Journeys in Children's Literature

Presidential Address Journeys in Children's Literature by Ma lcolm Usrey In Waiden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "I have traveled widely in Concord." I think Thoreau meant by his statement that he had done little traveling outside of Concord and that he preferred traveling at home in his own village and through books. We have many ways of traveling that Thoreau did not have. We can go to India in A Passage to India, the film version of E. M. Förster' s novel. We can travel to outer space through Star Wars. In front of our television sets, we can go to all parts of the world where we see mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, animals and plants that Thoreau never, perhaps, even dreamed of seeing. In our cars and on planes, we can go to places near and far that would have taken Thoreau days, months, or years to go to. Although all of these means of travel are available to us, they do not, and cannot, I think, take the place of those journeys that we make through children's books, where we can go backward or forward in time, or we can go to the outer fringes of the universe. When we make journeys in children's books, we have the opportunity to see things, do things, and meet people that we cannot when we see films or watch television programs or when we actually travel to a near or distant place. One of the most memorable journeys I made came when I was in the sixth grade, the year I read Elizabeth Coatsworth's Away Goes Sally. Sally lived with three aunts and two uncles in Massachusetts in 1790. Some of her relatives had moved to Maine and wrote back glowingly about the good life they had there. Sally and her uncles and aunts wanted to join their relatives in Maine. That is, all except Aunt Nannie did, and she refused to go, saying to her brother Joseph, "I tell you plain I shall never leave my own house". . . (19). But that did not stop Uncle Joseph. Without telling his sisters or his niece, he built a house on runners so that Aunt Nannie would not have to leave her own house. Pulled by six yoke of oxen, the little house had two rooms, a large one for Sally and her aunts to sleep in and for cooking and eating in, and a small one with bunk beds for the uncles to sleep in. Behind the little house, Uncle Eban rode in a sleigh, and behind him were more sleds with household goods and farm equipment. Last of all came the cows, and at the front, Uncle Joseph rode his horse, Peacock. The journey from Massachusetts to Maine I could never have imagined, could never even have thought of where I lived on the snowless plains of Texas. But I made the journey; I felt the lurch of the little house on sleds when the oxen started each day's travel; I felt the little house glide over the hard-packed snow or over the hard, frozen earth when there was no snow. I drank hot coffee, chocolate, and tea with Sally and the Aunts and Uncles in the afternoons, and I ate baked beans, brown bread, and apple pie with them in the snug little house when they stopped for the night along the way. And I was as scared as Sally and her aunts were the day they made their way through a blinding snow storm. I warmed myself by the little Franklin stove, and I smelled the wet fur of Hannibal, the pet cub bear of Uncle Eban when Aunt Nannie would sometimes let him in the house to warm himself. Not all journeys in children's books are as pleasant as the one I made with Sally from Massachusetts to Maine. Some journeys are difficult and sad, though "sad" is perhaps not the word to describe the journey that Veron Dumehjian Kherdian made from Azizya, Turkey, to Aleppo, Syria, and finally to the United States between 1915 and 1924 in David Kherdian' s biography of his mother's childhood, The...