The Secret of It
Today is
November 9, the anniversary of a certain day-after, and it seems as fitting a
day as any to ask, why read or write picture books? Acutely aware of my
privilege to make them, I’ve struggled for the past year-plus with how to keep doing
that, doing work I love, without feeling like my life is nothing but frivolity
and fluff. How have other writers done
it? I wonder. What have other writers done amid rage and storms and fires?
How have writers responded to and filtered their scary world for children?
Looking for answers, I ended up at one of my many picture book shelves recently,
and randomly pulled out my copy of The
Little Island.
Do you
remember The Little Island, that
Caldecott classic by Golden MacDonald (aka Margaret Wise Brown) and Leonard
Weisgard, published in 1946? The book begins with a poetic description of an
unspoiled island and the life on it, like “a tickly smelling pear tree,” and
“spiders sailing their webs against a gentle wind”. Then one day, lobsters
arrive, and seals, kingfishers, gulls, strawberries, and finally a sailboat
with a kitten. And with the arrival of the sailboat, the story shifts subtly
when the kitten’s voice, a childlike voice, enters and responds to the
narrative. “This little island is as little as big is big,” says the kitten.
And the island responds, “So are you.” It turns out the island has a voice too.
The kitten
and the island have a conversation about what it means to be an island:
“… I am part of this big world,”
said the little kitten.
“My feet are on it.”
“So am I, said the little Island.
“No, you’re not,” said the kitten.
“Water is all around you
and cuts you off from the land.”
“Ask any fish,” said the Island.
“So the kitten caught a fish…
and the fish told the kitten
how all land is one land
under the sea.
The cat’s eyes were shining
with the secret of it.
“The cat’s
eyes were shining with the secret of it.”
I just
love it, that moment when the kitten’s eyes get huge with the joy of “secret”
knowledge that “all land is one land under the sea” — the discovery that everything
in the world is invisibly connected. Expressed in deceptively simple pictures
and language, it’s a potent metaphor. After the kitten gets onto his boat and
returns to the land he came from, he will know that he is still connected to
that place of wonder and discovery, with his small paws on the same earth as
the beautiful, uncorrupted little Island.
Like The Little Island, my favorite
picture books all have something, as the sea does, beneath the surface of their
stories. They are bottomless but safe places where children can go deep and
find meaning for themselves, so that their eyes too might shine “with the
secret of it.” What was Margaret Wise Brown thinking when she wrote this book?
I wish I knew. Was she consciously responding to a world at war? “Asked on a
publisher’s questionnaire to indicate her wartime service, [Margaret Wise
Brown] replied in earnest ‘writer of children’s books.’”* I for one am thankful that she never stopped
doing what she did so well.
And these
days, I’m grateful to all of you who make sure books like hers are still read. I
can’t tell you how much lately it has comforted me to know that every day
readers of this blog are, through shared listening and looking, connecting
child to child, and children to the world. We are all connected, whether we
like it or not, to the earth, to each other… and call me naïve, but I think the world might
be a better place if everyone read a well-chosen picture book every day. We need
them now, more than ever.
* from
Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon, by Leonard Marcus
A random selection of other 20th
Century picturebooks I’ve re-read lately:
The Brownstone, by Paula Sher, 1972, reissued in
2015
Different
animals in an apartment building can’t get along. They figure it out.
Who Needs Donuts? By Marc Alan Stamaty, 1973,
reissued in 2003
A trippy,
70’s-fueled take on discovering what’s really important.
The Other Way to Listen, by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall,
1978
On true
listening, specifically to the natural world.
The Bee Tree, by Patrica Polacco, 1993
On the
sweetness of books.
The Great Migration: An American Story, by Jacob
Lawrence, his paintings of 1940-41 published with his words as a book in 1993,
with a poem in appreciation by Walter Dean Myers.
About the
exodus around World War I of African-Americans from the South to northern
industrial cities.
What Zeesie Saw on Delancy Street, by Elsa Okon Rael and Marjorie
Priceman, 1996
An
immigrant on the Lower East Side of New York in the 30’s discovers how and why
we share our pie.
*****
Deborah
Freedman is the author and illustrator of six picturebooks for children (of all
ages!), most recently SHY and THIS HOUSE, ONCE. She lives in a colorful house
in Connecticut, where she is busy working on her next book, about a worm. You
can learn more about Deborah and her work at www.deborahfreedman.net.
Twitter:
@DeborahFreedman
Instagram:
@freedmanillustrates
Facebook:
@deborahfreedman.author.illustrator
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