Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  CURSES, BANNED AGAIN! CENSORING SWEARING

  In 1965, Harriet M. Welsch told her mother, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go to dancing school” — and nothing was ever the same again.

  Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy was not the first children’s book to contain a curse word, but since many believe this novel ushered in the era of “new realism” in children’s fiction, Harriet’s single curse word echoed long and loud.

  Paul Zindel was also a pioneer, whose first novel for teenage readers, The Pigman, helped redefine the field of “young adult books.” Published just four years after Harriet, Zindel knew that the mouthy, modern protagonist of his novel would need franker language than “damned” to authentically tell his story — but would libraries and schools be ready for it? The author decided to compromise, having his novel’s co-narrator John use symbols such as #$% for a “mild curse” and then put a three in front of it — 3#$% — for “the raunchiest curse you can think of.”

  Zindel’s unique and humorous device served as a bridge between an era when cursing seldom appeared in books for young readers and the more expletive-laden “anything goes” years ahead. Just four years later, John Neufeld would publish Freddy’s Book, a children’s novel in which a young boy spends 140 pages trying to find out the meaning of a word he has seen scrawled on buildings and whispered among friends: fuck. Needless to say, Freddy’s Book soon met the censors and continues to be challenged decades later.

  By the time the twenty-first century arrived, all of the “seven dirty words” popularized in George Carlin’s comedy routine — and then some! — had found their way into children’s books. If self-proclaimed censors had their way and were able to remove every book with swearing from circulation, most library shelves would be as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Yet, strangely, when it comes to profanity, censors often leave the worst “fucking offenders” alone and instead focus their sights on books whose cursing content is much more mild.

  One of these is the 1992 Newbery winner, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor — an old-fashioned, generally inoffensive boy-and-dog story that its author describes as “the most moral book I have written.” Most of the complaints center around the mild epithets used by the novel’s villain. Naylor states, “What is most incomprehensible to me is that not one single parent has complained to me because Judd Travers, in my book, cheats shop owners, lies, kills deer out of season, and kicks and starves his dogs. What ticks them off is that he swears.” The author reported: “The most poignant incident of all, I think, was my receipt of a large envelope, full of class-assigned letters, all saying the same thing — that the students were shocked to discover some bad words in Shiloh and would read no more books by me. They all had the look of being copied from a letter dictated by a teacher. Each child referred to the swear words in Shiloh as ‘vulger language,’ and every child spelled it that way, obviously copying it from one the teacher had written on the board. But in folding their letters to go into the envelope, two of the boys had written in the crease, in the faintest writing, a message that the teacher had overlooked: ‘But we loved your book anyway.’”

  Another improbable target of censorship is the 1978 Newbery winner, Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, a novel of friendship and loss beloved by generations of young readers. What is it about this book that caused one minister to say that his goal in life was “to get Terabithia taken off the shelves of every school library”? The answer: The book includes what one censor referred to as “gutter and unholy language.”

  The offensive words:

  Several uses of the word Lord, as in “Lord, he was tired.”

  A couple of damns, as in “What are they teaching you at that damn school?”

  A handful of hells.

  One instance of the term bitched.

  For these offenses, Bridge to Terabithia was at one point the third most censored book in the country and continues to be challenged to this day, which is something of a shock to its author, a devout Christian and former missionary married to a Presbyterian minister. Paterson has formed her own rather sly opinions on what might really be causing the attacks on her novel:

  I have a feeling that what might really be behind a lot of these attacks is a fear of death, or perhaps a fear of talking about death to children. Maybe these people feel that the sudden and seemingly senseless nature of the death of the girl in the book would cause children to question their religious beliefs. Of course, most of the people who attack the book consider themselves to be devout Christians, and we Christians are not supposed to be afraid of death, so maybe my theory is wrong.

  Banned of Gold

  Asked about her most censored book, Katherine Paterson replied, “Of all my books, Bridge to Terabithia is the one that is most often used in schools, and I think that is the reason it is attacked more than my other books. It’s the most visible of my books.”

  Winning the Newbery Medal always raises a book’s visibility, so it should come as no surprise that so many of the award winners have been singled out by censors for a variety of reasons. Here are a few examples:

  1923: The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting. The publisher voluntarily edited the book to remove racist dialogue.

  1930: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field. Challenged over a scene in which a man picks up the eponymous doll “and pretended to make love” to her.

  1945: Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson. The publisher voluntarily edited the book to remove racist language.

  1951: Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates. Banned for being “culturally insensitive.”

  1959: The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. Challenged for witchcraft and violent content.

  1962: The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare. Challenged for religious content.

  1963: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Frequently challenged for its religious content.

  1970: Sounder by William H. Armstrong. Challenged due to its use of racial epithets in a historical setting.

  1973: Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George. Challenged because of its oblique reference to rape/possible forced sex.

  1974: The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox. Challenged due to its depiction of historical slavery.

  1977: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Frequently challenged for its depictions of historical racism.

  1978: Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Continually challenged for use of curse words.

  1979: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Challenged for “violence and horror.”

  1981: Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson. Challenged for religious content.

  1990: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. Challenged for profanity.

  1991: Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. Challenged for “racial content.”

  1992: Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Challenged for profanity.

  1994: The Giver by Lois Lowry. Continuously challenged for its negative portrayal of a futuristic society; one attempted banning in Kansas was based on a complaint that the book was “unfit for analysis by students because it is violent, sexually explicit, and portrays infanticide and euthanasia.”

  1999: Holes by Louis Sachar. Challenged on the grounds that it is not “quality literature.”

  2007: The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. Scrotumgate!

  In another case of “Nobody complained about the water babies’ dimpled bottoms in 1863, but we can’t even think about the Philharmonic’s bare butts in 1982,” let’s consider a three-letter word that didn’t make anyone blanch when it appeared in 1911’s Peter Pan but apparently has some modern readers reaching for their smelling salts and staggering toward their fainting sofas. The word is. . . ass. When Tinker Bell repeatedly used the words “you silly ass” in J. M. Barrie’s novel more than a hundred years ago, no one started a “Ban Pan” campaign. The phrase was even uttered aloud in the Mary Martin musical that aired on TV in 1955, and no one made a fuss. Yet a couple of dec
ades later, Roald Dahl’s novel James and the Giant Peach was singled out by censors because it contained the word ass.

  Then there’s the case of It’s a Book by Lane Smith.

  In this picture book, a donkey is puzzled to find his friend, a monkey, deeply immersed in reading a book. A product of the computer age, the donkey asks the monkey a myriad of questions about the object in his hands: “Do you blog with it? . . . Can it. . . tweet?” to which the monkey patiently and repeatedly replies, “It’s a book.” On the last page, a mouse who has been observing the encounter shouts, “It’s a book, jackass!”

  Could a volume that celebrates the joys of books and reading over the tweeting-blinking-noisy world of computers and video games ever be attacked by censors?

  Could the word “jackass,” which is another word for “donkey” and has no sexual connotation whatsoever, inflame the hearts and minds of those adults with banning on their minds?

  You bet your ass.

  Lane Smith’s book had barely hit the shelves before the Internet was buzzing with arguments over whether the word “jackass” was funny and appropriate or ill-chosen and unnecessary. Everyone wanted to have the last word on the book’s last word. Published in August 2010, the book was already banned by two Massachusetts school districts by December.

  The It’s a Book debate will likely rage on for years. How many more school districts and libraries will ban the book? How many parents and teachers reading the book aloud will simply substitute another word when they reach the last page? Does this damage the integrity of the book or the author’s freedom of expression? How far will censors go to sacrifice realism to protect young readers? Will they only be happy when all “offensive” words are removed from books? Perhaps they’d be satisfied if all authors used Paul Zindel’s technique of substituting @#$% for curse words in The Pigman.

  Or maybe not.

  You see, The Pigman has also appeared on a fair share of banned-books lists over the years. One of the biggest complaints about Zindel’s novel?

  The book’s profanity.

  MY BROTHER SAM IS ALIVE?: CENSORING POLITICS

  High-school reading lists are filled with novels containing political themes, such as Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Even though these books were originally published for adults and are now being recommended for students only a year or two from their legal majority, they continue to face challenges by censors at schools and libraries.

  However, of more interest to us are books published specifically for young readers that have faced opposition due to political content.

  My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier was a 1975 Newbery Honor Book as well as a finalist for the National Book Award. Despite these honors, the Colliers’ Revolutionary War novel ranked near the top ten in the American Library Association’s list of “The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” The book has been censored repeatedly, with most of the challenges focusing on the occasional salty dialogue. Lurking in the background, however, and often left unsaid by censors, is perhaps the concern that this novel about a family torn apart by war also presents an unorthodox view of patriotism. (“Bah, patriotism. . . . Go sell your patriotism elsewhere. I’ve had enough of it.”) And what can we say about the censors’ charge that the book contains “battlefield violence”? How would they suggest that war be portrayed in this novel — with soldier Sam and his compatriots approaching the battlefield armed with Nerf balls and squirt guns?

  The Newbery winner Number the Stars by Lois Lowry concerns the peaceful evacuation of Jews from Denmark during World War II. Though this inoffensive novel has received the occasional library challenge for profane language (it contains a single use of the word damn), no one expected that a 2010 United States Congressional vote would get the book banned in Turkey. According to a School Library Journal report, the event occurred shortly after the House Foreign Affairs Committee endorsed a resolution declaring that the World War I–era massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks should be called a genocide. Almost immediately, Turkey recalled its ambassador from the United States, and within days, Turkey’s Department of Education had banned Number the Stars from at least one school curriculum. Puzzled by this chain of events, Lois Lowry offered one possible explanation for the book’s banning: “Turkey is a largely Islamic country. And although Stars espouses no religious or political view, it does tell a true story of compassion toward persecuted Jews, and its unstated theme is clearly that of integrity and humanity between people of differing faiths. Perhaps that is a story that the Turkish government does not currently want told to children.”

  Considering all the ways that Turkey could have displayed its displeasure with the United States, how fascinating that one of the first things they went after was a children’s book, suggesting once again that children truly are the eternal battleground upon which all wars are fought.

  A different type of war was at the center of one of the most intriguing kid-book bannings of the twentieth century — the Cold War. We call this one the “Two Reds Scare,” and it all started with the publication of a small paperback in 1950.

  Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television fed into the era’s “Red Scare” hysteria — the belief that communist sympathizers were infiltrating American society. The book listed more than 150 actors, directors, and writers believed to be “subversives”; many would eventually be blacklisted by the entertainment industry. Among the writers listed in Red Channels were Lillian Hellman, Irwin Shaw, and Arthur Miller. No children’s authors were included, though a couple of the targeted writers — such as Louis Untermeyer and Langston Hughes — had published the occasional volume for kids.

  This doesn’t mean, however, that children’s books were immune to McCarthy-era scandals. The year 1950 also saw the publication of the picture book The Two Reds by a pair of creators known as “Will and Nicolas.” Will was William Lipkind, an anthropologist, and Nicolas was Nicolas Mordvinoff, an artist who left Russia as a boy and, after stops in France and Tahiti, arrived in New York in 1946. The two men met through Mr. Lipkind’s wife, who worked for the New York Public Library.

  They decided to collaborate on the mild story of a lonely city boy and a neighborhood cat, distinguished by Nicholas’s loose black-and-white illustrations, judiciously but vibrantly splashed with red and yellow. In this tale, the boy, named Red, lives in the same part of New York City as a cat with the same name. They start off as mortal enemies. The cat is interested in the boy’s bowl of goldfish, after all. Eventually, after each one gets into mischief and runs from punishment, they collide and become friends. Though it’s hardly considered a politically correct book today for other reasons, there was otherwise nothing scandalous going on in the name of communism.

  But when The Two Reds was published, a window dresser at New York’s famed FAO Schwarz devoted the store’s Fifth Avenue windows to displaying the book. Almost immediately the president of FAO Schwarz demanded that the display be taken down.

  A book called The Two Reds?

  Illustrated by an artist with a Russian name?

  Nyet, nyet!

  The window display was taken down. But people continued to whisper that the book was subversive. And The Two Reds would eventually be banned in Boston.

  Fortunately, the book’s controversy never exploded onto the national consciousness; Will and Nicolas were never called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (A silly thought? Not so silly when you consider that, during the early fifties the Cincinnati Reds even had to change their name to the “Cincinnati Redlegs” to avoid the stain of communism.) One of the factors that may have kept the controversy from boiling over is the support this book received from the children’s literary community. In Minders of Make-Believe, Leonard Marcus reports that Louise Seaman Bechtel wrote of The Two Reds in her newspaper column, “The publication of this book restores one’s faith in the experimental daring of American pub
lishers.”

  And Fritz Eichenberg said, “It takes great courage, for reasons too numerous and obvious to mention, to name a children’s book The Two Reds.” “Or to publish one,” Leonard Marcus adds, in a nod to Harcourt publisher Margaret K. McElderry.

  The Two Reds went on to be named a Caldecott Honor Book.

  It wasn’t communist propaganda. And the display set up by that window dresser at FAO Schwarz wasn’t a political statement but an acknowledgment of the book’s excellence.

  Could that window’s decorator have been twenty-two-year-old Maurice Sendak? It wouldn’t be an altogether unreasonable notion. After all, Sendak worked for FAO Schwarz at the time and even went so far as to tell Selma G. Lanes decades later that he thought The Two Reds was a nearly perfect book. And, given Sendak’s outspoken love of all things mischievous, perhaps to him the book’s very controversy was part and parcel of its perfection.

  DON’T ASK ALICE: CENSORING SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK-AND-ROLL

  Rightly or wrongly, the phrase “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll” has long been used to describe youth culture in the U.S.A. It’s not surprising, then, that these topics would be among the censors’ strongest targets.

  Someone should give an award to whoever designed the cover of the 1971 book Go Ask Alice. As anyone in the publishing industry knows, book covers have to continually change to keep up with the times — particularly when a volume is aimed at that most changeable audience: young readers. Yet the original cover of Go Ask Alice — a girl’s partially hidden face staring out from the shadows — has been so effective, so memorable, so perfectly suited for the text that the image has remained unchanged for over four decades. Would anyone have predicted it? And would anyone have predicted that this book, published at the height of the drug-fueled counterculture era, would remain in print this long? Despite the book’s murky origins, poor writing, and heavy-handed message, Alice touched a chord with young readers who were drawn into the story of an unnamed girl (nope, she isn’t called Alice) who is slipped a mickey at a party and almost immediately becomes a drug addict, strung out on speed, LSD, and heroin.