"Acknowledgment for What I Do, to Fortify Me to Go Ahead": Family, Ezra Jack Keats, and Peter

The scene in Ezra Jack Keats's Caldecott Award-winning picture book The Snowy Day (1962) in which Peter's mother takes off his wet socks always reminds me of returning home after my own childhood wintry expeditions: of holding my legs out perfectly straight while my mother pulled off both layers of Sears Toughskins jeans; of finally getting rid of the snow that had gotten between my mittens and my coat sleeves, between my scarf and my cap; of knowing that Mom and Dad were at home waiting when my sister sledded off a ledge and landed head first on a parked car. It saddens me to think that the creator of that scene, though he loved a city covered in snow as I did, had no such happy homecomings. For Keats felt invisible at home and thought that no one loved him. And because he felt he "survived" his childhood "on a very thin thread of love," he tried to make up that loss to his child readers; he once remarked that his "books give a fifth and eighth dimension, they give love" (0070.21,6).¹ In fact Keats seems to rewrite his own childhood in that of Peter, his best-known character. In those picture books that feature Peter, Keats employs both his art and his narrative in the service of providing Peter with the kind of family—loving, encouraging, and compassionate—that he himself would have liked to have, and this family helps Peter to mature into a loving, encouraging, and compassionate young man himself.

Keats drew many of his ideas for picture books from his life. For example, the idea for The Snowy Day came from a winter's night spent reminiscing with friends "about the fun we had as kids when snow transformed the city" (0073.14,5 ). Peter's Chair features a runaway adventure similar to the author's own. And the tale of Louie grew out of a story Keats heard from a Japanese puppeteer about a mentally challenged boy who disrupted a show by yelling "hello" at the puppets (Nikola-Lisa, "Image" 122). Another characteristic of Keats's work is that he typically depicts marginalized children as his protagonists. Indeed, he was one of the first authors to write a children's book with an African-American child as its main character. But, as W. Nikola-Lisa points out, "Keats' interest in representing the minority child . . . was fueled less by sociopolitical concerns than by his empathy in general for the 'underdog'" ("Image" 22).

Keats must have felt like a bit of an underdog himself. He grew up in a poor section of New York City, the child of Jewish immigrant parents who disliked each other, a boy with artistic talent and temperament that his parents barely tolerated. Herein lies the difference between the author and his fictional constructs: both Keats and his characters come from marginalized groups, but Keats also felt oppressed by his parents, whereas his characters are underdogs because they belong to a minority or because they have some other cultural or developmental challenge. Keats's characters, despite their circumstances—minority kids, poor kids, city kids in enemy territory—almost universally come from loving families.

Brian Alderson characterizes Keats's childhood as one of "general unhappiness" that "found focus in a contempt for his father and a feeling towards his mother that was as powerful as it was ambivalent" (16). His parents, Benjamin and Augusta Katz, did not understand their sensitive and artistic son, and, as Alderson reports, "The frequency with which, in later life, he reverted to descriptions and analyses of his childhood years . . . endorses the trite but ancient truth of the child being father to the man" (16-17). Benjamin Katz started out as an insurance man and apparently had some success; when the Depression arrived, however, Katz's career took a downturn, and he worked in a coffee shop for the rest of his life (Alderson 16). In unpublished autobiographical material, Keats remembers a time that the five-member family had only a few...