Folklore: by Barbara Bader

Transcription

1 Folklore: by Barbara Bader In 1955, Marcia Brown's Cinderella, "freely translated" from Perrault, was the first fairy-tale picture book to win a Caldecott Medal, No wonder: outside of the five-and-dime, old tales were a rarity in picture books. Folklore of all sorts came dependably in collections. There was Grimms' Fairy Tales, of course; there were English, Russian, and Japanese fairy tales There were compilations of tales from many lands. No collection was without illustrations, but these were the raisins in the cake. In 2010, the Caldecott went to Jerry Pinkney's wordless dramatization of the Aesop fable "The Lion and the Mouse" public recognition, in a way, of the ascendancy of pictures over words. Nowadays folklore comes mostly in picture books, and the few story collections that do appear are heavily pictorial, in the way of the Big Golden Books of old. But the changes of the past half century are more than skin deep. Once, folklore was the bedrock of children's literature. A child progressed from nursery rhymes and fables to folktales and literary fairy tales, then advanced to myths and legends, and emerged ready for anything high fantasy or hometown adventure. Library cataloging reflected that pattern, and so did the H.W, Wilson Children's Catalog, the bible of children's book selection. Barbara Bader, a longtime contributor to The Hort^ Book, has previously written about Verna Aardema and John Blerhorst. She is also the author of/4esop& Company, recipient of the 1992 Aesop Prize of the American Folklore Association for the most outstanding book incorporating folklore published for children or young adults. September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 19

2 Compiled from a host of library lists, the Children's Catalog represented a consensus of what children should be familiar with not unlike the corpus of recognized Western classics in college literature courses. Tbe children's canon was broader and looser, though. It included American Indian legends, animal fables from India, tall tales from the American frontier, magical tales from Japan. And from 1932, decades before Marcia Brown illustrated Cinderella, all proper library collections contained a picture-book version of a Puerto Rican folktale, Pura Belpré's Perez and Martina. Everyone knew Cinderella. Everyone knew, or was supposed to know. Brown's other 1950s folktale picture books. Puss in Boots and Dick Whittington and His Cat. But outside of the Puerto Rican community, who knew Perez and Martina'*. Gertainly not the mothers and grandmothers, cousins and aunts, who bought fairy tales as birthday presents. Perez and Martina: imperishable? Poor Perez the mouse falls into the boiling kettle of Christmas pudding that his beloved Martina the cockroach is making for him but the story oi Perez and Martina lives on as a library story twice-told. In the 1920s, Pura Belpré was working at the New York Public Library and going to the NYPL Library School when she came across books of folklore in the children's room and saw no sign of the stories she knew from her native Puerto Rico. She was in a position the best possible position to remedy that lack. In her storytelling class, Belpré wrote "Perez and Martina"; she told it at a storytelling symposium, and it became a popular puppet play. One way or another it must have caught the attention of Anne Carroll Moore, the NYPL's magisterial head of children's services. In 1932, under the imprint of Frederick Warne, a Moore intimate, Perez and Martina became a book the first book of Puerto Rican folklore by the first Puerto Rican librarian, or indeed Latina librarian, in the NYPL library system (or perhaps in any mainland library system). Perez and Martina: A Portorican Folk Taie has comedy, romance, and tragedy pictured by the Mexican illustrator Carlos Sanchez in bold, stagy scenes purportedly inspired by the puppet play. Pretty cockroach Martina, face powdered and elegantly dressed, waits on her 20 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010

3 It's a Fair assumption, then, that libraries and schools, not bookstores, kept Perez and Martina alive For seven transformative decades ^until it was only one ofa great many books offolk literature From all parts ofthe world, most ofthem picture books. WITH THE POSTWAR baby boom, schools and libraries boomed, too, and thanks to unprecedented Federal Funds For book purchases, so did children's book publishing. United balcony in hopes that gallant little Perez will call. Other suitors are turned away: their sounds do not please her. Enter Perez, crooning an old Spanish love song presented in Spanish and English and his ensuing "Chui, Chui, Chui, Chui" sounds "just like music" to Martina's ears. Nuptials follow, and then Perez's sad mishap. As for the faithful Martina: "she still sings, she still plays and she still weeps for her little Perez to come back to her!" In 1996 Belpré's groundbreaking achievements were recognized by the establishment of the Pura Belpré Award, given to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator for outstanding work portraying the Latino cultural experience, an appropriate spur to do as she did. Belpré and her cherished Perez and Martina are together again, too, in a new (2008) picture book. The Storyteller's Candle, written by Lucia González and illustrated by Lulu Delacre a heartwarming evocation of the old storytelling days at the New York Public and what it might have meant to newly arrived Puerto Rican children to hear a familiar story told in their own, familiar language. Nations euphoria, and the emergence of new nations in Asia and AFrica, quickly expanded the American market For Folklore from lands and cultures beyond the European orbit. The classic European collections were mostly made by the collectors themselves men of letters who at their best wrote simply and concisely, with directness and wit, "Once upon a time there was a gentleman who took For his second wife the proudest and haughtiest woman that was ever seen, " the Brown/Perrault Cinderella begins. But how was one to tap, and treat, the vast corpus of African Folklore material previously collected by Western anthropologists For study by other specialists? In 1947, with The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories, Harold Gourlander and George Herzog showed how. Gourlander, Folklorist and writer-at-large, and Herzog, an articled anthropologist, went to West AFrica to gather stories and learned firsthand what the stories represented in the lives of their AFrican listeners. "AFrica is many things, " we're told straightaway a continent ofmany climates, peoples, and cultures. Their stories, however, are also ours: "when [West AFricans] came to the New World as slaves they brought their stories along, and you may hear some of them today as Br'er Rabbit tales in the United States or as Bouqui and Anancy tales in the West Indies and South America. " The endnotes precisely identify the stories' sources and place each in context. Reviewers were struck September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 21

4 by the "originality and distinction" of the material and by its potential for storytelling and reading aloud, a big plus for teachers and librarians. Who could resist telling "Talk," as I did as a young librarian? "'It wasn't the cow who spoke to you,' the dog said [to the man]. 'It was the yam. The yam says leave him alone.'" The Horn Book review also took note of the illustrations deft black-and-white silhouetted drawings throughout and the scholarly care in making the book. It was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal, and Courlander was established. In the 1950s, sometimes with a collaborator, he published five additional books of folktales from Asian and African cultures (including the black South). The books attracted attention for their handsome design, their imaginative illustration, their thoughtful and expansive notes. The stories themselves had color and verve, and many got on library storytelling lists. By decade's end, Courlander had put the emerging lands of Africa and Asia on the folklore map for kids and prompted other writers, native and Western, to explore further. It was a departure. Along with the picture-booking of traditional tales initiated by Marcia Brown, it was a new beginning. In the 1940s, according to The Storyteller's Sourcehook, forty-eight books of folklore for children were published, virtually all of them collections. In the 1950s, the total jumped to eighty-five, and a few were assorted picture books of some note (illustrated by Barbara Cooney, Hans Fischer, and Feodor Rojankovsky, besides Brown). In the 1960s, a surge, an eruption: 348 folklore books in all, well over half of them picture books. And with the addition of myths and legends, which The Storyteller's Sourcebook does not index, the total would be far higher. Cultural expansion was not the only explanation. At home, the burgeoning population of preschool children came in for increased attention first in local nursery schools and neighborhood libraries, then in the federally funded Head Start program. For groups of squirmy three- and four-year-olds sitting on the floor, picture books were the obvious answer. And what better material to begin on than the age-old nursery tales? funny, fail-proof stories that practically read themselves. Opportunity knocked for veteran children's illustrator Paul Galdone, an 22 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010

5 agile, engaging storyteller who moved easily from the adventures of Anatole the mouse, in Eve Titus's imaginative tales, to the doings of the Gingerbread Boy, Henny Penny, the Three Little Pigs, Three Little Kittens, etc., etc., that occupied him for the next three decades and continue to delight young children. Outwardly, Blair Lent was Galdone's antithesis a painter and printmaker who found an artistic outlet in distinctly unconventional children's picture books. Each of Lent's books drew upon a different foreign tradition, in substance and style from The Wave, a Japanese story, through the Russian Baba Yaga, the Nigerian Why the Sun and the Moon Live in the Sky, the Chinese Tikki Tikki Tembo, the Tlingit Angry Moon, to the Japanese story that won a Caldecott for Lent, The Funny Little Woman. All these, and a few more with texts by such skilled writers as Margaret Hodges, Arlene Mosel, and William Sleator appeared in a period of eight years. Somewhere between Galdone, who focused on the familiar, and Lent, who went far afield, there was Margot Zemach. A virtuoso draftsmanillustrator, Zemach could do low comedy and high dudgeon, American folksiness and Italian craftiness as in, variously, the ubiquitous English Three Sillies, the Swedish Nail Soup, the Russian Salt, the English Teeny Tiny Woman, the Russian Speckled Hen, the Ozark Mommy, Buy Me a China Doll, the German Fisherman and His Wife, and the Italian Too Much Nose: all published, along with folk-like others, in the five-year span between 1963 and Everything in multiples. But that was the 1960s, when well-known tales were illustrated time and again and little-known tales were disinterred for their combination of artistic and ethnic potential the practice ever since. Folklore got a boost of another kind from Virginia Haviland, who was the children's reading advisor at the Boston Public Library and (from 1963) the first Children's Book Specialist at the Library of Congress. Haviland had THE SPECKLED HEN IAN NUHSKRV RHYME / AI>AI'1 Ml BV IIAKV'Ü September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 23

6 noticed, like others, that children were losing interest in fairy tales before they were able to read them. Her remedy was a total makeover. In the sixteen books of the Favorite Fairy Tales series, Haviland offered simple, fluent adaptations of fairy tales from around the world that youngsters of eight or nine could easily read, and so attractively presented that they'd want to. If someone under sixty knows the Greek myths, chances are she or he first read them in the D'Aulaires'Book of Greek Myths (1962), written and illustrated by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'aulaire. The d'aulaires had made their mark with picture books about children of the Northlands. Their pictorial biographies of all-time American heroes had swept the field and earned them a Caldecott (in 1940 ior Abraham Lincoln). They had no special knowledge of Greek mythology and no particular affinity for the accustomed art of classical Greece. Maybe being novices, like children, was a benefit. The oversize, exuberantly pictorial D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths is up to anything the gods offer. On go the illustrations, page after page, depicting every eye-blinking incident, every fraught encounter, with intriguing charts for guidance. The narrative speaks plain: "Zeus stood on Olympus and shook his head. He had to stop the careening chariot to save the earth from destruction, and he threw a thunderbolt at it." Zlatelo the Goat and Other Stories (1966) was written by the eminent Polish-Jewish-American author Isaac Bashevis Singer and illustrated by the eminent American Jewish illustrator Maurice Sendak. "Oh how I loved this book as a child!" an online Seattle Public Library reviewer writes. "I didn't understand it was based on Jewish folk tales..." If she didn't read the front jacket flap, she wouldn't have. That's not how the content was presented. Some of the stories were derived from folktales, some were original with Singer, but he made them all his. I Q 24 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010

7 Sendak had only recently begun to illustrate literary texts, and he'd done nothing deeply, absorbingly Jewish. "Ihese clever, tender, bittersweet tales...may be read silently or aloud, but they are best shared, with ample time to examine the subtleties of the etched illustrations," I wrote for Kirkus in 1966; and the comment stands. Recently I heard one read aloud in a college class. Two more, similar collections of Singer stories appeared almost immediately, both illustrated by Margot Zemach. Tbe celebrity of Singer and Sendak, and the incontestable success of their joint enterprise [Zlateh was a Newbery Honor Book, too), opened the floodgate of Jewisb stories religious, traditional, and anecdotal that was one of the defining features of the succeeding decades. The 1970s statistics are not impressive: 156 collections, 179 picture books. Not until tbe late 1980s and the 1990s would there be folklore matching and even exceeding tbe 1960s in sheer volume. But other voices were ready to be heard in tbe 1970s. Tbe decade was kicked off in spirit by Julius Lester's 1969 Black Folktales. Lester had just published, for adults, the expressly militant Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon Get Your Mama! and the first gleaning of WPA slave narratives for children. To Be a Slave. Enough of Br'er The oversize, exuberantly pictorial D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths is up to anything the gods offer. Rabbit and other talking-animal tales. Lester's take on black folklore ran to folksong and the likes of Stagger Lee. "Stagolee was, undoubtedly and without question, the baddest nigger that ever lived. Stagolee was so bad that the flies wouldn't even fly around his bead in the summertime, and snow wouldn't fall on his house in tbe winter." This was tbe voice that later, in The Tales of Uncle Remus (1987) and two succeeding volumes (1988, 1990), retold the hallowed stories of Joel Ghandler Harris, to the accompaniment ot crafty illustrations by Jerry Pinkney, replacing A. B. Frost and others. Lester's was also the voice that expanded on tbe legend oifohn Henry, in partnership with stirring, sometimes spectacular Pinkney spreads. Lester was a storyteller born into tbe tradition of the stories he told. Verna Aardema was a Midwestern schoolteacher, with literary aspirations, who took a fancy to African stories and adapted them for telling to her students. The rest is publishing history: thirty or so books, most of them picture books, illustrated by a galaxy of assorted talents. The most notable were Leo and Diane Dillon. Among the head-turning and prize-winning picture books of recent decades, several have been based on folklore. As illustrators recognized, there was no end of pictorial potential September/October 2010 The Horn Book Magazine 25

8 in those imaginative realms. The Dillons, For their part, make high drama of design. Action is Frozen in their images. Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears, a Caldecott winner, and the cagey drama Who's in Rabbit's House? stay in the mind's eye. As reigning illustrators, the Dillons even added luster to the work of one ofthe finest storytellers of recent times, Virginia Hamilton. From her first book, Zeely (1967), Hamilton's fiction had been infused with a Folklore spirit the imaginary is real and a historical sense. In The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985), she embraces the literature From the animal tales to the stories of the supernatural to the accounts of runaway slaves. Where Lester elaborates, spins out, Hamilton talks short and spare. You have to learn the language. "Now, Facts are Facts. Wiley was a boy. He and his mama lived by themselves with just Wiley's dogs. Say Wiley's papa Fell off the Ferry boat one time..." All folklore was not ethnic, either. Picture-book versions of the classic Fairy tales continued to appear, many of them splashy, empty, and evanescent. But some had individuality. Fred Marcellino made something theatrical and exciting oí Puss in Boots. Paul O. Zelinsky drew a haunted, near-surreal Hansel and Gretel and won a Galdecott For his imposing, somberly romantic Rapunzel. Jan Brett Found the ideal vehicle For her combination of rustic décor, anecdotal detail, and precise delineation in The Mitten and the public, I'm told, will have no other version. In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, numbers dominated, and now picture books were the name of the game. Gtedit the baby boomlet and the explosion of multiculturalism together with the diffusion of publish- r > As the houi hi he perfoi pproaches the Mu vihagen gather before the closed cunam, wai ting expectantly. Behind urtain thi act its prepi n r»i I tand tbe prop.t, ehearse the r lines. md dim their masks. 1^ \ 1 ^ -"«ii 26 The Horn Book Magazine September/October 2010

9 ing throughout the country. Of the 555 folklore picture books published in the nineties (out of a total of 675 folklore books overall), between a third and a half came from entities other than established trade publishers, and from locations other than New York or Boston. Computerization made it feasible; the clamor for ethnic material made it creditable; the market made it profitable. Of late, blog posts by children's writers speak of a shrinkage in the publishing oí folklore, and scrutiny of entries in The Horn Book Guide suggests that relatively little original or ambitious work is appearing. Meanwhile, a vast amount of good work has been disappearing some of it, like John Bierhorst's books of native literature of the Americas and author-illustrator Marilyn Hirsh's books of Jewish folklore, the best of its kind. All ofthat is retrievable, though: Hirsh's Tlje Rabbi and the Twenty-nine Witches, for one, has recently been republished. And what remains is a variety of approaches to familiar material, along with inventive presentations of the newfound. Take "Litde Red Riding Hood" in just four of its countless embodiments. There's a standard version from Trina Schart Hyman with all the trimmings, and a delicious spoof by James Marshall oí George and Martha fame. There's Ed Young's visually arresting Lon Po Po, a tense Chinese story of disaster averted. There's also Pretty Salma by South African author-illustrator Niki Daly, who adroitly uses the Riding Hood story to warn little African girls against sweettalking strangers. The story itself doesn't stale, it ramifies. Folklore by nature multiplies; children's books tend to run in series; and tricksters are what brave little tailors once were. So we have trickster tales from around the world by authorillustrator Gerald McDermott, Caldecott winner and honorée. We have (at least still on library shelves) Paul Goble's many artful books about Iktomi the Plains Indian trickster. We have Anansi tales retold by Eric Kimmel and illustrated by Janet Stevens, and Coyote tales retold and pictured with vigor and deadpan humor by Stevens herself Children's Catalog has long lost its sway; there's no more consensus or canon. Successful books are what's seen, read, and known. As for The Lion and the Mouse, it turns a simple metaphor into a richly emotional story, as it always has been for children. Folklore evolves. September/October 2010 Tlie Horn Book Magazine TJ

10 Copyright of Horn Book Magazine is the property of Library Journals, LLC and its content may not be copied or ed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or articles for individual use.