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Newbery Honor Books of the 1950s
Feb. 16th, 2023 08:18 amThis week, the 1950s Newberys Do Diversity, and please just take it as read that these 70-year-old books contain various degrees of problematic material.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Secret River is a beautifully dreamy fairytale about a girl named Calpurnia who sets out to catch fish for her family to see them through the hard times. She brings in a rich haul from the Secret River - which she can never find again thereafter, because the river doesn’t exist. And yet the fish she caught in the river turned the hard times around for the whole community.
Calpurnia’s race is never specified in the text. In Leo and Diane Dillon’s lovely illustrations for the 2011 reprint, Calpurnia is Black, and I checked Wikipedia to see if that held true in the original illustrations, too. Evidently Rawlings (who died before the book was published) always intended Calpurnia to be Black, but the publishing house was concerned that school boards might refuse to buy the book if the illustrations unambiguously portrayed her as such. They published The Secret River on brown paper so the illustrations would suggest Calpurnia’s race without ruffling any feathers.
Alice Dalgliesh’s The Courage of Sarah Noble is based on the true story of eight-year-old Sarah Noble. Sarah’s mother had to stay in their old home to care for a sick baby, so Sarah accompanied her father into the wilderness to keep house for him as he staked a claim. (If anyone had expected me to keep house in the wilderness when I was eight years old, they simply would have starved to death, but 19th century children were made of sterner stuff.) When her father went back to fetch his wife and other children, he left Sarah in the care of a local Indian family, and according to the historical note the two families remained friendly all through Sarah’s life.
Meindert De Jong’s The House of Sixty Fathers, inspired by De Jong’s own war service in China during World War II, is about a Chinese boy who gets separated from his family during the Japanese invasion of China. Accompanied by his trusty pet pig Glory-of-the-Republic, Tien Pao starts a daring cross-country journey to rejoin his family. Along the way, he rescues a downed American airman, falls under the protection of a Chinese guerilla band, and makes it back to the city where he lost his family… just in time for yet another Japanese assault! Tien Pao flees just ahead of the invasion, nearly starves to death, and is, in his turn, rescued by American airmen, who more or less adopt Tien Pao in gratitude because he saved the downed airman earlier. Thus their barracks become the titular “House of Sixty Fathers.”
( Spoilers for the ending )
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Secret River is a beautifully dreamy fairytale about a girl named Calpurnia who sets out to catch fish for her family to see them through the hard times. She brings in a rich haul from the Secret River - which she can never find again thereafter, because the river doesn’t exist. And yet the fish she caught in the river turned the hard times around for the whole community.
Calpurnia’s race is never specified in the text. In Leo and Diane Dillon’s lovely illustrations for the 2011 reprint, Calpurnia is Black, and I checked Wikipedia to see if that held true in the original illustrations, too. Evidently Rawlings (who died before the book was published) always intended Calpurnia to be Black, but the publishing house was concerned that school boards might refuse to buy the book if the illustrations unambiguously portrayed her as such. They published The Secret River on brown paper so the illustrations would suggest Calpurnia’s race without ruffling any feathers.
Alice Dalgliesh’s The Courage of Sarah Noble is based on the true story of eight-year-old Sarah Noble. Sarah’s mother had to stay in their old home to care for a sick baby, so Sarah accompanied her father into the wilderness to keep house for him as he staked a claim. (If anyone had expected me to keep house in the wilderness when I was eight years old, they simply would have starved to death, but 19th century children were made of sterner stuff.) When her father went back to fetch his wife and other children, he left Sarah in the care of a local Indian family, and according to the historical note the two families remained friendly all through Sarah’s life.
Meindert De Jong’s The House of Sixty Fathers, inspired by De Jong’s own war service in China during World War II, is about a Chinese boy who gets separated from his family during the Japanese invasion of China. Accompanied by his trusty pet pig Glory-of-the-Republic, Tien Pao starts a daring cross-country journey to rejoin his family. Along the way, he rescues a downed American airman, falls under the protection of a Chinese guerilla band, and makes it back to the city where he lost his family… just in time for yet another Japanese assault! Tien Pao flees just ahead of the invasion, nearly starves to death, and is, in his turn, rescued by American airmen, who more or less adopt Tien Pao in gratitude because he saved the downed airman earlier. Thus their barracks become the titular “House of Sixty Fathers.”
( Spoilers for the ending )
