P.C. Mommy Knows Best
West, Diana
N othing like a night of looting and torching to bring together cat-loving Korean grocers and their boycotting black neighbors. So concludes Smoky Night, written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by...
...one is severely depressed, runs away and dies in a bus crash...
...Whitewash styles itself as a teaching tool for second- through sixth-graders studying "guidance" or "multi-cultural studies...
...More memorable than such digressions is the book's desolate, if prize-winning, theme of dysfunctional family life...
...Kim, the Korean grocer, whose cat, it turns out, has befriended Daniel's...
...n a deep bow to the video age, the American Library Association four years ago began doling out a new Honor for the Children's Video that Best Inculcates an Abiding Sense of White Guilt and Black Entitlement, Simultaneously Using the Worst Possible English Grammar...
...As grandmother speaks, a cartoon montage takes the viewer from the back of the bus, to policemen and attack dogs, to policemen and fire hoses, to policemen with nightsticks, to a cartoon clip of Martin Luther King...
...T he other big plum handed down by the American Library Association is the Newberry Award for children's literature...
...While its message might (charitably) be described as childish, the book itself is inappropriate for actual children...
...The awfulness of the assault (which is based on a 1992 incident in the Bronx), triggers a media and political firestorm...
...And why should they...
...Meanwhile, every viewer is bound to come away from Whitewash with a heightened awareness of each other's skin color, which is not exactly what Martin Luther King, Whitewash's featured player, had in mind...
...Treasure Island, anyone...
...one is committed to a mental hospital...
...Turn the page and, against a none-too-subtle collage of badly-worn soles, see a sober-faced trio display newly looted shoes...
...They don't care anymore what's right and what's wrong...
...Alas, history is carved by the victors...
...Swamp Angel could stomp the breath out of those sons of Adam...
...Daniel's concern for his missing cat Jasmine (note the Oriental wink of a moniker), with whom he is reunited at the shelter he and his mother come to share with their neighbors...
...Without even mentioning Crown Heights, it's safe to say Whitewash is lacking something...
...Sanitizing a riot is of a piece with author Eve Bunting's earlier efforts...
...Did I say something wrong...
...The story pits gargantuan Swamp Angel (she's about six storeys tall) against a similarly scaled bear named Thundering Tarnation...
...My name is Gena," she tells Mrs...
...And then there's Ben, whose mother is also mysteriously AWOL...
...They probably didn't know each other before," I explained...
...I thought they didn't like each other...
...video) Michael Sporn Animation, Inc...
...Says she, "Quiltin' is men's work...
...P. C. Mommy Knows Best by DIANA WEST Award-winning works for children discussed in this review: Smoky Night by Eve Bunting illustrated by David Diaz Harcourt Brace & Company / $14.95 Swamp Angel by Anne Isaacs illustrated by Paul 0. Zelinsky Dutton / $14.99 Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech HarperCollins /280 pp...
...That didn't stop the American Library Association from recently honoring Smoky Night with its coveted Caldecott Award, joining the book's reputation to that of such past winners as Madeline's Rescue and Where the Wild Things Are...
...T he three runners-up to the Caldecott Award, while presenting a much lower profile than the winner, still conform to a trend-conscious political correctitude...
...Mama and Daniel's surprising composure is shared by almost every character depicted in Smoky Night, lawless and lawful alike...
...Miseries abound...
...That's not what it's called...
...The only lesson Whitewash teaches is that white racism lurks around every corner...
...I aim to," says she...
...All the human-sized men of the territory have been whupped by the beast, each in a novel and humiliating (and illustrated) way...
...This year, the award went to Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons, the story of 13-year-old Salamanca Tree Riddle, a Kentucky girl of Indian extraction determined to bring her runaway mother home from Idaho...
...The book opens as young Daniel and his Mama watch a mob pillage and burn the neighborhood outside their apartment window...
...Such men of myth, of course, draw life from an actual time and place, and, in most cases, from actual beings...
...Perhaps when things settledown you and your cat will come over and share a dish of milk with us...
...Whitewash's condemnation of a racially inspired assault on a child is uncontroversial—an unnecessary lesson in racial etiquette for grammar school children...
...Mama says it's better if we buy from our own people...
...Using shoe-polish spray, they whitewash her face...
...So concludes Smoky Night, written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by David Diaz...
...They never shop at her store...
...Mama's words are as impassive as her face: "[Rioting] can happen when people get angry," she explains to her son...
...Worthy of special mention is Swamp Angel, the story of an early-nineteenth-century giantess of wondrous strength...
...I whisper to Mama...
...Tally up the five mothers and two grandmothers who figure in Walk Two Moons, and here's the score: One is functional but loopy...
...Mama is all amazed...
...ID The American Spectator July 1995 65...
...Ta-da...
...its awkward contrivance reveals Swamp Angel to be an obvious political device...
...Heaping guilt and encouraging feelings of entitlement is precisely the exercise at which Whitewash, this year's pick, excels...
...Remarkably, Sal eschews the bloodless term "Native American...
...Shouldn't you be home, mending a quilt...
...and environmentalism (Someday A Tree, in which an old oak is destroyed by manmade chemicals...
...Well, how about baking a pie, Angel...
...Serves them right for the way they treated Swamp Angel when she first joined the hunt: "Hey, Angel...
...There's Sal's mother, who fled her family after a graphically described miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy (cheery plot point for the book's 8-to- 12-year-old target audience...
...Their hoots and taunts didn't stop Swamp Angel from signing up and setting out to find that bear...
...Helene Angel is deeply depressed until her grandmother ties her plight to the history of the civil rights movement...
...one is severely repressed, runs away, and returns with a new hairdo...
...A children's picture book for the brave new world set amid the Los Angeles riots, Smoky Night is not so much a storybook as a message book...
...Written by first-time author Anne Isaacs and illustrated by the talented Paul 0. Zelinsky, the book falls into a curious kind of woman-folklore—not to be confused with man-folklore, literary home to the John Henrys, Paul Bunyans, and Mighty Caseys of days gone by...
...But balancing the tally of hate crimes is not the way to rectify the cartoon's failings...
...No, Daniel...
...Nothing against happy endings, nothing against fairy tales, but Smoky Night has wrapped itself in a hard-edged mantle of reality, thus staking a claim to instruct its readers in the ways of the world...
...If there existed actual female models like Swamp Angel, patronizing behavior from the menfolk would hardly be the likely response...
...All of which is to say, the sexism ploy doesn't work...
...They want to smash and destroy...
...Among them is Mrs...
...There's Phoebe, whose mother has skipped town without a word...
...This Paula Bunyan character has materialized from nowhere, certainly from no recognizable human experience, solely to make the author's points about sexism—all for the benefit of unsuspecting tots...
...The second half of the book hangs on Diana West is a writer living in Washington, D.C...
...I .. . wondered why whoever carved them couldn't have put a couple of Indians up there too...
...But the story of a little girl's dreadful experience is not to be confused with the video's message...
...The book offers a dollop or two of Indian aware-ness, as when Mount Rushmore comes into Sal's view: "It was fine seeing the presidents, I've got nothing against the presidents, but you'd think the Sioux would be mighty sad to have those white faces carved into their sacred hill...
...Dublin-born in 1928, Bunting has churned out more than 100 children's books, an informal survey of which finds the innocuous and forgettable mixed in with the absurdly political picture books that infantilize, literally, every leftist cause of the moment...
...Even the Korean grocer, one of the few characters painted with a mouth-opened burst of emotion, shouts with frozen rage as she stands before her ransacked store (collage: spilled cereal and broken fortune cookies) across the street from Daniel and Mama...
...Everyone looks at me, and it's suddenly very quiet...
...A bear pie...
...16 Whitewash (20 min...
...Mommy, what's a paycheck...
...Look at that...
...But why settle for euphemism...
...one is an emergency-room nurse who sees her husband and child die after a car crash...
...A 20-minute cartoon, Whitewash tells the story of Helene Angel, a black schoolgirl who, while walking home with her older brother, is accosted by a gang of white street thugs...
...With features outlined in black, the blue-lavender faces of the boy and his mother are emotionless, vacantly focused as though absorbed by motion on a television screen...
...Frankly, no life-loving sexist would hoot and taunt a giantess, any giantess, especially one famous for such deeds as plucking mired wagon trains from murky swamps...
...in fact, such a 64 The American Spectator July 1995 character could only emerge from the mystical didacticism of late-twentiethcentury feminism...
...And with a stroke—poof—antagonism and hatred in the ghetto vanish...
...Swamp Angel has no such authenticity...
...Recognizable titles from the winners' roster include Johnny Tremain, A Wrinkle in Time, Sounder, and the like—solid, if not necessarily electric, novels for young readers...
...After that comes a knock at the door: Helene Angel's classmates, a veritable rainbow coalition, arrive at her apartment to walk her to school...
...Mama's tugging at her fingers the way she does when she's nervous...
...These range from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall) to homelessness (Fly Away Home), to vegetarianism (A Turkey For Thanksgiving—Why eat a turkey when you can invite him for dinner...
...one is blind and addled...
...The American Library Association, stuffy old thing, is sticking with its title, the Andrew Carnegie Medal...
...and one dies of complications from a snake bite...
...On one page, a foursome lugs a looted television, their faces—lips together, eyes calm—betraying none of the primitive glee or even the often-attributed rage behind their thievery and destruction, even as one wields a bat, poised to smash something beyond the picture...
...Fly Away Home, a ludicrous tale of a regular father and a regular son who happen to live in an airport, bears special mention for its particularly high-decibel amplification of the canard that we are, one and all, just a paycheck away from homelessness...
...Now they do...
...That mantle, it turns out, has been tailored to fit a bowdlerized model of human nature in order to teach the rudiments of a political agenda...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
