Tending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children's Narratives about Slavery and Freedom

By Karen Michele Chandler

In many popular depictions of Black resistance to slavery, stereotypes around victimization and the heroic efforts of a small number of individuals abound. These ideas ignore the powers of ordinary families and obscure the systematic working of racism. Tending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children’s Narratives about Slavery and Freedom examines Black-authored historical novels and films for children that counter this distortion and depict creative means by which ordinary African Americans survived slavery and racism in early America.

Tending to the Past argues that this important, understudied historical writing—freedom narratives—calls on young readers to be active, critical thinkers about the past and its legacies within the present. The book examines how narratives by children’s book authors, such as Joyce Hansen, Julius Lester, Marilyn Nelson, and Patricia McKissack, and the filmmakers Charles Burnett and Zeinabu irene Davis, were influenced by Black cultural imperatives, such as the Black Arts Movement, to foster an engaged, culturally aware public. Through careful analysis of this rich body of work, Tending to the Past thus contributes to ongoing efforts to construct a history of Black children’s literature and film attuned to its range, specificity, and depths.

Tending to the Past provides illuminating interpretations that will help scholars and educators see the significance of the freedom narratives’ reconstructions in a neoliberal era, a time of shrinking opportunities for many African Americans. It offers models for understanding the powers and continuing relevance of the Black child’s creative agency and the Black cultural practices that have fostered it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781496845955

Karen Michele Chandler

Karen Michele Chandler is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the University of Louisville’s Department of English. She has published many articles on American, African American, and children’s literature and film.

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Cover: Tending to the Past: Selfhood and Culture in Children’s Narratives about Slavery and Freedom, Written by Karen Michele Chandler, Published by University Press of Mississippi

Tending to the Past

Tending To The Past

Selfhood and Culture in Children’s Narratives about Slavery and Freedom

Karen Michele Chandler

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Children’s Literature Association Series

Children’s Literature Association Series

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2024 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, Spring 2006. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2006 Children’s Literature Association.

An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 47, no. 1, 2016, pp. 77–92. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chandler, Karen Michele, author.

Title: Tending to the past : selfhood and culture in children’s narratives about slavery and freedom / Karen Michele Chandler.

Other titles: Children’s Literature Association series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2024. | Series: Children’s literature association series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023040991 (print) | LCCN 2023040992 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496845931 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496845948 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496845955 (epub) | ISBN 9781496845962 (epub) | ISBN 9781496845979 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496845986 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—United States—History—Juvenile literature. | American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. | Children’s literature, American—History and criticism. | African Americans in literature. | African American children in literature. | African American children—Books and reading. | African American authors. | African Americans—Social conditions—History—Juvenile literature.

Classification: LCC E441 .C45 2024 (print) | LCC E441 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/9282—dc23/eng/20231002

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040991

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023040992

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In loving memory of Irene Chandler and Ben Chandler

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Freedom Narratives, History, and Black Agency

Chapter 2. Retaining African Selfhood and Culture in American Slavery

Chapter 3. Tending to Memory and African American Culture

Chapter 4. Stealing Letters: Freedom Narratives, Literacy, and Black Vernacular Traditions

Chapter 5. Let’s Play: Black Children’s Agency and the Pursuit of Fun

Chapter 6. Tending to the Land: Challenges of Black Financial Agency and Community in Youth Freedom Narratives

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to friends, family members, and colleagues who have helped me during the many years I worked on this book. Their help has taken so many forms and proved indispensable.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge early professional allies: Betsy Erkkila and David McWhirter. Betsy not only provided regular encouragement but also offered an inspiring model of a scholar and teacher whose interests encompassed film, literature, culture, and theory. David read my writing carefully and encouraged me to write a book, providing detailed guidelines for how I might do so. His constructive, discerning commentary about an earlier project greatly aided my work on this book.

I thank the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Louisville for its generous support for my scholarship through its professional development fund. I used some of the fund for children’s books and films, which helped as I concentrated more on writing about children’s texts. I also very much appreciate the support of the late Dean J. Blaine Hudson as I expanded the focus of my work to include children’s literature and cultures. I benefited from his two visits to my classes where he spoke about the history of Black resistance and misconceptions about Black history.

I am grateful to Lisa Sizemore Valenzuela and Linda Wilson for sharing their knowledge of diverse children’s books. I also thank the staff at the Jaffrey Public Library, particularly the former director Joan Knight, who accommodated my visit to explore the Amos Fortune papers.

I also thank past and current colleagues, including Susan Griffin, Carol Mattingly, Beth Willey, Mary Makris, Susan Ryan, Benjamin Hufbauer, and Frank Kelderman, for reading various parts of this book when it was still very much in process. Their comments helped me sharpen my ideas and confront important questions. Mary, Susan Ryan, Carol, and Benjamin were especially helpful when I shifted the focus of my writing and research to children’s literature. I am grateful to Sena Naslund for her friendship and encouragement. I thank Nancy Theriot for inviting me to give my first public lecture on children’s literature. That lecture was one of the starting points for this book.

I am profoundly grateful to scholars of children’s literature, who helped me think in complicated ways about culturally responsive children’s literature. These scholars include Leona Fisher, Susan C. Griffith, Michelle Pagni Stewart, Lois Rauch Gibson, Yvonne Atkinson, Lisa Rowe Fraustino, Andrea Wei-Ying, Meena Khorana, Naomi Lesley, Paula Connolly, Althea Tait, Richard Flynn, Katharine (Kate) Capshaw, Michelle Martin, Claudia Nelson, Jesus Montaño, Dawn Heinecken, and the late June Cummins. I thank the organizers of Children’s Literature Association panels for accepting my work and giving me opportunities to try out my ideas and gain feedback. I am grateful to those who attended the panels and shared questions or feedback about my papers. I thank Richard, Kate, and Annette Wannamaker for accepting earlier versions of two chapters that appear here for publication in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly and Children’s Literature in Education.

I thank Roxanne Harde, Katie Keene, Katie Turner, and the staff at the University Press of Mississippi for their kind support.

I am grateful to Naomi, Kate Capshaw, Jane Gangi, and KaaVonia Hinton for having read and commented on drafts of the book’s chapters. I thank Kaa, too, for her dedication to our writing support group. I am also grateful to Carol Cummings and my husband David Anderson for inviting me to join their weekly writing sessions.

My family have inspired me as I have worked on this project. My children Maya and Ben Anderson, now adults, led me back to children’s literature years ago and guided me to interesting questions about it. My sister Joyce Patterson has offered support by expressing sincere interest in everything I write. James, Patrice, and Parker Anderson provided space as I was finishing my revisions on the book. My dear husband David has been supportive and encouraging throughout the long process of writing.

Tending to the Past

Introduction

My fascination with children’s historical fiction was sparked by Charles Burnett’s film adaptation of Gary Paulsen’s novel Nightjohn. I had long taught antebellum and postbellum literature about slavery and neo-slave narratives such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which informed my interest in the adaptation.¹ Burnett is best known for arthouse films such as Killers of Sheep (1978) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) and is a central figure in the L.A. Rebellion, a collective of independent, UCLA-affiliated African and African American cinematic artists who began making films in the 1960s. As a director, writer, and cinematographer, Burnett has translated an aesthetic attuned to the nuances of the Black vernacular into inventive, provocative representations of everyday African American experiences. Although more commercial than his independent films, Nightjohn, which aired on the Disney Channel in 1996, was strikingly different from many other representations of slavery, especially in its portrayal of the relationship between literacy and vernacular culture. Unlike Gary Paulsen’s novel and many antebellum slave narratives, the film does not valorize reading and writing over orality. Burnett’s film portrays enslaved and fugitive African Americans who rely on both Black and non-Black ways of communicating, without one way being valued as better.² The film’s Black characters, within the constraints of slavery, claim and creatively transform the dominant culture’s tools, such as alphabetic literacy, to express themselves, resist domination, and gain freedoms. The characters demonstrate the nurturing and ingenious powers of Black culture through storytelling, religious practice, and modes of leadership, caretaking, learning, and other interpersonal connections.

I wondered how common this emphasis on Black cultural supports for survival was in texts for children, and started a search that led to my discovery of the representational patterns in many fictional narratives about African Americans’ enslavement and freedom in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. My search led me to formulate the questions that shape this book: How have twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black authors reimagined African American personal and cultural survival during the eras of slavery and Reconstruction? And, what is the significance of these narratives’ historical reconstructions for young audiences in our own neoliberal era? In other words, what ideological work are these texts performing through their focus on Black culture and its strategies for surviving oppression?

Tending to the Past argues that the narratives under discussion in this book, along with ideologically similar texts, comprise the freedom narrative genre, which challenges longstanding stereotypes of Blackness and fills in significant gaps and silences that inform many popular accounts of Black history. They perform this cultural work by recreating Black historical experiences through the perspectives and actions of young Black persons and rooting these perspectives and actions in distinctly Black cultures. In doing so, these children’s texts resist, and provide alternatives to, abiding cultural myths about African American identity and status, such as the lingering condition of group victimization (C. Johnson), the persistence of personal and group inadequacy, and the incapacity to realize the promise of American life.³ As Christopher Myers has pointed out, historical writing about the era of slavery and twentieth-century civil rights struggles has been one of the few areas in which publishers have allowed Black lives to be central (The Apartheid). Yet much of the modern literature and film set in the era of slavery or Reconstruction explores African Americans’ group subjection, and presents Black resistance and empowerment as exceptions that only a small number of heroic Black individuals have achieved. By contrast, many authors, including those I explore in this study, have been instrumental in using this focus to normalize African American individuals’, particularly African American children’s, agency. Freedom narratives contribute a distinctly pro-Black message that counters popular dominant culture assumptions about African Americans’ group victimization, waywardness, pathology, and other conditions and behaviors commonly understood as misaligned with American opportunity. These historical texts acknowledge and evoke the horrors of slavery, even as they highlight representations of Black communal resourcefulness and group and individual creativity. In offering this balance and correction, these culturally informed narratives not only address the expectation that children’s literature should offer hope and reassurance to child readers, but also reflect historical evidence of African American individual and communal resilience that is not widely acknowledged in the popular imagination (Berlin xvi).

My book’s title, which I borrow from Lucille Clifton’s poem I am accused of tending to the past, reflects her speaker’s need to go beyond the dominant culture’s inadequate attention to Black history. The poem’s speaker is accused of shaping Black history in a way that suits her rather than offering an objective, balanced account (Clifton, I am). Similarly, freedom narratives might arguably be called attempts to shape Black history into something that is palatable, celebratory, and partial to Black political agendas. The texts are partial because they emphasize Black perspectives, but these perspectives are legitimate, informing interpretations that are sensitive to a range of lived and felt experience that is too often ignored. Like Clifton’s speaker, freedom narratives maintain and encourage a connection to history that is complex and that discourages complacency. Whereas the poem’s speaker envisions herself as a mother figure who helps a personified history grow and express itself, freedom narratives rely on a blend of researched and imagined constructions of Black experience to encourage their audiences to see what may be very unfamiliar, not only because the representations are historical, but also because they depart from dominant culture standards and approved or official ideas about Blackness and American history. The narratives, for instance, complicate and even subvert polarities, fostering readers’ capacity to develop various resources in envisioning the past and seeing its relationship to the present. In tending to the past, the films and fiction encourage critical thinking about it, about the relationship between past and present systemic oppression, and about the prevalence of ideas about Black history that simplify and distort Black American experiences and identities.

Tending to the Past concentrates on children’s historical fiction and film created by Black authors from the 1980s onward. I argue that these freedom narratives are radical in exploring Black persons’ lives within and outside American slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The texts, as my book shows, portray the creativity and power of ordinary Black people who were enslaved or lived in circumscribed freedom during the era of slavery or Reconstruction. In offering important revisionist histories that challenge stereotypes of African American identity, culture, and history, the narratives counter silences about Black lives that have long been standard in mainstream accounts of American history, especially school textbooks and children’s literature. The freedom narratives I examine do not focus, for the most part, on epic heroics, such as those detailed in many antebellum slave narrative accounts of escapes from slavery, which continue to serve as the basis for many children’s books about Black history. Enslaved persons’ autobiographies are significant parts of the African American literary heritage, and contemporary children’s narratives about fugitives from slavery are essential, too, because they acknowledge ways in which African Americans—albeit a minority of African Americans—resisted enslavement.⁴ Yet escape narratives are disproportionate in literary and cinematic representations of slavery. The primary sources central to this book, by contrast, portray the everyday struggle of Black children and youth (and their biological and adopted families) to think and act in ways that preserve themselves and their networks of support. These texts focus on the ways Black children and adults created sustainable lives in spite of enslavement, racism, and socioeconomic oppression. I use the term freedom narratives, because although they were crafted to explore experiences that were shaped by enslavement, they insist on the power of ordinary African Americans to assert their freedom to resist a dominant culture’s circumscriptions and violent denials of Black selfhood and community.

Freedom narratives I discuss in this book encompass the experience of enslavement and freedom; they show the continuities between what are often thought to be sharply different conditions. I would never equate freedom and slavery, but by including narratives about characters who are not enslaved, along with texts that focus on slavery, I show how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black freedom was informed and limited by the practice of slavery and the racism that justified it. Whether legalized or illicit, freedom for Black persons, as Joyce Hansen’s Home Is With Our Family, Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village, Mildred Pitts Walter’s Second Daughter, Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, and other narratives pointedly demonstrate, was precarious. It depended on both white persons’ and institutions’ acknowledgment of Black civil rights and humanity and a Black person’s and community’s ingenuity and persistence in claiming rights. Whether Black characters are free during or after the antebellum era, they are often judged by the status of the enslaved, but they also operate with self-conceptions that transcend legal definitions and the dominant culture’s diminishment of Blackness. Yet this is true to a great extent in the narratives that concentrate on characters who are enslaved: They see or aim to see themselves as free, in spite of their legal status. Tending to the Past explores these complex reckonings with social identity and with the private sense of selfhood that Black communities nourished. Thus, the protagonists in the freedom narratives I discuss here and the larger body of texts to which they belong are varied: children and youth who are enslaved in the South or North, who have gained legal freedom through the US justice system, a state’s legislative action, federal law (i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation), or flight. In some narratives, characters are free while family members remain enslaved; others are part of families that emerged from slavery before they were born. These are just some of the conditions that define characters’ social positions and identities. Yet in spite of this variety, the freedom to resist inscribed in the narratives calls on readers to see beyond abiding stereotypes that associate Black people with subjection, pathology, incompetence, and victimhood. The narratives not only portray Black agency, but also foster readers’ awareness of their own power to interpret the past and present, to resist social injustice and to be creative interpreters of American experience amid dominant cultural protocols that push them to conform to a status quo that discounts and distorts Black experience and perspectives.

In selecting texts for this book, I have concentrated on literature and film by Black writers and directors that reflect the influence of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and 1970s. The BAM, the artistic extension of the Black Power Movement, centered Black perspectives and cultural values and rejected integration and dominant cultural standards as indicators of Black success. I argue that the roots of the freedom narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century are largely in the BAM, which fostered a commitment to representing Black lives in their complexity and to acknowledging the generative powers of Black people, communities, and cultures. The BAM’s emphasis on foregrounding Black expressive traditions and worldviews is evident in the freedom narratives’ reconstructions of Black history, which give weight and dimension to ordinary African Americans’ fight for freedom and dignity within and outside the bounds of legal slavery. The freedom narratives are also shaped by Black feminist critiques and revisions of BAM’s often masculinist tendencies. This feminist influence is evident in many texts’ portrayal of girls’ agentic action and leadership, often within the contexts of home and community, rather than in white-dominated spaces. Yet the feminist influence extends to textual representations of voice, intergenerational respect, and the creativity possible in ordinary persons’ lives. Moreover, the narratives represent the interiority, social struggles, and achievement of children, youth, and adults through Black perspectives that often depart from and critique the emphases in dominant culture stories. The narratives’ emphases thus call on audiences to read and understand history, selfhood, achievement, and freedom differently—indeed to free themselves from the stereotypes of Black personhood and culture that have long persisted in American culture. As my examination of various freedom narratives reveals, the influence of Black 1960s and 1970s social change movements is instrumental to the genre’s representations of Black agency, community, and freedom.

I call the texts freedom narratives because of their focus on characters’ insistence on thinking and acting freely within the constraints of slavery and circumscribed legal freedom. The words free and freedom are common in the texts, resonating with the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. Within the civil rights movements of the period, ideas of Black freedom proliferated through events, actions, and words that referenced liberation: The Freedom Riders, the Freedom Now Party, Freedom Schools, Freedom Summer, and freedom songs are examples. Although the term freedom narrative has served as a synonym for enslaved African Americans’ autobiographies, or slave narratives, I borrow and adapt the term, because it refers to storytelling and can be understood as alluding to Black persons’ fight for freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the twentieth century. As historical texts about the struggle to be free, freedom narratives also evoke Virginia Hamilton’s conception of liberation literature, a range of her historical writing that foregrounds the pursuit of freedom. In describing the contents of Her Stories, a collection of folktales and biographical sketches that she classifies as liberation literature, she explains that they are drawn from tales told by mostly girls who lived on plantations that were a means to free themselves through their imagination; in adapting these stories for her book, she sought to evoke this claiming of freedom and to show the empowerment they gave themselves (Clark 29). In other discussions of her liberation literature, Hamilton also explains that the freedom extends to the reader, who by identifying with a Black protagonist, bears witness to the character’s trials and suffering and triumphs. To the extent that the protagonist finds liberty, so, too, does the reader, as the witness who understands the struggle as a personal one and responds within with a spiritual sense of freedom (Reflections 285). As Hamilton asserts, historical literature provides opportunities for readers to recognize and understand experiences that may be outside their frames of reference; the process can be profound, transformative, and empowering.

Tending to the Past explores middle-grade historical narratives from the early 1980s through the mid-2010s. The primary texts include a diverse set of middle-grade novels such as Virginia Hamilton’s The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl, Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun, Joyce Hansen’s The Captive and Home Is With Our Family, Julius Lester’s Time’s Memory, Walter Dean Myers’s The Glory Field, Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton, and Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Sugar. In addition to these stand-alone novels, my list includes a few series books: Hansen’s I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl and Patricia McKissack’s A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, both part of Scholastic’s Dear America series; Hansen’s Out From This Place, the second book in a trilogy that begins with Which Way Freedom?; and Mildred Taylor’s The Land, an installment in the Logan family series. I do not classify Paulsen’s Nightjohn as a freedom narrative, because the novel lacks the attention to Black culture that enriches the film adaptation, but I discuss both. In addition to Burnett’s Nightjohn, Tending to the Past examines another children’s film, Zeinabu irene Davis’s Mother of the River. The primary sources also include Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village, a book of poems that chronicles a Black community’s history and resonates in interesting ways with Hansen’s Home Is With Our Family, which dramatizes the last year of the community’s existence.

This formal variety suggests some of the versatility Black authors have brought to answering the call for recovering Black history for young audiences, but I could have ranged much more broadly to include picture books, biography, graphic narratives, additional verse novels, and even young adult literature.⁵ I decided to focus on middle-grade narratives because they follow child protagonists over time, focusing in considerable detail on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, the effects of societal shifts on individuals and families, and the ways in which children and youth embraced and used culturally specific survival methods (Brooks and McNair 130). Long-form narrative is well-equipped both to show the personal and cultural processes that enable creativity and survival: As my analysis shows, the texts’ uses of narrative allow audiences to see Black children and youth grow, explore, and create within and outside the contexts of nurturing family, friendships, and/or community, giving detailed attention both to characters’ interior and external realities. The decision to focus on middle-grade novels also facilitates exploring how the generic elements of freedom narratives work across formally similar texts. This is not to dispute the power of other literary modes, such as the compression and evocativeness of lyrical poetry. Yet the novels I discuss here are so varied and rich that I found it useful to keep to a relatively narrow focus in order to dig deeper to illuminate the significance of recurring narrative patterns and motifs in the genre’s centering of Black worldviews.

Yet my parameters do hint at broader possibilities. Tending to the Past argues that children’s films by Burnett and Davis, such as Nightjohn and Mother of the River (1995), respectively, also serve as important, if often overlooked, Black alternatives to mainstream entertainments for young audiences. With their children’s films, Burnett and Davis, much lauded independent filmmakers, are specifically concerned with offering young viewers empowering portrayals of young Black protagonists within the fold of Black communities. The films relate thematically to the novels I discuss, using cinematic means to explore the child protagonists’ Black cultural values, communicative power, and resistance. While filmmaking is a collaborative art that involves input from dozens of technicians and artists, Tending to the Past relies on the auteur theory’s conception of the director-artist who is able to use the contributions of a film’s cast and crew in the service of distinct, identifiable visual styles and, perhaps more importantly, thematic emphases (B. Nichols 222; Sarris 662–63).⁶ As artists who largely have worked outside the Hollywood film industry, Burnett and Davis, another member of the L.A. Rebellion, arguably exercise considerable control over the process of shaping their films as lead authors (The Story).

Certainly, Nightjohn and Mother of the River parallel the other freedom narratives’ use of sustained storytelling to portray young Black characters’ agency. Another text central to my analysis, Nelson’s My Seneca Village (2015), as a book of lyrical persona poems, would seem to be more of an outlier. Nelson’s book departs from other texts under discussion here in not focusing on a single protagonist and in not presenting a sustained period of any particular character’s childhood or youth. Instead, My Seneca Village offers the story of a Black community through highlighting personal moments, exchanges, and epiphanies of various characters. This approach provides a collective insiders’ account of the community’s history as both a predominantly Black village and an inclusive, tolerant mecca that drew European immigrants, working class persons, and fugitive and newly emancipated enslaved persons. In spite of its formal difference from other freedom narratives I examine in Tending to the Past, My Seneca Village highlights Black interiority, supportive interpersonal networks, and Black cultural emphases in ways that resonate with Hansen’s more documentary-like narrative interpretation of Seneca Village, Home Is With Our Family (2010), and other place-based novels about Black survival.⁷ In bringing My Seneca Village into conversation with Hansen’s novel, I suggest that freedom narratives are not only long-form novels. And I encourage others to investigate how the forms and modes of other young people’s literature and media shape the freedom narratives’ representations of Black agency and community.

In organizing my argument about the freedom narrative genre, Tending to the Past takes a comparative and thematic, rather than a strict chronological, approach. I found that a thematic approach aided my efforts to consider the continuities between the texts I discuss and the freedom narratives’ relative consistency in sharing radical pro-Black perspectives on history. My approach does permit me, however, to consider how neoliberalism’s increasing entrenchment in American society in the 1990s and afterward has affected the development of diverse literature. The genre continues to evolve, and it will be interesting to see how the Black Lives Matter movement and the widespread protests against anti-Black policing influence historical writing and how the reactionary moves to ban culturally sensitive literatures affect authors’ ability to promote radical thinking about Black history and racial difference.

While centering on close textual analysis of the freedom narratives, Tending to the Past also reckons with their cultural work: They provided audiences with culturally specific frameworks for understanding a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black experiences (Brooks and McNair 130). Central to my discussion of the various freedom narratives is a concern with the texts’ representations of Black struggle and survival in the past and with their concern with empowering audiences in the present by fostering intellectual engagement. As my argument shows, Black history is never done; the freedom narratives encourage audiences to see continuities between past and present structures of racism and economic injustice and to recognize and lay claim to the creative means by which many African Americans navigated and survived these challenges. Julius Lester’s Time’s Memory (2006), for instance, is emphatic about the need for later generations of African Americans to understand and empathize with those who preceded them and to memorialize Black lives in their complexity. The novel follows a West African (Dogon) spirit’s transformation into an enslaved Black youth who discovers a viable way of preserving the memory of enslaved persons who have died. As a collector and recorder of their stories, he relies both on oral testimony from the dead and his own written as-told-to accounts that honor their lives and share their memory. In the process, Lester models ways of understandings that resist the common reduction of enslaved persons to the condition imposed by enslavers and legalized by society. This lesson has applications beyond the novel’s concern with slavery, for Lester charges his readers with seeking out the stories of older generations more generally, not only to honor ancestors, but also to have a fuller understanding of society.

In recognizing freedom narratives as an important current in the larger tradition of African American children’s literature, Tending to the Past contributes to a substantial body of scholarship that illuminates the literature’s necessary correctives to the omissions and misrepresentations in much of children’s literature and popular culture. As Violet Harris, Wanda Brooks, and Jonda C. McNair have argued, Black children’s literature challenges dominant cultural myopia, amnesia, and simplifications that shape much of children’s literature (V. Harris 547, 555; Brooks and McNair 129). As Brooks and McNair explain, Black children’s literature emerged, in large part, as an oppositional and creative endeavor that challenged the selective tradition in children’s literature that dominates publishers’ catalogues and curricular plans (130). The selective tradition excludes culturally specific perspectives and experiences of minoritized racial and ethnic groups (130). By contrast, Black children’s books and media that are attuned to Black culture and history, engage, as Harris avers, in ‘a storied tradition of resistance’; that is, while accurately portraying historical facts, they do so in ways that highlight African American resistance (V. Harris 555).⁸ As I argue in Tending to the Past, this opposition or resistance is manifest in freedom narratives not primarily through portraying dominant culture practices, rituals, or values, but rather through focusing on Black characters’ perspectives, actions, and networks of support in contact with or beyond the dominant culture.

This contrast between literature in the selective tradition and an African American tradition that resists its protocols is central to Paula Connolly’s research on the history of representations of slavery in children’s literature