Wednesday Words: They must have been magic brownies.

She left a vast pile of rich chocolate brownies on the kitchen table. He made up his mind not to touch them but even as he did so, he found that he had one in his hand.

– Paula Fox, ONE-EYED CAT

It’s always nice when you can really identify with a character… of course, Ned’s dilemma in this scene is gluttony vs. spite, whereas glut vs. laze is the defining quandary of my life.

Speaking of my piggishness: I am learning to cook (more on that soon), which is immensely exciting to me, and I’m overcome with the urge to throw dinner parties. I wanted to have an Eat Pig Like a Pig party before deciding that pork, etc are too expensive to buy for a lot of people. My boyfriend said I was the only person in the world who would think of throwing a party like that. Inexplicably, he did not appear to mean this as a compliment.

One-Eyed Cat: In which Paula Fox shows us the possibly dire consequences of disobeying our parents, and somehow it’s less didactic than lovely

This is what my edition looks like, and while it is so very '80s (down to the very odd posing)...

...I cannot imagine who is buying this newer one. When I glanced at it I thought the boy on the cover was an old lady ghost. That can't be what they were going for.

I don’t know what it was about the ’80s that made great authors start great books in the most boring way possible, but between this and JACOB HAVE I LOVED, I feel like I’m being confronted with some sort of trial: subtle and surprising stories await those with the patience to wade through long scene-setting descriptions while the author meanders around to such niceties as character and plot.

“This” is Paula Fox’s ONE-EYED CAT, a classic (a Newbery Honor) that I discovered only recently, and the problems of the book’s beginning were heightened by the fact that I couldn’t really get my head around the character; take this scene early on:

“I believe it must be close to your birthday,” she added. Ned was surprised; grown-ups often recalled things he thought they would have forgotten.

What kid doesn’t believe adults are always thinking of them and their birthdays? I scoffed. I now think this was in character for the book’s protagonist, an extraordinarily gentle boy who makes a mistake that leads him into secrecy and misery throughout much of the book.

Paula Fox, in fact, doesn’t mess around with her characterizations. The character painted with broadest strokes in this book is one Mrs. Scallop:

Ned went over to the radio and drew a finger down the back of the bronze lion. He imagined Mrs. Scallop saying, “Mrs. Scallop doesn’t dust lions.”

Or take this exchange that I particularly related* to:

He opened his mouth and she said at once, before he could speak, “Calm down, calm down.” He hated the way she spoke in that false soothing voice, as if she owned the country of calm and he was some kind of fool who’d stumbled across its borders.

But Fox rescues Mrs. Scallop from being a parody, not by redeeming her as much as simply revealing her. At the end of the book I still didn’t like or even particularly respect her, but I truly believed in her.

What I love about Fox is how moral her books are, and by that I don’t mean that she moralizes. I mean, instead, that she presents characters whose choices matter, and she shows us how they matter not by over-dramatizing their consequences in the outside world, but by showing the characters realizing how much their own sense of themselves depends on what they do.

In ONE-EYED CAT, I also particularly like the relationship between Ned’s parents. His father is the town minister and his mother, because she is the mother in an atmospheric novel for kids, has a mysterious ailment (I believe its technical name is Disneyosis). We get tiny glimpses of the family’s complicated relationship to religion; Ned remembers that before his mother was sick, his father (who provides very loving care for his ailing wife) never spoke in his “preacher voice,” but now he sometimes uses it like a shield; Ned’s mother has her own beliefs, which are not necessarily her husband’s, and not necessarily anything she feels an urgent need to spell out to Ned. They seem like real people, in other words.

And… holy shit, you guys. Writing this post and thinking about how principled Fox’s books seem to me made me want to learn more about her, and the first thing Google has taught me? Paula Fox is Courtney Love’s grandmother.

That kind of just took the wind out of whatever I was going to write. I leave you with that odd bit of trivia.

* One of my boyfriend’s favorite ways to annoy me — one of many, I might add — is to adopt just this condescending tone. “There, there, relax,” he’ll say, just to piss me off. “Just — shhh…... Just calm down.” He does it because it drives me to violence. He perfected this technique on his sister growing up; I think it’s a wonder she still speaks to him.

Wednesday Words: From now on, I’m just going to describe my house as “truthy.”

A lie was so tidy, like a small box you could make with nails and thin pieces of wood and glue. But the truth lay sprawled all over the place like the mess up in the attic.

– Paula Fox, ONE-EYED CAT

Besides liking this metaphor because it captures something I recognize*, I like this because it’s the opposite of that “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…” adage, which I first learned from a CHARLES IN CHARGE episode built around it. When I stop to think about it, it is astounding and horrifying how much of my basic cultural education comes from terrible ’80s sitcoms.

* And am I the only one who sometimes tells small, irrelevant lies, especially to strangers, for exactly this reason? Except then they sometimes spiral out of control and suddenly your tidy little box that you only constructed in the first place to avoid making small talk more complicated than interests either party is like a faulty Jack-in-the-Box of conversational pitfalls that could leap out at any moment and this is what I was saying about not being able to construct metaphors.

Why I Love It / Book Controversy: The Slave Dancer

Paula Fox’s THE SLAVE DANCER is, to my mind, a surprisingly challenging and psychologically sophisticated book for younger readers.

The main character is a white boy, Jessie, kidnapped from New Orleans in 1840 and put on a slave ship. While not free himself, he is not treated like the Black slaves that are the ship’s cargo; rather, his job is to play the flute as they, chained, are made to “dance” in shifts: a grotesque display meant, by enforcing brief moments of exercise and air, to keep a few more of them alive despite the inhumane conditions of their passage.

At first, the account of Jessie’s struggle to survive on the ship is dominated by his attempt to navigate among the distinct personalities of the ship’s various crew: they are, respectively, coarse and mean, personable, mercenary, and deeply pious. Some seem immediate antagonists; others, friends and protectors to Jessie. But as the book progresses, those differences recede into a portrait of the immense emotional sickness of each and every crew member. Despite their differences in affect, all are utterly compromised by their acceptance of their own role in the slave trade.

A Newbery and Hans Christensen Anderson Award winner after its 1973 publication, THE SLAVE DANCER is thus both critically acclaimed, and — from what I gather from fairly vague accounts online — controversial among anti-racists.

The criticisms, apparently, center around the slaves being portrayed in an unflattering light, rather than as more active agents for their own liberation. I think these criticisms are misguided, and — after all appropriate spoiler alert!s — here’s why.

It’s true that Jessie is the book’s main actor, and that what we see of the slaves through his eyes, especially while still on the ship, center around the appalling conditions they are in. But I disagree that this means the slaves are presented as child-like or as less than full characters. Jessie’s own shot at liberating himself ultimately depends on his casting his lot with one of the Black slave boys, named Ras, against the whole crew of white men that has participated in enslaving them both.

In this sense, the controversy over THE SLAVE DANCER surprises me because the book seems to conform to a very standard children’s book model: a child protagonist interacts with someone who experiences an oppression (often racism, sometimes class oppression) that the protagonist doesn’t; through ultimately rejecting that oppression — often overcoming their own prejudice in the process — the child comes to recognize ways that their own life is constricted as well. Seriously, is (for example) Avi’s THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF CHARLOTTE DOYLE much different from this? So why all the criticism of THE SLAVE DANCER?

That’s not just a rhetorical question, by the way; I want to hear the argument, because I don’t get it.

And not getting it is frustrating to me, because in the abstract, I’m sympathetic to this type of criticism. There’s nothing I find more inspirational than stories of the most seemingly unlikely resistance; this is true in life and in literature. Nothing has moved me as much in recent years as resistance among prisoners in the U.S., and in the world’s largest open-air prison, Gaza. Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve told everyone I know that M.T. Anderson’s THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING, TRAITOR TO THE NATION is the best book I’ve read in years; what I haven’t always said (because no one can stand to hear me talk about my love of M.T. Anderson any more) is that my favorite parts, by far, of the second volume were the stories of the assorted runaways the hero Octavian met. In tiny details, Anderson showed the immense ingenuity and personality of his slave characters. They were not just fictional characters; they were bit parts, most of them, but I believed in them utterly.

So I’ll be the first to say that we need more stories of slave revolts — and, by the way, to draw attention to the historical role of self-conscious, organized lefties in making space in the field of children’s literature for the slave revolt stories that we do have. (Julia Mickenberg is the main academic who’s exhaustively documented this history; I wrote about it briefly in a magazine article.)

But I also feel that there has to be room for stories like Jessie’s: stories that develop a small piece of what oppression looks like, even if they start from what it looks like from the outside. And stories that dramatize the connection between all those who are made unfree, even when the inequality in their servitude seems, at first glance, to make all the difference in the world. THE SLAVE DANCER starts there, but it ultimately draws its line between free and not free, between who is on the right and the wrong side, in a different place.