasis? What drove the authors (Leon Walter Tillage and Susan Roth) to choose the few double negative statements in the book and maintain standard English for the most part, or is there no intentionality here? If there is intent or not, what is the impact on the reader?
Part of the aesthetic appeal of this story is that it is in the form of the first person narrative. This format provides an intimacy difficult to achieve in other genres. The assumption is that first-person narratives are closer to the “truth” and convey a “purer meaning.” The information is transmitted directly rather than mediated through a narrator. Leon is providing us with his selective perspective. He is clearly addressing an implied reader with expressions like “you see …” and by the explanatory and conversational phrases he inserts. He is assuming that the implied reader is sympathetic. Keep in mind that this text is a product of Leon’s school presentations. He has a sense of the audience, what the audience already knows, and is familiar with the social tenor of the school.
What are the implications of a first-person narrative? In literary terms, it is designed to personalize and to invite empathy on the part of the reader. John Stephens (1992: 57) maintains that a first-person narrative
inscribes ideology either (a) by strategically disclosing that the narrator is unreliable, whereby the text constructs an oppositional world view, notions of what is right, or a right way of seeing and encoding; or, (b) by situating readers in a subject position effectively identical with that of the narrator, so that readers share the narrator’s view of the world or are convicted of error when/if the narrator is proved to be in the wrong in any sense.
In other words, the first-person narrative can make the reader either support or disagree with the narrator. Leon does not use the details of his personal life to endear the reader to him. Unlike many first-person narratives, Leon’s Story does not include information about his growing up and family, or everyday events. The “Afterword” informs us that Leon was married twice, had three children, and works with his brother at the school. We also learn that his mother is thriving and is the first female deacon of her church.
As with many works of literature, this one is a mixed genre, combining oral performance with negotiated autobiography/first-person narrative/ memoir. We wonder about what kind of story would have been written if Mr. Tillage had collaborated with someone else, or had written the story himself. We also wonder about how much Ms. Roth changed the original text. She is careful to inform readers: “We have tried very hard to be faithful to and respectful of Leon’s own precise voice. All editing was done with his participation and approval. We tried to restrict the changes to bridging the gap between the spoken word and the written word” (Tillage, 1997: 104).
Certainly this project brought two people together across social lines and different storytelling and writing experience. Part of the power of the narrative resides precisely in the decision to include only the elements of Leon’s life that situate the story and the reader in the events and climate of the American South in the years leading up to and including the Civil Rights Movement.
A developmental approach assumes that there is a clinical way of assigning emotional and cognitive factors to a child’s act of reading a book that will be predictable and uniform across age groups. The danger here is in rigidly defining stages or patterns, assuming that every child at a certain age will react and respond in the same way as every other child of that age, and that this behavior is consistent and predictable.
Gaile Sloan Cannella (1997) cautions against assuming a common human developmental pathway that disregards the myriad differences among children. Children demonstrate a wide range of changes and variations shaped by the interplay of biological, historical, sociopolitical, environmental, and cultural factors.
The Park School teachers have made the decision to include Mr. Tillage’s story in the seventh grade curriculum. The school has made an assumption about the developmental appropriateness of this kind of information for twelve-year-olds. However, now that the story is in print, it is not possible to control the age range of the readership. The simplicity of the language might invite a younger audience. On the other hand, the graphic cruelty depicted here might constitute an overwhelmingly difficult burden for younger readers to manage.
While the developmental approach tries to match the text with the growth stage of the reader, the reader response approach inserts the reader into the text. The partnership of the individual reader and the text requires readers’ interactive contribution. Within this approach in responding to Leon’s Story, readers could draw on personal incidents of bullying and overt cruelty that might help them to empathize with Leon’s situation. However, focusing exclusively on the personal individual experience and bypassing the sociopolitical impact could trivialize institutionalized racism or oppression.
In the most favorable of circumstances, readers fill in the gaps of particular texts, drawing on their own knowledge and personal experience. Reader response theory claims that readers personally create meanings from their lived experience. John Stephens (1992: 68) argues:
In my view, the present habit of stressing reader-focused approaches to text in combination with advocacy of identification with focalizers [main characters], inconsistent as this may be, is a dangerous ideological tool and pedagogically irresponsible. It fosters an illusion that readers are in control of texts whereas they are highly susceptible to the ideologies of the text, especially the unarticulated or implicit ideologies.
Bronwyn Davies (1993/2003: 155) echoes Stephens’ position but adds that although it is not sufficient in and of itself, reader response is necessary along with other more critical approaches to reading:
Although I would see this as one necessary dimension of reading, I also regard it as a dangerous form of reading if it is the whole rather than one part. If students can import unreflective sexism and oppressive and limited forms of thought into the text and then see that as an authoritative reading of that text, texts can only confirm the legitimacy of the oppressive world they live in.
Mingshui Cai (2008), in his seminal article in Language Arts, defends transactional reader response theory and makes a case for the expansion of the notion of multicultural awareness into the aesthetic component of this theory. Eventually, combined with an expanded efferent stance (i.e., gathering information), he argues for the feasibility and importance of incorporating a critical multicultural stance into the reading process.
The feminist approach focuses on gender relations depicted in any text. Like the other ideologically positioned approaches, it asks who has power and who does not. However, looking exclusively at how women are treated in Leon’s Story might misrepresent the book’s sociopolitical context. A feminist reading might focus on Leon’s mother and her perspective as well as her involvement in the events of the community. It is likely that an entire other book could be written about his mother’s story. It would be interesting to find out how she became the deacon of the church, and how looking back on it from her current place in history, she might have changed what she said to her children. But to impose a focus on a character that does not figure largely in the story would be a distortion.
A feminist critique might examine more closely the role of women within the family. It might also question the apparently casual dismissal of the two women to whom Leon was married. On the other hand, Leon has eight brothers and sisters, but he does not include much information about his brothers or about himself. His mother emerges with enormous agency at the end, but after all, in this book it is not any individual’s story; it is Leon’s recounting of U.S. society at a particular time and place, and to apply a feminist analysis here could distort the text and ignore the influence of race and class.
Early feminist approaches often fail to show how gender intersects with race and class. This is unfair to the feminists who go beyond simple focalizing on gender in isolation from other power relations. There exists now a group of scholars like bell hooks (2000), Patti Lather (1991, 2007), and Chris Weedon (1997), who critique how power is distributed, and advocate for a multi-layered analysis of gender relations by looking at gender, race, and class together.
A multicultural approach applied to Leon’s Story examines how African American characters and community are depicted. As readers, we are invited into this personal story about a sharecropping family in a particular historical period. Leon’s mother sometimes cooked for the Johnsons (the White owners of Leon’s family’s home). When she cooked collard greens she would take home the discarded liquid to make a soup. Leon comments that the part of the greens that was most healthy was the liquid, and it was a big joke that the White owners’ children were less hardy than their workers partly because of the difference in their diets.
Leon and the other sharecroppers’ children walked a long distance and attended a school that required them to fire up the pot bellied stove, draw water from the well, and eat lunches, usually of beans or white potatoes, that their families managed to provide them.
We also learn about the culture of the White community, whose children ride a bus to a school housed in a big beautiful building with steam heat and a large kitchen. Mr. Johnson, a White property owner, has an attitude not far removed from having been a plantation owner. In contrast, Mr. and Mrs. Clark are kind and cordial to the Black community and to its children in particular. The Black children work in the fields all summer, but the White children lie in the shade and never have to work to help their families.
Church every Sunday, to which Leon’s mother took dinner, was an important part of their lives. Recreation time was sitting around the fire in the evenings, listening to the elder people talking about family members, family history, cooking, washing clothes with lye soap, and their work on farms. Unlike the White families, they had no radio or other means of entertainment, except that on Saturdays Leon and his siblings did go to the movies.
Using a multicultural perspective the reader gathers information about cultural practices and mores of all the characters in the story. This group is part of the larger community, and represents Leon’s experiences and economic status as well as his activities of daily life. In our view, it is important to recognize and value culture, without isolating it from other factors such as power, history, and politics. Cultural elements are interesting and informative but, when left unexamined and unchallenged in terms of power, do not yield as much insight into the impact and political ramifications of their struggles as when combined with context and sociopolitical lenses. Their cultural practices are largely shaped by historical and sociopolitical factors.
Leon begins his narrative with how ashamed he is to be Black and ends the story with how proud he is to be honored by The Park School with a scholarship fund and other recognitions. The implication is that this is a character that developed, much because of history and changing attitudes, and also because of his involvement in civil rights marches and demonstrations. He does not merely talk about civil rights action, he participates in it. On the one hand, Leon seems compliant, even complicit, and on the other hand, by bringing up the injustices in what appears to be a seemingly acceptant stance, he plants within the reader the seeds of outrage at the inhumanity of racism.
A critical multicultural analysis locates how power is exercised, circulated, negotiated, and reconstructed. In the process of creating the published text, Ms. Roth, a privileged professional member of the community, acknowledges the authority of Leon’s lived experience. Although this is the first time his story has been set down in print, Leon has chosen to tell the story repeatedly to the children of The Park School. In doing so, Leon exercises agency and influences his audience by exposing racism and encouraging the listeners to connect the present to the past.
Ms. Roth, one member of Leon’s audience, recognized the power of his story and suggested widening his audience by setting his story into print. It is to her credit that she honored Mr. Tillage’s perspective rather than injecting her own. Thus this narrative, albeit in the guise of a personal story, avoids being reduced to Leon’s story only. It is Leon who paves the way for the reader to be immersed in the events of the time and the feelings of the characters. It personalizes the events, but we must not stop there. Critical multicultural analysis demands that we look at the historical and sociopolitical layers of this narrative, as well as the social interactions among the characters.
Leon is a rare person. He has the capacity for empathizing even with the enemy, without excusing the enemy’s behavior. Despite the cruelty and injustice, he never becomes a martyr. He never diminishes injustice, but recognizes the complexities of the human condition, and, that in some ways, White people were victims of a racist system too. That Leon endured is miraculous. That he is able to tell his story so piercingly is a gift to the reader.
The book not only raises the spectre of the coercive power of the Klan and the collusion of the government, but it also showcases collaborative power of Leon and his family. At the beginning of the book, Leon explains the sharecropper system and how it institutionalizes economic oppression. Leon provides the reader with a practical understanding of the power of education, without leaving it abstract. He provides examples. He comments on the consequences of his family’s lack of education: “If they kept you uneducated, you weren’t qualified to do anything but work on the farm” (Tillage, 1997: 10).
In a few words, Leon also demonstrates how the plantation-power structure deprived the sharecropper of some basic needs such as running water and electricity. The culture of the plantation is graphically drawn, and the coexisting culture of the family with strict rules, strong values, and regular interaction with the community, mostly through the church, also communicated. This culture is not exoticized or romanticized. It provides information to the reader and a context for the action of the story.
The family shows resistance that might not have been visible to the owners, that included a strong immediate and extended family cohesion, regular, communal church attendance, and provision of healthful food like the liquid from collard greens, the benefits of which the owners were unaware. When it seems as if the parents are colluding by telling their children “… that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You’ll never equal up to the Whites” (Tillage, 1997: 27), Leon immediately explains how different his parents’ attitudes (speaking from their perceived place in the world) were in those days and how today he would respond differently to his son.
Throughout the book, while he does not speak bitterly, he does point to injustice. After reporting on the murderous acts of a constable who had killed two Black brothers, Leon comments, “Both brothers in one night. It was never, never investigated or nothing” (Tillage, 1997: 61). Mr. Johnson, the landowner, pretends to be a kind, considerate man, who tells Leon’s family to hide when he expects the Klan to ride that night. Leon is not a fool. He knows that Mr. Johnson is, in actuality, in collusion with the Klansmen.
By the 1950s, Leon reports “…were learning that we weren’t suppose to be living like this regardless of what our parents said … we knew it was time for change” (Tillage, 1997: 87). If the book were to be divided into sections of domination, collusion, resistance, and agency, this section would reflect resistance. In the end, we learn of Leon’s consistent, secure position of 30 years duration as custodian at The Park School in Baltimore. In telling his story in person and on paper, Leon continues his “quiet protest.” Through his participation and agency, he has affirmed his own power, and has taken and continues to take responsibility for social change.
Reading children’s literature with a critical multicultural lens guides us to examine how power is exercised. We realize we have choices and that knowing these choices can help us see our own power, as well as see how we are implicated in the circulation of power. It invites us to co-construct history and society but, even before that, to actively construct who we are, and to keep on asking questions.
Critical multicultural analysis is a framework for teaching literature and constructing curriculum. It urges the construction of spaces in which to examine issues of diversity and social justice by problematizing children’s literature. It is literary study for social change. Readers, young and adult alike, can grapple, inquire, and engage with issues of social transformation and justice through their reading. Stephens (1992: 8) reminds us that children’s literature socializes children “to take part in society and act purposively [sic] within its structures.” He argues, “Texts do not exist in a vacuum, but are context-dependent. They are produced within, and to an extent by, particular social formations, and they seek, explicitly or implicitly, to inculcate particular social values and attitudes available at the time of production” (Stephens, 1992: 69). By uncovering systems of meaning that perpetuate social inequities, readers can reposition themselves and envision new intellectual spaces, new social worlds.
Thus, we explore critical approaches to analyzing literature that involve active participation on the part of the reader. Reader response, feminist, multicultural, and critical analyses all require readers to question, problematize, deconstruct, and engage with text in ways that are not prepackaged, standardized, or even predictable. Combined, they all demand attention to power and to the examination of social and institutional practices. Together, they have implications for pedagogy, and they all have ramifications for social action. Critical multicultural analysis brings all of these lenses together and connects our reading to personal, interactive, complex, multicultural, sociopolitical, and historical factors.
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