Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane (review)

The simple but amazing answer to the question posed in the title Who Writes for Black Children? is that everyone—or potentially anyone—writes for black children even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Calling for a "capacious" understanding of African American children's literature (xvii), editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane assemble an absorbing array of essays about both literature pre-1900 that was intended for (even if not read by) black children and texts that black children pre-1900 may have read (even if not intended for them). The twelve contributors show that along with texts by black leaders (for example, teachers, preachers, and editors), black children also read white-authored children's literature, abolitionist pamphlets, and educational material. As Mary Niall Mitchell's study of letters by Creole schoolboys and Angela Sorby's and Ivy Linton Stabell's respective analyses of Ann Plato's work illustrate, black youth also wrote for black children.

Exemplifying the usual archival savvy of child studies as a field, the collection brings to the center a cornucopia of recently recovered texts and little-discussed authors. Sorby introduces the plantation-school poetry of the enslaved Lucy Skipwith. Courtney Weikle-Mills spotlights the also enslaved poet Jupiter Hammon as typifying how "childhood created a space where black writers could appropriate beliefs about children's capacity for growth and change" (22). Stabell acquaints us with the "progressive force" of biography in Ann Plato's and Susan Paul's writing (75). LuElla D'Amico brings to the center the politics of religious revisioning in the first African American children's novel by Amelia E. Johnson. The import of all these texts for black children are amplified by Laura Wasowicz's survey of the problematic portrayal of black youth in the mainstream (white-authored) children's literature of the time.

Additionally the collection explores the influence of child readers on canonical black writers not regularly associated with children's literature. Examining how Frances Harper's activism "includ[ed] addresses to children," for instance, enables Karen Chandler to read Harper as not just popular poet but promoter of a populist poetics (42). For both Martha J. Cutter and Valentina K. Tikoff, comparing Abigail Field Mott's 1829 illustrated adaptation of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano to the 1789 original not only illuminates the troublingly narrow personhood that Mott, a white abolitionist, imaged for her free black students but also brings into bolder relief the political and philosophical critiques ensconced in the rhetorical complexities of Equiano's original narrative. Analyzing the diversity of texts and contexts through which black children honed their literacy, the collection challenges views of African American children's literature as an early twentieth-century extension of an increasingly developing body of African American literature; instead they render it as an always-present commitment and practice in the black literary tradition.

The collection repeatedly suggests that attending to black children's literature ultimately allows us to recognize the black literary tradition's intergenerational, interracial, and generically heterogeneous origins. Consider, for example, the collection's contemplation of reprinting in black periodicals. Comparing prewar and postwar issues of the Christian Recorder, Eric Gardner illustrates black editors' commitment to providing literature for black children by examining their strategic reproduction of white-authored children's literature. Like Gardner, Brigitte Fielder explains how strategic reprinting manipulated the porous line between literature for black children and that for black adults. Calling attention to the "sometimes contradictory ways in which dogs and cats appeared" in the Christian Recorder (165), Fielder argues that the explicitly "racialized content" in the "adult" sections likely framed how black children read white-authored stories and the "racial baggage animals carried in nineteenth century discourses of slavery and racism" (169). Nazera Sadiq Wright discusses even earlier uses of reprinting in the Colored American. Highlighting the...