Tradition!

Dear Annie,

I've been thinking about the gathering of the family at your home in a few weeks, looking forward to seeing many of us together around your Thanksgiving table.  And eating the pumpkin pie, of course: a tradition passed down from your great-grandmother (my grandmother) and before -- those hard-working constantly-cooking Ohio women.

Some of these musings have been inspired by two books about family traditions by Patricia Polacco.  She's updated her classic The Keeping Quilt on its 25th anniversary, and written a new family tale, The Blessing Cup.

The Keeping Quilt starts with Polacco's great-grandmother Anna arriving in New York as a child more than 100 years ago. 

The only things she had left of backhome Russia were her dress and babushka she liked to throw up into the air when she was dancing.

When Anna grows bigger, her mother makes the dress, babushka and other clothes from the old country into a quilt.  "It will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night," she says.  The quilt is used to wrap babies, cover celebratory tables, make wedding huppas, and for generations of children's play.

Polacco lovingly describes each wedding, the births of babies who grow up to be grandmas, deaths.  25 years ago, she ended the book with the births of her own children, the fifth generation in her story.  At each wedding, there's a symbolic gift:

Carle [Anna's daughter] was given a gift of gold, flower, salt and bread.  Gold so she would never know poverty, a flower so she would always know love, salt so her life would always have flavor and bread so that she would never know hunger.

One wonders how the quilt survived the babies, the birthday parties, weeping relatives at deathbeds, not to mention energetic make-believe.  It seems to have, and in the new book Polacco describes how she's taken it with her to schools and other book talks for the past 25 years.  It finally shows its age -- the white parts of the quilt in the illustrations turn to brown -- and her children surprise her with a meticulously-researched, lovingly sewn copy of the quilt.  The original now hangs in a museum in Ohio.

The loveliest part of the revised book, though, is Polacco's addition of both of her children's weddings, under the original quilt huppa.  One wedding is straight; the other is gay:

Sometimes I think multi-generational picture books don't quite engage kids.  But this one is so full of babies and parties and family gatherings that it can really resonate with a young reader.

The Blessing Cup, a new addition to Polacco's many stories of her family history, tells how Anna came to the U.S.  It starts in a shtetl , with young Anna and her mother hiding in a goat barn during a pogrom.  One of the family's prize possessions is an elaborate tea set given by an aunt.  "Anyone who drinks from it," she wrote, "Has a blessing from God.  They will never know a day of hunger.   Their lives will always have flavor.  They will know love and joy . . . and they will never be poor!"  The family rejoices in the richness of having each other.

Later, Jews are expelled from Russia and the family begins a long trek to the coast where they hope to find passage to America. Anna's father collapses from exhaustion and the family is taken in by a friendly doctor who cares for all of them for months.  When soldiers demand that the family leave, the doctor sells one of his prized possessions to pay for their safe passage to America.  They bid each other farewell over hot tea in the tea set. The family leaves all but one cup of the tea set behind, conferring its blessings on the doctor: "We kept one cup so that we can still have its blessing among the four of us.  It is all that we will need."  The cup, like the quilt, symbolizes the blessings conferred by a strong and loving family.

The story fast-forwards through the cup being handed to the family brides under the quilt huppa -- and a sad but sweet denouement during the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. 

So this all brings me back to impending holidays, family gatherings, the stories we all tell each other about the ancestors we never met, and the feelings that get wrapped up in the traditions. I can't wait to see your brood, to be one of the old folks telling stories of generations past, and to have some of grandma's amazing pumpkin pie.

With love,

Deborah

Blogging from a hurricane

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The wind is howling outside my windows, and the lights have been flickering, but so far our power has remained on.  Fingers crossed.  I hope you're doing well down in DC, too.

I kept thinking tonight of amazing storm images from children's books we've written about here:

Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder:



Patricia Polacco's Thunder Cake:

Rachel Isadora's The Fisherman and His Wife:

Yup, that's pretty much how we're feeling, here in New York.  Stay safe.

Love, Annie

Searching for great gay-friendly picture books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Over the last few months, quite a number of my friends have welcomed new babies into their lives -- they seem to come in waves, like weddings did in my mid-twenties.  I found myself heading to my favorite independent bookstore multiple weekends in a row to buy a few first board books for each family.  As I did so, I found myself wondering, as I have in the past, about whether there are any really great children's books out there involving gay characters, especially families with gay or lesbian parents, that aren't purely Message Books.  You know the kind I mean: well-meaning, but didactic, more about Showing Gay People are Normal than about telling a story.

For pretty much any new baby, I gravitate towards the books I highlighted in my "brand-new babies" section of the Top 25 (well, 33) picture books list I wrote up a couple of months ago.  Several of these books depict animal characters rather than human ones, and a couple of them (Baby! Baby! and I Love Colors) have terrific photos of babies, but no adults at all.  But it's nice for kids to have books which reflect the families they have, and do so in natural, easy ways.

For white friends of mine who have just adopted an African-American baby, I included Vera B. Williams's fabulous "More, More, More," Said the Baby, in which the illustrations to the three brief stories show racial diversity unobtrusively, in the context of a beautifully-written celebration of chasing after and playing with your small child.

For my college roommate and her partner, welcoming their first child, one of my choices was Everywhere Babies, by Susan Meyers, illustrated by Marla Frazee.  Frazee's illustrations are the reason I like this book, and the reason you first recommended it to me.  In the packed pictures of babies being hugged, fed, rocked, and played with in various ways, there are depictions of a number of different kinds of families, including what appears to be an interracial lesbian couple passed out on a bed next to a sleeping baby in a cradle, and a few pairs of dads who might be couples themselves.  The text accompanying these pictures is general and rhythmic:

Every day, everywhere, babies are born --

fat babies, thin babies, small babies, tall babies, 

winter and spring babies, summer and fall babies.

...

Every day, everywhere, babies are fed --

by bottle, by breast, with cups and with spoons,

with milk, and then cereal, carrots, and prunes.

You get the idea.  It's fine, and scans well, but it doesn't cry out for multiple rereadings.  The pictures are inclusive, but the last whole family shown on the page celebrating the baby's first birthday is still white and hetero.  I'd like to find a book I love as much as the others on my list that depicts families which look more like the families my gay friends are now creating.

I've written before about Patricia Polacco's In Our Mothers' House, which tells the story of a lesbian couple and their three adopted kids, each of a different race (the eldest daughter narrates).  There are a lot of things to like about the book, as with pretty much anything Polacco writes, but it's not the book I'm looking for.

At the library today, I picked up the infamous Heather Has Two Mommies, Leslea Newman's oft-banned book which made so many headlines 15 and 20 years ago.  I'd never actually read it, but it's -- okay.  It's clearly an Issue Book, and while it shows a sweet, loving family made up of two moms and a daughter, it's also a little odd in the way it opens up the issue.  Heather goes to a playgroup for the first time, and realizes for the first time that all the other kids have daddies, and she doesn't.  She feels bad, and cries, and the teacher consoles her, and has all the kids draw pictures of their different families, so everyone can appreciate that all kinds of families provide love and support.  It is, of course, the most diverse preschool group EVER, so there's another girl with two daddies, and an adopted kid, and a kid with divorced parents, and multiple races represented.  Maybe still useful for getting across the Message, but odd in its implication that Heather would never have run across other families different from her own before going to playgroup, and that her moms would never have talked to her about their own family.

On the same shelf, I found the more recent A Tale of Two Mommies, by Vanita Oelschlager (spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with Dickens).  In this one, a little dark-skinned boy answers the questions of two other kids on the beach about which of his moms (here, "Momma" and "Mommy") takes on which responsibilities of parenting:

Which mom coaches your T-ball team?
Which mom's there when you've had a bad dream?


Mommy is the coach of my T-ball team. 
Both mommies are there when I've had a bad dream.

The mommies appear largely from the waist down, as two pairs of long white legs -- I think the facelessness is supposed to represent a child's-eye view, but I find it a little disconcerting.  Again, it's -- okay.

In doing a quick online search, I came across some good reviews for Leslea Newman's newer Mommy, Mama, and Me -- have you read it?  I'd love your suggestions on some of the newer stuff out there.  Our foray into gay YA generated a nice long list of options (which you can find here under "Gay and Gay-Friendly YA"); I'd love to do the same for picture books.


Love, Annie

Social issues embedded in picture books

Dear Aunt Debbie,

These books sound fabulous -- I'll clearly be reading some of them myself before Eleanor is ready to go there. It strikes me, though, how dark their themes are. This is a comment (a complaint?) I've heard a lot about recent YA books, though I'm not sure how different they are in tone from previous generations. Do you think books for teens have gotten darker or weightier? Is this necessarily a bad thing if it's true?

I think about this as we've been reading a lot of Patricia Polacco in our house. Her picture books often touch on weighty or at least societally complex issues, but the touch is light and the illustrations filled with swiftness and joy.

I first came across Polacco's wonderful book Chicken Sunday long before I had kids, when I was right out of college and teaching at a boarding school. That year, I was part of a group of teachers who met once a month to talk about "issues of educational equity and diversity." For one meeting, our assignment was to find a children's book with themes of diversity. I think we were supposed to do a swap with the books after the session, but everyone wanted to keep the books they'd picked, so we all took our own home again.


Chicken Sunday

What I like about Chicken Sunday is that it isn't preachy. It's the 1950's, I think, and the narrator is white, and her best friends and adopted grandmother are black, and the hat-maker is Jewish, and the complexities are there underneath the narrative, but they're not made too explicit. The grandmother talks about how the hat-maker had "a hard life," and in one illustration you can see a number tattooed on his arm, but that's all that's mentioned. So there's this other level that, at some point, Eleanor can notice and ask questions about, but for right now, it's a story about the kids wanting to save up to buy an Easter hat, and being unfairly accused of throwing eggs, and doing something creative to get the hat for their grandmother.

When I was looking recently for good books involving same-sex couples, you mentioned Polacco's In Our Mothers' House, with the caveat that the story isn't as good as some of her others.


In Our Mothers' House

Like Chicken Sunday, In Our Mothers' House is told in retrospect. The narrator is one of three children adopted by a warm, loving lesbian couple (the kids call their mothers Marmee and Meema). They live in Berkeley, and all of their neighbors are totally accepting of them except for one family, where the parents keep their kids away. The most explicit this family's homophobia gets is when the mother tells Meema and Marmee: "I don't appreciate what you two are!" Then she walks away, and everybody else in the neighborhood hugs them. It's enough to spark a question in a child reader: why doesn't this mother like their family? Polacco leaves the complexities of the conversation to the parent reader. Mostly, I appreciate this approach.

I'd like the book to be a little less episodic -- here's another warm, loving thing that happened in our house or neighborhood as I was growing up -- and to have more of a single narrative. That said, it does part of what I want it to do: provides pictures and text that normalize the idea of a household with two moms, and with adopted kids of different races. Eleanor's first reaction to the book was not positive: she sighed as we got to the end and said, "This book is long." But then when we went to pick which books to return to the library that week, she wanted to keep it. We've renewed it twice now, and she's asked me to read it to her multiple times. What's her favorite part? When Meema and Marmee, who always wear pants, don huge flowing dresses to host a mother-daughter tea at their house. So, she's 3.

The other two Polacco books we're reading regularly were your recommendations as well. And because you put it so well in the email you sent to me recommending them, I'm going to quote you here:

Go out and get Thunder Cake.
A girl and her babushka'd grandma, on grandma's farm, see that a thunderstorm is brewing. Girl is scared. Grandma says they have to make a thunder cake before it hits, so they race. To the cows for milk, the chickens for eggs, etc. It has those lovely energetic Polacco people and animals with hands and feet going in many directions. And the last page, after the two sit down to their cake as the (slow-moving) storm crashes, is the recipe, complete with a secret ingredient.

I also really like The Keeping Quilt, which follows a quilt through many generations of Polacco's family. Don't know if this one will read to Eleanor a little too slowly, like Our Mothers. I've given it as a wedding gift, because it's so full of family. She of course has a pretty serious quilter for a grandma, so it might resonate.

Eleanor loves them both. The Keeping Quilt doesn't feel slow at all, but again touches on so many periods of history, here especially Russian Jewish immigrant history, that there is a rich layer waiting for her to get a little older. And, of course, there are a lot of wedding dresses for her to look at.

Love, Annie