Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  A late-in-life revision of P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins brings up another issue: What if the author makes changes to her original text herself? Does that render a previously racist text more acceptable, or should it still be left as is, in the name of teaching children about diversity by pointing out its absence in the past? Mary Poppins — the first of eight books in a series — was published in 1934. The original version of the chapter “Bad Tuesday,” edited by Travers herself for the 1972 paperback edition, included the following passage:

  Beneath the palm-tree sat a man and a woman, both quite black all over and with very few clothes on. But to make up for this they wore a great many beads — some hung around their heads just below great crowns of feathers, some in their ears, one or two in their noses. Beads were looped about their necks and plaited bead belts surrounded their waists. On the knee of the negro lady sat a tiny black picaninny with nothing on at all. It smiled at the children as its Mother spoke.

  “Ah bin ’specting you a long time, Mar’ Poppins,” she said, smiling. “You bring dem chillun dere into ma li’l house for a slice of watermelon right now. My, but dem’s very white babies. You wan’ use a li’l bit black boot polish on dem. Com ’long, now. You’se mighty welcome.”

  In a 1977 interview with Albert V. Schwartz, Travers said, “Remember, Mary Poppins was written a long time ago when racism was not as important.” After a teacher friend told her that reading such text aloud to her students made her uncomfortable — Travers adding that she wasn’t quite sure where she had learned the “picaninny” language, since she hadn’t known any black people when writing the novel — she opted to revise it. In altering her text, she chose to use “[f]ormal English, grave and formal. Now that I’ve met Black people from time to time, they speak a formal English.” The result, still managing to render the black mother as simpleminded, read like this:

  “We’ve been anticipating your visit, Mary Poppins,” she said, smiling. “Goodness, those are very pale children. Where did you find them? On the moon?” She laughed at them, loud happy laughter, as she got to her feet and began to lead the way to a little hut made of palm-leaves. “Come in, come in and share our dinner. You’re all as welcome as sunlight.”

  In the last portion of the original chapter, in which Mary Poppins and the children travel the world with a magic compass, Michael is terrified by an “Eskimo with a spear, the Negro lady with her husband’s huge club, the Mandarin with a great curved sword, and the Red Indian with a tomahawk.” They seem to rush on him, “full of revenge,” says Schwartz, calling it a “racist nightmare in which Third World people turn — without the slightest provocation — into monsters to punish a white child.” In Travers’s 1972 book, Friend Monkey, the book’s protagonist, a world explorer, rescues a baby from the jaws of a crocodile in Africa. “He belonged, she had learned, to the Fan tribe, and since his family seemed not to want him — perhaps because the child was deaf — she had brought him back to England with her.” Amusingly, Schwartz asks her if she doesn’t think it would offend black people to have black parents reject their child simply because he or she is deaf. Remarkably, there is no mention of how deaf or hard-of-hearing parents might feel about the same predicament, no matter their skin color.

  I Take It Back!

  “One of my pet peeves,” Mitali Perkins says, “is any ‘exoticization’ of Asian women by the media. I went on long and boring tirades against it — something one should never do before making sure one will not commit that particular blunder oneself. Which I proceeded to do, and badly.”

  Perkins is talking about her 2005 novel, The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, which was actually a second edition, the first one titled The Sunita Experiment. Perkins wrote the first edition of Sunita’s story when she was young, and it was immediately published to widespread positive reviews — except for one. “This particular reviewer said the book was fine except for the ending, which unnecessarily ‘exoticized’ the main character. ‘WHAT IS SHE TALKING ABOUT?!?’ I yelled.”

  Perkins then took a second look at her own book and was “stunned.” Here’s the original ending to The Sunita Experiment, during which Sunita makes a sari-clad appearance to her crush, Michael:

  “You look. . . Just like I thought you would, Sunni,” he whispers when she reaches him. “Are you sure you’re still Sunita Sen and not some exotic Indian princess coming to cast a spell on me?”

  “I’m sure, Michael,” she tells him, giving him one of her trademark smiles just to prove it.

  “HOLY BLUNDERS, BATMAN! I HAD DONE THE DEED MYSELF!!!!!” Perkins admits. “I spent years feeling a bit of shame about the book, despite the fact that I got lovely letters from readers.”

  Ten years later, an editor from Little, Brown called Perkins to notify her they would be reissuing the book, asking her if she was interested in changing the text in any way. “I almost bawled like a baby as I said yes, indeedy, I did. I definitely did.” Here’s the revised ending in The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen:

  “You look. . . Just like I thought you would, Sunni,” he whispers when she reaches him. “Are you sure you’re still the same Sunita Sen? The California girl?”

  “I’m sure, Michael,” she tells him, giving him one of her trademark smiles just to prove it.

  “What a lesson! A good dose of humiliation is a superb teacher, as is maturity and experience. Thank heavens, too, for the grace of a reissue.”

  Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series is one of the most important contributions ever made to children’s literature and continues to be read and loved today. However, in recent years the books have come under attack for their treatment of Native Americans, who are portrayed negatively and insensitively — and sometimes referred to as “terrible men.” One minor character repeatedly states, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Little House on the Prairie has been challenged for its racial insensitivity in several school districts and was eventually banned in Sturgis, South Dakota. Unlike some of the works mentioned above, Wilder’s publishers have not removed or edited any material from the series. After all, the books are autobiographical and are meant to authentically reflect the lives and emotions of nineteenth-century pioneers — no matter how offensive their thoughts and opinions may seem to today’s readers and how uncomfortable these insensitivities make them feel. As Janet Spaeth has noted, a historical novel has “two historical periods to deal with: the time in which it is written and the time it is written about. Clearly the time of Western expansion in the United States was one of enforced racism. . . . Wilder would have been remiss to have left out that aspect of pioneering.” Wilder wrote these novels during a time of segregation as well.

  But don’t count out the idea of new, expurgated editions at some point in the future. After all, as we’ve seen, it happened to Huckleberry Finn. The success or failure of the still relatively new NewSouth Finn may determine the fate of future censorship campaigns. If this edition is ignored by schools and libraries, we can expect the unexpurgated text to continue to flourish — and to continue to be challenged. But if this revision of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn becomes the go-to edition of Twain’s work and begins selling like, well, Little Black Sambo’s hotcakes, we can surely expect other great works of literature, including Wilder’s Little House series, to be bowdlerized to reflect present societal standards.

  ONE MORE KIND OF LOVE: CENSORING HOMOSEXUALITY

  At the beginning of this chapter, Nancy Garden recalled looking for gay-themed books during her own youth and finding none. Others found “crypto” or “coded” gay content in novels by Amelia Walden and Margery Bianco (Winterbound; Other People’s Houses), as well as in androgynous literary characters such as Jo March and Peter Pan. It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that homosexual characters came out in young adult novels such as John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip and Isabelle Holland’s The Man Without a Face. Such books were usually met with library challenges, but
as the decades wore on, the number of gay characters in both young adult and children’s books increased with such abandon that censors were pretty much playing a frenzied game of Whack-a-Mole trying to suppress them: challenge one book here and three more popped up there. While an occasional novel for older readers emerged as a cause célèbre, à la Annie on My Mind, censors began to focus their efforts on three books geared for early audiences.

  Both Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and Daddy’s Roommate (1990) were published by Alyson, an adult gay press. Lesléa Newman wrote Heather after meeting a lesbian couple who complained, “We have no books to read our daughter that show our type of family. Somebody should write one.” The book, which concerns a little girl trying to understand why she has two mothers instead of a mother and father, is purposeful and message-driven, as is Michael Willhoite’s story of a boy whose divorced father has a roommate, later revealed to be his partner. Neither of these books is particularly distinguished in terms of writing or illustration, but they were perfectly timed for the zeitgeist of the early nineties, an era when homosexuality was becoming a mainstream cultural issue. But even as culture became more open and accepting, censors attacked these two books with a vengeance, claiming they were “obscene and vulgar,” promoted “a dangerous and ungodly lifestyle from which children must be protected,” and were “decaying the minds of children.” That’s a lot of vitriol for books whose message, in the words of Daddy’s Roommate, is simply, “Being gay is just one more kind of love.”

  Sometimes you have to wince at censorship.

  And sometimes you have to fight back.

  STANDING UP TO CENSORSHIP

  One of the biggest problems with censorship is that no one can agree on what’s offensive and what is not. In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, grappling with a definition of obscenity, famously admitted that he couldn’t quite explain pornography, “but I know it when I see it.” And that continues to be the problem: when a myriad of perspectives examine an untold number of books, someone is always going to be offended. You’d think that those who pasted underwear on Maurice Sendak’s Mickey in the 1970s would be thrilled that one of today’s most popular children’s book figures, superhero Captain Underpants, never removes his briefs. But there are those who also condemn Dav Pilkey’s series on scatological grounds.

  Then there’s the matter of cultural and societal changes constantly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. In 1940, a “What Do You Want to Be?” book for girls might limit career options to nurse, teacher, and wife; such a book would be scorned today. Writers and publishers must negotiate this thorny issue every time they face a censorship charge, asking themselves, “Is it better to have this book’s content altered and continue to be read. . . or not revised and not read at all?”

  Some groups and creators have taken a strong anti-censorship stand. The American Library Association, always leading the “freedom to read” movement, celebrates “Banned Books Week” every year, encouraging the reading of censored or controversial books. When Ellen Hopkins was disinvited from a Texas book festival because of the controversial contents of her novels, so many of her colleagues (including Melissa de la Cruz, Pete Hautman, and Matt de la Pena) withdrew from the festival that the event had to be canceled. Lauren Myracle also took a stand against censorship when the Scholastic Book Fairs asked that she remove a pair of lesbian moms from her novel Luv Ya Bunches before it could be sold. Despite taking a large financial loss for her decision, Myracle refused to alter her book, and Luv Ya Bunches was banned from the fairs.

  Then there’s the case of Nancy Garden, who only wanted to write the book she’d always wanted to read as a young person.

  When the author learned that Annie on My Mind had been burned in Kansas, Missouri, she recalls thinking, “Burned! I didn’t think people burned books anymore. Only Nazis burn books.” She then made a trip to the Midwest, where she was picketed by Fred Phelps of the “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church while speaking at bookstores. The controversy over her novel peaked in Olathe, Kansas, when brave librarians did what they could to fight for the book. Students even participated, one kid passing out white ribbons for those students who wanted the book to stay on the shelves, while a group of them spoke out in school board meetings on Annie’s behalf. When in the end those arguments failed, the students opted to sue. Garden then found herself having to defend her book in a court of law.

  During my testimony, I tried to explain that Annie doesn’t “glorify” homosexuality, nor does it “promote” it — accusations that are usually made against LGBT books in challenges. Both, I think, cloak one of the fears people have who think LGBT books are evil and shouldn’t be available to kids. Anything that treats being gay honestly and shows, as our books usually do, that we gay people can lead happy, healthy, productive lives is seen by them as “glorifying” the state of being gay — making it sound better than it is. And anything that does that is seen by them as “promoting” it — trying to get kids to “become” gay. But I haven’t met anyone yet who “decided” to become gay because of reading a book — and since I don’t know any gay person who’s been “converted” to being straight because of reading a book about straight people, it seems unlikely that it would work the other way around!

  The students who sued on behalf of the book won their case in the U.S. District Court in December 1995, but it wasn’t until 1999 that all the copies of the book were returned to library shelves in the Olathe school district.

  Pushcart Debate: Banned Books Have I Loved

  BETSY: The Witches by Roald Dahl gets banned at a fair clip. I remember being delightedly horrified by it as a child. Particularly when I think back to the fates recounted by the grandmother to her grandson of the children who came face-to-face with witches. That stuff petrified me in the best possible way.

  JULIE: Betsy, I heard an audio version of The Witches on a road trip when I was thirty-eight, and I got scared. As for me, I read Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass in grad school, when first studying children’s lit, and it was a force of nature to me. The novel played a huge role in children’s literature, becoming something I wanted to pursue, careerwise, for the rest of my life.

  PETER: I stumbled across Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret as a kid and was shocked. Were people allowed to write about such things? Then I learned she’d written a new book, which I heard “was just like Margaret, but for boys.” Couldn’t wait to read it, but I ended up disappointed. The book didn’t really speak to my own experiences as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy. It seemed like more of an outsider’s view and almost dull. . . whereas the “girl” experiences of Margaret and her friends seemed “exotic” and exciting.

  When Garden first published Annie on My Mind in 1982, the worst complaint the novel received concerned the homely “butch” appearance of the two girls depicted on the cover. The author never dreamed that in the future she’d be facing book burnings, Fred Phelps, and cross-examination before a judge. In the years since her book won its court case, Nancy Garden has become an advocate for a child’s right to read. She used her experiences in Olathe as the basis for The Year They Burned the Books — a young adult novel which, like Annie, also features a lesbian protagonist. She’s watched Annie on My Mind remain in print for decades and continue to be widely read by young people, both gay and straight. And she’s now seen the novel go through many different paperback editions and formats, with a variety of designs.

  These days the girls on the cover are lovely.

  Cover of Annie on My Mind, 2007

  Image Credit 6

  Gotcha!

  — Trina Schart Hyman accepting her 1985 Caldecott Medal

  One of reading’s greatest delights is a story’s ability to take one down many unexpected paths. Whether read from the pages of a book or a tablet screen or heard while snuggling in a parent’s lap, stories can delight or confound or wake up a reader. Any narrative worth its salt will also
surprise that reader, sometimes in subtle ways and other times with bigger, louder twists. But, we wondered, what about those books that also include mysteries that the author or illustrator didn’t intend for anyone to know?

  For readers like ourselves, the bottom line is that we ultimately want a good story. That’s what truly matters. But ’fess up! It can be fun, albeit sometimes a little creepy (note the copulating kitchen-table couple in this chapter) to find the cryptic surprises here and covert tributes there in a book intended for a child. Readers often find those secret stories fascinating in that they show us that children’s literature is often more than what it seems on the surface — not to mention that it’s intriguing to take a look at what was intended to be hidden from the public eye.

  Here, for fun, we take a look at several of those stories, beginning with one macabre moment of revenge.

  Diss Tombstone Is Blank

  If you have read Jean Fritz’s Revolutionary War biography Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?, published by Coward-McCann in 1976, you will recognize — unless you have a rare first-edition copy — this graveyard scene: