Do you ever wonder—as I do—where it is written that the wife is instantly available to find the flat-headed screwdriver even if she doesn’t even know what one is? Do you ever believe—as I do—that children come with a gene that says it is mothers and not fathers who are instantly interruptible to explain where she put the skateboard, the hair dryer, and the WD-40 even if she has never used them? Do you ever think—as I do—that a plague year would be welcome if it meant a year without a supper-time phone call from the aluminum siding salesperson?
Aside from these interruptions, there are forces acting on women over which they have no control. I think of a study done several years ago in Denver. Within a year of living together, nurses in a dormitory had all their menstrual cycles fall to within a few days of one another even though, initially, their periods had been weeks apart. When I mentioned the remarkable implications of this to a young friend who was in college, living in a coed dormitory, she said, “That’s strange; the same thing happened to me and my friends.”
I don’t know if it also happened when I lived in a college dormitory because I went to college in an era when no one ever dreamed that tampon commercials would appear on TV, and cigarette commercials would not. Periods were mentioned in public only as the full stop at the end of a sentence. But do you wonder—as I do—if women were not meant to have solitude but were meant to be part of a pack for some communal, territorial, arena-stomping male selection process?
But if given a choice, I would rather have an unsatisfied need for solitude than have no need for it at all. Einstein once said, “Perhaps, some day solitude will come to be properly recognized and appreciated as the teacher of personality. The Orientals have long known this. The individual who has experienced solitude will not easily become a victim of mass suggestion.” The art of being alone with vigor is a talent. Like all talent, it must be developed, and if the Orientals have developed it more, some cultures develop it less.
That this is so became apparent to me in 1981 when I was in Texas for a speaking engagement at Southwest Texas State University. On the evening before my lecture, my host was a retired navy man who was seriously indulging his love of history, particularly Texas history. There is no state’s history more intertwined with Mexico than that of Texas, and he had a profound interest in both. He had been born in the Midwest but grew up in Mexico. His wife referred to him as her American-Mexican husband. Long after the evening was mellow, he asked me a question that I could not answer then and have difficulty answering now.
His question was this: Why since there has developed a broad acceptance of minority cultures in the United States, why since there has developed a body of children’s literature produced by Asian-Americans and African-Americans, why has there been no work, let alone a body of work, produced by Mexican-Americans? There are books about them, but there are no books by them.
I pleaded with him that although I write books for children, I am not and never have claimed to be an authority on them. But when I asked an authority, she came up with one book: Aurora Labastida wrote the text for the picture book Nine Days to Christmas, published in 1959.
I continued to give a lot of thought to his question. I asked teachers and counselors who worked in Mexican-American neighborhoods, and they reported that life in the barrio represents a kind of togetherness that is almost unknown on the outside. Living is done in groups. Women visit while shopping, watching television, going to the launderette, eating. Is it possible that the child never has a chance to develop a talent for being alone? Is it possible that the barrio is protection but is also a prison? Is it as sweet as a marshmallow and just as hard to punch out of?
How can a person disturb the neighborhood if a person never learns to be solitary? How can a culture produce disturbers of the universe if it never unleashes its members from the neighborhood? There must be solitude, and there must be something to feed that solitude, and I believe that books should. Certainly books are a more alone—a more one-to-one—activity than television.
Thus, books enrich fantasy, and books enrich solitude. But by one of those wonderful organic paradoxes, it is equally true that fantasy and solitude enrich books and make possible the writing of them.
Writers need to dream, and writers need to be alone. For I am convinced there can be no creative process without fantasy and without solitude. And I am equally convinced that a writer, even if he is not writing about the earth circling the sun, even if he is writing fiction, must have the courage to disturb the neighborhood. Thomas Wolfe could not go home to Asheville again after writing Look Homeward, Angel. I know people in New Jersey who still will not speak to Philip Roth, and I know a town in Vermont where a Nobel Laureate lived because he found that it was easier to disturb Mother Nature than to disturb Mother Russia. Novelist Salman Rushdie has to keep his current neighborhood a secret because he disturbed his old one.
As a writer of fiction for middle-aged children, I have often addressed the need to disturb the neighborhood. There is no time in a child’s life when the question, Do I dare disturb the neighborhood? is more pressing than when he is in grades five through eight, for that is the time when children are being pulled by their peers on the one hand and by their core selves on the other.
To illustrate my concern with gathering the courage it takes to disturb the neighborhood, I would like to present excerpts from a story called “With Bert and Ray” from my collection of short stories called Throwing Shadows. William is telling the story. It begins:
If I have to start at the beginning of things, I guess I would have to start with Pa. Or the end of Pa, I should say. I had long ago heard the expression of someone being dead drunk. Well, that was Pa. Or the end of Pa. He died dead drunk when I was six, and that was as many years ago. Half my life ago. For a long time before he died, he couldn’t get anyone to sell him any more insurance, and I can’t say that I blame them. Anyway, the little bit he did have, didn’t hardly pay for his funeral, and the little bit that Ma got from Social Security didn’t hardly carry us from one month to the next.
So what Ma did, after Pa had been dead for three years, and we had some powerful dentist bills mounted up, was to sell off all his stuff. Wasn’t any of it she wanted anyways … hunting guns and duck decoys and all the issues of National Geographic back to when it was started.
Two of the people who came to the sale were Bert and Ray, this couple who have an antique store over in the section of town called Huntington. Bert and Ray were kinda thrilled about the duck decoys and the price Ma had put on them. They sure did tuck them decoys under their arms real quick and paid Ma exactly what she asked for them and gave her a card, saying that she should please to call them whenever she did another house sale. Ma took the card and said that she sure would call them if she ever did another. I was speculating about what Ma could sell until I realized that Ma is just a timid soul who says “scuse me” to the chiffonier when she bumps into it.
Soon William and his mother are over in the Huntington section of town for their dental appointments, and, as they are waiting for the bus, William notices that they are right at Bert and Ray’s shop. William takes the initiative and makes his mother pay them a visit. Shortly afterward, William’s mother gets a call from Ray asking her if she would like to handle a house sale for them.
Ma said sure she’d like to help them, not even knowing what was in it for her, but she wanted to thank them for having her and me to tea. She asked Ray if I, William, could help, too. I guess she figured that I ought to since I had had some tea, too, and Ray told her yes, that certainly William could help.
The sale turned out real good. We cleared out that whole houseful of stuff and made two hundred forty three dollars and thirty-eight cents for our work, and that was the start of our career managing house sales.
Business is good, and William and his mother begin upgrading their household by buying things—at fair market value— from their estate sales, and Bert and Ray begin upgrading their business by traveling t
o far places to buy fancier antiques. William continues his story:
Ma and me came to see how the hardest part about antiques is finding them and buying them at a good price. Selling them is pretty easy except for some things and those things aren’t necessarily the ugliest. Sometimes ugly sells real good. It depends on the style of ugly. Ma had gathered together a little library of books, but she didn’t never do the pricing if Bert and Ray were around and if they showed even by a quick look in their eyes that they wanted to keep in practice. Ma always let them because she told me she didn’t want to hurt their feelings none, and she didn’t want to give them the idea that she had forgot from whence all her new career had sprung.
One day when Ma and me were invited over to Bert and Ray’s for tea, they had just come back from a buying trip up to Kentucky and some other horse country … when Ma spotted this piece of furniture leaning by the wall that leads to their parlor … and Ma went on over to it and studied on it a while and said, “I just love your panetière, Bert. Wherever did you find it?”
“Panetiere?” Bert said. “What panetière?”
“That there cupboard,” Ma said, pointing to the piece of furniture leaning against the parlor wall.
“This’n,” I said. “Ma called it a panetiere.”
Then Ma looked at the ticket and said, “I see that y’all made a good buy. A right good buy.”
Ray came in from the kitchen just then, and Bert said to him, “It seems to me that we made a good buy on our panetiere, Ray.”
And Ray said, “Our what?”
“Your panetiere right there,” I said, pointing to that same cupboard leaning against the parlor wall.
Ray got real upset. I know he did. So did Bert. They smiled, both of them did, but I could tell ... I peeked back in the door after we left, and I saw them pulling the tag off of that there panetiere, which they didn’t even know they had until Ma called it to their attention.
Next week Ma had Bert and Ray over to supper, and Ray announced, “Bert and I sold our panetiere to Mrs. Sinclair. She’s doing everything in French, and we called her and told her that we had an authentic eighteenth century bread cupboard, and she didn’t even know it was a panetiere until we told her. She bought it like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
“Fancy that,” I said, “a genuine eighteenth century panetiere, and Mrs. Sinclair didn’t even know it.”
Bert said, “Well some of these people who have big houses need to be educated in good taste.”
Ma just smiled and told them how glad she was that they had turned a nice profit.
William and Ma get a call to handle the Birchfield estate, where they find a Chinese silk screen. No one buys it at the sale, and Bert and Ray even make fun of it, saying that it’s a piece of junk. William’s mother, convinced that it is something fine, buys it from the estate for $125 and takes it home and studies it. She becomes increasingly convinced that it is something special. William takes Polaroid pictures of it and during his class trip to Washington, D.C., he makes his way to the Freer Gallery, where they indicate some interest; so when school is out, William and Ma load the screen into their station wagon and go with it to the Freer. Her asking price is twenty thousand dollars. William finishes telling the story.
When we’d been back home eight days, we got a telegram from the museum saying the committee had voted to purchase the screen. I called up the newspaper and told them, and a writer from the newspaper came on over to the house and listened to Ma’s story and published two of my Polaroids besides, not even complaining that they were a little out of focus or that they had fingerprints on them in the wrong places.
We must have got a hundred phone calls the day the story come out in the paper. I told Ma that what I couldn’t understand was why Bert and Ray hadn’t called us up to congratulate us. A lot of other dealers had. Ma said that she understood why they had not, and she was feeling pretty sad about it.
I asked Ma if she thought that they was jealous about the money. Ma said that the money was just a little bit of it. “What do you suppose is the big part of it then, Ma?” I asked.
“It’s hard for me to know the words for saying it, William,” she said. “I know what it is that’s bothering them. It’s the same thing that bothered them about the panetiere, but I don’t know the psychological words for it.”
Bert and Ray finally called the next day, and I heard Ma say, “It seems like I got took pretty good, Bert. I found out that that there screen I sold to the museum for twenty thousand dollars was really worth twenty-five. Guess I just still got a lot to learn.”
Well, that was it.
Bert and Ray come on over to the house that night and teased Ma about how she got took and Ma just laughed at herself right along with them.
Well, that was it.
Bert and Ray just couldn’t stand being beat out by Ma, who had been their student just a few years ago. Bert and Ray couldn’t stand it that Ma already knowed more about antiques than they did, not only because she studies on them but also because she got all these delicate feelings about things that you can’t hardly help but notice when you watch her looking at something or touching it so gentle.
But Ma’s been so wore down by everything, including living all them years with Pa, that she figures won’t nobody love her if she shows that she knows one thing more than they do.
But I look back on how good she stuck by her guns with that screen, and I figure that if she can stand by her guns with strangers, she soon will be able to with people who have us over to tea. And I figure that I got six more years before I finish school and have to go off and leave her, and I’m going to work on her. I pushed her up them steps to Huntington Antiques, and I got her to go to that museum, and I’m sure that I can help her to find out how being grateful to Bert and Ray is something she should always be, but outgrown them is something she already is. By the time I leave home, she’s going to be ready to face that fact and live with it. She’ll need it, being’s she won’t have me around to push her here and there any more.
This story was sparked from my reading an account of how in 1963 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its polychrome statue of St. John the Baptist by the Spanish master, Juan Martinez Montañes. It is a beauty. I recommend that the next time you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art you seek out the majestic statue that Mildred Centers bought for sixty-five dollars and sold to the museum for eighteen thousand dollars.
Mildred Centers lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
So you see, my immediate neighborhood is in the background of this story about disturbing the neighborhood … step one between a peach and the universe.
Before my time to ask, Do I dare to eat a peach? I want to ask, Do I dare to dream? Do I dare enjoy my solitude? Do I dare disturb the neighborhood?
And
If I do,
And if I dare,
I may write a book about someone who does.
Or
I may write a book that does.
Or
I may disturb the universe.
Winding up the 80s
Since I wrote “Between a Peach and the Universe” the number of Mexican-American books by Mexican-American authors has grown. I do not know how many. I simply know there are more.
The number of children’s books written by Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans has grown, too. So have those by Hmong-Americans, Native American-Americans, and Tex-Mex-Americans. I do not know how many. I simply know there are more, for multiculturalism is the latest trend in the field of children’s literature.
Children love to read about themselves. In my Newbery address, I said that reading about families such as those depicted in Mary Poppins and The Secret Garden made me think “that they were the norm and that the way I lived was subnormal, waiting for normal.” When I was a child, it would have been wonderful to read about a Jewish girl living in a small mill town with a father who worked long hours and a mother who “helped out in the store.” How I would h
ave loved to see my father’s rich Hungarian accent translated into print. It would, as I have said, have added a dimension to reality. (Hungarians put the accent on the first syllable of words. Thus, my father spoke of lapp-ils for lapels.
You can guess the correct pronunciation of our family name: Lobl.)
Farrell, Pennsylvania, where I graduated from high school, had as its motto, An Industrial City of Friendly People. If we were writing that motto today, it would be called An Industrial City of Friendly Ethnic People. But we didn’t know we were ethnic. We were a city of 12,500 people living in mixed neighborhoods where no one tried to keep up with the Joneses because, as I have said, there was no one named Jones in my class.
Within its population of 12,500, Farrell had the following social clubs: Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Slovenian, Hungarian, Italian, Carpo-Russ, German as well as Saxon, Greek as well as Macedonian, a Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the Twin City Elks, which was all black, and three Croatian Homes. Members of the club met with a level of social comfort in the alien New World. It was in the privacy of these clubs that the Croats, the Serbs, the Saxons, et cetera, kept alive their traditions and language and memories of the old country while their children were becoming Americans. Each of us children of immigrants was free to keep the customs of our parents or modify them or abandon them. Sometimes we mixed; sometimes we matched. The Zahariou girls and Achilles Mouganis studied Greek after school just as the Jewish kids studied Hebrew after school. The kids whose parents belonged to the Macedonian Club as well as the ones whose parents belonged to the Greek Club all became Americans. As did I.
Now, in the interest of multiculturalism, children’s books are being asked to do for the new generation of immigrants what ethnic social clubs once did for my parents’. They are being asked to make a record, and that is fine. They are being asked to give comfort, recognition, and respect, and that is fine, too. But I have some concerns about this latest trend in children’s literature.
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