Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction (review)

Rudine Sims' extensive examination of children's books depicting the black child, shows that the "realistic" children's fiction of the late sixties still contained reverberations of a regrettable literary past: Amos and Andy stereotypes; plodding adults or frightened children facing a token white bully (usually converted by the end of the story); "Super Negroes" accepted solely for their superior talents or intelligence.

Sims points out that such characters are most often found in "social conscience" fiction, books written primarily by white authors of the fifties and sixties, in order to educate white children. (Marguerite DeAngeli's Bright April, published by Doubleday in 1946, was a forerunner of the type.) In addition to presenting misleading conceptions about the society they attempted to portray, these books were so poor in literary quality that, had they not satisfied the social concerns of the day (to develop sympathy and tolerance for Afro-American children caught up in the hostilities of school and housing integration), they would probably never have been published at all. But many were still in print in the late seventies, alongside another, larger stream of books published in the sixties to promote harmony between the races.

Sims says that these "Melting Pot" books, which were also produced primarily by white authors and illsutrators, ignored, or tried to ignore, all differences in race; yet sometimes stereotypes still appeared, as in the watermelon image of E. L. Konigsburg's Jennifer, Hecate, MacBeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth (Atheneum, 1967), which Sims sees as exemplifying an author's having unconsciously internalized negative images of the black child's past. Most, however, were picture books (Ezra Keats' The Snowy Day, published by Viking in 1962, is a well-known early example), with only the illustrations revealing that a major or minor character was black; and because details of Afro-American experience could be conveyed through attractive and authentic illustrations of Afro-American children, these books were an improvement over the social conscience books.

Sims, whose own Afro-American heritage gives her a special sensitivity to the subject, finds that the books most valuable for the black child, and by extension, for the multicultural education of all children, are the "culturally conscious" ones. In the best of these books (in her opinion, the most authentic are nearly always the ones by black writers), both the text and pictures consciously seek to mirror the "shared collective memories" of those who produce them—memories and experiences of the Afro-American heritage and history, the sense of community, particularly within families, and the sense of determination for survival among black people. In Sims' judgment, the quality of the work is diminished if a white author's point of view or intellectual stance is too greatly distanced from the way a non-white writer would see and convey the experience of growing up black in America. Many books, she says, depict

with some degree of accuracy, some of the harsh reality of ghetto life. But their reality is that which can be seen by anyone who walks through a ghetto, or even by a regular visitor; it lacks the nuances apparent to those who call the ghetto home. The books miss out on the essence; they lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. What is minimized is the recognition that within those grim realities Afro-American people live their lives—they learn and grow and develop strength. They find sustenance in relationships with each other, and in their dreams, and in laughter.

In addition, many white writers, even in the culturally conscious books, cannot replicate the style and grammar of black speech or recreate credible actions and attitudes for their non-white characters, particularly in scenes involving black families and black peer groups; and, even in the decade of the seventies, many, like Bette Greene in Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon, Maybe (Dial, 1974), continued to exhibit patronizing attitudes toward black characters.

Fortunately, more Afro-American...