Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (6 page)

WELLS, ENGLAND

My wife and I were in London for a week before we left by train for Bath, a pretty and touristy town known for its curative waters. According to tradition, you sip from a ladle of spring water and are healed. I drank from the ladle, made a sour face, and immediately thought of ale: a pint of ale could make it all better.

We stayed at a B&B on the famous Royal Crescent, slept in a frilly bed, ate our daily English breakfast, which included tomatoes and kippers, and strolled in the mist, for it was early April, still cold, still short on the supply of sunlight. There were reports of snow, but we saw neither flurries nor a white blanketing of the streets, only frost on parked cars.

In Bath we visited the usual sites: the spa, the church, and the costume museum. We saw a play by Alan Bennett about an
MP
who is having an affair — imagine that, such unexpected behavior from an elected official. I recall one historical home at the end of the Royal Crescent. It was dedicated to middle-class life around Jane Austen's time (Austen having lived in Bath). And if this house was any indication, life for the middle class had been comfortable. There were ornate plates and cups patterned with Chinese characters, fine cutlery, paintings of the gentry, dainty cordials, and so on.

In the kitchen was a wooden-wheeled contraption that turned the fireplace spit with the power of a feisty dog. More detail: when a roast was impaled on the spit, a small dog — perhaps a Jack Russell — would be placed in the wheel and made to jog, thus turning the spit. If the dog slowed — or dared to stop — the kitchen help would spank its rump. The dog would be rewarded for this circular trot with scraps from the roast and a warm place to sleep.

After three days in Bath, we ventured out by a regional bus to Salisbury, an even lovelier town, with its celestial cathedral, and then to Wells, which also has a cathedral that could make believers out of nonbelievers. In Wells, we enjoyed English tea in a little shop that sold playful teapots resembling pigs or chickens or small cathedrals — touristy stuff, things you pick up and put back down. However, my wife bought a teapot shaped like an antique sewing machine — silly but cute. After tea, my wife went off to an actual antique shop, also cute, and I had nothing to do but sit on a bench, hands in my pockets from the cold, and watch the activity of a vegetable market, which was nearing its day's end. Because very little was happening, I got up and bought two apples, my contribution to the town's economy.

My wife came out of the antique shop and pointed to the adjacent store — at least a half hour there, I figured. Hands in my coat pockets, I ambled along the cobblestone streets. (Later I would learn that I was wrong about the stones. The streets were paced with
setts
, Belgian blocks that are rectangular, not roundish.) I meandered like a lost sheep, then stopped to read a sign that announced a choral concert that evening; another sign explained that Wells had been named after three wells dedicated to Saint Andrew. This had been around
AD
704, when Saxons were in control, and King Ine of Wessex was the law. I did my best to input that data into the machinery of my frontal lobe, then returned to find my wife exiting the store with a small package. “Thimbles,” she told me, she had bought thimbles. Thimbles I could remember.

Wells is a pretty town, an historical town, and a friendly town — the townspeople smile and stop to chat with one another, just as they do on the
BBC
television programs we've watched over the years. We discovered the Vicars' Close, reportedly the oldest residential street in Europe, harking back to the mid-fourteenth century. And by “residential” we mean houses lined up and facing other houses, thus creating a neighborhood, a block or, their word, a
close
. We walked with our purchases (teapot and thimbles) up this street, which is neither long nor wide but, like the town's other streets, paved with
setts
.

A girl with blond locks came out onto her porch to look at us, the first tourists of an early spring. Perhaps she had mistaken our steps for those of her mother, or a friend, or possibly a boy. Her eyes followed us briefly before she went back inside, disappointed that it was just
us
, a couple seeing what there was to see. But we didn't fret over our tag:
tourists
. We walked up the street twice because we knew we would not return again.

We ate our apples on the bus ride home, apples that tasted of another kind of earth. Then it began to snow.

* * *

Footnote: Wells has produced no eminent artists, writers, or musicians. However it can claim one heavy-handed educator by the name of John Keate, born in 1773, who became a headmaster at Eton. Finding the boys in need of discipline when he arrived, he reintroduced the birch. It's claimed that he flogged eighty boys in one day, a good workout for the arm. One wonders what the boys did to deserve such a thrashing.

WHY I STOPPED WRITING CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

“Keep Cool” became my mantra in December 2005, after the phone rang for the third time. I knew by then that a short message would be left, expounding the caller's disappointment in me. The first two calls had been surprising rants which made my invisible antennas, not unlike the antennas of ants, start vibrating.

I, a poet, was suddenly controversial over my chapter book
Marisol
, a 140-page novel about a little girl (Marisol) living in Pilsen, a primarily Latino area of Chicago. The fictional Luna family plans to move from Pilsen to the suburb of Des Plaines, twenty-five miles east, which, as it so happens, is also noticeably Latino. Marisol is not happy about their in-state migration — a drawing on page 20 shows her frowning, hand on chin. She'll have to say good-bye to friends, school, neighbors, and Rascal, her cat, who has mysteriously disappeared the day before the move — childhood drama but, alas, nothing like the drama that followed the little book's publication.

A little history: in 2003, I had been contacted by an American Girl editor, asking if I would be game to write a chapter novel for their series about preteen girls. I listened with the heartbeat of a tree sloth, calmly, because I was a veteran — how many times had I heard of writing projects that would bring me fame and fortune? The editor explained that the book would accompany a doll or, more accurately, that the book would be one of the doll's accessories, along with costumes and matching clothes that
real
ten-year-old girls could wear. This doll, yet unnamed, would be the 2005 Girl of the Year. At this my heart, with its freight of blood, began to pick up speed — this wasn't a prank call after all. When I suggested Fresno, my hometown, as a setting, the editor said Fresno was not an available locale — the 2004 Girl of the Year had been Kailey, a California surfer. The editor said that the narrative should be set either in New York City or Chicago. And the girl should be a dancer.

A
ballet
folklórico
dancer, I suggested, picturing Marisol in a flaring dress the colors of the Mexican flag.

Possibly, the editor remarked.

I agreed to the project, a wholly new venture for me. I wrote a complete draft in a month (in the end, Marisol would do tap and jazz), then tinkered with the prose, listening to the parent company (Mattel) about adding the details that would make Marisol hip — she needed a cell phone, for instance. Because she also would need a carrying case for her dance costumes, could I mention the carrying case once or twice in the narrative? I was getting the picture now, and dutifully added a purse and necklace — merchandise, in other words. I realized that this doll was a commercial project, most certainly. But why was it necessary to sell the glittery top hat as an extra?

Once I finished writing
Marisol
, I didn't think much about the manuscript or the doll. I was at work on a new book of poems, titled
A Simple Plan
, which included “Bean Plants,” possibly the best thing I've written, a longish effort, lamentable in tone, a poem about how even a short-lived bean plant suffers — arms out like our crucified Jesus. I quote the beginning:

I wrote this favorite poem of mine about the same time I was working on
Marisol.
I'm a writer who can compartmentalize. Each project is mutually exclusive, the frivolous and the serious, the small press and the commercial press, the poetry that requires close reading and the prose that can make sense while I am eating an ice cream cone.

The doll was born in November 2005 in an edition of 240,000 units.
Good God
, I thought blasphemously, a book of mine, however simple, had the publication run of a major author! My palms became itchy: was that a sign that I would finally make money in this industry? Of course, I didn't expect anyone to read the book; no, it would be tossed aside as the girls immediately began to comb Marisol's hair.

But an electrical storm swept westward to hover above my house in California. My own hair stood up in alarm, both the black and the grayish strands. The first calls came from the mayor of Des Plaines, from aldermen, from Chicano activists. More came from
Time
magazine, the
BBC
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
,
NBC
's
Today Show
,
ABC
's
World News Tonight
, an art director, a journalist from Spain, students, professors — all because of a piece of dialogue uttered by Marisol's mother. Using her motherly reasoning, she argues that the family should leave Pilsen. “Dad and I think it's time that we move out of this neighborhood,” she says. Later in the same paragraph, she remarks that it is dangerous and there is no place for Marisol to play. This apparent slight was caught by Andrew Herman of the
Chicago Sun-Times
, who brought it to the public's attention. Mr. Herman was among the first and last callers. I didn't pick up either time.

I can be a loudmouth on occasion, but my antennas were rotating cautiously. I watched the blinking red light of my answering machine as the journalist requested my response. I erased his message with a light touch of my index finger.

I had written that Pilsen was not good enough for Marisol the doll — or so the callers' logic implied. In truth, the mother comforts the daughter with a sighing heart. She acknowledges that her daughter has no place to play except an urban street busy with traffic. She also says that the neighborhood is dangerous — this phrasing, I will admit.

People came out swinging. They were “outraged” by this dig at Pilsen — and perhaps Chicago as a whole. What would parents say when their little girls discovered that their own neighborhood had been deemed not good enough for a doll? Congressman Luis Gutierrez wrote a furious letter to the president of American Girl, who wrote back in turn, defending the book. Daniel Solis, alderman of the Twenty-Fifth Ward, set up a meeting with representatives of Mattel. I was not privy to the outcome, but the gist of it was that Alderman Solis was not inclined to outrage. Perhaps he saw the case of a fictitious character speaking her mind as a benign calamity. In any event, he said the description was “probably an unintended mistake.”

Eight years after the book's publication, I will say that it was not a mistake. As an author, I come clean. I made Marisol's mother say those words — she was my character, right? She was speaking her mind. And she could read the newspapers. Chicago's Pilsen area is surrounded by mayhem — the mother knew this, and the father, too — along with all the other good people walking down the street. The mother argued that urban life was not for her. It was her house and her daughter, and in her own house it was reasonable that she would say what she felt. That's life and that's fiction.

But the following figures are not fiction. Chicago is statistically dangerous. Here are the unfortunate facts: from 2005 (when Marisol was Girl of the Year) through 2012, Chicago has averaged more than 450 murders yearly. Moreover, 100 murders had occurred by April of every one of those years, except in 2012, when 100 murders were committed by March.

Marisol
is a light, sugary narrative set right in the middle of Chicago, where murders have been occurring for decades. In 1991, for instance, 941 Chicagoans were killed. Do you think any mother, fictional or real, would be clueless in the face of this information? Do you think that she wouldn't warn her daughters — and sons — to keep safe when they leave the house? And let's not speak of rapes, burglaries, carjackings, arsons, muggings, domestic violence, old-fashioned stickups, wretched litter, verbal nastiness, mindless and dispiriting graffiti. Between 2005 and 2013, more than 3,500 Chicagoans were murdered, with many more wounded in the crossfire. On the holiday weekend of July 4, 2014, fifty-three people were shot, seventeen fatally, including a girl of eleven. The grief must be overwhelming.

How could Chicago's elected officials — especially the aldermen from the southern districts — argue that its neighborhoods are safe? In fact, some of these same elected officials have themselves bedded down inside prison. Four of the last seven governors of Illinois have served — or are serving — jail time. It's lawless at the top. Isn't Jesse Jackson, Jr., getting ready to shed a designer suit for jail attire, sentenced to thirty months for scheming to spend campaign money on personal items? And meanwhile, his wife, Sandra Jackson (wasn't she an alderman in Chicago?) also is doing time in jail for some crime.

I could have had the mother really go off. I could have had her tell her daughter in strong terms, “
Sal si puedes!
Get out of here if you can!” Instead, she tenderly explains their move by saying that the family wants another kind of life for themselves, one with a backyard, for instance. Migration makes sense for them, just as migration from Mexico to Chicago, or Houston, or my hometown of Fresno, makes sense for others. Life is not stagnant. The Pilsen of 2005 is not the Pilsen of 2014; isn't gentrification in the works?

Nevertheless, the controversy did not go away quickly — the red eye of my answering machine kept blinking. On March 28, 2006, fifty students from an alternative high school appeared at American Girl's Chicago store and restaurant to protest
Marisol
, the book and the doll. With encouragement from teachers, the students chanted, “Stop the racist doll! Respect us like you want us to respect you! Marisol don't mix with white people!” There were plenty of local television stations present, as well as newspapers journalists. Were they waiting for a melee? A few six-year-old girls cried and were led away by their mothers; the girls were hugging their dolls: Samantha, Kailey, Sara, and Marisol.

For months, I stared at the phone whenever it rang. Stared and let the message machine kick in. Did this book — this author — really deserve such over-the-top outrage? What nerve had I touched?

Eventually, someone came to my defense. In my files is a story published by a
Sun-Times
columnist on April 1, 2006. “Why shouldn't a fictional character in someone's book be allowed to say whatever they like?” the writer asks. “Frankly, the only one who comes out looking good here is American Girl Doll's owner Mattel, which, in a rare moment of corporate courage, didn't simply give in to the extortion of demands (15 scholarships, plus jobs programs, plus more — I'm surprised they didn't ask for ponies, too) but stood by its author and its book.” [Note: The previously mentioned students also asked for donations to their school.]

I received a message from a professor at Loyola University inviting me to come and debate the issue. Wouldn't that be loads of fun? Fly five hours across the country to be tarred and feathered and shipped back as cargo? I stared at our answering machine, the number of messages mounting like the daily murders in Chicago — teenagers shot right out of their shoes.

I kept quiet. I kept to myself. At night, we unplugged the telephone.

Marisol, the Girl of the Year, aged very quickly; she was gone after the Christmas rush. I have one doll on a shelf in the garage. A collector's item, she never sits up from her coffin-like box. Now and then I visit her, viewing her face through the cellophane window. She sleeps and sleeps, but when I stand the box up she awakens and opens her eyes. She doesn't accuse me at all. She's a cute doll with a carrying case over her shoulder.

* * *

In 2005, Marisol, the sixteen-inch doll shaped from plastic, was a ten-year-old. She looked lifelike, a prepubescent girl like any other. If she had been real, as in flesh-and-blood real, she would now be eighteen, grown to five-foot-seven, a freshman at the University of Chicago, majoring in psychology, with a secret desire to write poetry. On a Saturday in October, she would be hurting from failed love. I picture her, our bereted beauty, at a used bookstore. In the poetry section resides a columbarium of dead and living poets, all unread. Once poetry books are shelved in a used bookstore — whether remaindered, resold, or given away — only would-be poets visit them. If these visitors fan the pages, they cough from the dust. I see Marisol reach for my poetry collection,
A Simple Plan.
It was published three years after
Marisol
and received no attention, not a single review. The book sold 327 copies then went out of print.

Marisol picks up
A Simple Plan
and thumbs through its eighty-eight pages until she comes to “Bean Plants.” She reads it, sighs, and re-shelves the book. She opens another book, then another — more sighs through her pliable mouth, not the plastic mouth of a doll that couldn't speak for herself. If only flesh-and-blood Marisol could have told the outraged in 2005 to mind their own business. Because her family wanted to move, they just packed up and went, watching Pilsen get smaller and smaller in the side mirrors of their rental truck. The neighborhood became a memory, a place once called home. Marisol gave up dance shortly after the move. She mourned her cat Rascal, probably struck by a car. Her new best friend was Guatemalan, and another was Illinois white. When the phone rang in her new house in Des Plaines, she would run to get it.

Marisol returns to
A Simple Plan
. She opens it again, reads another poem, and sees enough there to take it to the front counter. The young woman takes my book home, me the lost father who brought her to life.