Good-bye, Jerry Pinkney

 Famed Black children's book illustrator Jerry Pinkney died yesterday of a heart attack, at age 81. He was prolific and precise and his illustrations, primarily in watercolor, were magical. Though he's probably best known for his wordless Caldecott-winning masterpiece The Lion and the Mouse, my favorites of his books were less well known.

Many years ago--I'm trying to remember--probably fifteen? around there--my children would have been eleven and eight?--anyway, Jerry Pinkney was the visiting author/illustrator at my children's small Catholic grade school. St. Anne's had a visiting author or illustrator come every year, and any child who'd read a certain number of books on the Virginia state book award list was invited to breakfast with the author/illustrator before school began. I'm assuming one or both of my kids was at the breakfast with Jerry; I know for sure I was. 

I remember his quiet dignity. I remember how he spoke directly to the children. I remember him saying, "There's something you might be interested to see," and pulling a sheaf of white paper out of his briefcase. The children clustered around. It was his preliminary sketches for the book Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. A mouse floated up to the sky on a leaf turned into a boat. Even in rough pencil sketches the art came alive.

Later that day, in one of his presentations, he showed a slide from the book Black Cowboy, Wild Horses, written by Julius Lester. The illustrations, as you might imagine, were absolutely packed with herds of horses, all caught in the middle of fluid motion. People who don't understand horses well often have trouble drawing them, but Jerry's illustrations were absolute perfection. Their realism and vivacity stunned me so much that I raised my hand. "How did you get those horses so right?" I asked him.

He told me that he watched videos of old Westerns, stopping the film frame after frame. "For each horse," he said, "I had to know where every hoof came from and where it would go next." That was of course the secret--to know how the motion began and ended, even while you were only capturing it in the middle. But it would have been so much work. Jerry shuddered. "I'll never draw horses again."

Jerry Pinkney was honored with the American Library Association's lifetime achievement award, the Children's Literature Legacy Award, in 2016, the year I won a Newbery Honor for The War That Saved My Life. The award dinner and speeches for the Newbery, Caldecott, and Legacy Awards finished around 10:30 at night; the honorees then stood in a receiving line for 3 hours. It was brilliant and fabulous and entirely overwhelming. Afterwards--one thirty in the morning--we all gathered for what has become one of my favorite photographs ever. Writers and illustrators are often terrible introverts but by that point we were all so exhausted that we were completely relaxed, laughing and leaning on each other.

I sat in the front row on a chair beside Jerry. His wife, author Gloria Jean Pinkney, who was wearing the most fabulous hat, came over to him. "Button your coat," she said. He waved her off. 

"Button your coat," she said. He waved her off again.

"Jerry," she said, "your belly's pooching out. Button that coat!" He buttoned it.

My friend author Carole Boston Weatherford phrased it best: rest in pictures, Jerry.

You Can't Learn to Ride a Bike Without a Bicycle

 Hey, everybody.

I can't say for sure that the blog is back--check with me in a few weeks, we'll all see if I've written again. There was a pandemic, and my daughter came home for an 18-month-long spring break, and a couple of big writing projects took up a lot of time but will never been seen by the world (it's not just a long story, it's a couple of long stories--let's just say that the stories weren't only mine, so I couldn't completely control the outcomes), and then I was researching the Holocaust, which wasn't exactly smooth sailing during the pandemic--and also I'm thinking a bit differently about what I want to write about here. I really want to be aware of whose story I'm telling, and make sure it's truly mine. And I don't want to be up on my soapbox too often. I'm glad I care about injustice but I can also write about other things.

However.

You saw that coming, didn't you?

Last night I had the sublime pleasure of my first in-person writerly event since NCTE in November of 2019. I spoke in conversation with Katherine Paterson, right here in Bristol, as part of King University's annual series on Faith and Culture. It was a lovely evening, not least because I absolutely love being with Katherine Paterson. She's won every literary award there is, many more than once, and the Library of Congress has named her a "Living Legend." But also she approaches writing the same way I do--I'd say she's one of the very few writers whose entire process seems the same as mine. She's funny, warm, genuine, curious. She's turn 89 on Halloween, and honestly, I want to grow up to be like her.

Martin Dotterweich, the King professor who runs the series, who's also a longtime friend of mine, moderated the discussion, and kindly gave me a chance to talk a little about Appalachian Literacy Initiative, the nonprofit I co-founded to give low-income Appalachian students new books of their choice. I'm ridiculously proud of ALI, especially of the growth we've achieved in the middle of the freaking pandemic. This year we've gotten grants from Ballad Health Care and Walmart along with a strong flow of private donations, and it means we've been able to expand into 3rd grade AND add more schools. We're serving 3600 students this school year. Bristol Faith in Action has very generously loaned us a large room I now call ALI World Headquarters. It's stuffed full of books and every week we mailed out a couple hundred pounds of them. It's so good.

Yesterday, when I was talking off the cuff, I came up with the perfect analogy for why book access is so crucial. You can't learn to ride a bike without a bicycle.

Think about it. Remember, if you can, the days when you were first learning to ride a bike. It was impossible. Wobbly. Scary. You probably fell. You wanted your parent or whoever to hold onto the back, to steady you while you pedaled. And then with enough practice you learned until you were probably quite competent. And you never forgot. Years later, if you got on a bike, you'd still know how to ride it. 

But if you never had a bike--no matter how athletic you were, no matter how much you would have loved to ride--you couldn't have learned. To learn you needed to practice, and to practice you needed a bike.

So you've got kids with no books--lots of kids. At school they've got books they're learning from. But they don't have books at home, they can't get to libraries, their school library doesn't allow checkouts (it happens, and shouldn't) or doesn't have a librarian to match kids with the books that suit them (happens all the time, and shouldn't). Kids go home for holidays and summer break and while they're gone, they're not reading, because they have nothing to read, whereas the kids whose houses are filled with books--they're like the kids who have shiny bicycles of their very own, that they can ride around the block all the time. Those kids are going to be much more proficient at bike riding reading.

So we're giving kids bicycles books. And it works. They learn to ride read.

Yet More Ish I Should Have Known

 I had a hard time falling asleep last night: my mind was disturbed. When I did sleep, I dreamed of the Tacky Postcard Contest my dear friend Sarah and embarked upon in college. Wherever either of us went we sought out the tackiest possible postcard and sent it to the other. It went on for a few years, with some remarkably tacky cards, until Sarah went to Florence and mailed me a postcard that was a closeup of the genitalia from Michaelangelo's masterpiece sculpture David, with "I came, I saw, I conquered!" written in Latin across it. We acclaimed this the winner, and the contest ended.

When I woke up I thought immediately of the thing that had made it so hard for me to fall asleep.

Lynching postcards.

I'm in an online writer's group with four Black women. We're diverse in age, experiences, and geography. I fully believe that it is not their responsibility to teach me about being Black in America, and yet, nearly every meeting, they do.

Last night one of the others was telling the group about her involved, beautiful idea for a novel that blended Ghanian folklore, American history, and magical realism. As she was talking, she mentioned 'lynching postcards' in passing. It was clear the other three understood what this meant. I did not. I said, "I'm really sorry--what is a lynching postcard?"

They told me, but in the interests of clarity and full detail I will quote this from Wikipedia, which I read this morning:

Spectators sold one another souvenirs including postcards.^[7] Often the photographer was one of the killers.^[8]

In a typical lynching postcard, the victim is displayed prominently at the center of the shot, while smiling spectators, often including children,^[7] crowd the margins of the frame, posing for the camera to prove their presence. Facial expressions suggesting remorse, guilt, shame, or regret are rare.^[8]

Some purchasers used lynching postcards as ordinary postcards, communicating unrelated events to friends and relatives. Others resold lynching postcards at a profit.^[6] Still others collected them as historical objects or racist paraphernalia: their manufacture and continued distribution was part of white supremacist culture, and has been likened to "bigot pornography".^[9]

Whatever their use, the cultural message embodied in most lynching postcards was one of racial superiority. Historian Amy Louise Wood argues:

Within specific localities, viewers did not disconnect the photographs from the actual lynchings they represented. Through that particularity, the images served as visual proof for the uncontested 'truth' of white civilized morality over and against supposed black bestiality and savagery. ^[9]

Viewed from an outsider's perspective, bereft of local context, the postcards symbolized white power more generally. White citizens were depicted as victorious over powerless dead black victims, and the pictures became part of secular iconography.

Richard Lacayo, writing for Time magazine, noted in 2000:

Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz, but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned the cards from the mails.^[10]

As late as the 21st century, James Allen was able to acquire a collection of lynching postcards from dealers who offered them in whispered tones and clandestine marketplaces.

Obviously this is repugnant almost beyond belief. But here is what bothers me most, what kept me up at night: I didn't know.

I'm 53 years old, smart, very well educated, and over the past 15 years have tried to read and educate myself about race, particularly in America. When you're writing historical fiction, as I do, the biggest dangers are what you don't know you don't know--the things you never think to question, that you therefore don't bother to research, that therefore leave holes in your story.

I will never write a story about a lynching. But still, I should have known. Somewhere in my history lessons, while I was told about Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, and that Black and white people couldn't use the same drinking fountains, someone should have taught me that the Civil Rights movement was about more than that. Someone should have explained redlining, told me that the reason having Black people moving into a neighborhood would decrease property values (a fact I vaguely remember hearing from my childhood) wasn't because Black people were intrinsically less valuable, but because white people had rigged the housing market to make it so. Someone should have explained about penal servitude. Someone should have told me about the Tulsa race massacre. These should have been facts presented in my history, not just Dr. King's dream and subsequent assasination.

It is my teacher's fault and it is my fault. 

Now I know better. By reading this, so do you.

Beverly

 My husband and son and I were having dinner in California. We were uptight and anxious, because several thousand miles away my daughter's horse had developed a full-blown medical emergency that could well prove fatal; my daughter, and especially our friends Caroline and Bruce--especially you, Bruce, we won't forget it--were loading him into the trailer for a midnight haul to the veterinary school two hours away. (My daughter drives our truck and trailer well--after her horse recovered she picked him up by herself--but that late drive with the horse's life in danger was emotionally beyond her. Our friends stepped up large and got her through it when the rest of us were 3000 miles away.)

Anyhow, we were sitting outdoors, under a heat lamp, trying to have a lovely time at a real restaurant while our stomachs tied themselves in knots. I checked my phone, hoping for news from my daughter. "Oh, no!" I said. "Beverly Cleary died!"

"Oh, no," my husband said, softly. "I'm so sorry."

"What did she die of?" my son asked. 

I scanned the news item. "It doesn't say."

"How old was she?"

"A hundred and four."

Husband and son looked at me. Son began to grin. And okay, it wasn't a tragedy. One hundred and four--very nearly one hundred and five. And yet. For the next few days my internet feeds were filled with universal mourning. From Judy Blume to Victoria Jamieson to me, at least two generations of children's book authors were influenced by her work, and who knows how many children. Millions. My mom read Ramona The Pest to me when I was myself in kindergarten--I identified with every aspect of Ramona's perilous walk to school. Her pulling up that flowering beet--I loved her. 

The next day (the horse was better, survived the night without surgery, happier spirits all around. We love this horse, he's young and vibrant and quirky and smart, we can't bear the thought of losing him) I went with my husband and son while they played an old, beautiful, California golf course. One of the houses on the course had a Little Free Library near one of the teeboxes, so of course I went to have a look--and there, among the other books, was a copy of The Mouse and the Motorcycle, my favorite of all Beverly Cleary's books. 

I just looked it up. It was originally published in 1965. The edition in the LFL had been published in 2016. I read the first few pages--they're still good--and replaced the book for a child to find.

We all knew she wouldn't live forever, but there were many of us who loved knowing that Beverly Cleary was still in our world. We loved her for her quiet groundbreaking subversive ordinary characters. We loved her for her truth.

For awhile now my husband and I have been thinking of getting a second dog. Our young cavoodle, Cava, loves the company of other dogs. She sometimes finds my husband and I dull, well-loved but slightly insufficient as playmates. When she's around other dogs she lights up with joy.

And so this Saturday we acquired a schnoodle pup. Just as we hoped, Cava reacted with joy, and patience, and deep satisfaction. The puppy is all things puppy, affectionate and sweet.

My husband named her. He names most of our animals. He's very good at names.

I present to you: Beverly Cleary Bradley.

Only Racists See Race? Discussing Dr. Seuss

 Boy-howdee. 

I am trying to figure out what has so many white people so upset. There's all this talk of "cancel culture," but, as far as I can tell, everyone seems up in arms about the demise of  things already dead. Yesterday my internet feeds were blowing up because Dr. Seuss was being labelled racist. His books were being called racist! And some people were very upset.

I can't quite figure out why, except that of course many of them didn't know the facts of the matter, they'd simply seen clickbait titles like, "Dr. Seuss Banned!"

So let's start with the facts. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the organization which owns the copyrights to the author's material, decided to cease publication of six books due to their racially insensitive words or illustrations.  Those books are: McElligot's Pool (published 1947), If I Ran The Zoo (1950), Scrambled Eggs Super (1953), On Beyond Zebra (1955), And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1964), and The Cat's Quizzer (1976.) 

I'm 53 years old, and only one of those books was first published in my lifetime. Also, I'm really well-versed in the field of children's literature, and I've never even heard of four of the titles. Also, do you all imagine books stay in print forever? Very few do. I have published 18 books, the first in 1998. Nine of them are still in print--two of those as electronic versions only. This is likely slightly better than average. Dr. Seuss's books have had phenomenal runs. 

No one is suggesting that these books be banned, removed from libraries, or burnt in the public square. They're just not printing new copies.

Are those six books racist? Yep. They are.

You don't have to like it. You can excuse Theodor Giesel as being a man of his time. You can say that you've not noticed racism in your favorite Dr. Seuss books--but you can't look at the specific books in question and say they don't propagate harmful racial stereotypes. They do.

And. This is important: you don't get to decide what offends someone else.

Take, for example, the swastika. You might see it as an ancient Sanskrit symbol of well-being. But if you wear it as a tattoo people will consider you a neo-Nazi. You can call the Confederate flag a symbol of states' rights all you want--but you need to recognize that many people see it as a badge of white supremacy. When the only pictures of Black people in a book show them barefoot wearing grass skirts--well, that's equating Blackness with ignorance and savagery.  Maybe you don't see it this way, but many people do. When they say they're offended, you don't get to tell them they aren't.

This is also important: there is no good reason to continue to offend people here. McElligot's Pool is not a hill to die on. 

I get that many people have happy childhood memories of Dr. Seuss books. I do. The Sleep Book was my favorite, in part because it was so long, and in part because of one particular illustration I loved so much I could probably draw it for you even now,. The kids I babysit used to made me read Fox In Socks every time because they thought it was hilarious how the tongue twisters tripped me up. No one is "cancelling" this. No one takes those memories away--nor is anyone ceasing publication of Fox In Socks or Green Eggs And Ham.

Dr. Seuss may or may not have been racist himself. I have no idea. Most likely, neither do you. It's irrelevant to the conversation. The man has been dead for thirty years. My grandmother, who's been dead more than twenty years, was absolutely racist for at least most of her life. I loved her dearly, and have many fond memories of her. I also remember how, in her very last years, some of her opinions about Black people changed--she became less racist, in part because she had more genuine interactions with Black people. None of that matters, any more than Dr. Seuss's real beliefs matter. All we're doing now is no longer producing new copies of some racist books Seuss wrote.

I'd like everyone who's got their knickers in a twist to answer these questions honestly:

--when was the last time you read a Dr. Seuss book?

--when was the last time you read any of the six books going out of print?

--how many of those six books have you read?

--if you have read them, what's your honest opinion of them? How do they compare with other children's books you've recently read? If you were going to buy three books for any child of your acquaintance, out of all the books in the bookstore, would any of these make the cut?

Look, it's not much of a stretch to say that today's children are better served by books written less than sixty years ago. We're in a glorious golden age of children's literature right now. There are amazing books being written, and our kids deserve to enjoy them. Take a look next time you go to a bookstore. Browse through the children's section. Open up some of those picture books. You'll see.

As for the title of this blog post: it's something someone wrote yesterday on a thread about the Seuss news. Only racists see race. Which is, honestly, one of the stupidest things I've ever read. If you don't see my identity, including my race, you don't see me. It's nothing to do with prejudice. It's simple truth.

A Vast Anti-Misogynistic Conspiracy

 Dear Wall Street Journal Opinion Page Editor Paul A. Gigot,

Or, should I say, Babycakes?  After all, the new article (behind a payway, here's a NYT article about it) you wrote defending the article that Joseph Epstein wrote, and you published, says that Epstein's use of the word 'Kiddo' to describe Dr. Jill Biden, an educator and a grandmother, is acceptable because that's what her husband sometimes calls her.

My husband doesn't call me Babycakes. He calls me Sweetheart sometimes. That doesn't give you, or Epstein, permission to do so. Please take a note of it.

You claim that the outrage sparked by Epstein's essay (that link is behind a paywall, but if you look around the internet, you can read it for free) is a Democratic conspiracy meant to somehow stifle free speech, and that the people expressing it were playing "the race or gender card to stifle controversy." You remind us that Dr. Biden's position as incipient First Lady means she's not off-limits to this sort of criticism.

You. Don't. Get. It.

People are not angry because they're Democrats or Republicans. They're angry because Epstein's misogyny, which you considered worth publishing and defending, trivialized not only an impressive accomplishment but also every woman who attempts such things. They're angry because yet another old white man told a woman to sit down, shut up, and find her fulfillment in the shadow of her connection to a powerful man.

The line that really makes me furious isn't being talked about much. Epstein rattles on about the how doctorates aren't worth as much any more, how even honorary doctorates have been diminished these days, and then--this is the part that really torqued me--that they decreased in prestige proportionally to how often they'd been given to Black women. Yep. It's not just these women who want to be called "doctor" that infuriate Epstein. It's these uppity Black women with advanced degrees.

How dare he? How dare you? Is it remotely possible that you don't understand how insulting you're being? How is it possible you think people are angry as a stunt, instead of being angry because you, the pair of you, gave them sufficient reason to feel that way?

I'm not a doctor of any sort. My friend Sarah is (Doctor of divinity from Harvard, therefore Reverend Doctor to you), as is my other friend Sarah (veterinarian), and her sister Kelly (biologist, head of a university department). As is the female obstetrician who delivered my daughter. As was the other female obstetrician who delivered my son. But none of that is the actual point here. The point is that this man went out of his way to trivialize a woman's accomplishments. He even demeaned the title of her doctoral thesis. He's small-minded and petty, and you found his insults worthy of being given a national stage, not to expose them, but because you agreed. And we're angry. Not because we're Democrats. Not because we're women. Because the pair of you are assholes, and you piss us off.

A Spot of Morning Chaos

 Half an hour ago I took my second cup of coffee into my office and sat down at my desk. My dog hopped into my lap and curled herself around me as she usually does (and as she is again now), butt on my left leg, head on the right arm of my chair. I'd started up the computer and was happily contemplating my morning's work--I got some particularly good news yesterday, which, while I'm not ready to make it public, certainly made the morning and the idea of work quite pleasant--when I heard a soft but definite thunk thunk.

I decanted the dog, leapt to my feet, looked out the window, and, my daughter later told me, squawked loud enough that she heard it upstairs.

My large grey mare, Sarah, looked back at me. Through my office window. Across a very large front lawn from anywhere she was supposed to be. 

Pal, our very ancient Quarter horse, stood beside her.

Boots on, jacket, hat, dog leash stuffed in pocket, out I went. Pal was now standing under the birch tree in the side yard, looking mournful. He's like a kid who can't bear to be left behind, but he regrets the consequences. I looped the leash around his neck. "C'mon, old man, where's Sarah?"

I could see the barn now. I could see the wide-open gate beside it--snow, my fault then, I went through it last and clearly didn't properly latch it. Sarah was all the way back to the barn--she must have run. My daughter's horse Merlin was milling around near the parked truck and trailer. T, my rental horse, was standing in the field in front of the open gate, looking scandalized. T is Lawful Good and doesn't break rules. (My daughter thinks he's a vampire: can only cross thresholds if specifically invited.)

Pal puffed and huffed and dragged his feet. This was a lot of work for him, something he should have considered before he followed Sarah.

Merlin looked up, saw us, and dashed back into the field. It's not because he cares about breaking rules. It's because he's greedy for his breakfast, and wants to be the first into the barn. He went to stand by his stall door.

I got everyone into the field. Gate properly latched. Portioned out the breakfasts, dumped them into the feed bins in each stall. Went through the end stall, Pal's, into the field, letting it swing shut behind me. Opened Merlin's stall, let him in. Turned around to see that Sarah had flung Pal's unlatched door open and gone in to eat Pal's food. Happily she was still wearing her grazing muzzle. She pounded it into the feed bucket in frustration.

I grabbed her, took her out. T stood outside, looking appalled and slightly petulant. I opened his stall door with one hand and kept hold of Sarah with the other. "Good morning, T, here you go," I said. Properly invited, he stepped inside.

I took Sarah into her stall and removed her muzzle. Shut her in and went back outside, where Pal was very slowly making his way to his stall, because, by crikey, it's already been quite a day.