This year marks the third release of poet Eve Merriam's The Inner City Mother Goose (Simon and Schuster, $16.00; ages 12 and up). In its 1969 printing the book sold 100,000 copies, became the basis for the 1971-2 Broadway musical Inner City, and to Merriam's surprise was "just about the most banned book in the country."
Twenty-seven years ago, Merriam's songs of urban outrage were sung alone. This is not true anymore. I have been surprised to see four books published in the last six months that speak up about the situation of the urban poor. Certainly I've seen these settings before, but these latest releases make previous books seem white-washed. Was this because authors thought no one would listen or that the truths were so foreign to many Americans, they needed a gentler translation. Now whether Latino, Black, or Irish-American, these authors speak with voices that demand hearing. Regardless of ethnicity and manner of expression, they chorus an insistence that the truths, ugly or not, can wait no longer. I suspect these book herald the advent of more books to come. These are voices that are not going away!
Merriam was one of the strongest voices in children's poetry and the seventy-one poems fulfill her need to take up " a number of distressingly familiar topics that I felt we dare not close our eyes to" . She writes about everything from inadequate housing to cutbacks in essential community services with an eloquence that is hard hitting and perfect in irony, meter, and truth.
With a variety of voices, styles, and treatments, she refused to shy away from what she saw, adding an epithet. to an almost original Mother Goose rhyme or using soft expression of harsh truth as in: Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the double lock will keep; May no brick through the window break, And no one rob me till I wake
The new version has even more power because of an added forward by Nikki Giovanni and illustrations by Caldecott-award winning artist David Diaz, whose reputation is already established him as a spokesperson for the underprivileged . In the past several years he's illustrated books on the L.A. riots, Wilma Rudolph, and most recently, a rap book about gun violence.
Just as haunting is the Coretta Scott King award-winning book, Sisters on the Homefront by Rita Williams-Garcia (Lodestar, $15.99; ages 12 and up). The main character, Gayle, lives in a New York urban area with her widowed mother and brother. The book opens as her mother drags pregnant Gayle and her seven month old baby to the Women's Clinic for an abortion. With less skillful handling, I would have shut the cover quickly, but Williams-Garcia's dialogue teems with humor, emotion, and directness. Her style turns street talk into literature.
When Gayle protests her mothers action, "S'pose I want to keep it. It's mines." Her mother answers with a retort that is dead serious, but filled the richness of the African-American storytelling voice: "As long as you fourteen and in my house, you mines... What you think I'm running? Does my door say South Jamaica Welfare Hotel? No. Do you see Hoe House on my mailbox?..."
Williams-Garcia goes on to place Gayle in an alien world when she's sent "down Souf" to live with her proper aunt, minister uncle, and kneesock-wearing, Bible-toting cousin where she feels like a "house slave" in her ancestral home. Eventually, removed from the streets, she begins learning about the past, what family means, and how the street has robbed her of a slow sexual blossoming. None of this comes easily or gracefully, but that's part of the author's genius. Her character changes believable, because readers know Gayle to be a young woman of intelligence and sensitivity, even though she prefers to hide this with attitude.
In the past year, Chris Lynch published three volumes: Mick, Blood Relations, and Dog Eat Dog (all from HarperCollins, $4.50; ages 12 and up) that center on Mick and his Irish-American poverty. Mick grows up in a blue-collar Irish home where he's been raised on a steady diet of alcohol, racism, profanity, gangs, and brutality. He feels "as if I were at the beach and there was a wicked undertow and I didn't know how to swim, so I couldn't get out of the damn water to save my life."
Mick's actions are often less than admirable and his reactions sometimes shocking and callous.. He sleeps with his best friend's mother, burns down the room of a family willing to take him in, and befriends a dog for the purpose of pitting him against his brother's canine in a deadly fight. What redeems Mick is his struggle to be human; to disentangle himself from the web of ugliness that has held him from birth, to resist his payback mentality; to reinvent himself in a environment that does not encourage change.
Lynch's writing is ragged and sure to make readers uncomfortable. He swings from literary metaphors to crass dialogue, and his descriptions are as often as ugly as the story's events. Lynch's style places readers in a literary world which is a metaphor for the world of Mick, who is in a perpetual state of trying to recover from one blow before the next lands.
Lynne Ewing's Drive-By (HarperCollins, $13.95; ages less sensitive 10 and up), an eighty-five page novella, begins with the death of sixth grade Tito's brother. The police think it might be a revenge shooting, but Tito is sure his brother wasn't in a gang because "Jimmy always told me there were only two kinds of gangbangers: those who were dead and those who were going to die." After Jimmy's death, Tito spends much time convincing himself about his brother's goodness and the stability of his world, though all events contradict his efforts. The adults in the novel seem to react the same way. Tito's mother tells her children everything's okay, but makes a bed for Mina, Tito's sister, in the bathtub and tells him to sleep on the floor.
The book's strength is not in it's writing style, nor in plot innovation, and Drive-By has nowhere near the power of the other books in this review. It does have a brevity and simplicity that provide access for less proficient readers and so may reach the kind of child who's pictured in the novel. My hope is that it will find its way to them. Like the other books, it has a ring of honest and reflects, rather than teaches.
Readers will have to wonder about the ending which seems like a happily ever after. Can safety and happiness exist in the hopeless world Ewing describes or is this a temporary happily ever after.
As Nikki Giovanni writes in her forward in The Inner City Mother Goose : "There are indeed times when there is nothing we can do about the conditions we see, the pain we empathize with, the hopelessness of the situation. But we can acknowledge that it exists."
That's what these books do. Politicians know that campaigning about the plight of children is sexy, but money's seldom thrown in the direction of these children. I'm proud that children's books powerfully plunge readers into places where a whole different reality system operates and hard-hitting truths are never sugar-coated. If there were a required reading list for legislators, these new books ought to be on it.