Smoky Night by Eve Bunting, Illustrated by David Diaz, 1995 Caldecott Medal Winner

15 Oct 1996
Daphne Kutzer

Dan Hade gave a wonderful paper at last year's CHLA entitled "Aestheticizing the Poor/Anesthetizing the Reader: The "social Justice' books of Eve Bunting." He focused primarily on "Fly Away Home" (I think that's the title--the one about the homeless father and son in the airport) , and if I'm remembering the paper accurately, he criticized it for its implications that simply passively waiting for the metaphorical doors to open for the two (as the literal door opens for the trapped bird) was sufficient. The book, in his view, takes poverty and homelessness right out of its social context; suggests that it is an INDIVIDUAL and not a social problem; and offers no solution except stoic suffering. Some of the same sorts of criticisms could be made of "Smoky Night." The book, in my view, oversimplifies (even for children) the difficulties of living in a multicultural society, the difficulties that exist between Koreans and African-Americans in LA and elsewhere, and again denies any sort of social reason behind the riots. It ends up, I think, by implying that Rodney King's famous line of "Can't we just get along?" is sufficient to solve racisim in this country--which it isn't.

Anyhow, if Dan is on this list maybe he would like to amplify? It was a wonderful paper.

15 Oct 1996
??

For Gale and anyone else who wanted to know the source of the source of the review I mentionned. Thank you to Betsy for catching it! Horn Book, Sept./Oct. 1996, "Civil People, Uncivil Times," by Selma G. Lanes, page 555.

16 Oct 1996
ddh2

I'm not on the childlit listserv. Thanks to Laura Zaidman and Perry Nodelman for forwarding Daphne's comments to me. I'm going to try to send this message directly to the listserv, but I'll copy Perry, Laura and Daphne just in case this doesn't work.

I think the same argument can be made for Smoky Night, How Many Days to America?, Cheyenne Again, A Day's Work, and her newest book, Going Home. What Eve Bunting does is use the poor, the dispossessed, the less fortunate as aesthetic objects to moralize. The message that one should never give up hope or that we should all try to get along with each other are fine themes, certainly themes I'd want to put before children. But some of the narrative devices Bunting uses to tell her stories seems to put a cruel or indifferent twist to these themes. In most of her books she uses a first person narrative voice, usually the voice of a very young child. Using this limited voice to tell the story prevents Bunting from exploring very complicated social issues in any depth. Then there is the issue of who is the child narrator? Though the child is supposed to be one of the unfortunate poor, the child seems extremely naive to the situation. My own experiences with children suggest that most children are aware of why some children have things and others don't and that if a particular child was homeless, that child would know why. Likewise, children living in the neighborhoods of LA that exploded into riots know something about the anger and disillusionment present. The naive narrators of these books strike me as a middle class voice speaking not from experience but from wish.

Then what about the audience? That the audience would be homeless children or children who lived in the riot-torn neighborhoods seems far-fetched, even offensive. For someone who lives as comfortablely as a successful children author to be moralizing to victims to have hope and to try harder to get along with one another is obscene. If the audience is middle and upper middle class children, then the stories seem profanely reassuring. Yes, there are problems, there are people hurting out there, but the means for solving their problems lie within them -- either by hoping or by getting along with one another. There are reasons riots happen and people are homeless, reasons that are linked to social policy, but you'd never know those reasons from Bunting's books.

One of the reasons some scholars have argued for using children's literature across the curriculum is that literature provides insight into human problems that textbooks just don't address. Bunting's books, which are very popular in elementary school classrooms, strike me as being little better than a textbook. Unfortunate things just happen, no reasons and no real solutions are suggested.

16 Oct 1996
Jane E Kurtz

Our threads are converging, as so often happens, with the discussions of SMOKY NIGHT and the important question this post raised. I see the children's book world through a number of lenses, with the author lens probably being strongest, and I think the pressures are scary right now. It isn't just the pressure from corporate parents of publishing houses, though. The demise of many, many independent bookstores, with their staffs who tended to be passionate and articulate advocates for literary children's books, is affecting the scene greatly. Super stores tend to do well by a certain type of book. Those of us who care about books that don't do well in super stores need to be looking for creative ways to nurture those books, I'd say. If it's true, as has been suggested, that Eve Bunting's books give a safe, middle class view of poverty, racisms, and other oppressions, consider the possibility that it's going to get tougher and tougher to do anything but safe books. Jane Kurtz

16 Oct 1996
Elizabeth H Wiley

I have to say to you that my students, inner-city, southern, asian, black, hispanic, etc. third graders loved this book and the theme. Could recite incidents of fires, etc. in their neighborhoods where the same sorts of interactions had occurred. I imagine for a little older students, would be even more meaningful.

16 Oct 1996
linnea m hendrickson

Thanks to Dan Hade and to Daphne for the contributions on Smoky Night and other Bunting books. Although I accidentally deleted the message, and can't quote Dan verbatim, I would like to reply and raise a couple of questions.

The questions Dan raises are important ones, but I feel a bit uneasy about attacking Bunting for her efforts to present difficult topics in ways meaningful and understandable to young children. How many deep issues can one picture book contend with?

I've thought about whether the voices of the child narrators are really the voices of middle class children. In Smoky Night, the child narrator's voice is more literary than realistic: "Outside the sky is hazy orange. Flames pounce up the side of our building." It is true that this is not the language of a child's conversation, but it does sound as though it could be something a child would write at school, perhaps with a bit of help and editing ("Think of a metaphor to describe the flames," I could imagine the teacher saying.)

I thought about this voice in comparison with the child narrator's voice in Steptoe's Stevie, which we could say is authentic, childlike, and conversational. But this is not the voice of all children, either, or the voice a child would most likely use to write about an event.

I question whether we can say that Bunting's child's voice is an outsider voice, a middle class voice: it is clearly a literary voice. But what makes it not the voice of an inner city child?

In Cheyenne Again, the language does echo the cadences and patterns of Native American speech.

I am not sure that suggesting solutions, that providing more pointed critiques of the society that causes the problems faced by the child in Smoky Night, in Cheyenne Again, and in Fly Away Home, can fit within the context of the kinds of picture books that Bunting is attempting to create.

At the child's level all events are very personal, and this is the level at which Bunting is writing. I'd like some suggestions on how these books could be written differently, to make the link between the personal and the political at a child's level. Can it be done?

Is Bunting really saying, in Smoky Night, that the problem and its solution is simply a matter of learning to get along, or does the story imply, without specifying, that the problems are much deeper than that? What gaps does she leave for the reader to fill in? As Smoky Night is written, I suspect it is accessible both to children who have experienced riots and to children who either have no idea of riots, or who have seen or heard about them in newspapers, television, and adult conversations. Maybe the question to ask is what is the next step after books like this?

But, I'd also like to know, how could one write a children's picture book that could convey the complexities behind such issues as the Los Angeles riot, homelessness, and the attempted annihilation of Native Americans and their cultures? And there are those who say Smoky Night is too harsh for children. Are there examples of books that have done this kind of thing more successfully than Bunting?

17 Oct 1996
Bonita Kale

I found Smokey Night and Fly Away Home (especially the latter) very moving, so I have a hard time regarding them as simply no good. We don't like to think we're so easily fooled.

I think we miss a good deal of the interest of a story when we focus too much on the political or sociological meaning. The interest of Fly Away Home is very largely in how the boy and his dad manage in their tricky and secret situation. If it were an adult book, it'd probably need some sort of plot to mask that fact and carry it along. Both books ask "What would it be like if...", and I think that's a very strong interest for children (and adults too) in literature. "What would it be like if God was incarnated in a world of talking animals?" "What would it be like to be accused of witchcraft?" "What would it be like to be a forensic pathologist, a priest in a small town, a schoolteacher in an English village?"

I think these books are eyeopeners for comfortable children and someone else on the list has said that less comfortable children are also interested in Smokey Night. But the interest is the main thing, not the politics or the sociological reasons. (I have my opinions about those, and no doubt Bunting has hers. But by -not- including them, Bunting has left the book open to wider audiences than they would have been had her opinions been included.)

I don't think every book that shows Timmy getting dressed has to explain why Timmy can afford shoes and blue jeans and how his family is exploiting third world workers to obtain them. Not because that isn't true, but because not everything has to be in every book.

17 Oct 1996
Janet

I follow with great interest the postings on this thread. I am sure Eve Bunting is no more or less limited in her writing (by her ability, her background, her hopes, her editors, etc.) than anyone else. Since we both reside in Southern California, I have had the opportunity to hear her speak a number of times. Ms. Bunting was born in Northern Ireland and attended Methodist College in Belfast. She emigrated to the United States in her 31st year and is now a U.S. citizen Her experience of the hositilities between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland clearly influenced her greatly. She has been quoted in SATA while speaking of a 1977 novel, it "is set in contemporary Northern Ireland with its political upheaval, its senseless hatreds and killings in the name of religion." And further, "I tried to write a story that children would find exciting but that would also show them the insidious horror of prejudice and the tragedy of a people torn apart by old hatred....." This theme, the tragedy of hatred and misunderstanding, is one she reinterates when speaking to an audience. Of course, her books must stand or fall on their own merits, but I believe this information provides a useful context for better understanding her intentions.

17 Oct 1996
Daphne Kutzer

Well, I'm feeling cranky and have a head cold, so I'll pursue this thread a little further.

No,not every book need tell us that Johnny can't afford Nikes or whatever. BUT--all children begin to learn about the world, begin to develop values, and begin (subconsciously) to take on the dominant ideology of their culture at a very, very young age. Books like Bunting's, it seems to me, reinforce a comfortable, middle-class, cozy ideology that I, for one, am not too comfortable with and that I think has led to lots of current social and political problems in America. There's nothing wrong with a book here, a book there, that promulgates such an ideology--but if that is the ONLY ideology we find expressed in books for kids, there's a problem, IMO. And the trouble with Bunting is not so much the books themselves, as the fact that she is a prize-winning, well-reviewed, and COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL author. Her books are likely to be bought and read in greater numbers than other, more challenging (ideologically speaking) works. This train of thought obviously ties in with the recent one about the commercialization of kids' books.

A book like Estes' "The Hundred Dresses" is, I think, a far more realistic and thought-provoking book about poverty and prejudice than "I'll Fly Away. " Yet I don't think that today it is as well known by children or by teachers as it was 30 years ago.

OK. Enough from my addled and medicated, cold-infected brain.

17 Oct 1996
Naomi J Wood

I have been following the discussion about Eve Bunting's _Smoky Night_ with interest, as this is an issue of deep concern to me.

It seems to me that a book like Faith Ringgold's _Tar Beach_ deals with problems of discrimination and disenfranchisement very effectively, not by soft-pedaling it, but by incorporating it into a tale about triumphing over the oppression (admittedly in a fairy-tale way).

The protagonist imagines flying over the city and taking back everything that has been denied her and her family because of racism. Brief references to her mother's, father's, and grandfather's situations show that life is not rosy for this city dweller. Still, she is able to imagine a hopeful future. Rather than simply reading this as wish-fulfillment fantasy, I see it as similar to what Jack Zipes sees in other radical fairy tales--an important recognition of injustice, but also an imaginative and triumphant repudiation of it.

Perhaps because she is not dealing with an explicitly violent or scary situation, Ringgold manages to do both: offer hope AND recognition that injustice exists. Interesting to note, also, that my sister, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Chicago (she's had homeless children in her class), tells me that her students LOVE this book, while my middle-class, predominately white, rural college-level students find it somewhat depressing.

17 Oct 1996
Bonita Kale

A small piece of raw data--I read the Estes book as a child and -hated- it with a passion I can hardly believe, re-reading it now.

It seemed nothing but sorrow, regret, pain, and hopelessness. I didn't find one redeeming quality in it.

Maybe it depends on the kid.

About middle class ideology. If you mean that ideology that thinks the middle class is the happiest and sanest place to be, I think most Americans share that feeling. We may differ on what middle class is (Hollywood and Washington have exaggerated ideas of how rich middle-class people are). And of course, the middle class has had a lot to answer for. But to be well-fed, warm, dry, clothed, and part of a loving family is something it's reasonable to value.

17 Oct 1996
B. Griffin

I've used Bunting's book with elem. kids and like them as discussion starters. Most particularly, I've used TERRIBLE THINGS with sixth graders and put paper over the cover so students won't see the "an allegory about the Holocaust" part. When asked what the book might also be talking about, kids will bring up a number of issues like conservation or other things where people don't care until they are directly affected. The discussion started by this book is usually thoughtful and wide-ranging.

Another book that I enjoy using with students (if I can get thru it without crying) is NETTIE'S TRIP SOUTH by Anne Turner. Nettie's view of slaves in the pre-civil war south is an eye opener for our students.

By the way and off the subject, I finally read MICK HARTE WAS HERE and absolutely loved it! I'm teaching a Bibliotherapy course and read a few chapters to my class. The classroom teachers were unanimous in there delight as well as the students who have discussed it with me.

18 Oct 1996
Elizabeth H Wiley

The third graders at my inner-city, low income neighborhood, multicultural school responded to the book by being inspired to relate similar neighborhood friendliness during fires or following crimes (both common in their experience). It seemed to me that the incidents in the story were very realistic and meaningful to them, and they enjoyed the art and questions about the objects in borders. It is in constant circulation.