Literature for Children of the Sun

Dianne Johnson's Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth is an important book. At present, there is only a handful of critical volumes devoted to examining portrayals of African Americans in children's literature, and one of the best known of these, Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard's The Black American in Books for Children, is a collection of previously published articles, not a full-length study in and of itself. This is not to say that the collection by MacCann and Woodard is anything less than indispensable to the criticism of children's literature, as are books such as Dorothy M. Broderick's Image of the Black in Children's Fiction, and Rudine Sims's Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction. Johnson's study, however, builds upon the work of her predecessors to move beyond the deconstruction of stereotypes of African Americans and their experiences (as necessary a project as that continues to be). Taking her cue from Sims's discussion of "culturally conscious" books, Johnson directs her attention to literature by African Americans written primarily for African American youth. Her ultimate goal is to articulate the salient characteristics of this vital, although still largely unrecognized, literary tradition.

Accordingly, Johnson chooses to discuss at some length a number of representative texts rather than take a more generalized survey approach. In her first chapter, she locates the real beginnings of African American children's literature with the publication of The Brownies' Book magazine, which ran from January 1920 to December 1921. An outgrowth of the children's issue of the NAACP's The Crisis magazine, The Brownies' Book was published by W.E.B. DuBois and Augustus Granville Dill and edited by DuBois and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Johnson sees the magazine's importance residing in its framing a rationale and objectives for what is now called African American children's literature. Dedicated, in DuBois's words, to "the Children of the Sun," The Brownies' Book countered mainstream misrepresentations, and promoted the self-esteem of African American children. The presentation of Black history and the achievements of individuals, as well as the presentation of a world/pan-Africanist perspective, were central to this project, as was the fostering of a deep sense of community that began with strong family ties. Johnson's second chapter demonstrates how the agenda set by The Brownies Book is elaborated and extended by Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and subsequent writers of both historical fiction and realistic fiction concerned with the American Dream, a key element of which is gaining and maintaining freedom. Chapter three is an in-depth reading of Lucille Clifton's picture books as exemplary of the ways in which African American culture and several of its central tropes (freedom, literacy, and name) can be expressed in children's books. The book concludes by "bringing the study full circle" with a brief examination of Ebony Jr!, the only successful African American children's magazine to appear after The Brownies' Book ceased publication (129).

It is also possible to see Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth as coming "full circle" in yet another way. In Johnson's introduction to her book, she makes it clear that just as she writes about African Americans who themselves write primarily for African American youth, she envisions her primary audience as African American adults, parents as well as educators: "it is the responsibility of African American adults to instruct our young people about our collective histories as well as to guide them in their development as individuals, while also initiating them into a culture, with all that that entails" (2). Previous critics who have written about the presentation of African Americans in children's fiction also explicitly address the question of their audiences, but their assumed audiences range from being almost entirely white (see, for example, Broderick's statement in her preface) to majority white, given the...