In 1965, Saturday Review published a groundbreaking essay, “The All-White World of Children’s Books.” Its author, Nancy Larrick, lamented the enormous racial imbalance in books for young readers. Her survey of 5,206 books published in a three-year period showed that fewer than 7 percent of them included images of African Americans. “Of the books which publishers report as ‘including one or more Negroes,’” she wrote, “many show only one or two dark faces in a crowd. In others, the litho-pencil sketches leave the reader wondering whether a delicate shadow indicates a racial difference or a case of sunburn.” A former president of the International Reading Association, Larrick warned that the huge preponderance of white-centered children’s books could distort white youngsters’ understanding of their place in the world. If they grew up without encountering numerous and varied representations of people of color, they might not ever learn to see things as they are.
She also considered the impact of the disparity on young black readers. “In Cleveland,” she wrote, “53 per cent of the children in kindergarten through high school are Negro. In St. Louis, the figure is 56.9 per cent.… Across the country, 6,340,000 nonwhite children are learning to read and to understand the American way of life in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them. There is no need to elaborate upon the damage—much of it irreparable—to the Negro child’s personality.”
Larrick exaggerates the fragility of young black psyches, but I take her point. Literature written with African American children in mind doesn’t replace the many other ways in which collective wisdom and affirmation are conveyed from generation to generation (including music, art, and the instruction of elders). Instead it complements those sources, strengthening the narrative framework that helps us make sense of the black experience.
Two years after her essay appeared, I entered kindergarten as part of that expanding black student population she had noted in St. Louis. Of the children’s books I’d seen up to that point, I don’t remember many that included kids who looked like me. The one exception had been Watty Piper’s Gateway to Storyland, which included an unremarkable version of “Little Black Sambo” that steered clear of stereotypes, at least as I recall it. That changed in 1968 during a field trip to our city’s main library. Under the watchful eye of our teacher, Mrs. Hayden, we first graders sat attentively while a librarian read to us from Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard. It was newly published that year, and the (white) librarian may have been eager or even delighted to welcome an audience that seemed ideally suited for it. Written by Polly Greenberg and illustrated by Aliki, it’s a spare, poetic picture book about a family of African American sharecroppers tasked with harvesting an immense field of cotton. Aliki limited her palette to browns, muted oranges, hints of gray, and white space imaginatively used. The opening image reveals the sun hovering above stalks of long brown grass. On the following page, a man and his two children set out for the fields. Father and son wear overalls and floppy straw hats; the daughter, barefoot, wears a striped kerchief and a simple dress. The monotony of the setting is offset slightly by the lovely patterns on their clothing, but there is little vibrancy otherwise. The color purple will never pop up among these rows.
None of the characters smile as they work. The family picks and gathers in the foreground; behind them, backs bend in the distance. The cotton often appears as white blots, infinite and demanding, as if the artist flung them at her canvas. The sun remains close overhead as the story progresses, radiating above endless waves of undulant bolls.
Greenberg’s text used repetition effectively to drive home the drudgery and discomfort of the family’s work. “We picked and we picked / and we picked and we picked,” the girl regularly reminds us. “It was hot, oh my, it was hot” runs through the narrative like the chorus of a Delta blues.
Aside from the principal characters, the figures are rendered in telling fragments; we see only shoulders, backs, hats, and elbows. The cotton could almost be seen as devouring or slowly digesting them. Near the middle of the book, Aliki used tricks of perspective to show cotton stalks looming on the horizon as tall as trees.
The unnamed narrator, accustomed as she is to menial chores, searches for amiable distractions. She envies the freedom of every animal she sees. “Oh, Lord, I wish I was a buzzard,” she says, wiping her brow.
The freedom of the bird, a nearby dog, and a fluttering butterfly seem to taunt her as she toils, reminding her (and us) of her family’s relative confinement. To my adult eyes, the animals’ ability to roam or rest at will underscores black people’s demeaned status at the bottom of the Jim Crow ecosystem, tethered to the land even though their chains are gone. In contrast, as a first grader, my eyes marveled mostly at the girl’s brown skin, her loveliness and her resemblance to the women and girls who populated my world. She notes that they finished “on Saturday,” concluding not a day but a week of hard, tedious labor. Her father rewards his children with lollipops. Only then do the girl and boy get to smile and behave like youngsters.
Part of what made Buzzard special was Mrs. Hayden’s visible enchantment with it. At first, I thought she paid rapt attention because she wanted to model proper behavior for us. But soon, it became clear that she’d almost forgotten we were there. If a children’s book about a little black girl was novel to us, I’m now imagining what it must have meant to her, not just as a dedicated educator who had worked with all-white textbooks for decades but also as a mature black woman who was once a little black girl. I thought none of that, then, of course. Still, I found her enthusiasm catching. I no longer recall if Mrs. Hayden borrowed the book from the library right then and there, or later ordered it from a bookstore. I just remember that only a few days seemed to pass before a copy appeared in our classroom. Mrs. Hayden read it to us with unbridled joy. It may seem odd that a book that offered an unblinking look at child laborers sweating under a broiling sun made a classroom of restless first graders so happy. It was a testament to the book’s quality, perhaps, as well as its timely fulfillment of a hunger that maybe we didn’t even know we had. We had seen some version of ourselves, and that absorbed us enough to keep us sitting still.
That field trip was not my first visit to the library. My father had taken me there to obtain my own library card shortly after I turned five. With his help I checked out a book about Noah’s Ark (I don’t remember the author, only its small, toddler-friendly dimensions and its dull yellow cover) and Circus by Dick Bruna, wonderfully bright with thick cardboard pages. It was the beginning of a long friendship with libraries that included even a brief stint of employment when I was a young man and newly wed. I worked my way through much of Philip Roth’s output while shelving large print books at the Community Services department in St. Louis, and sold my first newspaper article while working there. For the princely sum of thirty-five dollars, the St. Louis American, a black weekly, bought my interview with a legally blind sculptor. My wife, Liana, was working two part-time jobs at a downtown mall on the day the article published. During our lunch breaks, we hurried toward each other on a street halfway between our workplaces. I remember her holding the American above her head like a banner as she advanced, her grin as bright and dazzling as the moment when she first caught my eye.
* * *
Bookmobile visits began in first grade. While the huge library on wheels parked directly on the blacktop playground of Farragut School, we formed orderly groups and filed in and out. This was the year before my baseball obsession began, at which point my reading choices seldom strayed from books about the national pastime. I do remember working my way through Beatrix Potter and becoming particularly enamored with The Roly-Poly Pudding.
My subsequent attachment to all things baseball may be the cause of my missing Who Look at Me, a children’s book published in 1969, when I was in second grade. It had begun as a collaboration between the authors Milton Meltzer and Langston Hughes. The latter’s death in 1967 put the project on hold until Meltzer enlisted the poet June Jordan to take it over. Meltzer had assembled a collection of paintings and illustrations, some by noted African American artists such as Charles Alston and Henry Ossawa Tanner; others came from white painters like Colleen Browning and Alice Neel, known for their sensitive renderings of black life and culture. The images encompass many aspects of the African American experience, including street scenes, formal family sittings, children at play and adults at work. Jordan’s words, musical and formidable, function much as a choir would; as the pages turn, the voices she assumes become a collective shout of assertion, an impassioned demand for recognition and acknowledgment.
“We only see what we look at,” John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. “To look is an act of choice.” In the grip of Jordan’s words, readers may regard the summons to gaze as both an exhortation and a dare, less an act of free will than a surrendering to the inevitable pull of forces beyond their control.
see me darkly covered ribs
around my heart across my skull
thin skin protects the part
that dulls from longing
In echoing Ellison, Jordan places blackness, complex and unpredictable, in the center of the frame. At the same time, she tenderly considers the risks of visibility, how speedily the spotlight can be turned into crosshairs. Fifty years before Freddy Gray would die after making “eye contact” with a policeman, and Philando Castile’s noticeably “broad nose” led to his execution, Jordan limned the high-tension wire between the seer and the seen.
How would I have felt about Who Look at Me? The poetry, brilliant to my grown-up eyes, may not have been accessible to my seven-year-old self. I was familiar enough with art. My dad was a fine artist and a sign painter when not teaching. He often took us to the museum on Tuesday nights when admission was free. Along with my brother Seitu, he had helped create our community’s Wall of Respect, a mural/gathering spot where poets and revolutionaries shared their musings and manifestos before sizable crowds. Indoors, my father made his art in his basement studio or at a nearby sign shop. My brother drew wherever he was—even while in motion, from the kitchen to the dining room, from the backyard to the front porch. He spent countless hours teaching me how to color. Two years later, when I was nine, he would be out of the house, a married father with new responsibilities. In the meantime, we met on a bench near the heating vent in the front hall. As we dug our fingers into a Dutch Masters cigar box, searching through dozens of stubbed and broken crayons, we worked on coloring books featuring Gumby and Pokey and a short-lived cartoon series called The Super Six. Seitu transformed his pages into textured, layered, and shaded portraits, often rubbing the paper with his fingers to create the proper blend, say, of cornflower blue and forest green. While scribbling beside him, I struggled to stay between the lines.
Outside our house, I seldom saw figurative art with black bodies. Who Look at Me would have held my interest for that alone. I must say, though, that my house and my neighborhood had no shortage of black bodies, and while I couldn’t say for sure whose gaze I attracted, everyone and everything attracted mine. The streets shimmered with personalities as rich, mystifying, and dynamic as those captured by any work of oil or watercolor. To the extent that I recognized my neighbors as reflections of myself (and as children we understood this instinctively), I could look out my window and see “me” everywhere I turned.
* * *
Aside from Buzzard, I can remember only one other book in my first-grade classroom with a character that looked like me: Two Is a Team by Lorraine and Jerrold Beim. The story of a friendship between Ted, a black boy, and Paul, a white one, it unfolds predictably in workmanlike prose. Ted’s presence initially drew me to the book, but after a while I became more interested in the images of the two pals visiting each other’s homes. This was the same year that the beautiful black actress Diahann Carroll starred in Julia, a TV show in which her son, Corey, had a similar friendship with Earl J. Waggedorn, a white classmate. When Ted and Paul played with a sailboat while Ted’s lovely mother sat nearby, it reminded me, pleasantly, of Corey and Earl. The pedestrian text seldom matched Ernest Crichlow’s brisk illustrations. Although I don’t remember doing so, I’m sure I read the promotional copy on the jacket flap introducing Chrichlow as “a distinguished young Negro artist.” I didn’t learn until decades later that he was indeed reputable, an active member of a generation of painters that included Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Norman Lewis.
A far more lively book was Ezra Jack Keats’s classic The Snowy Day, which I borrowed from the library, but I don’t remember seeing in my first-grade classroom. It was published in 1962; Two Is a Team, astonishingly, was published back in 1945. Taken together, Mrs. Hayden’s bookshelf and Nancy Larrick’s exhaustive research suggest that little else was published during the years in between.
* * *
In Mrs. Hayden’s class, picture books were reserved for story time or quiet reading. For serious study, we turned to Jack and Janet, part of Houghton Mifflin’s Reading for Meaning series. Here is where my father’s schoolteacher background provided me with an advantage. Most of the books in the series, including Up and Away, Come Along, and On We Go, were on a shelf in our house, residuals from Dad’s end-of-semester classroom clean-outs. I finished them at home while Mrs. Hayden was still leading us through the pages of Jack and Janet in class. I was fond of the title characters, as well as their little sister, Penny, their pets Tip and Mitten, and their pals Bill and Dot.
Put m with eat
and you have meat.
Do you eat meat?
Put b with eat
And you have beat.
Who will beat Jack home?
People of color—and the racial “problems” that usually came with them—did not exist in the pastoral paradise where Jack and Janet lived. While they might occasionally encounter a stray goat or kitten, no Negro would ever stop and ask for directions or show up on the porch looking to rent a room. Difficulties usually stemmed from a harmless misunderstanding, easily resolved within the span of a few pages. Rereading Jack and Janet as an adult, I was struck by the authors’ awareness of changing gender politics, as well as their uncertainty about how to address them.
In one typical adventure, a new boy, Dick, tries to trade a pocketknife for Tip, Jack’s beloved dog. But Tip also belongs to Janet, so she will have to consent to the exchange. She turns her nose up at the pocketknife. “That is not good for a girl,” she says. “A girl could not play with it.” Janet reconsiders when Dick offers to add a tricycle to the bargain. “A girl could play with that,” she says.
In a subsequent episode, Penny suggests buying Jack a pair of dolls for his birthday, but Janet says, “No! Put those back. Those are good for girls but not for boys.”
Janet buys Jack a kite instead. Later he declines to let her and Dot help him fly it. “Kites are for boys,” he tells them. “Kites are not for girls.”
Janet and Dot win the argument by successfully flying the kite after Jack has tried and failed. They tie the kite string to the baby carriage in which they are pushing a doll.
“It is a good kite for girls,” Janet says. But, she might have added, only if they agree to mind the children at the same time.
Take the l away from look.
Put in b to make book.
What do you do with a book?
Jack and Janet served as the color bearer, as it were, for the rest of the Reading for Meaning series. Come Along consisted of original stories and abridged adaptations of popular picture books such as Curious George and Katy and the Big Snow. Aside from the figures in “The Five Brothers,” an adaptation of a Chinese fairy tale, every character in its 250-plus pages was white. On We Go, which I absolutely loved, featured a cameo by a different quintet of Chinese men. Besides them, the book’s only acknowledgment that people of color exist occurs when a white man entertains his kids by allowing them to paint his face with red stripes like “a big Chief.” The only principal character with brown skin is a dog named Noodle.
Notwithstanding Nancy Larrick’s dire forecast, I found the world conjured in those books more fascinating than alienating. I enjoyed every moment I spent there, but I never considered for a minute that it was better than the nurturing, stimulating all-black world to which I would return after shutting the book.
* * *
I take mild umbrage with Larrick’s prediction of “irreparable” harm because it cast a pall of hopelessness over the black readers she aimed to defend. Much like a presidential candidate who solicits black voters by asking them what else they have to lose, she may have encouraged her readers to see black communities as quagmires of hopelessness, and black people as suffering from terminal illiteracy and dysfunctional vocabularies.
I don’t pretend that our family household was typical, but I am confident there were others like it. Born the fifth of six children, I grew up in a culture of reading. Some days I could hardly wait to get older, when I stood to inherit my siblings’ libraries. My eldest sister Dale’s shelves held books by Baldwin and Hemingway, among others. With little effort, I can still see her Scribner’s paperback edition of The Old Man and the Sea. Seitu had stacks of Marvel comics and an almost complete set of Doc Savage adventures, most of which I eventually snapped up. My sister Karen collected Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, all of them hardbacks. In time, I would start with The Secret of the Old Clock and The Hidden Staircase.
My older siblings neither marveled at my precociousness (not out of place in our household) nor condescended to me. When I was about thirteen, Karen, observing my boredom with books designed for readers my age, began to share her own. From a pile of thrillers she had been racing through, she tossed me The Chancellor Manuscript by Robert Ludlum. “It has some sex in it,” she said, “but you can handle it.”
Reading material was always at hand throughout my extended family. My paternal grandparents subscribed to The Crisis (the official publication of the NAACP), my maternal grandfather kept piles of Black Enterprise in his bedroom and allowed me to take the back issues home to read at my leisure, and my parents subscribed to both daily newspapers as well as Ebony, a widely circulated African American magazine. Jet, Ebony’s immensely popular sister publication, could be found in every barbershop, beauty salon, and record store. That said, perhaps our community’s best resource was our muscular imaginations. They were not in short supply in black neighborhoods across the country, where storytelling remains a spectator sport. Some of us may not have had many books, but we all had plenty of stories.
I don’t mean to suggest that having a rich oral tradition is the same as being literate. Our teachers were instructed to make sure we knew the difference, as well as the connections. It was to this combined legacy of creativity and literacy that I turned when I began to write children’s books myself. I was not responding to any lack that I experienced as a young reader so much as aiming to sustain the tradition that had nourished and enlightened me.
* * *
The revised edition of Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard, published in 2002, includes a note from Polly Greenberg, recalling her work creating Head Start centers in Mississippi during the 1960s. It was there that she met Gladys Henton. “The story in this book is based on a childhood recollection” of Henton’s, Greenberg explains.
In another book, The Devil Has Slippery Shoes (weighing in at a whopping eight-hundred-plus pages), Greenberg wrote in considerable detail about the poor, black Mississippians she came to know while working in the Magnolia State. Gladys Henton doesn’t appear in those pages, but Hattie Saffold does. She parlayed her experience as a Head Start instructor into a college degree and a career as a kindergarten teacher. Her memories show that Gladys Henton’s experience was far from unique.
We raised some cotton, some corn, vegetables, a few hogs, cows, chickens. My mother and father were farmers. We lived near them. For survival, we had to work on plantations, too, chopping cotton for about $3 a day in that hot, hot sun, or picking—$2 for a hundred [pounds of cotton. It takes over half a day to accomplish this, so this also paid $3 a day]. When our children were small, I’d drop them off up the road at my mother’s, but when they got a little bigger, they’d come along and work too. We needed every dollar.… We were getting about $45 a week for the full-time work of two adults and a bunch of kids, and it was seasonal.
Buzzard offered a realistic and even unpleasant view of life seldom—if ever—reflected in white children’s literature published at the same time. In her afterword, Greenberg suggested that young readers be told that the story “took place before their mothers were born.” Yet Saffold describes children toiling in the fields as recently as 1965, when the War on Poverty brought funds and jobs to the state. My mother-in-law, born in Robinsonville, Mississippi, in 1946, managed somehow to avoid setting foot in a cotton field until she was a teenager. “It would be hot,” she told me. “You had a big hat on and a thermos of water. You put your sack across your shoulder, you pick it and put it in the side. When you get to the end of the row, you tie it up and leave it there. A man drives by in a tractor, gets it, weighs it, writes a number by your name and brings your sack back. My first day I picked 280 [pounds]. I picked 280 to 310 every day.”
And how much was she paid? “Three dollars a hundred,” she said.
After reading the original edition of Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard, my mother-in-law attested to the accuracy of Greenberg’s narrative. Still, she was struck more by the heroine’s resourcefulness than by the endless drudgery. “She never got disheartened because in her heart she knew she was doing what she had to do to survive,” she said. “She’s very observant. She notices everything while constantly doing her work and keeping her purpose in mind.”
I asked her if it was possible to experience joyful moments in the field, and she quickly assured me it was. “It was hot but it was also pleasant. Sometimes my sister Jenny and I would take a boll of cotton and throw it at each other. Mama would shake her head because she knew my stepdad wouldn’t like that.”
* * *
Like nearly every other first grader in Mrs. Hayden’s class, I had my own not-so-distant connection to cotton and to Mississippi. I knew that my mother’s father had been born there. I didn’t know, however, that my enslaved ancestors had toiled in Amite County, where much of the state’s cotton had been cultivated.
Most of what I later learned about conditions in antebellum Mississippi came from studying The Slaves of Liberty, a book by the fine historian Dale Edwyna Smith, who happens to be my sister. Tireless and determined in her pursuit of our ancestral legacy, she sifted through archives, traveled to Mississippi, interviewed descendants, confirmed connections, reexamined details, and verified hunches. I find reading about historians’ efforts to get at the truth—the U-turns, dead ends, and gravity-testing journeys across rope bridges—as satisfying as learning about the history they eventually uncover. The details of searches like those Greenberg and my sister conducted easily impress someone like me, whose idea of adventure involves a cool drink and a comfortable armchair.
My sister’s essay in the Southern Review, published in 1990, reconstructed the story of Irris Bonner Harris, born in Amite County around 1856. During a research project, Dale came upon Irris unawares “in the pages of a book at Harvard’s Widener Library.” While reading WPA interviews with the formerly enslaved, she writes, “I felt sure that I was looking at words inspired by my own flesh and blood.” Her essay travels back to the past from its starting point in 1950, when as an infant, she was carried to McComb, Mississippi, to be blessed by our family’s matriarch, one Irris Bonner Harris.
Through the magic of modern software, I can download a photograph of their fateful meeting and look at it on my smartphone. The picture is a miracle of genetics and circumstance, five generations of my family in a single portrait. In the right foreground, Dale sits on my mother’s lap. A teenage bride, my mother sparkles with girlish beauty. My grandfather stands behind them, his hand on my mother’s shoulder. My great-grandfather, tall and dignified, stands in the background on the left. In front of him sits Irris, relaxed and regal. If there is Mississippi in her face, I don’t see it, although I don’t know if I’d recognize it if it were present. Similarly, her face tells me little about her childhood in bondage, her chronically injured hip, or the sundry ordeals that must have marked her ninety-plus years. I can, I think, see evidence of the amusements she had enjoyed and the loves she had known, the sweet surprises and the joy. Her expression is alert and her lips are turned slightly, as if suppressing merriment.
From my sister, I learned about the inadequacies of census-taking and transcriptions, the countless flaws in methodology that can undermine the historian’s quest. Even if perfect, those kinds of documents couldn’t provide the intangibles I crave, like the sound of Irris’s voice, and the signature gestures that belonged to her alone. Neither can the photograph, for all my efforts to read and see it. For all I know, when my daughter lets loose her marvelous chortle, it could be the echo of Irris’s laughter, resonating through the years.
The WPA interviewer who recorded Irris’s recollections couldn’t resist adding her own two cents to the narrative, or perhaps she was expected to. At any rate, positing herself as a close observer, she concludes her report by telling us what (she thinks) she’d seen. Irris, she wrote, was a “bright yellow … darkey who wants to be ‘looked up’ to.”
* * *
My mother was born in St. Louis, but spent most of her childhood in Sacramento, where she attended integrated schools and enjoyed friendships with Latino, Asian, and white classmates. Although returning to her rigidly segregated hometown as an adolescent had required some adjustment, it didn’t prepare her for the sojourn to Mississippi. My parents’ trip to McComb with Dale was their first journey to the Deep South, and their last. I had heard the account of my parents’ Mississippi pilgrimage many times. Over the years, my mom had repeated a story about stopping at a restaurant for a takeout meal soon after they’d arrived in the state. Years later, the details eluded me. All I could recall was my parents being sent to the back door of the restaurant to await their food. When I called my mother and asked her to repeat the story one more time, she was eighty-six years old. More than sixty years had passed; the details eluded her, too. Besides spending time with the family matriarch, my mother most remembered wanting to hurry back North and stay there. “I didn’t like Mississippi at all,” she told me. “People deserve respect, especially adults. You should be careful how you talk to people. They didn’t care.” Even over the phone, I could hear the tension in her voice and imagine her furrowed brow as she probed the gauzy details of her past. “It was the wrong place for somebody who’s outspoken,” she concluded. “I was about to get hurt down there. It wasn’t my type of deal. I went because my daddy wanted me to go.”
* * *
I worked at the Washington Post in the late nineties and early aughts. Once, while waiting for a meeting to start, I mentioned my formerly enslaved great-great-grandmother to my colleagues. I told them she had lived long enough to hold my sister on her lap. A fellow editor stared quizzically, looking not at me but just past my shoulder. With the fingers of one hand he tapped the fingers of the other, like a third grader solving a math problem. “Are you sure? That doesn’t seem possible,” he said, looking down at the table. It had happened and there was supporting evidence, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to see it. His skepticism reddened his pale skin and emitted from him in waves, like body odor. “You can read all about it in the Southern Review,” I said with no small degree of satisfaction. We left the matter unresolved, and he likely forgot our exchange by lunchtime. I still recall it from time to time, and when I do I also think of a passage in “The Law,” a poem by Eugene Gloria:
What with those men and their gift
of whiteness, their constant need of proof.
At first glance, the only difference between the original and revised editions of Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard seemed to be the author’s explanatory afterword. When I looked again, however, I noticed a change in the way the little girl introduces her family’s mission.
1968:
My daddy told us
if we didn’t pick a lot of cotton
we were going to get a whipping.
2002:
My daddy told us
if we picked a lot of cotton
we might get a sucker.
Apparently, Greenberg or her editor thought the prospect of bodily harm might have been too much for twenty-first-century sensibilities. Gladys Henton likely wouldn’t have mentioned the threat of a whipping if it were not a real possibility. Even so, Greenberg wasn’t obligated to produce a verbatim reconstruction of actual events. A story “based on” someone else’s memories leaves plenty of room for contraction and expansion. What’s more, the searing heat and the backbreaking repetitiveness of the family’s tasks make it more than clear that they weren’t enjoying “a fun day” in the sun. In the original version, the father still holds out the possibility of a sucker, but only after he has first raised the possibility of punishment.
As has been pointed out many times, modern-day youngsters are exposed daily to violence through so many outlets that they risk becoming desensitized to it. My first-grade classmates, of course, had no access to video games, the Internet, or cable television. Still, it is likely that none of us blinked at the mention of a whipping. At my school, kids were beaten daily with yardsticks, rattans, hands, belts, and bolo bats. One girl’s mother came to our class several times and disciplined her daughter on the spot with what she fondly called “the Persuader,” a menacing, serpentine cord that she uncoiled from her purse with undisguised delight. As bad as a whipping from a teacher was, discipline from an administrator was much worse. Once Mr. Overton, the assistant principal whom we all feared, came into our classroom and ordered our class clown to bend over a desk. He whipped him ferociously with a bamboo pointer. The boy looked distressed but to my amazement he endured each blow without shedding a tear or uttering a cry. I nearly passed out—and I was sitting on the other side of the room.
In the slave narrative my sister had found, our ancestor spoke of the constant threat of violence as her mother and fellow captives labored among the cotton. “Marse Alex wud … ride ober de fiel’ he all de time toted dat whip,” she said, “an’ sum times would pop it ’cross sum body’s back.” Returning to Buzzard as an adult, I found that the new knowledge stemming from my sister’s research had colored my reading. History, lead-footed and relentless, weighed down the text. Nor was I able to see the illustrations as I once had, before I asked my mother-in-law to distill her experience into dollars and cents. While unquestionably a liberating force, at times reading can remind us of the limits of perception, the complications of looking.
Nancy Larrick must have had such complications in mind when she wrote her landmark report. She died in 2004, at age ninety-three, with the world of children’s publishing only slightly more diverse than when she first examined it. There is little evidence to suggest that industry stalwarts paid serious attention to her warning about children’s books that falsely positioned white characters at the center of the universe. She predicted that white youngsters raised on a steady diet of such books would grow up to become adults who’d have difficulty seeing people of color as peers, neighbors, or friends. I’m reminded of her gloomy forecast whenever my wife quietly signals me to offer my business card. It’s a practiced routine of ours in settings where credentials might be helpful in explaining our black presence. Liana, all incandescence and grace, turns on her megawatt smile. I lead with my business card to ward off skepticism, holding it in my left hand while I lean in to shake with my right.
The recipient looks at the card, then up at my face, although the card has no photograph, only my name, a title, and contact information under my college’s corporate logo. I’ve performed this ritual enough to sense when my new acquaintance is caught in a strange kind of dissonance, reading one thing while seeing another. At such moments I find myself also thinking of John Berger. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote. “Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”