Refiner’s Fire: Blacks and Amerinds in Children’s Books

Ten or fifteen years ago children’s books were so thoroughly dominated by white characters that a child would have had a hard time knowing that people of other races were anything more than exotic creatures on a par with polar bears and breadfruit. Fortunately, things have changed, and today a book with a black or an Amerind child as the central character is not really unusual.

What is unusual is to find a book that goes beyond racism or race-related issues. In the well meant rush to give children a picture of all ethnic groups in their books, some authors have replaced their outdated stereotypes with a progressive variety that looks good on the surface but falls apart on closer examination. The better authors, though, are doing what good authors have always done: avoiding stereotypes and creating significant books that probe the human experience.

Two books from this past fall’s list illustrate the differences between the excellent book and the merely progressive one: Virginia Hamilton’s Arilla Sun Down and William O. Steele’s The Man With the Silver Eyes. Both have children of minority races as their central characters, and both treat them and their conflicts sympathetically. However, one creates a conflict to be considered from a distance, while the other brings the conflict within to touch the reader deeply.

Hamilton’s Arilla Sun Down tells the story of Arilla Adams, a thirteen-year-old girl of black and Amerind parentage. Arilla’s background doesn’t press her into a stereotype, however. She does not suffer from racist taunts, for instance; her home is intact, and her parents are not poor; her neighborhood is clean and unmenacing. Numbers runners, prostitutes, drug addicts, and gangs—so common in recent realist novels—play no part whatsoever. Where other authors have included such elements to convey the strains on minority families in a white society, Hamilton has chosen to make Arilla an ordinary girl of thirteen.

Her racial heritage is important to her, of course, not because she is fighting racist oppression (though indirectly she is) but because she wants to get a sense of her roots. Arilla struggles primarily with her jealousy toward her older brother, who is obsessed with recovering every shred of his Amerind heritage, more than even his ancestors knew existed. She also struggles with her mother’s love of cultured activities like “The Dance” when she herself prefers roller skating. And she struggles to find her own place in her school, where she suspects girls hang around her because of her older brother or because they study dancing with her mother.

Every young girl experiences similar conflicts, and so it’s easy to care about Arilla. And her desire to find a place for herself that respects both the past and the present is equally universal. Arilla Sun Down is not just a progressive tract against racism because Arilla herself cannot be defined by race. This is a sophisticated novel that examines the conflicts that come to children in early adolescence. It is the kind we have come to expect of Virginia Hamilton, one of the most inventive authors writing for children today. Although the narrative form is quite complicated in this book, the ideas are not as complex as those in her earlier book, M. C. Higgins the Great.

William Steele’s The Man With the Silver Eyes is an example of a book that looks good but is essentially just a progressive story that depends on stereotypes. The book tries to show people rising above the hatred of their neighbors, but racism is still defined as prejudice to be exorcised by faith, trust, and hard work. The result is a book that for all its appeal becomes uncomfortably patronizing.

The story concerns Talatu, a Cherokee Indian boy, who for safety is sent to live with a Quaker trapper named Shinn. The Revolutionary War is in full swing, and whites and Indians are thoroughly mixed in the loyalist and revolutionary ranks. However, the central conflict for Talatu is overcoming his hatred of white people and becoming a sensitive person who can live at peace with others.

The story outline is familiar: a tough, hate-filled child of a minority race is thrown into contact with a nonviolent and loving white person; the hostile child discovers whites are not as bad as he had once thought. The outline might be usable with a weightier flesh hung on it, but Talatu is essentially a race object—he defines himself in terms of race alone, people relate to him as something on which they can vent their prejudices, and the revelation that comes to him is that a few white people can sufficiently overcome their prejudice to die for Indians. (However, the revelation that the fatally wounded Shinn is really Talatu’s father spoils the possibilities in that one.)

Therefore it’s difficult to identify with either Zalatu or Shinn. We can read their very interesting story at arm’s length and perhaps feel mildly inspired, but it’s difficult to nourish the soul on the tales of people who are as thinly conceived as these two are. That’s the trouble with stereotypes, even when they appear in apparently progressive books.

That’s a pity, because good adventure books are in great demand. Too few books have Amerind or black characters who are complex and memorable like those in Arilla Sun Down. Too many have the flat kind of moral-bearing characters who destroy good themes by crumpling under the merest touch of a reader who probes.

Bonnie M. Greene is the editor of “Vanguard” magazine, Toronto, Ontario.

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