A Certain Slant of Light

Another round of Newbery Honor books from the 1960s!

Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave is a grimly fascinating history of American slavery, drawn from oral histories compiled by antebellum anti-slavery societies (which published a slew of slave memoirs to rouse anti-slavery feeling) and by the WPA in the 1930s. I listened to the audiobook version, which I highly recommend: the three readers bring the voices to life, and they also sing many of the songs included in the text, which adds an extra layer to their meaning.

Many of the excerpts are extremely brief, just a sentence or two, but at the end of the day it is a children’s book, and there’s something to be said for brevity. I did note down one of the WPA histories, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of American Slavery, for further research.

Actually, the complete set of narratives are now available on Gutenberg - scroll down to the bottom of this Wikipedia article about the Slave Narrative Collection to find them - so if you really want to deep dive, it’s all available, and unlike Julius Lester in the 1960s, you don’t have to make a trip to the Library of Congress to do it.

In Jack Schaefer’s Old Ramon, Old Ramon is a shepherd with years of experience who is taking the patrón’s son along to spend a summer herding sheep. On the first night, the youngest sheepdog rests his head in the boy’s lap, leading Old Ramon to comment that the dog has chosen the boy as his special person… Three guesses what happens to this dog and the first two don’t count.

( Spoilers )

On its own each particular Newbery animal death is distressing, but in the aggregate this has become funny in a ghastly sort of way.

However, Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth bucks the trend: in this book, the dog lives! Not only that, he kills a man! A bad man, who has been training the formerly friendly gray dog Tigre to act as an attack dog, so we are all on board with Tigre’s crime.

This book begins as Esteban is in prison for withholding the titular king’s fifth of the gold that he and his conquistador companions found in the city of Cibola. As he awaits trial, he writes his memoirs about the events that led to this point, a simple but effective device to raise the tension. I actually rather enjoyed the book, which is not an experience I usually associate with Scott O’Dell.

There is a character named Zia, which confused me briefly: isn’t there a Scott O’Dell book called Zia? Is that the sequel to The King’s Fifth? But no. Apparently O’Dell just liked the name SO much that he named two completely different characters Zia.

I don’t know exactly when the Newbery Award fully embraced doom & gloom as an improving aesthetic for children’s literature, but by the 1970s the trend seems to have been firmly in place. See for instance James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, a book that was on my childhood bookshelves which I never actually read because, well, look at that title. This is a very post-Vietnam “war is hell” book, and it is about as grueling as “war is hell” books usually are, although it was thoughtful of the authors to tell us who was going to die in the title instead of saving it for a fun surprise. (Although there are some fun surprise deaths, too.)

Sam starts the book by signing up to fight in the American Revolution, a messy affair that sets neighbor against neighbor, especially in the mostly Tory town from which Sam hails and in which his little brother, our narrator Tim, still lives. This is not the kind of book where anyone gets to die heroically in battle, so my money was on Sam dying of cholera or something of that ilk, but ( Spoilers! An upsetting death! )

Scott O’Dell’s Sing Down the Moon is also pretty miserable. Our heroine, the Navajo girl Bright Morning, gets kidnapped and sold into slavery. She heroically escapes, with the help of her fiance Tall Boy, who is maimed in the attempt, which permanently spoils his disposition! (My general impression is that men in Scott O’Dell novels are useless at best.) They arrive back in the Canyon de Chelly just in time for the U.S. Cavalry to round up the whole tribe and march them to Bosque Redondo, a hellhole with alkaline soil unsuited to growing anything. Bright Morning and Tall Boy (now married) escape back to the Canyon de Chelly to have their baby, and… that’s where the book ends.

In a way it feels wrong to complain about this ending at the very same time that I’m complaining that the Newbery books of the 1970s are such downers, but this seems like a falsely positive place to stop. The book ends with the heroine and her son petting a lamb in the Canyon de Chelly, when we all know the cavalry’s going to drag them back to Bosque Redondo at some point. If you’re going for tragedy then commit to your tragedy, Scott O’Dell! Go full Rosemary Sutcliff or go home.

After the general misery of Laurence Yep’s Dragon’s Gate I approached Dragonwings with caution… but actually this one bucks the miserable trend of the 1970s Newberys! Yes, there’s some misery, but overall the book is enjoyable. In the early years of the twentieth century, young Moon Shadow moves to San Francisco to be with his father (yes, there IS an earthquake sequence), who grows obsessed with building an airplane.

( Spoilers )