Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

Epilogue

Epilogue We must tell the story with continually accruing detail from the cradle to the grave. From the mother’s knee and the fireside of the home, through the nursery, the kindergarten and the grade school, high school, college and university . . . through newspaper, storybook and pictures, we must tell the thrilling story. When they learn the fairy tales of mythical king and queen and princess, we must let them hear, too, of the Pharaohs and African kings and the brilliant pageantry of the Valley of the Nile. —Mary McLeod Bethune, February 1938 The study of early African American children’s literature requires revision of the conceptual categories that structure critical understanding of children’s literature and of African American literary history. First, Harlem Renaissance texts challenge conventional assumptions about the nature and purposes of children’s literature by unsettling notions about the features and desires of its audience. A black child audience in the 1920s and 1930s was by no means monolithic, and texts assumed a variety of regional, social, and economic identities. But the issue of audience becomes even more complex with the recognition that black adults, often new to literacy themselves, also read their children ’s texts and attended their plays and communal poetry readings. Early black children’s literature acknowledges the presence of African American adults in its audience by addressing their imagined inter- ests: It valorizes oral culture and the rural South, and at the same time it encourages the adults to embrace the cultural values that black children brought home from the schoolhouse. Further complicating the issue of audience, early black children’s literature also intended to address white children and adults, though the degree to which a white readership actually experienced this body of work remains unclear. But whether or not white children actually read or encountered their texts, writers like Inez Burke, Shackelford, Hughes, and Bontemps embedded levels of meaning that directly confronted the biases of a white audience.The rich intertextuality of early black children’s literature speaks vehemently of writers’ desire to combat representations of racial bias and of their longing to interact with conventions of mainstream children’s literature and education. Second, this complex audience forces a reappraisal of the critical tools employed to study children’s literature. The theoretical concept of cross writing, generally understood as a means to examine the interplay between adult- and child-directed voices within texts, becomes considerably complicated when applied to the eclectic audience for Harlem Renaissance children’s literature. With a sensitivity to the intersecting voices within early black children’s texts, sophisticated and suggestive applications of the cross writing paradigm emerge. Additionally , the imperialistic model of children’s literature, that of adult in power writing to subjugated child, is enlarged through attention to this particular moment in black cultural history. Because black children were entering schools in record numbers in the 1920s and 1930s, their literacy and knowledge of white cultural modes sometimes placed them in positions of power over their elders, as imagined in many of the texts. Children’s literature often became the means to breach the divide between the progressive black child and unschooled adults, oªering interesting inversions and subversions of power and authority . The critical tools necessary to explore New Negro Renaissance material complicate productively the theoretical models grounding the study of children’s literature. Third, study of early black children’s literature changes critical constructions of the New Negro movement. Primarily, such study uncovers another crucial facet to a period of dynamic creative accomplishment . But it also compels a decentering of attention away from Harlem and toward other vital sites of cultural production.The issues -274Children ’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance at the heart of debate within the Renaissance, like cultural nationalism , Pan-Africanism, and folk identity, were also vital to writers in Alabama , Georgia, Indiana, and Delaware. In fact, each of these sites had its own character and tendencies; for example, the enormous influence of Howard University and of Carter G. Woodson gave writers in Washington, D.C., a decidedly academic cast, one that propelled the community’s interest in black history for children. In addition to decentering the movement from Harlem, the study of New Negro Renaissance children’s literature also uncovers the work of writers elided by literary history, those who lived at a distance from urban centers of the movement, such as Yancey, Shackelford, Love, and Newsome. These...