Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children's Literature 1003189318, 9781003189312

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Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature

Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question—​Who speaks?—​by examining a variety of represented silences. These include children who do not speak, do not yet speak effectively, or speak on behalf of others. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children’s literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children’s literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children’s literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child’s journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child’s verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may act as intermediaries, speaking on behalf of species that cannot. Recently, we have seen children exercise their voices on the world stage and as authors. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account—​inside and outside the text. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature addresses this underconceptualized subject in what will be an important text for scholars of children’s literature, childhood studies, English, disability studies, gender studies, race studies, ecopedagogy, and education. Danielle E. Price (Ph.D. UCLA) writes on children’s literature, nineteenth-​ century studies, and disability. Recent publications include articles on disability in contemporary children’s fiction (2022) and in George MacDonald’s The Light Princess (2019) as well as on heterotopia in Christopher Paul Curtis’ Elijah of Buxton (2016). She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Windsor.

Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor Philip Nel, Series Editor, 2011–​2018 Kenneth Kidd and Elizabeth Marshall, Current Series Editors

Founded by Jack Zipes in 1994, Children’s Literature and Culture is the longest-​running series devoted to the study of children’s literature and culture from a national and international perspective. Dedicated to promoting original research in children’s literature and children’s culture, in 2011 the series expanded its focus to include childhood studies, and it seeks to explore the legal, historical, and philosophical conditions of different childhoods. An advocate for scholarship from around the globe, the series recognizes innovation and encourages interdisciplinarity. Children’s Literature and Culture offers cutting-​edge, upper-​level scholarly studies and edited collections considering topics such as gender, race, picturebooks, childhood, nation, religion, technology, and many others. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Next-​Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction The Seeds of Memory Mateusz Świetlicki Age in David Almond’s Oeuvre A Multi-​Method Approach to Studying Age and the Life Course in Children’s Literature Vanessa Joosen, Michelle Anya Anjirbag, Leander Duthoy, Lindsey Geybels, Frauke Pauwels and Emma-​Louise Silva Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature Danielle E. Price For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​Childr​ens-​ Lit​erat​ure-​and-​Cult​ure/​book-​ser​ies/​SE0​686

Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature Danielle E. Price

Designed cover image: Getty First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Danielle E. Price The right of Danielle E. Price to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​03836-​0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​03838-​4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​18931-​2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003189312 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

To Robert, Maria, Stefan, and Charlie—​for your bravery and love

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child

viii 1

2 Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism

17

3 Race and Speech: Learning to Signify

61

4 Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals

105

5 Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality

149

Index

179

Acknowledgments

I have often joked that I wanted to write a book so I could acknowledge all the friends and colleagues who helped me on the way. But it is a serious matter, particularly given the last couple of years. In our stressful, fragmented world we need each other more than ever. I would like to thank James Madison University’s College of Arts and Letters Writing Group for weekly infusions of encouragement; in particular, Melinda Adams, Holly Yanacek, Becca Howes-​ Mischel, Heidi Pennington, and Mary Thompson. My thanks also to Becky Childs, Head of the Department of English at JMU, for her general can-​do spirit and for arranging my teaching schedule so I could get more writing accomplished. Past department head Dabney Bankert eased my arrival at the university and recommended a reduced teaching load when I needed medical treatment. A Provost Diversity Curriculum Grant aided the development of my African American children’s literature course and thus this project. Brian Flota and the librarians at JMU worked magic to purchase or borrow the books I needed. I was fortunate to present at the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) Congress in 2019 in Stockholm. This conference, entitled Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature, helped me develop the material for Chapter 2. I presented virtually the beginnings of Chapter 4 at Vancouver Island University’s 2022 conference, Assembling Common Worlds: An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment and Young People’s Literature and Culture. For encouraging me to read hundreds of children’s books, I thank the Children’s Literature Roundtable led by Beth Watson, in Windsor, Ontario. For comments that always helped strengthen the argument, style, and format of this book, I thank Robert Aguirre, Stefan Price-​Aguirre, André Narbonne, Nicole Markotić, Melanie Shoffner, Libby Gruner, Siân White, and Renée Bondy. For sustaining friendships—​frequent conversations, dog walks, shared meals and books, and advice on every topic—​I thank Renée Bondy, Heather

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Acknowledgments  ix Denman, A.J. Morey, Siân White, John Casteen, Melanie Shoffner, Tammy Dwosh, Diane Foucar-​ Szocki, Susan Clague, Laurie Kutchins, Mary Thompson, Shauna Huffaker, and Suzanne Matheson. For inspiring me with their talent and generosity, I thank my creative writing group: André Narbonne, Renée Bondy, Gord Grisenthwaite, and Doug Moulton. My gratitude to the doctors, therapists, and counsellors—​ in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg—​who kept me together, body and soul, over the past four years, including Anne Martin, Dr. Man, Dr. C. Brenin, Dr. D. Brenin, Dr. Wilson, and Dr. Barron. And to the volunteers who drove me to Charlottesville for medical treatment, including Renée Bondy, Heather Denman, Iris Haseloff, and Sarah Jones. For love and support I could feel across a closed border, all the way from Ottawa to Harrisonburg, I thank my parents—​Gemma and Robert Price—​and my sister, Megan Price. I am grateful for my household—​Robert, Maria, Stefan, and Charlie. Our leafy Harrisonburg house did indeed hold us well over the past five years, particularly through the pandemic. It has been my privilege to watch my husband, daughter, and son transform themselves through courage and hard work. Charlie, practically a pandemic pup, has been perfect from the beginning. Robert, Stefan, and Maria edited every part of this book. To Robert, who made his own book writing look easy, thank you for helping me gather the argumentative threads, for knowing I would finish this project, and for dragging me away from it. On to the next chapter. For the use of previously published material, I credit the publishers listed here: John Hopkins University Press as publisher and copyright holder of “Sponsored Silence: Literary Selective Mutism in Children’s Fiction” as follows: Copyright © 2022 Children’s Literature Association. This article first appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 2, summer 2022. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. University of Toronto Press, as first publisher of “Heterotopic Nightmares and Coming of Age in Elijah of Buxton.” Copyright © 2016 University of Toronto Press. “Heterotopic Nightmares and Coming of Age in Elijah of Buxton: Mobility and Maturation” first appeared in Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 8, no.1, summer 2016, pp. 202–​26, doi:10.1353/​jeu.2016.0009. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (https://​utj​ourn​als.press).

1 Introduction Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child

In 2018, my literary, personal, and professional worlds merged. My children’s literature roundtable had read recent nominees and winners for the Schneider Family Book Award. This award recognizes outstanding portrayals of disability in books for young people. We discussed Sarah Lean’s A Dog Called Homeless—​winner in 2013—​an emotional tale of a girl who stops talking. At the same time, I learned from friends that their young child spoke at home but struggled with speaking in school. And the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) issued a call for papers on “Silence and Silencing in Children’s Literature.” As a reader and literary scholar interested in disability, I began to reflect on the number of child protagonists who stop speaking. They are everywhere—​mostly in realistic fiction but also in medieval settings and dystopian futures. They populate children’s and young adult literature. I read and reread tall stacks of these tales, curious about what connects them and why we need them. Often these child characters would be diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder called selective mutism, but their selective mutism only faintly resembled that of the condition I saw in “real life.” In preparation for the IRSCL conference, my fellow panelists and I questioned the call for proposals that privileged a metaphorical discussion of silence; in other words, silence and silencing as a lack of agency. We chose instead to focus on representations of children who could not speak. Our panel, entitled “Speechless but Not Silent: Reading Mute Characters in Children’s Literature,” countered the idea of muteness as primarily metaphorical. While the fiction I was reading was full of nonspeaking children, the world I was living in was paying more attention to children’s utterances. In 2018, Marley Dias published Marley Dias Gets It Done and So Can You!, a book building on her reputation as the founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign, started in 2013 when she was eleven. Dias added a young voice and a focus on African American girls to the ongoing discussion.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189312-1

2  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child X. Gonzalez, who lived through the Parkland School shooting of February 2018, rallied, marched, and spoke. Greta Thunberg, inspired by the Parkland students, burst into the public consciousness as a fierce advocate for the climate; her first public speeches were in 2018. Dias, Gonzalez, and Thunberg joined the list of other young activists who commanded global and national stages to speak on weighty subjects such as girls’ education, environmental catastrophe, and war. Their galvanizing presence on these stages indicates their own sense of the importance of children speaking. It was, and remains, a kind of awakening. I went back to children’s fiction to reconsider silence in its multiple meanings, but also to consider empowered speech, discourse that demonstrates agency. This book is the fruit of this process of reflection, research, and synthesis. Speech and Silence in Contemporary Children’s Literature brings a fresh perspective to a central literary question—​Who speaks? It does so by examining a wide variety of represented silences, attending not only to children who do not speak, but also children who do not yet speak effectively and those who speak on behalf of animals. A rich and unexamined literary archive explores the problematics of children who are literally silent or metaphorically so because they cannot communicate effectively with adults or peers. This project centers children’s literature in the question of voice by considering disability, gender, race, and ecocriticism. Children’s literature rests on a paradox at the root of its own genre: it is produced by an adult author writing to a constructed idea of what children should be. By reading a range of contemporary children’s literature, this book scrutinizes how such texts narrate the child’s journey from communicative alterity to a place of empowered adult speech. Sometimes the child’s verbal enclosure enables privacy and resistance. At other times, silence is coerced or imposed or arises from bodily impairment. Children may employ human language on behalf of species that cannot. In all cases, the texts analyzed here reveal speech as a minefield to be traversed. Children who talk too much, too little, or with insufficient expertise pose problems to themselves and others. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, they attempt to hold adults to account—​inside and outside the text. “Human discourse”—​or speech—​“is an ongoing project of meaning-​ making” (Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet 91). Speech is also “body-​generated language” (Kittay and Godzich in Davis 17). This book is concerned, for the most part, with representations of speech and its shadowy partner, silence. In literature, speech is usually marked as distinctive in a narrative, set apart from exposition by quotation marks or some other means. Silence is more difficult to represent. As Lennard J. Davis writes, “in a printed text, silence can only be indicated by language” (112). He notes that expressions (“they fell silent”), or ellipses, or most dramatically, a blank

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  3 page can signify the absence of speech (112). Linguists Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-​Ginet examine the interplay between silence and speech in embodied conversation. Their words are worth quoting in full: But silence is not always or only an absence of expression. Speech is, among other things, an absence of silence, and in the interplay between speech and silence, each frames the other. Silence in social situations is never neutral. We talk about awkward silences, ominous silences, stunned, strained, awed, reverent, and respectful silences. Silences take on meaning because in Anglo-​American culture, we expect social exchange to involve fairly continuous talk … A protracted silence between turns at talk, therefore, signals something unusual. But exactly what it means depends on its discursive history. (119) Speech and silence give meaning to each other in life and texts. This project is informed by Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet’s injunction—​that the meaning of silence “depends on its discursive history” (119)—​but takes “discursive history” in the widest sense possible, beyond a particular conversation to its larger social meaning. Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet continue their discussion of speech as “meaning-​making” by pointing out that people can only influence this shared project if their words are heeded (91). In other words, they indicate the significance of “voice.” An elastic term, “voice” has been embraced by social justice movements to discuss which perspectives are amplified and which are ignored. Nick Couldry, in Why Voice Matters, lays out the common uses of the term, starting with the sound produced by the human mouth and, figuratively, as someone’s unique viewpoint (1). However, he argues the most valuable way of considering voice is “as a process”: “people’s practice of giving an account, implicitly or explicitly, of the world within which they act” (7). He notes that this idea of voice depends on a collective which fosters “both speaking and listening” (8–​9; emphasis in original). Therefore, Couldry holds up the narrative act and conversation as central to his idea of voice. In discussions of literature, “voice” metaphorically maps speech onto narrative tone and style and is the most important distinction between adult and children’s literature.1 This project is interested in how speech contributes to both kinds of voice. I begin with two key antecedents to the contemporary silent and speaking child: earlier depictions of the child as a creature of language and speech, accompanying the idea of the silent child as the proper child, and the child who is metaphorically silenced by exclusion from the category of “child,” by race, class, and ability. Traces of these earlier representations both linger and are contested in our current discourse of

4  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child childhood and stretch their sticky fingers into contemporary children’s literature. They affect the books available in the marketplace and the lived experiences of children. Proverbially, since the fifteenth century, “children should be seen and not heard.” Or, more precisely, “A mayde schuld be seen, but not herd” (“Children”). “Mayde” here refers to a girl, though the word originally could refer to virgins of either sex. Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet comment that there are “reams of prose through the ages extolling the virtues of silence” in those of lower position, particularly women and children (21). The idea that the proper child is a silent one who attends to the speech of adults frequently emerges as “an old proverb” taught to youths by their mothers. An example from a nineteenth-​century periodical provides the rationale. The author (“W.”) states that, following the Bible, “there is a time for every thing,” including the proper time for speech and silence, and in particular for the child’s “respectful attention to his parents, teachers, or older friends” (334). In paying attention to adult utterances, the child is “laying up thoughts which will make him … worthy to be heard” (334). Generally, a child is better to “observe more, and express his own opinion less” (334).2 Children should be quiet because their speech is less valuable. Though children have often been counseled to be quiet, our language and culture define the child against the subject of speech. The English “infant,” derived from the Latin, means “unable to speak.” The Greek equivalent, according to Seth Lerer, is “nepion,” “The one who does not speak” (20). Lerer explains that in classical Greece and Rome “[t]‌o be a nepion or infans was thus to be before speech: to be not quite a person at all. It was as if selfhood emerged through linguistic performance” (21). Early works of children’s literature continue this idea. I will briefly note one author and set of texts to stand for many: Hannah Barbauld’s Lessons for Children (1778–​79) and Hymns in Prose for Children (1781). In these works—​written for children, and in the case of Hymns written for children to recite—​Barbauld contrasts the child who speaks with infants and animals, both of whom do not. In the voice of the child, she writes in the first hymn, A few years ago, and I was a little infant, and my tongue was dumb within my mouth: And I did not know the great name of God, for my reason was not come unto me. But now I can speak, and my tongue shall praise him. (9) Barbauld emphasizes the child’s growth from unspeaking and irrational baby to speaking and rational child. This passage, as with others, focuses on the physical mechanism of speech in referring to the tongue—​and in

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  5 other places, the lips—​using parts of the mouth metonymically. Here is another example, from Hymn 7: “We that cannot speak plain, should lisp out praises to him who teacheth us how to speak, and hath opened our dumb lips” (35). Barbauld implicitly distinguishes the speech of children from that of adults in both content and sound; children “cannot speak plain”—​in a way that is easily understood—​and instead must “lisp out”—​ “to utter”—​according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “with childlike, imperfect, or faltering articulation.” “Lisp” as a speech defect is bound up with its sense as childlike. Both examples from Barbauld employ the word “dumb” for nonspeaking, which connects young children to animals. In Barbauld’s two texts, the contrast between animals and children—​ indeed, humans—​rests fundamentally on speech and language. In Hymn Two, animals and plants “are dumb,” so the child will praise God in their stead (16). The young animals “may thank him in their hearts, but we can thank him with our tongues; we are better than they, and can praise him better” (14–​15). Though animals make sounds—​”The birds can warble, and the young lambs can bleat”—​it is only humans who “can open our lips in his praise” (15). Lessons for Children further discusses this central difference between humans and animals by way of the narrator mother, who compares the child Charles to an animal multiple times. First the text lists all the things the cat can do as well as or better than Charles: Puss can play as well as you; and puss can drink milk, and lie upon the carpet; and she can run as fast as you, and faster, too, a great deal; and she can climb trees better; and she can catch mice which you cannot do. (53–​54) This is followed by what, crucially, the cat cannot do: “But can puss talk? No. Can puss read? No. Then that is the reason why you are better than puss—​because you can talk and read” (54). Charles’ duty is to take advantage of these skills because, his mother tells him, “If you do not learn, Charles, you are not good for half so much as Puss. You had better be drowned” (54). I would note that Lessons for Children, by and large, eschews the moralism we attribute to eighteenth-​century children’s literature, and the context of “You had better be drowned” suggests the statement is (mostly!) in jest. Barbauld’s Hymns and Lessons are perhaps even more important for what they represent: those works of early children’s literature which present the child’s voice. The Hymns, meant to be recited by children, give us the child alone, praising God. The Lessons give us the child conversing with an adult; the narrator ascribes and responds to little Charles’ words. William McCarthy notes that this method of pleasurable instruction, taking place through conversation—​or “chit-​chat”—​was recognized at

6  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child the time as one of Barbauld’s influential hallmarks (201). Children like Charles would go on to become well-​rounded characters, even full-​fledged narrators, in literature for both young people and adults in the nineteenth century. Barbauld gives primary voice to white upper-​middle-​class figures. Her texts demonstrate sympathy for animals, the poor, and the enslaved, but always in relation to the child’s moral development. She encourages Charles to give alms to the poor and to feed the hungry robin (Lessons 48). She dramatizes the situation of the “harmless” hare who is torn up by the hounds (106). Although she emphasizes throughout The Lessons that animals do not speak, occasionally they do, to explain themselves to Charles. Hymn Eight presents the pious laborer’s cottage and the enslaved woman who “sittest pining in captivity and weepest over thy sick child,” reminding her that “though no one seeth thee, God seeth thee; though no one pitieth thee, God pitieth thee” and telling her to “raise thy voice … call upon him from amidst thy bonds, for assuredly he will hear thee” (60). Children who recite this hymn therefore learn to speak for “the forlorn and abandoned” Black woman imagined by the author (60). Speaking and silence are also central concerns in “The Golden Age of Children’s Literature,” a term used to describe the period from the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865 to The Secret Garden in 1911. During this period developed the main features of what many consider “children’s literature”—​with its primary appeal to the imagination. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland demonstrates that speech is a hazard, as Alice navigates a fantasy world in which animals who usually stay silent talk back to her. A talking rabbit leads Alice “Down the Rabbit-​Hole”; her unthinking utterances about her cat Dinah land her in trouble; and she dismisses the dream world by crying “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (7, 95). The great puzzle, which Alice articulates, is “Who in the world am I?,” and her uncertainty about the answer is reinforced by her inability to properly recite everything from the multiplication tables to familiar didactic poems (15–​16). Alice is absent at the book’s end when her sister imagines her as the future storyteller of Wonderland (97). In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, speech plays just as important a role, though by this point in the tradition, the protagonist alludes to fairy tales rather than overtly didactic literature. Mary Lennox’s transition from being “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived” (3) to being a happy, healthy English girl is marked in her tone. When Mary addresses the robin, “just as if she was speaking to a person,” she drops her “imperious Indian voice” and Ben the gardener comments that she is talking “as if tha’ was a real child instead of a sharp old woman” (26). Mary’s desire to speak the Yorkshire dialect also marks her transformation. Notably,

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  7 Mary’s words prompt Colin Craven’s recovery, just as much as the secret garden itself. She outshouts him in the middle of the night and tells him, in “crossly spoken childish words,” that there is nothing wrong with his back (104). The Secret Garden is also a book of lies and silences. The servants lie about Colin, both by not mentioning his existence and by overtly lying when Mary asks about sounds in the night. Colin falls into the category of prohibited subjects, along with the garden where Mrs. Craven fell. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden does not give us talking animals—​and certainly not antagonistic animals—​though it does at one point use a robin as focalizer. Instead, it gives us a character who can tell what animals intend. The moor creatures respond to Dickon as one of their own and he says of himself, “p’raps I’m a bird, or a fox, or a rabbit, or a squirrel, or even a beetle, an’ I don’t know it” (59). When the robin chirps, Dickon can translate for Mary and respond with own chirp-​like sound (58). Colin refers to Dickon as an “animal charmer” and jokingly of himself as a “boy animal” (90). Dickon’s closeness to nature is part of the book’s class politics; the working-​class boy provides the material support for the rehabilitation of the middle-​class girl and her upper-​class cousin. He helps them find their roots and stands for an essential Englishness, in a way that is difficult to imagine for the working-​class characters of Alice in Wonderland. However, ultimately The Secret Garden’s is not Dickon’s story. Nor is it Mary’s. Having served its role of shaking Colin out of stasis, Mary’s rude speech evaporates at the end of the text. Indeed, as readers commonly lament, Colin becomes the chronicler while Mary vanishes at the book’s conclusion—​as does Dickon. They have faded into the shadows while Master Colin stands tall.3 Gender, race, class, and ability are intertwined subjects in The Secret Garden. The working-​class English country boy is the healthiest as proved by his Yorkshire dialect. Mary has been contaminated by her life in India, and in particular by her ability there to command servants. The Indian servants are characterized by their repeated uttering of “It is not the custom” if they are asked to do something “their ancestor had not done for a thousand years” (19). The book suggests, in typical Orientalist fashion, that they are stuck in tradition and deserve to be ruled. Mary herself is horrified to discover that her English servant had hoped she was a Black girl. Though Martha believes, using abolitionist rhetoric, that “a black’s a man an’ a brother,” Mary responds that “They are not people” (18). Her assessment—​based on Victorian racial ideology—​has its class corollary in Miss Minchin’s view of Becky in Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905). About Becky, who is “dingy” with a “smudgy face” (54), and responsible for blacking the boots, Miss Minchin proclaims, “Becky is the scullery maid. Scullery maids—​er—​are not little girls” (87). Not surprisingly, the 1995 film of A Little Princess, which changes the setting from

8  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child London to New York, casts a Black actress to play Becky, displacing class politics onto racial ones. Mary’s exclusion of Black people from the category of people, like Miss Minchin’s characterization of servants, mirrors the nineteenth-​ century conception of childhood as reserved for white middle-​class children, particularly boys.4 In the United States, as Rudine Sims Bishop notes, the “seeds of an African American children’s literature were sown in the soil of Black people’s struggles for liberation, literacy, and survival” (Free 1). This literature grew out of the oral tradition (Bishop, Free 1–​4). Violet J. Harris comments that white writer’s portrayals of African Americans, from the seventeenth century on, “are stereotyped, pejorative, and unauthentic” (540); she argues that the same caricatures of African Americans that appeared in writings for adults are also found in those for children (541). The emergence of a tradition of Black children’s literature in the early twentieth century—​particularly The Brownies’ Book—​functions, among other purposes, to correct these stereotypes.5 There have been, no doubt, some key advances in this tradition. However, even with the flourishing of African American literature through the twentieth century, the representation of children of color still needs improvement. Rudine Sims Bishop argued in 1990 that children need “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors”; in other words, children need stories that depict different realities, that reflect themselves, and that allow them to step into other worlds (“Windows” 9). We still have a long way to go. Authors—​and father and son—​Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers penned complementary articles in The New York Times in 2014, responding to dismal statistics from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which tracks racial and ethnic diversity in authors and subject matter.6 Building on Bishop’s formulation, Walter Dean Myers argues that representation opens up possible lives for Black children and humanizes them to others. He also notes that the tradition has overrelied on historical fiction focused on slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. Christopher Myers calls this emphasis “apartheid,” bringing together systemic racism and enforced separation: The apartheid of literature—​in which characters of color are limited to the townships of occasional historical books that concern themselves with the legacies of civil rights and slavery but are never given a pass card to traverse the lands of adventure, curiosity, imagination or personal growth.7 To Bishop’s “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” he adds the symbol of “maps.” Children, he says, “create, through the stories they’re given, an atlas of their world, of their relationships to others, of their possible destinations.”

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  9 The problem with representations of disability, by contrast, has never been absence. Since its origins, western literature has relied on disability as a plot device or “narrative prosthesis,” according to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Critics have charted the various ways disability has been used metaphorically in narrative. Ato Quayson, for example, categorizes representations in nine ways—​including disability as a “moral test,” as a sign of wickedness, and as an “interface with otherness” (52)—​and Jay Dolmage has deconstructed the disability myths that we seemingly cannot escape. Classic children’s literature usually presents, Lois Keith writes, two options for the child with a disability: “kill or cure” (5). In The Secret Garden we have the child cured, moving, as the plot progresses, from his bed, to a wheelchair, to his feet.8 By-​and-​large, contemporary children’s literature has progressed from the “kill or cure” model, aiming instead to realistically portray characters with disabilities. To be considered for The Schneider Family Book Award, texts “must portray some aspect of living with a disability, whether the disability is physical, mental, or emotional” (5). Furthermore, “Books where the character with a disability dies are generally disqualified” (5). Most contemporary works featuring protagonists with disabilities opt out of the “kill or cure” binary, and often show that disability “is a part of a character’s full life, not the focus of the life” (“Schneider” 3). Nevertheless, as the guidelines also state, “Disability is a kind of diversity that is mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion efforts” (4).9 And many books continue to rely on disability and its disappearance as a plot device. In the omission of representation, we have a type of silencing—​a metaphorical one. Certainly, we must ponder what we do not have. “The missing books cast a pernicious shadow,” Ebony Thomas writes in discussing what kinds of books do not exist for and about Black children (400). Thomas notes the recycled plots with African American characters that she read in school: “if we were not following the North Star to freedom or marching for civil rights, we were dodging bullets in the ghetto or we were the Black best friend” (404). She pleads for “tales of otherwheres and elsewhens” (407). This kind of silencing—​expressed in genre—​has meaning, just as silence in dialogue does.10 The books in which I examine various types of speech and silence fall into the category of children’s literature as commonly defined: books marketed for children twelve and under, usually with a child protagonist, and written to an implied child reader.11 Many of them use a first-​person child narrator. In particular, I analyze mostly fiction intended for eight–​to twelve-​year-​olds with protagonists in the same age range—​eleven seems to be the magic age. The exception is Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, which I discuss throughout. Though described on the front flap of the dust jacket as Emezi’s “young adult debut,” Pet features a plot and characters that cross

10  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child over into children’s fiction. On the book cover stands a young Black girl in her slippers and pajamas, against the background of a pink gridded town. As has often been noted, the category of children’s literature stands apart from other genres because the term usually defines readership rather than authorship. In my concluding chapter I look at nonfiction by young adults in support of the environmental movement. Some of these works are marketed to teens but others assume a general readership. All of them, though, position their authors as young people employing speech to change the world. A brief outline of my chapters follows, with suggestions for supplementary readings. In Chapter 2, “Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism,” I unearth and name, for the first time, a subgenre in contemporary children’s literature that retreats from contemporary depictions of disability to narrative resolutions curing disability. I call this structure “literary selective mutism” or LSM: a traumatic event; a child who stops speaking; a crisis; and the restoration of the child’s power to speak. Beyond naming this subgenre, I am interested in the way that writers use LSM to privilege questions of silence and speech and their connection to power. Sarah Lean’s A Dog Called Homeless (2012) provides a central example. The second half of the chapter analyzes texts that refute the idea that not vocalizing is silence; namely, Leslie Connor’s Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? (2022), Sharon M. Draper’s Out of My Mind (2010), and Ann Clare LeZotte’s Show Me a Sign (2020). I also discuss Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet as an alternative to LSM texts in its depiction of selective mutism. Ultimately, this chapter concludes by assessing that it is time to put the LSM paradigm to rest. Four texts that are enlightening to read alongside depictions of disability are G. Thomas Couser’s Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing, Lennard J. Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Jay Timothy Dolmage’s Disability Rhetoric, and Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson’s “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Chapter 3, “Race and Speech: Learning to Signify,” examines African American novels that ring the changes on the familiar themes of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement. In doing so with humor and nuance, these texts revitalize the genre of historical fiction, and in looking back, they suggest how to look forward. I examine several works for their discussion of Black children learning to signify, a maturation process that occurs in connection with the reality of racism; in particular, Christopher Paul Curtis’ Elijah of Buxton (2007) and Rita Williams-​Garcia’s Gaither Sisters Trilogy (2010–​15), as well as Sugar (2013) by Jewell Parker Rhodes and Jacqueline Woodson’s verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014). These texts make explicit what others imply; namely, that coming of age in African American children’s literature is centrally concerned with manipulating

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  11 speech. Although critics and teachers, including myself, lament the paucity of fantasy fiction that features African American protagonists, the works examined here are speculative in their own wonderful ways. Critical works especially helpful for framing and interpreting African American literature include Rudine Sims Bishops’ Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-​ American Literary Criticism, Dianne Johnson’s Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth, and Michelle Martin’s Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–​2002. Chapter 4, “Ecology and Speech: Talking with the Animals,” analyzes fiction with children who converse or communicate with animals. I examine these texts in the tradition of the “talking animal story,” considering the benefits and drawbacks of giving speech to animals and of situating children (often) as intermediaries and saviors. In particular, I place Piers Torday’s The Last Wild Trilogy (2013–​15) alongside a dozen other works with overtly environmental purposes and assess their reflection on and solutions for such crucial environmental issues as climate change, extinction, and nature deficit disorder. I make a brief trip to that touchstone of environmental children’s literature—​Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax—​published in 1971. Ultimately, I grapple with whether granting speech to animals reinforces or weakens the human-animal divide. Valuable critical works in animal and environmental studies include Matthew R. Calarco’s Animal Studies: The Key Concepts and Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction; Greta Gaard’s “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy,” and Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-​Deficit Disorder. In the conclusion, I return to the voices of young activists, mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. Chapter 5, “Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality,” considers the myriad types of speech and silence alluded to in the speeches and writings of four changemakers: Mya-​Rose Craig, Jamie Margolin, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, and Greta Thunberg. Importantly, each of these young authors employs an intersectional awareness, which is often why they recognize silences or are provoked to speak. They wield sophisticated rhetorical strategies to hold adults to account. On the subjects of youth writing, activism, and rhetoric, the following readings are beneficial: Rachel Conrad’s “Youth Climate Activists Trading on Time: Temporal Strategies in Xiuhetezcatl Martinez’s We Rise and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference”; Amy Jo Murray and Kevin Durrheim’s edited volume, Qualitative Studies of Silence: The Unsaid as Social Action; Graham Meikle’s introduction to The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism; and Niall Nance-​Carroll’s “Children and Young People as Activist Authors.”

12  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child I close with a return to the personal. As an educator and writer, I spend my days negotiating the shift between hours of speaking to students in a classroom and hours of silence in my office. Both of these are luxuries, a point the pandemic made clear. I have support from my university and family that makes these hours possible. As a child, I could retreat to my own bedroom where I engaged for countless hours in silent conversation with many books from the local library—​and some, few and precious, that I owned. I also loved to talk, and I was privileged to have my speech encouraged. My mother recounts that at the age of three, I was, or so she claims, an excellent conversationalist, and quite entertaining to my parents. Other relatives—​adherents to the adage that “children should be seen and not heard”—​did not admire my vocal skills. To keep the peace, my grandfather paid me ten cents not to talk at the dinner table. While the grownups ate and talked, I played under the table and felt I had gotten the best of the bargain. This was my introduction to the value of silence; I could even call it a “sponsored silence,” which is the subject of Chapter 2. Notes 1 For a brief discussion of narrative voice in children’s literature, see Cadden; for more on narrative voice generally, see Aczel. 2 “Children should be seen and not heard” can be found in too many sources to list. For another example from the nineteenth-​century press, see “Harry’s Lecture” in the Christian Index. A memorable opening scene in nineteenth-​ century literature is that of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where Jane is disciplined for her questions and ordered to “Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent” (9). In Little House on the Prairie (1935), which, like the other Little House books, is a treasure trove of proverbial wisdom, Laura reminds herself “that children must be seen and not heard. Then she was quiet” (66). 3 See, among many articles, Melanie Eckford-​ Prossor’s “Colonizing Children: Dramas of Transformation, which also discusses children themselves as the colonized of adults; Jerry Phillips’ “The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret Garden”; and my “Cultivating Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden.” 4 For an overview, see Crystal Lynn Webster. 5 See Harris, Bishop (Free within Ourselves), Johnson, and Martin on this point generally and on the crucial role of The Brownies’ Book (1920–​21). Excellent recent scholarship on the centennial of The Brownies’ Book includes The Children of the Sun: A Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book and the edited collection of Johnson-​Feelings and McNair. 6 For the latest statistics, see “Books by and/​or about Black, Indigenous and People of Color (All Years)” at Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-​Madison.

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  13 7 This idea that African American characters should only be in historical or gritty realistic texts is caricatured in Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid in which Jordan Banks at the school book fair faces “African American Escapist Literature” titled Escape from Gang Life, Escape from Poverty, and Escape from Prison (128–​31). 8 See Lois Keith’s chapter, “The Miracle Cures” for a discussion of Colin’s miraculous recovery and its metaphorical import; on the connection between Colin’s cure and Burnett’s Christian Science beliefs, see Anne Stiles. 9 The guidelines for the Schneider Award also point out that considerations of disability extend to the format of books: “Books are often not ‘born accessible’ but have to be scanned or recorded for those with print disabilities” (4). 10 For more on generic silencing, see Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ monograph and Philip Nel’s chapter “Childhoods ‘Outside the Boundaries of Imagination’: Genre is the New Jim Crow” in Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books. 11 Helpful on children’s literature as a genre are Peter Hunt, Maria Nikolajeva, Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer, Jacqueline Rose, and Barbara Wall. Rudine Sims Bishop defines the genre of African American children’s literature in Free within Ourselves.

Works Cited Aczel, Richard. “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts.” New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 3, 1998, pp. 467–​ 500. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/​ nlh.1998.0023. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. Hymns in Prose for Children. 1781. 7th ed., London, W. Baynes and B. Crosby, 1798. —​—​—​. Lessons for Children. 1778. Boston, William D. Ticknor, 1839. Bishop, Rudine Sims. Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Heinemann, 2007. —​—​—​. “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books in the Classroom, vol. 6, no. 3, 1990, pp. 9–​11. “Books by and/​or about Black, Indigenous and People of Color (All Years).” Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-​Madison, last updated May 4, 2023, https://​ccbc.educat​ion.wisc.edu/​ lit​erat​ure-​resour​ces/​ccbc-​divers​ity-​sta​tist​ics/​books-​by-​about-​poc-​fnn/​. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Deborah Lutz, Norton Critical Edition, 4th ed., Norton, 2016. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. 1905. HarperFestival, 1992. —​—​—​. The Secret Garden. Edited by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 2006. Cadden, Mike. “Voice.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, 2nd ed., New York UP, 2021, pp. 194–​95. Calarco, Matthew R. Animal Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2021.

14  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child —​—​—​. Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford Briefs-​Stanford UP, 2015. Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. Edited by Donald J. Gray, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., Norton, 2013. The Children of the Sun: A Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book. Special issue of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, https://​muse.jhu.edu/​issue/​46105. “Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard.” The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, edited by John Simpson and Jennifer Speake, 5th ed., Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford Reference, Accessed 27 June 2023 www.oxfo​rdre​fere​nce.com/​view/​10.1093/​ acref/​978019​9539​536.001.0001/​acref-​978019​9539​536-​e-​354. Connor, Leslie. Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? Katherine Tegen, 2022. Conrad, Rachel. “Youth Climate Activists Trading on Time: Temporal Strategies in Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, Apr. 2021, pp. 226–​43. Couldry, Nick. Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism. Sage, 2010. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. U of Michigan P, 2009. Craft, Jerry. New Kid. HarperCollins, 2019. Curtis, Christopher Paul. Elijah of Buxton. Scholastic Canada, 2007. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. Dias, Marley. Marley Dias Gets It Done and So Can You! Scholastic, 2018. Dolmage, Jay. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse UP, 2014. Draper, Sharon M. Out of My Mind. Atheneum, 2012. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-​Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge UP, 2003. Eckford-​ Prossor, Melanie. “Colonizing Children: Dramas of Transformation.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 30, no. 2, 2000, pp. 237–​62. EBSCOhost, https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​jnt.2011.0022. Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet. Make Me a World, 2019. Gaard, Greta. “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy.” Neohelicon, vol. 36, 2009, pp. 321–​34. Garland-​ Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder et al., Modern Language Association of America, 2002, pp. 56–​75. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-​ American Literary Criticism. 25th Anniversary ed., Oxford UP, 2014. Harris, Violet J. “African American Children’s Literature: The First One Hundred Years.” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 59, no. 4, 1990, pp. 540–​55. “Harry’s Lecture.” Christian Index (1831–​1899), vol. 65, no. 42, 20 Oct. 1887, p. 7. ProQuest, www.proqu​est.com/​magazi​nes/​har​rys-​lect​ure/​docv​iew/​125797​ 326/​se-​2.

Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child  15 Hunt, Peter. “Children’s Literature.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul, 1st ed., New York UP, 2011, pp. 42–​47. —​—​—​. “Children’s Literature.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, 2nd. ed., New York UP, 2021, pp. 41–​44. Johnson, Dianne. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth. Greenwood, 1990. Johnson-​Feelings, Dianne and Jonda C. McNair, editors. A Centennial Celebration of The Brownies’ Book. University Press of Mississippi, 2022. JSTOR, https://​ doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctv​2z0v​v1b. Keith, Lois. Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. Women’s P, 2001. Lean, Sarah. A Dog Called Homeless. Harper, 2012. Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. U of Chicago P, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est. com/​lib/​jmu/​det​ail.act​ion?docID=​432​257. LeZotte, Anne Clare. Show Me A Sign. Scholastic, 2020. “Lisp, v.” OED Online, Oxford UP, Mar. 2023, www.oed.com/​view/​Entry/​108​ 969. Accessed 17 Mar. 2023. A Little Princess. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, performances by Eleanor Bron, Liam Cunningham, and Liesel Matthews, Warner Brothers, 1995. Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-​Deficit Disorder. Updated and expanded ed., Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008. Martin, Michelle. Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–​2002. Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​jmu/​det​ail.act​ion?docID=​182​797. McCarthy, William. “Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 60, no. 2, 1999, pp. 196–​219, https://​doi.org/​10.25290/​prinu​nivl​ibrc​hro.60.2.0196. Meikle, Graham, “Introduction: Making Meanings and Making Trouble.” The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, edited by Graham Meikle, Taylor and Francis, 2018, pp. 1–​16. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Murray, Amy Jo and Durrheim, Kevin, editors. Qualitative Studies of Silence: The Unsaid as Social Action. Cambridge UP, 2019. Myers, Christopher. “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.” The New York Times, 15 Mar. 2014, www.nyti​mes.com/​2014/​03/​16/​opin​ion/​sun​day/​the-​ aparth​eid-​of-​childr​ens-​lit​erat​ure.html. Myers, Walter Dean. “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” The New York Times, 15 Mar. 2014, www.nyti​mes.com/​2014/​03/​16/​opin​ion/​sun​ day/​where-​are-​the-​peo​ple-​of-​color-​in-​childr​ens-​books.html. Nance-​ Carroll, Niall. “Children and Young People as Activist Authors.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 14, no. 1, 2021, pp. 6–​21. Nel, Phil. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford UP, 2017.

16  Introduction: Tracing the Silent and Speaking Child Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Routledge, 2010. Nodelman, Perry and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 3rd ed., Allyn and Bacon, 2003. Phillips, Jerry. “The Mem Sahib, the Worthy, the Rajah and His Minions: Some Reflections on the Class Politics of The Secret Garden.” The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Literature, vol. 17, no. 2, Dec. 1993, pp. 168–​94. EBSCOhost, https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​uni.0.0133. Price, Danielle E. “Cultivating Mary: The Victorian Secret Garden.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 2001, pp. 4–​14. Quayson, Ato. Disability and the Crisis of Representation: Aesthetic Nervousness. Columbia UP, 2007. Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Sugar. Scholastic, 2015. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. 1984. U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. “Schneider Family Book Award Manual.” American Library Association: Schneider Book Award, revised 2022, www.ala.org/​award​sgra​nts/​schnei​der-​fam​ily-​book-​ award. Seuss, Dr. [Theodor Seuss Geisel]. The Lorax. Random House, 1971. Stiles, Anne. “Christian Science versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, 2015, pp. 295–​319. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/​mfs.2015.0024. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York UP, 2019. —​ —​ —​ . “We Have Always Dreamed of (Afro) Futures: The Brownies’ Book and the Black Fantastic Storytelling Tradition.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, pp. 393–​412. Torday, Piers. The Dark Wild. Viking, 2014. —​—​—​. The Last Wild. Puffin, 2013. —​—​—​. The Wild Beyond. Quercus, 2015. W. “Children Should be Seen—​Not Heard.” The Independent … Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848–​1921), vol. 6, no. 307, Oct. 19, 1854, pp. 334. ProQuest, www.proqu​est.com/​magazi​nes/​child​ren-​sho​uld-​be-​seen-​not-​heard/​docv​iew/​ 90011​805/​se-​2. Wall, Barbara. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. MacMillan, 1991. Webster, Crystal Lynn. “The History of Black Girls and the Field of Black Girl Studies: At the Forefront of Academic Scholarship.” The American Historian, Mar. 2020, www.oah.org/​tah/​iss​ues/​2020/​the-​hist​ory-​of-​girlh​ood/​the-​hist​ory-​of-​ black-​girls-​and-​the-​field-​of-​black-​girlh​ood-​stud​ies-​at-​the-​forefr​ont-​of-​acade​mic/.​ Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House on the Prairie. 1935. Illustrated by Garth Williams, HarperTrophy, 2004. Williams-​Garcia, Rita. Gone Crazy in Alabama. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2015. —​—​—​. One Crazy Summer. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2010. —​—​—​. P.S. Be Eleven. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2013. Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. 2014. Puffin, 2016.

2 Disability and the Silent Child Literary Selective Mutism

In E.L. Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone, Connor states of his friend, Branwell, “Not speaking was the only weapon he had” (69). Kester, in Piers Torday’s The Last Wild, reflects on the benefits of his mutism: “That’s one of the advantages of not being able to speak—​you never get in bother for talking back” (8). Cally, who has stopped talking in Sarah Lean’s A Dog Called Homeless, thinks, “I was already sure by then that nothing I said would make any difference” (54). This chapter focuses on the children who do not speak, examining the many texts that place a silent child at the center of their narratives. It reflects on the sheer number of these characters and considers the ways silence is strategic for both child characters and authors. In this chapter I identify and analyze a subgenre of children’s literature that I have named “literary selective mutism” or “LSM,” the novelistic translation of the medical condition called selective mutism. As I lay out the facets of this subgenre, I consider the problems posed and exposed by the child who does not speak, and then turn to other representations of the nonspeaking child. This examination allows us to consider questions of perennial importance in children’s literature and in disability studies: questions of silence, voice, and power. Literary Selective Mutism Contemporary children’s literature is enamored with the following plot: a traumatic event; a child who stops speaking; a crisis; and the return of the child’s speech. Over the last twenty-​five years, children’s novels that follow this pattern include, as we move back in time, Christina Collins’ After Zero (2019), Piers Torday’s The Last Wild Trilogy (2013–​15), Sarah Lean’s A Dog Called Homeless (2012), Katherine Hanigan’s True (… Sort Of) (2011), H.L. McCutchen’s Lightland (2002), E.L. Konigsburg’s Silent to the Bone (2000), Dori Jones Yang’s The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang (2000), Ralph Fletcher’s Flying Solo (1998), and Margaret Mahy’s The

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189312-2

18  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism Other Side of Silence (1995). These texts, which range from realistic fiction to fantasy to dystopian science fiction, implicitly and sometimes explicitly claim to represent selective mutism. Some refer to selective mutism within the narrative; After Zero includes peritextual resources on the condition.1 These texts, however, present a false picture of selective mutism, so much so that we need to use a different designation to reflect the translation of this disorder in children’s literature. Thus, I propose the term “literary selective mutism” or LSM. Literary selective mutism has its own pattern, with its own causes, symptoms, and treatment. It generates a particular plot structure and cast of characters. Furthermore, texts featuring LSM also turn this portrayal into a metaphor. They do so not to delegitimate actual mutism, but to focus on questions of silence, voice, and power. Both literary tactics—​misrepresenting disability and making it metaphorical—​raise thorny ethical questions. The critical material on these texts individually is slim, and on the phenomenon of selective mutism across texts essentially nonexistent, given that my focus here is on children’s rather than young adult fiction. As mentioned in the introduction, I take children’s fiction to be concerned with characters who are twelve or younger, and aimed at a similar readership. There is no doubt that the selective mutism plot is also well-​established in young adult literature, though its paradigm differs. The most well-​known example of selective mutism in YA literature is that found in Laurie Halse Anderson’s young adult novel Speak (1999).2 Of the children’s literature I evaluate, Mahy’s The Other Side of Silence (2002) has received the most attention. Christine Wilkie-​Stibbs’ analysis in The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature sets out many of the important discussions of the novel, including an examination of gender, of the protagonist’s place in the family, of female silence as rebellion, and of the use of the double and fairy-​tale tropes. She refers to the protagonist as having “elected to be silent” (63). Roberta Seelinger Trites, while focusing on other works by Mahy, mentions the protagonist of the novel as someone who queers gender conventions (“Margaret” 146). Lucy Butler continues the discussion of fairy-​tale motifs. A sustained discussion of the representation of selective mutism has yet to be articulated. The most compelling theoretical approaches to these books are studies of trauma and disability in children’s literature. The former approach often relies on psychoanalysis and focuses on Holocaust literature. Katherine Capshaw Smith’s introduction to a Children’s Literature forum entitled “Trauma and Children’s Literature” considers briefly the position of the child, inherited from the Romantics, as both victim of traumatic experience and able to provide a model of survival (116). Moreover, Smith reflects on the essays she introduces as demonstrating that “other modes of criticism—​such as sociohistorical analysis, critical social theory,

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  19 and gender studies—​may be productive contributions to a field that has hitherto been defined by psychoanalytic study” (116). Yet it is disability studies that offers the most useful set of concepts and ideas for examining the subgenre of books that feature selective mutism, as will be made clear in the discussion that follows. Selective mutism is a relatively rare anxiety disorder, affecting less than 1% of the population (Capozzi 776; Wong 2). Typically, it begins when children are young, usually before they are five (Capozzi 775; Wong 2), and appears, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as a “consistent failure to speak in specific social situations in which there is an expectation for speaking (e.g., at school) despite speaking in other situations” (313.23 A). Thus, children may continue to speak to close family members even though they do not speak to teachers or classmates. Only in very rare circumstances is selective mutism connected to trauma (Wong 10). Usually diagnosed after other conditions have been ruled out, selective mutism is then treated with therapy and medication (Wong 3–​6). Some researchers claim that most children outgrow it (Wong 2); others indicate that it can be long-​lasting (Capozzi 775). The term “selective mutism” dates from 1994; previously, the condition was called “elective mutism,” but this implies an oppositional refusal to speak rather than an inability to do so (Wong 3). The change to “selective” transfers the focus of the term from the rationale for the condition to the circumstances involved, indicating that these children speak in some settings and not others (Wong 3). It represents a shift from a model based on responsibility and blame—​the recalcitrant child—​to one based on situational anxiety. The Library of Congress changed its subject heading from “elective” to “selective” mutism in late 2006 or early 2007 (Polutta). Literary selective mutism reinforces myths about selective mutism; for example, that it arises out of trauma, is an “all or nothing” condition, appears just before or at the onset of puberty, and disappears when necessary, usually in service of someone else in need of help that only the “mute” person can provide. In considering how and why the texts under discussion present selective mutism, one might be tempted to see them as a collection of cases. My research shows that the literary occurrence of selective mutism is not so rare, the list of texts above providing just a start. Instead of beginning before school-​age, literary selective mutism in children’s fiction affects ten to thirteen-​year-​olds and usually results in a complete lack of speech. It is almost always connected to trauma, and rather than being treated with medication, it usually disappears during a crisis that requires speech. What are the implications of this portrayal? Here disability studies provides helpful paradigms. Its foundational writings demonstrate how narrative itself relies on disability for its plots. Lennard J. Davis, for

20  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism example, in his critique of the eighteenth–​and nineteenth-​century novel, sees the basic narrative plot as moving from normality to abnormality and back again (331). In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess” (53). Anita Wohlmann and Marion Rana write that fictional accounts of disability usually introduce “a problem, crisis, or deviance to be addressed, solved, or fixed in the course of a narrative” (8). Lois Keith, who examines classic children’s literature and disability, bluntly states that there are only two possibilities in these texts for the disabled character: “kill or cure” (5). Contemporary children’s literature generally attempts to move away from that stark binary to present children living with disabilities. Therefore, the LSM pattern, in relying on disability as a narrative “crutch,” appears to be a relic (Mitchell and Snyder 49). The texts I am examining have a tricky relationship to the widely accepted models of disability. Disability scholars have long criticized the medical model of disability, which sees the person with a disability as a patient in need of a cure, and championed the social model of disability, which sees disability as arising when an impairment meets barriers. On the one hand, these texts acknowledge the insufficiency of the medical model—​to the point of complete rejection—​and emphasize a version of the social model of disability. On the other hand, they create false narratives about selective mutism that dismiss the possibility of interventions from counsellors and medication, perpetuating the idea that the disorder is one that the individual himself or herself can surmount; in other words, they return us to a world similar to that of the recalcitrant child and “elective mutism.” Furthermore, as my analysis will indicate, these novels use their version of selective mutism as a metaphor for the power imbalance between children and adults. Literary selective mutism is a strategy on the part of the child characters and the authors to resist adult power and judgment. In his wise analysis of Lauren Slater’s Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, G. Thomas Couser indicates the problems with misrepresenting disability and turning it into a trope: this affects real people who do have the disability (112); it endorses false ideas about the disability (128); and it turns a bodily or mental disorder into something to be judged (129). Couser’s critique of Slater, in which he states that “the metaphor of epilepsy is apparently well suited to communicating certain home truths about Slater’s life and self (which is of course her rationale for it)” (124), applies as well to the texts I am examining: literary selective mutism easily stands for discussions of power and voice. Through what Couser calls a “familiarizing metaphor” (124–​25), one that identifies similarities with something we already know, LSM both uses and erases disability.

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  21 This chapter section lays out the way literary selective mutism works, taking Lean’s A Dog Called Homeless as paradigmatic but considering also the other texts mentioned above. In “Intertextuality and the Child Reader,” Wilkie-​ Stibbs discusses the particular type of intertextuality which distinguishes genres, and we might add, subgenres: “where identifiable shared clusters of codes and literary conventions are grouped together in recognisable patterns which allow readers to expect and locate them, and to cause them to seek out similar texts” (170). Texts featuring LSM share a set of plot devices and character types, they critique the power of adults to regulate speech, and they conclude in transcending disability. Fundamentally, these texts employ LSM to condemn the adult world for its inability to see, help, or solve the pain of childhood; indeed, adults often perpetuate that childhood pain. The three quotations that begin this chapter suggest different reasons for the abandonment of speech, but all these instances, as is the case with the LSM texts more generally, demonstrate that a strategic silence eventually rebalances power between the child and adults. In this way, LSM is used as a strategy of not only ­resistance—​ which is problematic—​but also of recovery and renewal. The Paradigm: Sponsored Silence

LSM texts begin with someone—​usually the protagonist, sometimes the protagonist’s friend—​who has stopped talking. One of the ironies of LSM is that books with a silent protagonist are filled with the words of the silent character. This irony intensifies the usual experience of the reader who is allowed into a character’s thoughts. In these texts, the reader often occupies the privileged position of “hearing” or reading the words of a person who will not speak them aloud, who does not communicate with words to anyone else. As an overhearer of the mute character’s interior monologue, the reader understands the character’s motivations. This technique puts the reader in a knowing and sympathetic position vis-​à-​vis the “silent” character, an effect that is reinforced by the short time span between the act of narration and its subject; thus, we readers are not just privy to the character’s voice after she or he has “recovered.” Readers also enjoy discrepant awareness, whereby we are placed in a more cognizant position than other characters in the text. Here again, LSM balances kinds of authority or knowledge. In The Other Side of Silence, the text is a document written by the protagonist Hero, who writes, “I had better put down that, back then when I was twelve, I never screamed myself” (Mahy 3). Indeed, as her teacher says later in the book, “She’s completely locked in. But her internal voice is perfectly intact. Take a look at this written work!” (138). Silent to the Bone and True (… Sort Of) avoid the paradox of the mute individual whose words fill the page by casting this character as the

22  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism friend of the protagonist. In these instances, the reader, like the protagonist, must decipher the silence. In most texts, however, the reader understands why the main character will not speak. A Dog Called Homeless begins with eleven-​year-​old Cally Fisher telling the reader that she has not spoken for a month. The reason is obvious: speech leads to disempowerment. The adults in Cally’s life frequently demand silence. Her father indicates the Cally’s speech is inappropriate. When Cally tries to tell her father that she can see her dead mother, her father responds, “I don’t want to hear another word about it” (Lean 9). Her teacher signals that her speech is unruly and ill-​timed. When Cally speaks out of turn in class, her teacher shushes her (11). Furthermore, Cally realizes that the significant adults in her life do not attend to her speech, rendering it meaningless. She might as well be silent. Cally states that her father and aunt observe her “in that way people do when they’re not really listening to what you’re saying” (7). Punished for speaking, Cally is also rewarded for silence. When Cally’s school holds a “sponsored silence” for charity—​nominated students raise money by not talking—​no one thinks that Cally, who often is disciplined for speaking at the wrong time, will be able to go a whole day without talking; though discouraged from volunteering, she does so anyway. Even Cally’s older brother, on hearing that Cally is collecting money for a “sponsored silence,” says, “I wish it were forever” (32). At the end of her day of silence, Cally realizes that she has avoided trouble the entire time, and so she continues to be silent. The text, thus, presents her silence as a choice, reinforcing the idea that her mutism is “elective.” A Dog Called Homeless models LSM in two ways: first, a traumatic event plus a precipitating event tips the character from speech into silence, and second, the text demonstrates both the perils of speech and the potentialities of silence. The traumatic events that occur in LSM texts would test anyone’s coping powers; they lead to a psychic “wound,” the Greek origin of “trauma.” Such events always precede the narrative’s opening and often are connected to death, the ultimate silencer. In Cally’s situation, this event is her mother’s death in a car accident. Her father refuses to mention her mother, thus intensifying the psychological effects. This kind of silence, which will be discussed at greater length below, is a metaphorical one; not the refusal to speak at all, but the refusal to address certain subjects. The death of the mother is also the traumatic event behind Silent to the Bone and The Last Wild. In one of the most interesting examples, that of After Zero, the suffering stems from deaths that the main character, Elise, has not been informed about—​the death of her brothers in a car accident shortly after she was born. The withholding silence of adults is at its peak here. These traumatic incidents are almost always connected to the family: in The Other Side of Silence, family fighting and rivalry, in True

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  23 (… Sort Of), paternal abuse. And usually, adults refuse to discuss them. Not only do the child characters represent a version of selective mutism, but they also represent the metaphorical enactment of the adults’ verbal choices. Often, the traumatic event is followed by a catalyst that pushes characters into silence. In A Dog Called Homeless, this is the “sponsored silence.” The precipitating event could also be a death, as in Flying Solo, where it is the death of a classmate, rather than a family member. Problems with communicating to schoolmates function as the precipitating events in The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang and After Zero. In The Other Side of Silence, the angry departure of the protagonist’s older sister from the family flips the switch. In Silent to the Bone, Branwell’s baby sister is in a coma, and Branwell is suspected of putting her there. In many of these cases, then, a system of rewards and punishments drives the individual. In fact, we might read all these occurrences of LSM as metaphorical “sponsored silences,” since external events and individuals prompt the condition. LSM, then, is constructed as a social disorder, and pushes to the limit another premise of disability studies—​namely, that disability occurs when impairment meets social barriers. In the case of LSM, the impairment itself is a result of social factors. If LSM texts present silence as a rational response to difficult circumstances, they also suggest different motivations for mutism, and here I examine the quotations that begin the chapter. The first, from Silent to the Bone, represents the group of texts in which silence is bluntly described as a tool used to achieve some end: “Not speaking was the only weapon he [Branwell] had” (Konigsburg 69). In this case, the goal is the piecing together by Branwell’s friend of the circumstances that rendered baby Nikki comatose. Branwell does not speak because he does not think his speech will exculpate him and thus his silence functions as resistance. In The Other Side of Silence, Hero eventually understands that her own silence was her “way of being famous” in a family that values speech and argument over everything else (Mahy 164). Christine Wilkie-​Stibbs refers to Hero’s silence as “a perverse kind of power and control,” and further a sign of her “rage against a world of words” (Feminine 65). As with Branwell, remaining silent is Hero’s weapon of choice. The second quotation, from The Last Wild, presents one of the most common reasons for silence. Here silence seems like neutrality, a way to avoid punishment. Kester notes as a benefit of not talking that “you never get in bother for talking back” (Torday 8). Likewise, Ferris Boyd in True (… Sort Of) does not speak because, as the policewoman realizes, “somebody’s told her he’ll hurt her if she talks. She thinks her voice can’t help her” (Hannigan 336). In these cases, speech is viewed as something so powerful that it can lead to catastrophe, and silence might be

24  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism a way—​though it never is—​to be inconspicuous. Rachel in Flying Solo believes the one time she yelled at her parents for their constant bickering caused her father to leave, blaming herself and her speech for the actions of adults. In After Zero and The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, the main characters fear the ridicule of their classmates, and hope to avoid it by not speaking. In the third quotation—​“I was already sure by then that nothing I said would make any difference” (Lean 54)—​silence appears to be surrender, a giving up on the idea that speech matters. Lewis in Lightland realizes that “[h]‌e had withdrawn from the world his entire life by refusing to speak” (McCutchen 154). Looking at all these examples, it is possible to see them as employing the language of war by depicting silence as a weapon, or neutrality, or surrender. We are firmly in the land of silence as a metaphor for struggle—​one in which the child character has few choices other than to stop speaking. While the first part of an LSM text typically provides the reader with the rationale for mutism, the rising action introduces several character types usually found in LSM fiction. Generally, these can be divided, fairy-​ tale like, into helpers and antagonists. One type that appears with startling regularity is the character who is more disabled, who may have even more trouble with communication than the one with selective mutism. The “more disabled” character fulfills several roles, providing friendship and sometimes a project, since the “more disabled” character needs the help of the mute character. Lois Keith, using a term coined by Pat Thomson, refers to books where the disabled character becomes the catalyst for the protagonist’s growth as “second-​fiddle books” (Thomson in Keith 209). Occasionally, the “more disabled” character also becomes an example of what disability activists refer to as “inspiration porn”: the ascribing of near sainthood to disabled individuals who manage to go about their lives in almost “normal” ways. In A Dog Called Homeless, Sam Cooper, who is the same age as Cally, fills this role. As his mother characterizes him, “[h]‌e’s blind and mostly deaf, but otherwise he’s just like you and me” (Lean 72). Sam provides Cally with companionship and a project—​ “It took ages to learn the deaf-​blind alphabet”—​and proves that communication happens apart from speech (128). At moments Sam appears close to angelic; Cally describes him as “magic” and as having, despite his heart ailment, “the best heart anyone could have, a mysterious heart that told him things I only dreamed of” (147, 174). In The Other Side of Silence, Rinda, who has multiple disabilities including being unable to speak, provides the foil to Hero. Tommy, in Flying Solo, has cognitive disabilities and difficulties with social cues. Silent to the Bone gives us baby Nikki; she is in a coma for most of the text, temporarily disabled. Connor, who narrates the story of the silent Branwell and his baby sister, draws

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  25 the connection between the two when he comments, “I’m not sure that Nikki is the only one in a vegetative state” (Konigsburg 137, emphasis in original). The book also alludes to the case of Jean-​Dominique Bauby, author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, who communicated after his stroke by blinking (142). The real-​life Bauby hovers in the background as a “more disabled” character, but also as one who provides the clue for communicating with Branwell. In The Last Wild, the characters who have more difficulty with communication turn out to be plague-​infected animals who can communicate telepathically with Kester, the main character, but who need his human abilities to save them. Both The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang and After Zero have characters who use wheelchairs, and in the case of the former, cannot speak. The “more disabled” characters function ultimately to help the mute individual. Along with this character type, many of these texts also introduce helpers manqué in the form of psychiatrists, psychologists, educators, or therapists who attempt to treat the silent character but fail. Often, they diagnose and then give up; their presence may introduce the term “selective mutism” in the novel. Generally, their inability to help provides a critique of the medical model of disability. In A Dog Called Homeless, the “special needs lady” at the school “deals with all the problems—​if you can’t do math or English, if you’re in a wheelchair, or if you are the problem” (Lean 24). Mrs. Brooks wishes that the “old Cally” could return, even before Cally stops talking, and is the epitome of the insensitive counsellor (26). In Flying Solo, Dr. Bang-​Jansen diagnoses Rachel “as a selective mute: a person who chooses not to speak” and links the condition to “profound emotional trauma” (Fletcher 5)—​thus reinforcing two myths about mutism that are often found in LSM texts. The school psychologist is worse; frustrated, he yells at Rachel (52). In The Other Side of Silence, Hero reads the reports written about her by the school psychologist. Her educators, she reflects, “had been so sure that they would solve my problems, both through kindness and through seeing the world in the right way” (Mahy 104). Of course, they do not. Usually, adults, no matter how sympathetic, cannot cure the character with LSM. That cure, as I discuss later, comes from a new crisis. A Dog Called Homeless also presents the exception to the bullying counsellor: a compassionate, funny professional named Dr. Colborn who assesses Cally, sympathizes with her, reassures her, and mentions in an offhand way that though our voices are important, “people communicate with their bodies all the time[.]‌Tiny little vibrations and movements all tell a story about someone. Their eyes give them away” (Lean 166). Cally believes Dr. Colborn “could see right inside me, right into my heart” (166). Dr. Colborn not only contrasts with the usual representation of therapists, but also states what is implied in many of the LSM texts: that alternative

26  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism forms of communication exist and can be drawn upon when speech has been silenced. It is not surprising, for example, that Cally communicates by touch not only with her neighbor, Sam, but also with the titular dog. She smiles back at Jed, the man who lives on the streets, and reflects that this communication was “kind of like talking but not talking,” and though she is unsure of exactly what they “were saying … it was something nice” (44). Many of the texts include a sympathetic adult who hovers on the margins, someone who understands, as Rachel’s teacher Mr. Fabiano does in Flying Solo, that “You’ll speak when you’re ready” (Fletcher 43). These statements, and others like it, perpetuate the idea that mutism is indeed “elective,” a choice. Dr. Colborn’s statement above that “people communicate with their bodies all the time” raises one of the most important themes in LSM texts and exposes its reliance on disability as metaphor. At root, these texts are concerned with the larger subject of communication. How and why do the characters relate to each other? What interferes with or enables successful communication, particularly that between adults and children? Many of the plots and subplots of these texts are connected to silence and speech. In A Dog Called Homeless, Cally’s muteness proves that the wolfhound shadowing her was intended as a gift from her mother. In an incredible twist of fate, Cally’s mother purchased the dog on the very day of her fatal car accident. She handed the dog over to Jed, who tried to help her at the scene of the accident, and who has spent the last year trying to find the intended recipient of the dog. When Cally’s father says to Jed, “How do we know you’re telling the truth, that this isn’t some story from Cally’s vivid imagination, some story she’s convinced you about?” Jed can respond, “Because Cally’s never said a word to me. Not one” (Lean 181). Cally’s muteness proves that Jed is telling the truth and that the dog rightly belongs to her. In Silent to the Bone, Branwell’s silence drives the plot by turning his best friend, the first-​person narrator, into a detective who must discover what really happened the day baby Nikki became comatose. Hero’s silence in The Other Side of Silence makes her the pawn of an unscrupulous neighbor. Kester’s silence in The Last Wild attunes him to his “gift of the voice” that allows him to communicate with animals (66). In these examples, and in the other texts above, LSM drives the plot forward. These texts reinforce communication as a theme through their metaphors, symbols, and allusions. To take one such common symbol, birds figure prominently in several of these books, including The Last Wild, The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, The Other Side of Silence, Flying Solo, and A Dog Called Homeless, sometimes operating in multiple ways in one story. Birdsong represents nonverbal communication as well as beauty and art. Birds can also symbolize imprisonment if they are caged, freedom if

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  27 they are flying free, or some middle point if they are domesticated. The classical myth of Philomela—​uniting violence, muteness, the transformation of suffering into art and of human into bird—​seems particularly appropriate here. The connection between birds and characters with disabilities is common in children’s literature. Sara K. Day and Paige Gray discuss how disabled characters who cannot speak or speak only with difficulty are birdwatchers, and the birds themselves are multivalent symbols. A recent example is Leslie Connor’s Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, discussed later in this chapter, in which Frenchie, who is autistic and nonverbal, is described by the protagonist as “my bird-​loving, no-​talk, very best friend” (321). In E.B. White’s classic, The Trumpet of the Swan, a bird is the disabled character. Louis, a mute trumpeter swan, is depicted as “different” (43), a “defective child” (36) with “a speech defect” (42). With the help of a prosthesis—​a trumpet—​Louis feels that “[h]‌is defect of being without a voice had at last been overcome” (163). Birds in LSM texts often represent the mute character. Cally, for example, remembers a family outing when her mother was still alive: Swans were waiting there. Two of them reached their necks up and pulled a blue rope to ring a bell hanging from the window frame. They were mute swans. They didn’t speak or squawk. They used the bell to tell someone they were hungry. Mom said, “What beautiful creatures. Can you see how clever they are to find a way to speak to us like that, to speak of everything about themselves?” And I felt the churning and yearning inside for how Dad had been back then. How he’d listened to her and looked at her. How he had seen all of us, seen the way we wondered at the swans, and had said, “I see it too.” (Lean 104) Like the swans, Cally is trying to communicate without speech. She is pulling a metaphorical rope to ring a metaphorical bell, but that bell is silence. The passage suggests that her mother was the parent who paid attention to what mattered and drew others’ attention to the same. She was the primary parent. Now Cally is trying to get her father’s attention. He has to become the parent who notices. At the end of the novel, when Cally prepares to sing at the school concert, her father says she sings “[l]‌ike a bird … [l]ike your mom” (199). In After Zero, Elise’s notebook is decorated with swans and the following Buddhist quotation: “Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely about” (Collins 21). Supposedly, to

28  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism speak is to be imprisoned, to be silent is to be liberated. Later Elise thinks about the mute swan: “If I were to have a Patronus like in Harry Potter, or a daemon like in His Dark Materials, maybe it would take the form of a mute swan” (148). The author extends the symbol of the bird to apply not only to the protagonist but also to the reader who may suffer from selective mutism. Collins dedicates the book to “mute swans, lone ravens, and ‘other birds’ around the world.” Hero in The Other Side of Silence roams the trees of her neighbor’s property and thinks of herself as bird-​like even before the neighbor refers to her as “Jorinda.” That name brings the fairy-​tale tradition into the text in the tale from the Brothers Grimm; in particular, “Jorinda and Joringal,” in which a maiden is transformed into a nightingale (“Jorinda and Joringal” 228). The Other Side of Silence is not the only LSM text to refer to fairy tales where humans become birds, reflecting the way in which these texts want to depict disability as a medical and social reality and nod to the outdated model of disability as a curse or enchantment. Collins credits “The Twelve Brothers” by the Brothers Grimm for inspiring After Zero (244). This tale depicts a sister and her brothers, who have been turned into ravens. To undo the spell, the girl must remain mute for twelve years. Several elements of the fairy tale seep into After Zero, including a daughter who if not unwanted, feels herself to be so; a daughter’s ignorance that she has brothers; and a raven that appears at critical moments in the novel. Fairy-​tale allusions tie these mostly realistic novels to stories of enchantment, elevating the characters and circumstances beyond the mundane. The German fairy-​tale tradition favors passive heroines who speak little. As Ruth B. Bottigheimer demonstrates, the Grimms’ fairy tales reflected the German cultural belief that a good woman is a silent woman (117). Muteness, then, entwines disability and gender issues. LSM texts that use this tradition also write against it by increasing the agency of the “enchanted” protagonist. Gender in LSM Texts

It is worth pausing here to take further note of gender. In the texts examined in this chapter, most protagonists are female, a fact that holds true in other LSM children’s books as well as in YA books with selective mutism plots. The ratio of female characters with selective mutism to male characters with the same condition is much higher in literary texts than in the actual population. Some medical studies report slightly more girls with selective mutism; others say that it seems equally prevalent in girls and boys (Capozzi 776; Wong 2). Why, then, all the nontalking fictional girls? First, there is the lengthy tradition of the perfect woman as the silent woman, and thus of the perfect girl or woman-​in-​training as silent also. The first day that Cally does not speak, she also does not get in trouble.

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  29 It seems a prerequisite for any discussion of female speech to begin with Paul’s injunctions in first Timothy to “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection” and “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (King James Version, 1 Tim. 2:11–​12). However, a study of children’s literature does not need to look so far back. Instead, readers can call to mind silent women and girls within the literary tradition. Again, Bottigheimer on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm: At one end of the speech scale are biological mothers—​good but dead—​ and their marriageable daughters. Both are silent … At the other end … appear both evil witches and witchlike figures and authority figures—​ the Virgin Mary, kings, princes, and men in general—​all free to speak. (125) This distinction holds true in other fairy tales as well. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” gives us a character who even in girlhood is “a curious child, silent and thoughtful” (217), unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the most important girl character of the nineteenth century, who is curious and garrulous and whose garrulousness causes her all kinds of trouble. The mermaid’s only chance at human love and hence an immortal soul rests on her ability to entice the prince to fall in love with her—​without any voice at all. The sea witch has cut out her tongue, taking her mellifluous voice in exchange for giving her legs. The little mermaid is trapped, for it seems that the ideal mate is quiet but not too quiet. She cannot assert her identity, and so the prince believes that the girl who rescued him is someone else. Presumably the Virgin Mary of Bottigheimer’s words is free to speak because everything she says is holy, and thus the distinction is not only between speech and silence, but also between “good speech” and “bad speech.” For Paul, sinful speech might claim authority; in fairy tales, it would be the witch’s curse. In a formative text like Little Women (1868), bad speech is angry speech. Jo asks her mother for advice on controlling the “sharp words” that “fly out”: “the more I say the worse I get, till it’s a pleasure to hurt people’s feelings, and say dreadful things” (Alcott 80). Jo’s mother, who has revealed that she is “angry nearly every day of … [her] life” (79), tells Jo that I’ve learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips; and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away a minute, and give myself a little shake, for being so weak and wicked. (79–​80) Even in texts like Anne of Green Gables (1908), where volubility is central to the protagonist’s personality—​indeed, endearing to the reader—​it

30  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism is also viewed as something that diminishes with age, that needs to be put away with other childish things. Fifteen-​year-​old Anne is “much quieter” than her younger self, or as Marilla puts it, somewhat wistfully, “You don’t chatter half as much as you used to, Anne” (Montgomery 236). Marilla and the reader both miss the Anne of old, but Marilla only values her talkativeness retrospectively. Aside from the connection between quietness and femininity, we might also reflect on the cultural devaluing of female speech, the way in which it is marked both as trivial and superabundant. According to linguists, female speech is more likely to be called “gossip” and to be condemned (Talbot 76; Eckert and McConnell-​Ginet 99). Several of the novels discussed in this chapter depict female conversation as malicious and exclusionary; for example, in A Dog Called Homeless, Cally overhears her former best friend talk disparagingly about her with another girl in, of course, the girls’ restroom. When Cally challenges their words, they accuse her of not being able to take a joke (15). The rub is that female talk is often portrayed as both trivial and as significant, a necessary social skill for bonding and belonging to a group. In After Zero, part of what drives Elise to speechlessness is her self-​perceived failure at female group talk. According to Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-​Ginet, as girls become teenagers, their place in the social order emerges from “discussion, arguments, and dramatic friendship incidents. These hierarchies are developed over time in discursive practice” (126). Many of these novels demonstrate the social banishment that occurs when a girl cannot master the right speech moves. Feminist literary criticism has often connected gender and silence. Two such examples in the field of children’s literature are Roberta Seelinger Trites’ now classic Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels (1997) and Christine Wilkie-​ Stibbs’ The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature (2002). Both works apply Anglo-​ American and French feminist theory to their chosen texts. Trites analyzes a range of novels published mostly from the 1960s to the 1990s. Her title places the silent young woman on display; the only state move silent than unconsciousness is death. According to Trites, as with Anne of Green Gables and Jo March, female protagonists of “prefeminist” novels “grow up and into the ladylike art of silence” while protagonists in feminist novels “retain their voices” (Waking 7). In her chapter on “Feminine Silence,” she examines several feminist children’s novels where female protagonists, though others attempt to silence them, continue to speak through their narrative voices (which we might note is true, generally, of first-​person novels). Christine Wilkie-​ Stibbs, who emphasizes French feminism, analyzes seven texts, five of which are by Margaret Mahy. Both Trites and Wilkie-​Stibbs draw upon disability metaphorically, using ideas of aphasia and anorexia taken from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  31 (1979). Trites employs the medical term “aphasia,” referring, for example, to a character as having “enforced aphasia,” meaning that she stops herself from speaking (Waking 47, 50). Aphasia refers to speech loss derived from such underlying conditions as a stroke or cerebral palsy. Trites states that Cassie of Let the Circle Be Unbroken suffers from “verbal” but “not mental” aphasia because her inner voice still speaks (50). Thus, “her aphasia is never a complete one” (51). Wilkie-​Stibbs applies Gilbert and Gubar’s idea of the nineteenth-​century female writer as metaphorically anorexic in her analysis of The Other Side of Silence. According to Wilkie-​Stibbs, Hero Rapper engages in “a verbal anorexia with which she mutilates not her body but her speech in an act of personal rebellion” (65). Here again we should take note of G. Thomas Couser’s warning against turning disability into a metaphor even if those metaphors seem well-​suited to the situations they describe. The Return to Speech

In children’s literature that hews to the pattern of the LSM narrative, we expect that the mute child will embrace speech, or plan to, by the end of the novel. Unlike actual cases of selective mutism, where the slow process of therapy and medication might help children speak again, the LSM model relies on a moment of crisis to bring about speech. Ironically, the solution to trauma turns out to be more trauma. The difference is that in the traumatic solutions to LSM the character has some agency. In A Dog Called Homeless this moment occurs when most of the main characters are arguing and are too distracted to notice that Sam is missing. Cally realizes that he has probably gone to the lake to swim, an activity that is forbidden to him because of his health. Cally finds him floundering in the water, on the verge of drowning. To save him, she must shout for her father: “I filled my ribs and belly with air, felt the tightness, fit to burst. I shouted at the top of my voice what Sam had spelled, what I knew I had to say. ‘DAD!’ ” (Lean 186–​87). The passage is notable for its focus on the body. Sam will die from inhaling water if Cally cannot fill her lungs with air and expel it in speech. In Silent to the Bone, Branwell speaks to prevent the babysitter from hurting other children. Hero of The Other Side of Silence must call out to alert others that she and Rinda are imprisoned. Kester in The Last Wild yells “NO!” to ensure his father helps cure the animals (306). Ferris Boyd in True (… Sort Of) alerts Delly and tells her to run (Hannigan 313). Regardless of whether these texts depict silence as aggression, detachment, or capitulation, the return to language is sudden and triumphal. Cally and Hero both shout; Rachel sees that she “could choose to speak” (Fletcher 137). In After Zero, speaking and flying come together as Elise readies herself to contribute in class. Continuing the use of bird metaphors, Elise

32  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism states, “I breath in, part my lips, spread my wings. And fly” (236). The reader is confident that Elise will speak in class, even though we do not hear her words. When Ferris Boyd yells to help her friend avoid punishment—​“her voice was loud and strong. It blasted through the crowd”—​ the protagonist and the reader discover that Ferris can speak, and the text implies that once Ferris knows she is safe from her father’s abuse, she will fully return to speech (Hannigan 313). Lewis of Lightland realizes “This is the time … He’d been silent long enough” (McCutchen 154). The return to speech is presented as a choice. In LSM texts, speech is often supplemented by other creative communicative endeavors. Cally had to forgo being the star of her school musical when her mother died. The book concludes with her singing solo at her school concert, accompanied by her father on guitar. In After Zero, Elise wins the school poetry contest. In The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, Jinna creates elaborate stories featuring her yarn people dolls, and these become a manuscript submitted by herself and her friend and read to the class by the teacher. In The Other Side of Silence, the story we are reading turns out to be Hero’s creative endeavor, though she goes on to burn it. She destroys her memoir in favor of speech, her art in favor of the “normal.” These activities and others like them have multiple implications. They supply an outlet for expression, indicate the creativity of the mute character, and in some cases provide a way of communicating without speaking. According to Trites, in several texts she examines with silenced characters, “art provides a metaphorical expression of voice” (Waking 48). But we might criticize this authorial strategy. Art gives structure to passion and in some cases speech. It is passion made palatable, made socially acceptable. Thus, Hero’s burning of her manuscript at the end of The Other Side of Silence suggests her continuing rebellion, even though she is no longer mute. The resolutions of these texts suggest that the power imbalance between adults and the child character has been somewhat rectified, that acknowledgment has been made of the child’s perspective. The arc of these disability narratives ends with the individual being cured and often the child’s silence has taught the adults a lesson—​that they need to speak forthrightly. In A Dog Called Homeless, Cally instructs her father on how he needs to proceed after her mother’s death; paradoxically, her past silence was in part a result of his. “Dad,” she says, we don’t have to talk about every Christmas and birthday. I just want you to talk about her [Cally’s mother], because when you do, I remember her. As if she were here … we could just talk a little bit … and then keep practicing until we can do it easily. (Lean 190)

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  33 This paradox occurs in many of these novels. While the primary “mute” character is the child, adults have been withholding necessary words and conversations. They have been silent on particular subjects. Their speech is even more vital because the death of a parent, sibling, or friend robs the child of the opportunity to hear that person’s words. In After Zero, Elise’s mother realizes that her attempt to hide the deaths of her two young sons has made her life and her daughter’s life miserable, and confesses, “I should have told you. I should have told you lots of things” (Collins 221). Jinna’s father in The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang finally tells her that he himself suffered from mutism as a child. After he speaks, a “weight lifted from Jinna’s heart … How could she let him know how glad she was that he had told her?” (Yang 174). When Kester’s mother is dying, she says, “Tell Dad he has to tell you” (Torday, Last Wild 31), and Kester’s father apologizes at the end of the novel (the asterisk indicates that this speech is telepathic): “*I’m sorry,* he says. *I know I should have … you know, chip off the old … but they took you away before I could … *” (320, ellipses in the original). His words paradoxically make clear what they do not say: that he, like his son, can speak to animals with his mind. In some cases, parents have behaved so terribly that no redemption, no mending of the break, is possible. Ferris Boyd’s father has left scars on her body: “They were slashes across her skin, like a message written in code. A bad message, ripped into Ferris Boyd’s back” (Hannigan 302). Lewis’ father, the “NightKing,” tries to kill him, and at the end, Lewis renounces him by stating that he is “no longer his son” (McCutchen 217). In most cases, however, the adult characters learn to speak more honestly, forgoing their elective mutism. The temporary silence of the child characters proves to be just a questionable means to the end of reaffirming and even strengthening family bonds. Denying the Paradigm

One text overtly denies the connection between mutism and trauma, and between itself and the LSM genre more generally. In a self-​reflexive moment, the protagonist of After Zero considers her state: People want to know why I don’t talk. So do I. I almost wish I’d experienced some traumatic event, or lost a loved one, or been physically abused or something, just so I could have an excuse. Like in those novels in the library, with descriptions like “So-​and-​so hasn’t said a word since the earthquake took her family,” or “After watching his twin fall from a cliff, So-​and-​so won’t speak to anyone.” Heck, I’d even take the little mermaid’s excuse—​that I made a bargain with a sea witch. (Collins 55)

34  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism After Zero is significant because it recognizes the model that I have named “literary selective mutism.” Here, Elise attempts to differentiate herself from the standard LSM protagonist with a harrowing past, even while accepting that narrative as a reasonable one. Although After Zero claims to present a more “realistic” version of selective mutism by denying that trauma is at the root of Elise’s condition, the novel closely follows the LSM paradigm. Unbeknownst to her, Elise has suffered from the aftermath of a devastating occurrence. She has lost loved ones, and she has been subject to emotional abuse. This family tragedy has colored her entire life and contributed to her silence. Elise dismisses trauma because she sees it as too easy an explanation. But in her own case, not only are there the undisclosed sibling deaths, but also the emotional cruelty of her mother, who, for example, does not celebrate her daughter’s birthday. The precipitating event is her difficult switch from homeschooling to public school, and the numerous faux pas she feels she makes in encounters with her peers: “I said only what was necessary. It was better that way. I was less likely to speak out of turn or mispronounce a word or insult someone’s father or spill the beans” (41). Eventually, the few words become none, the safest position possible. Like the little mermaid, Elise has made a bargain, but this one is with herself. Along with traumatic and precipitating events, After Zero also features the usual LSM characters. The “more disabled” characters appear as hallucinatory visions of her brothers in wheelchairs. And it is a series of distressing incidents that brings everything to a head, until Elise is swarmed by bullies. Though Elise does not immediately speak, she rehearses the moment when this will happen in a way not dissimilar in its physical details to other examples where the mute protagonist does speak: “I will my vocal cords to vibrate and turn the thoughts in my head into sounds. Stop. Leave me alone” (205). A second later, the bully who is threatening her mouth and tongue with a nail file is attacked by a shrieking raven—​ clearly Elise’s avatar—​and then disciplined by a teacher. To explain herself, Elise “write[s]‌down everything” (208), bringing about a rapprochement between herself and her mother, and with her peers. Her mother admits that her own silence was the problem: “I still couldn’t face telling you. Silence was easier. And I realize now what sort of harm that might have done” (224). Here Elise’s mother’s withholding behavior mirrors the “elective” adjective that so often defines mutism in these texts. Finally, Elise’s poem, entitled “When I Speak,” wins the school contest and she is poised to talk at the end of the novel (233, 237–​38). Therefore, even though After Zero distances itself from other LSM texts, it adheres to all their conventions. As LSM texts move toward their resolutions, they often rely on the written word, like Elise’s narrative and poetry, to make the case for the

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  35 silent character. After Zero, The Other Side of Silence, and Flying Solo are all novels in which, to varying extents, the written word is explanatory if not exculpatory. The writings of the mute characters stand in for their absent voices. In a larger sense, the texts I am examining with silent protagonists operate in an analogous way: the written words provide what the mute characters cannot and allow them, as in the case of the testimonies some write, to shape their stories. In the situation of a protagonist’s mute friend, silence and communication through means other than voice allow the character control over information and how it is revealed. In all cases, these books use mutism to stand for the difficulties and power of language—​deciphering it, using it, withholding it—​and the necessity of communication by some means or other, though in the end they privilege speech. Representing Disability: Nonverbal Characters Here I turn our attention to nonspeaking children outside the LSM plot. This category includes children who cannot vocalize because of their disabilities. These texts, such as Leslie Connor’s Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? (2022), Sharon M. Draper’s Out of My Mind (2010), and Ann Clare LeZotte’s Show Me a Sign (2020), provide a contrast to LSM texts, especially in their differing approaches to silence and speech. There are several key points of departure. In LSM texts, characters accept the intelligence of the temporarily nonspeaking child; in fact, several of these characters, such as Branwell in Silent to the Bone, are viewed as nerdy geniuses. Readers also generally expect silent characters in LSM texts to regain speech, which they cannot contemplate in characters who have never had it. By and large, mute characters in LSM texts are viewed by other characters not as having a disability but as being recalcitrant. And their muteness, rather than making them invisible, draws more attention to them. This section features children who are not going to be cured of their disabilities and who may feel no need for a cure. All the texts examined in this chapter, and these three are no exception, critique the medical model of disability. Silence and Speech in Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? and Out of My Mind

Both Leslie Connor’s Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? and Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind comment on silence and speech and use animal metaphors to do so. In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? the nonverbal character is the best friend of the protagonist. Although Frenchie, who has autism, is named in the title, his chatty best friend, Aurora, controls the story and narrates most of the book’s chapters; these are usually in the present tense and take us through the time just before and after the start of the new

36  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism school year. Other chapters are rendered in the third person, told in the past tense, and focalized through Frenchie and members of the community. The title refers to the search conducted when Frenchie does not show up at his classroom and also suggests that people do not notice him. When students leave messages hoping for Frenchie’s return, Aurora remarks that many of them come “from kids who have never bothered with Frenchie before today, kids who walk right by him in the hall—​because most kids do” (135). Aurora’s classmates usually do not pay attention to Frenchie; now they and everyone else are trying to find him. Aurora, however, sees Frenchie as “perfect. Perfectly Frenchie” (115). The title of Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind also has several meanings that reflect on the book’s themes. The book is ostensibly the story Melody recounts when her teacher asks students to write an autobiography. Her cerebral palsy means that though her mind is full of words, she cannot articulate them. During the course of the novel she receives a customized computer that speaks and writes in response to her touch. The book ends the way it opens, with Melody starting her autobiography. The title tells the reader that the story is Melody’s creation. The title also rebukes those, like some of her peers, who believe that Melody’s mind is empty. Further, the back cover’s use of the title—​“Being stuck inside her head is making Melody go out of her mind”—​suggests that Melody’s inability to communicate at the level she desires is driving her to madness. Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? and Out of My Mind both disconnect silence from lack of understanding. This serves to refute connotations of the word “dumb,” which almost from its origins has meant both “mute” and “stupid.” Frenchie does not talk. He remains silent when spoken to. Silence here means the absence of speech. But his mother and his best friend both know that his silence does not mean that he is not listening and understanding. Three years before the story’s main action, when Frenchie and his mother, Gracia, move in next door to Aurora’s family, Aurora is perplexed because he does not answer her. Gracia tells her that “Frenchie doesn’t talk. Not in words. But he does hear you” (14). At first, Aurora is doubtful, but she tests Frenchie by whispering in his ear and watching his response. She then becomes his advocate and instructs her annoying antagonist, Darleen, who claims Frenchie “doesn’t know what you’re saying,” that indeed he does (35). Aurora points to his gestures as a way of communicating. She also indicates problems with Darleen’s speech itself, telling her that Frenchie “might be a little upset that we are talking about him instead of to him,” and that he might have taken offense at the way Darleen is addressing Aurora (35). Aurora’s rebuke of Darleen is also a rebuke of a common myth that Jay Dolmage refers to as “disability drift” (46). This is the idea that people who are disabled in one way are also disabled in other ways; for

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  37 example, a wheelchair user might be deemed cognitively impaired. More applicable here is the way “Disability drift also works to make the disability overpower all other facets of an individual’s personality” (Dolmage 46). Darleen believes that because Frenchie does not speak, he has no memory of things and little understanding of the world around him. The teacher who adjudicates the dispute between Darleen and Aurora says, “Frenchie doesn’t speak, but he is a human being just like each of you are. So let’s always choose kindness, okay?” (38–​39). It is telling that she feels the necessity of reminding Darleen and Aurora—​who needs no such reminder—​that being human does not depend upon speech; however, the “but” throws her statement into doubt. It is as if the teacher were saying, “Frenchie has a quality which might make you see him as not human; however, we must still treat him kindly.” The teacher reinforces as she denies the idea that language, particularly spoken language, defines what it means to be human. In this way, she fulfills the trope of the not-​helpful adult who does not fully understand the child with a disability nor children in general. In Out of My Mind, Melody encounters similar stereotypes. In fifth grade, Melody and the other students from the “special program” take part in “inclusion classes” where she encounters the scrutiny of her nondisabled peers (29, 90). At first Melody communicates by pointing to words and letters on a board, as she has been doing most of her life. Then she receives the “Medi-​Talker,” which generates speech in response to her touch. Many students in her mainstream classroom clearly had doubted her intelligence. Claire, who is a nastier version of Darleen, says to the teacher, “I’m not trying to be mean—​honest—​but it just never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head” (143). Even though Melody could communicate before—​if slowly and silently—​Claire has never seen her as intelligent. In response to Claire, the teacher remarks, “You’ve always been able to say whatever came to your mind, Claire, All of you. But Melody has been forced to be silent. She probably has mountains of stuff to say” (143). The memoir that Melody writes proves the teacher is correct; Melody does have mountains to say. Darlene and Claire share an inability to see things from someone else’s perspective and they are both rude in the name of honesty. The teacher points out Claire’s privilege—​ that she has always been able to say what she wants—​and implies that she should use more judgment before uttering whatever pops into her head. In other words, in contrast to Melody, Claire speaks too freely. Authority figures, who should know better, also succumb to “disability drift.” Melody’s third-​grade teacher spends her time on the alphabet because she believes that students with disabilities “don’t retain information like the rest of us” (56). Melody’s mother reminds the teacher that even though Melody cannot walk or talk, “she is extremely intelligent!”

38  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism (58). Melody’s mother also must contradict the doctor who concludes that “Melody is severely brain-​ damaged and profoundly retarded” (22). He reaches this assessment because Melody cannot utter words in response to his questions. He interprets her lack of speech as a lack of intelligence. In both texts there are other kinds of silence than the inability to speak. Melody’s classmates on the quiz team leave her behind when they fly to Washington, D.C., for the national competition. When Melody sees them afterward, an awkward silence ensues. Though the teacher addresses Melody in a “fake cheerful” way, Melody does not initially respond. She allows the discomfort in the room to grow. Her silence is strategic and places her in control. Eventually, she “break[s]‌the silence” by using her computer at a loud volume to pose the question “Why did you leave me?” (289). The yawning silence in response to her question is again an awkward one. When Melody discovers that the quiz team went for breakfast together on the morning of the flight, she interrogates them as to why they had not invited her. She sees their lack of a reply as betrayal, but the rejection is coded as cold silence, one that “says what their words cannot—​it’s better without me” (290). The entire conversation is punctuated with uneasy gaps that indicate her teammates’ reluctance to own up to their shoddy behavior. Melody reflects, “How can silence be so loud?” (291). In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? Aurora reflects on the silence she feels after Frenchie goes missing—​the silence of absence. This silence goes beyond Frenchie’s usual lack of response to her speech. As she walks through a meadow searching for Frenchie instead of walking with him, she remembers the sounds of his body in motion—​the swishing of his clothes, “all the different way he breathes,” the noise of his burps, and his inhaled breath before he makes bird sounds (156). Lack of speech does not mean lack of sound. “Today,” Aurora, thinks, “there is a whole lot of silence coming back at me. It’s different than not hearing answers from my friend … It’s bigger” (156). When Frenchie is outdoors, he practices what we might call “contemplative silence,” one that allows him to engage with other species. When he spots a bird, he stops and remains motionless, letting Aurora know that she too should be quiet. It is Frenchie who, on a walk with Aurora and her toddler brother, first sees the piebald deer, the deer that will tempt him away from the school on the day he disappears. Both Out of My Mind and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? demonstrate that, as in LSM texts, communication happens in ways other than speech. In fact, Melody and Frenchie are better understood by their parents, caregivers, and friends than some of the LSM characters are by theirs. This communication occurs through gesture and sound. Melody states

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  39 that she and her mother “can sometimes talk without words” (Out of My Mind 84). Her mother understands her gestures—​such as pointing at the ceiling—​and reads them contextually. She can tell what Melody needs and how she feels. Melody can joke with her mother and understands when “she’s kinda reached her max” (85). When Melody reaches her own max, in the days before her prosthetic speech device, she is capable of making, as she puts it, “a lot of noise”—​unharmonious, unpleasant sound (54). Fed up with the teacher who asks her and the other third-​ grade students to say “buh,” “the sound of the letter ‘B’,”—​particularly annoying since Melody cannot say the sound but is far beyond the concept being demonstrated—​Melody screams and yells. Her frustration is magnified because she fears, “I’d never be able to tell anybody what I was really thinking” (54). Melody’s protest takes over her entire body. Her mother, who is called to the scene, reveals her own frustration by “balling and unballing her fists” (57). She lectures the teacher and then takes the CD playing baby songs in the background and breaks it in two. Melody’s mother acts out what Melody wishes she could do. In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? Frenchie communicates with Aurora primarily through gesture, posture, and movement. When Aurora asks Frenchie if he sees any birds, “He doesn’t answer. He never does. Not with words. But he arches his back a little” (1). Aurora understands that when Frenchie paces near her at recess he wants to run (35). When Frenchie moans and rocks, Aurora knows he is overwhelmed (47). Aurora credits Frenchie’s mother, Gracia, for helping Aurora and her family “learn to watch him, to see all the different ways Frenchie can be” (25). This type of watching is different from the staring of other children when Frenchie first goes to Aurora’s school. Aurora tries to understand Frenchie; the other children engage in objectifying staring. In “The Politics of Staring,” Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson analyzes staring at a disabled person as othering because “staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant” (56). She notes that this type of stare does not take in the full person (57). The children who stare at Frenchie are uneasy with his differences and then uneasy that they themselves are staring, since, as Garland-​ Thomson puts it, this kind of gaze is “considered illicit” (57). Aurora herself is comfortable with not fully understanding Frenchie. She also sees their relationship as reciprocal. She tells his mother when she figures out something Frenchie wants to do that “it’s a little bit him asking and a little bit me guessing” (45). That Nathan French Livernois is called by a variant of his middle name—​“Frenchie”—​suggests that he, metaphorically, speaks another language and this language needs interpretation. His inability to speak means he cannot confirm what she says, but neither can he “rat … [her] out” (26).

40  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism In both texts staring and invisibility are linked, and often connected to “disability drift.” The initial response to Frenchie and Melody is the stealthy look; then this glancing interest is replaced by overlooking them. Aurora reflects that after the third graders stare at Frenchie, they ignore him, “[l]‌ike he wasn’t there. Frenchie Livernois. Invisible boy” (Connor 23). Melody undergoes similar experiences. She notes that the doctor talks to her mother as if she is not in the room, and states, “I’m always amazed at how adults assume I can’t hear. They talk about me as if I’m invisible, figuring I’m too retarded to understand their conversation” (Draper 22). When Melody tries out for the quiz team, the teacher addresses her aide rather than addressing her, “as if,” Melody states, “I were invisible” (179). Though Melody is integrated into some regular classes, she is alone at recess, ignored by the other students who, she reflects earlier, “must think we’re all so backward that we don’t care that we get treated like we’re invisible” (28–​29). Only when Frenchie is missing do most of his schoolmates think about him. Only when Melody helps the quiz team advance do the team members acknowledge her intelligence but also worry, as they have before, about how they will look alongside Melody. In other words, they worry about having a stigmatizing gaze turned on them. In “Vision, Visibility, and Disability,” Sara K. Day and Paige Gray argue that two 1970s novels, The Summer of the Swans and The Westing Game, “share a common interest in the metaphorical invisibility of young people with disabilities” (167). Day and Paige connect this invisibility to the historical discrimination that placed people with disabilities out of sight, in institutions, and ignored them as narrative subjects (168). They briefly refer to Out of My Mind as part of a shift in representation “in which children with disabilities are both protagonist and narrator” (171). Out of My Mind takes us inside the class for students with disabilities, making visible not only Melody but also the other students in that class, who though treated briefly, are described with enough detail to turn them into real people. Until these students are integrated into the regular schoolrooms, they are almost as invisible to other students their age as children in a separate institution would have been. Melody herself understands this group of students differently after she has been mistreated by the “regular” students. As she thinks about each person in turn, she reflects “Not one of them even knows how to be mean” (286). In Has Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, Frenchie is not separated from the other students. He attends class with an aide. Some chapters are focalized through him. Nevertheless, he remains the friend of the protagonist. Aurora is the garrulous counterweight to Frenchie’s muteness. Thus, in Anybody Seen Frenchie?, speech and silence seem embodied in the two main characters who are viewed as a quirky and ideal pair by

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  41 the townspeople and even by Aurora herself. Ezelda Trink reflects, “The girl had been a ripe talker. The boy couldn’t or wouldn’t” (285). After Frenchie goes missing, Maxine Grindel pities Aurora and considers her Frenchie’s “poor little loud friend. She must ache for him … [She] knew a special bond when she saw one” (215). The pie deliverer, Carney Huggins, who finds Aurora annoying, thinks about Frenchie and Aurora: “Wasn’t that all kinds of ironic? The quietest kid he’d ever run across paired with the loudest one on earth?” (130). The further irony is that Aurora’s speech lands her in trouble while Frenchie’s silence is unproblematic. Aurora draws a comparison between the two of them: “Frenchie gets ideas—​kind of the same way I sometimes blurt—​and suddenly, he slips away” (247). She sees Frenchie’s inward focus—​“he slips away”—​as like her impulsive speech; both are beyond their control. One of the reasons she loves being with Frenchie is, she says, “he didn’t care if I talked my head off” (22). In return, Frenchie finds Aurora’s voice appealing: “The girl’s voice was one. Single. Clear. It gave Frenchie the feeling of birds without seeing birds” (17). Aurora’s voice is distinctive and reminds Frenchie of what he loves most. This pairing of the chatty girl with the quiet friend is found in several of the LSM texts discussed earlier in the chapter (none of which feature a talkative boy with a silent girl). Aurora bears the most resemblance to Delly in True (… Sort Of). Delly’s impulsivity frequently lands her in trouble, and her introduction to the girl who will become her best friend bears some resemblance to Aurora’s introduction to Frenchie. Delly initially misgenders Ferris Boy, the girl who does not talk: “Delly didn’t say it to be mean. She said it because after being wrong about everything else, she was right about this. ‘That’s no Ms.,’ she announced. ‘That’s a boy’ ” (Hannigan 60). For all that Delly violates conversational norms, she also is in love with language, and creates her own words, often portmanteaus, listed in a glossary at the end of the book. Aurora also has a tag expression which marks her speech as her own. Numerous times she says “sheesh” or her own intensified version of it—​“Sheeshy-​sheesh—​to indicate her extreme exasperation. And she takes delight in and thus loudly recites a verse written on the side of a barn. Both characters almost explode with speech at certain moments. Linguist Douglas Robinson notes that children are socialized into the rules of conversation: how long it’s okay to talk, and when to shut up and let someone else have a turn; how to grab the next turn, and when to yield and let someone else grab it; how to show deference to a more powerful speaker, and so on. (132)

42  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism Aurora violates conversational conventions in multiple ways. When she first meets Frenchie, for example: “Hey! What’s with him?” I blurted. I pointed my finger behind me. Mom said, “Aurora, try not to—​” “Interrupt,” I said. “Yeah, sorry about that. But what the heck?” (14) In this passage, even when Aurora acknowledges she is interrupting, she does so through another interruption. Along with interrupting adult speech, she also “blurts” her question to Frenchie’s mother. As she says in another moment, “I blurt things. I do that a lot” (7). Her blurts are often blunt, as in “Hey! What’s with him?,” rather than sugar-​coated. Certainly, she does not act deferentially. And she is loud—​“I am not a quiet girl” (3)—​so on occasion she “roared … [her] name to be friendly” (13). As Aurora describes herself, “I’ve always had too much to say” (21). She is conscious that speech is something that gets her in trouble; therefore, she says admiringly to Frenchie, “I bet you don’t get in trouble, do ya?” (15). Aurora and Delly’s impulsivity in words and actions make them outsiders at school. Delly’s world is crueler and more violent than Aurora’s, where Aurora’s teachers and neighbors assume she is well intentioned. Aurora’s teachers coach her in “good strategies” that will help her converse with her peers, such as “Look at your friends when they’re speaking. Let them finish their sentences. Listen to what they say” (22). Aurora has difficulties with all of these except when she is with Frenchie. His silence prods her to pay attention to him, and to be “quiet every once in a while” (22). Although Aurora herself has trouble with conversation, she notes that some adults respond to Frenchie with cheery loud talk, “like they’re afraid to leave any space between their words because if they do, something could go wrong in there” (54). They are violating conversational norms for fear of silence. In Out of One’s Mind, speech is construed as power. The contrast is not between Melody and a friend but between Melody’s inner voice and what she can express, as well as Melody before and after she receives a speech-generating computer. When Melody is asked by her neighbor, who is both babysitter and life coach, whether she would rather walk or talk she emphatically indicates her response by pointing to the word “talk” (46). Out of My Mind is filled with her exasperation at not being able to communicate with specificity what she feels and knows. She has not been able to say that she loves the scent of her mother’s hair and the touch of her father’s unshaven face; that the toy blocks on the supermarket shelf are toxic; that she is sorry her mother is worrying about her pregnancy; that she wants a vanilla milkshake and hamburger from McDonald’s. Many of these things that she cannot say only occur to her because she has a

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  43 photographic memory and is highly perceptive of others. As someone who cannot speak, however, she clearly wants what words can do: “Everybody uses words to express themselves. Except me. And I bet most people don’t realize the real power of words. But I do. Thoughts need words. Words need a voice” (8). Only someone who has been deprived of speech can, according to Melody, understand its value. In LSM texts, a crisis provokes speech in order to help someone vulnerable. Out of My Mind presents a similar emergency. This scene occurs after Melody has received the Medi-​Talker; however, an electrical storm means she cannot use it. As her mother gets ready to back out the car and drive her to school, Melody sees her toddling sister emerge from the house and walk behind the vehicle. Melody tries to communicate to her mother by yelling and kicking and lashing out: “I had to tell her that Penny was out there! Never had I wanted words more. I was going out of my mind” (275). The refrain of the title indicates that speechlessness makes Melody frenzied. In LSM texts, this is the moment the mute character would start speaking again. Melody cannot. Her mother does not understand what she wants, and Penny is hit by the car. Luckily, Penny’s injuries will all heal, but Melody, who insisted her mother take her to school that morning, feels responsible for the accident. Catherine, her helper, tells her, however, that she “probably saved her [Penny’s] life”: “Your screaming and yelling slowed your mother down” (287). This episode then bears resemblance to the LSM texts where trauma cures trauma, except that, more realistically, Melody does not regain speech and Penny is not spared injury. The accident, however, as with the crises in LSM texts, puts matters into perspective. Stinging over her treatment by the quiz team, she realizes that the love, pain, and fear of her family are more important, and rather than hide from the team members who treated her badly, she will address them directly. As in LSM texts, the traumatic moment—​the almost death of her sister—​does help Melody find the courage to speak up. Out of My Mind, like many LSM texts, though more self-​consciously, is filled with words that the narrator has not articulated. The text is preoccupied with language from the beginning: “Words. I’m surrounded by thousands of words. Maybe millions” (1). The first chapter ends with Melody writing “I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old” (2). The book dramatically contrasts the precise language in Melody’s mind and what she describes as “the meaningless sounds and squeaks” her mouth can produce (87). “Meaningless sounds” constitute the opposite of speech—​meaningful sound—​even more than silence does. Melody claims that these sounds make her seem like a feral child, “like one of those children who was raised by wolves” (87). As with the comment made about Frenchie by his teacher—​“Frenchie has a quality which might make you see him as not human; however, we must still treat

44  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism him kindly”—​Melody’s remark suggests that others do not see her as fully human. She envies the cartoon cat Garfield with his speech bubbles. Though she knows “He can’t really talk, of course—​ he’s a cat!” she imagines how wonderful it would be to have someone produce dialogue balloons for her mind (86). Rather than speech bubbles, a prosthetic device transmits Melody’s inner voice to the world. This speech, indicated in bold type in the novel, occurs through a combination of technology and human effort. Melody’s neighbor understands that Melody wants to talk more than anything else. She fills Melody’s basic communication board with as many words and phrases as she could and teaches Melody to read. And when the Medi-​ Talker arrives, Mrs. V, as Melody calls her, programs it for her. Melody’s father captures her first words on video, just as he did with her baby sister. Melody personalizes the machine by naming it “Elvira” after her favorite song and by changing the voice from robotic to a girl’s voice (136). When she notices that the machine is programmed in many different languages, she joins an imagined community. She had never considered that there were children in other countries “who need a machine to help them talk” (137). Out of My Mind, however, does not suggest that this ability will solve all of Melody’s social problems. Though her ability to produce speech proves her intelligence to her peers and compels them to listen to her, it cannot make them like her. Both Out of My Mind and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? use animals as symbols and metaphors. Sara K. Day and Paige Gray’s arguments about the function of birds and birdwatching in the 1970s novels The Summer of the Swans and The Westing Game are helpful here. Frenchie has been “all about birds” since he was three (82). His mother describes him in this way: “He’d watch them [birds] at our feeder and everywhere we went. He started to flap his hands like little wings, and raise his chin and purse his lips, like making a beak … One day, he whistled!” (82) Frenchie’s delight is visual—​he constantly looks for birds and collects pictures of them—​ and affects his body’s movement and sounds. Frenchie waves his hands “like little wings” (82). This stimming, a behavior associated with neurodiversity, is interpreted by his mother as connected to what he loves. He also whistles, and Aurora comments that this sound “is like birdsong,” though his “tweet” is unlike that of any actual bird (82). It is distinctive. His own. Frenchie is indeed a rara avis. Day and Paige argue that birdwatching in their texts could indicate an “active engagement with the world … potentially undercutting assumptions about intellectual disabilities” (172). Autism is not an intellectual disability. Frenchie’s passion for birds, though, allows others to ascribe meaning to his actions. Thus, Aurora tells Ezaelda Trink that because Frenchie does not speak, “you have to look for his answers” (225). She continues, “he looks like

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  45 he’s having a big old stare at nothing. But he’s really looking for birds” (225). Aurora also normalizes Frenchie’s passion by describing herself and Frenchie similarly: “He’s birds. I’m rocks” (225). She states that they are the things that they love. The book depicts many people with their own quirky interests, suggesting that the difference between them and Frenchie is one of degree rather than kind. However, Aurora’s repetition of the word “look” also demonstrates what Day and Gray refer to as “sight semantics.” Ocularcentrism is so deeply embedded in our language, we so commonly exchange words like “see” and “know,” that it is hard to imagine a text without it. Day and Gray note that the birdwatching topos reinforces the connection between sight and knowing (172). Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? like Summer of the Swans puts seeing at the center of its plot (and its title). Both books revolve around the search for a lost boy who does not speak and who loves birds. Day and Gray also critique the way birds are used to suggest a contrast between their autonomy and the disabled character’s restrictions (172). In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, however, birds symbolize not limitation but a connection to nature and empowerment. Not only does Frenchie’s “tweet” sound “like birdsong” (82), but when he is upset, he “tucks up like an egg” (64). When he relaxes and extends his limbs, Aurora states, “You’re like a bird leaving the egg … You’re hatching” (66). These descriptions, though, are all Aurora’s. Frenchie himself, though, in the chapters that are focalized through him, knows that he is like a bird but not actually a bird. He knows that “Arms are like wings. They are not wings” (18). He likes the way birds flash in the air, “Turning colors off and on, flick quick, like his own blinking eye” (71). He dreams of his bird photos turning into real birds (255–​56). At the end, when Frenchie is rescued by being fastened to and lifted by cables, Aurora encourages him to “BE THE BIRD!” and all the watching and helping neighbors flap and tweet to encourage him (301). This communal and sympathetic speech Frenchie describes as “a circle of birdsongs” (303). In Out of My Mind, Melody draws connections between herself and other animals mainly because she sees them as similarly speechless. She describes herself through a simile that invokes any trapped animal: “It’s like I live in a cage with no door and no key. And I have no way to tell someone how to get me out” (38). Nevertheless, her name alludes to the sweetness of birdsong, and, when she is little, she and her father bond together on the porch near the bird feeder. As she watches the feeder as an older girl, her neighbor asks, “What would you do if you could fly?” (169). Melody responds that she would be frightened that it “would feel so good, I’d just fly away” (169). The conversation then moves from the speculative to the metaphorical: “You are a bird, Melody. And you will fly on Monday when you take the test” (169). Mrs. V. uses

46  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism flying to indicate success. The irony is that Melody is successful, but her teammates leave her behind when they fly in an airplane to the national competition. But birds are not as important as the animal that appears on the cover of Out of My Mind. The cover photo is a glass fishbowl with a goldfish leaping, almost flying, into the air (the fish on the cover is a popular image for books about children with disabilities).3 The fishbowl becomes the metaphoric equivalent of Melody’s mind, representing her shimmering thoughts. But the jumping fish also features in an incident in the novel. Melody draws the parallel between Ollie the fish and herself, feeling sorry for a creature whose life is more circumscribed than her own (62). She sees him, day and night, “swimming, his little mouth opening and closing like was he trying to say something” (62). When he takes a flying leap out of the bowl, Melody tries to save him by yelling for her mother and by knocking water out of the fishbowl on top of him. Her mother, though, believes Melody has overturned the bowl and caused the fish to die: “Don’t you know a fish can’t live without water?” (63). Melody is angry that her mother could not save the fish, that she thinks Melody upset the bowl on purpose, and that she misunderstands both of them. Her mother has too rosy a view of Ollie’s life, thinking “He was happy in his little world,” while Melody believes Ollie “was sick and tired of the bowl and that log and circle. Maybe he just couldn’t take it anymore. I feel like that sometimes” (64). The goldfish, then, symbolizes Melody’s inability to communicate which makes her feel like she is imprisoned. The incident also foreshadows the accident where Melody tries to stop her mother from backing out the car. If Melody’s circumscribed life is implied in the fishbowl, the possibility of something larger appears at the visit to the aquarium. She is pleased by the sheer variety of species. Melody looks at the huge tanks and imagines Ollie “might have been happy here” (118). Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? appears to be all about birds, but its cover image also suggests something different. The cover’s foreground has birds pecking on the ground and behind them a girl with her back to the reader, her hands raised as if shouting. She is emerging out of the words into a meadow, and in that meadow is a piebald deer. The reader who does not know the story might assume the “Frenchie” of the title refers to the deer. Indeed, the piebald deer operates as a symbol for Frenchie. It is the creature that draws Aurora and Frenchie’s attention, and that turns Frenchie away from school and from his usual focus on birds. The deer is unique in the story—​Aurora has never seen anything like it—​and in actuality, since each piebald deer has a different pattern. The deer seems magical, and Aurora views it as “an end-​of-​summer gift” (120). When Aurora steps toward it, the deer leaps away, and Aurora apologizes that

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  47 she “broke the spell” (120). Other people who encounter the deer are similarly charmed. Carney Huggins sees it as “something that’d walked out of a fairy tale” (127). Maxine Grindel refers to it as “a strange jewel of a creature” that “looks quilted” (217, 218). In sum, the deer is rare and perfect in its own way. This is how the novel portrays Frenchie. Both Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? and Out of My Mind oppose the medical model of disability. In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? Aurora has an epiphany about her friend: “Why change him? He’s perfect. Perfectly Frenchie” (115). This realization she deems so important that she speaks it aloud to herself (115). Notably, though the book jacket flap refers to Frenchie as an autistic child, the novel never mentions a diagnosis. Similarly, Aurora, who shares some characteristics with Frenchie—​both are supersensitive to touch and have difficulty with emotional regulation—​ is not given a diagnosis. Frenchie’s aide, Mr. Menkis, is small of stature, perhaps enough to be a little person, but again, the book avoids such labels. Aurora’s little brother has ear infections that cannot be fixed by any of the medical professionals who treat him; rather, his infections clear up with the warm weather (31). Thus Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? refutes the medical model through what it does not say. Out of My Mind counters the medical model head on. It does, though, engage in what Jay Dolmage calls the myth of a “disability hierarchy,” the idea that bodily disabilities are worse than cognitive impairments (46). Dolmage argues that the stigma attached to the latter produces this myth within the disability community itself (46). In her study of adolescent fiction, Abbye E. Meyer asserts that these texts treat physical and cognitive impairments differently by celebrating the former and denigrating the latter (269). Out of My Mind fits this model. Melody fears others judge her as having an intellectual disability. Paradoxically, though, she performs such a disability for doctors. These doctors want to but cannot “fix” Melody and so she plays the role that they imagine she occupies; as she states, “I usually ignore them and act like the retarded person they think I am” (18). The novel demonstrates that Melody’s family knows more about her abilities than the doctor who declares that Melody has no intelligence and should be institutionalized. Melody’s mother replies that though Melody has cerebral palsy, “a person is so much more than the name of a diagnosis on a chart!” (23). And, she follows, Melody is the one who has to adapt to an environment not suited for her; thus, “She’s the one with the true intelligence!” (26). Once Melody has her speaking computer, she answers questions about her condition directly. She sets two responses. The first replies with her medical diagnosis: “I have spastic bilateral quadriplegia, also known as cerebral palsy. It limits my body, but not my mind” (168). The second is for even ruder people: “We all have disabilities. What’s yours?” (168). In her first response, Melody emphasizes that

48  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism the diagnosis does not define her; in the second, she throws the question back to the questioner. Just as Aurora decides that Frenchie is perfectly himself, Melody’s neighbor tells her that “Normal sucks!” and she is loved because “you’re Melody, not because of what you can or cannot do” (281). Out of My Mind is not a book that wraps up neatly at the end or that wallows in inspiration. Melody can express herself but there is no group hug with the students who left her behind. Deafness and Community in Show Me a Sign Both Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? and Out of My Mind present characters with disabilities who do not see others like themselves. Elizabeth A. Wheeler argues that although many “realist children’s books stay in the relatively small circle of the family and the school,” these texts may present a “disability community”—​“a circle of able-​bodied people at home and school united together through their experiences with disability and prejudice” (335). Frenchie certainly has this type of community in his small Maine town. Anne Clare LeZotte’s Show Me a Sign, set in the community of Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, presents a disability community consisting of hearing and Deaf people alike. This work of historical fiction counters stereotypes about deafness as it engages in current debates, if through a fantastical plot. It also reframes the discussion of speech and silence. The novel presents the first-​person narrative of eleven-​year-​old Mary Lambert, a Deaf islander at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I refer to Mary as “Deaf” with a capital “D” to signal that she is a participant in Deaf culture, though the distinction between “Deaf” and “deaf” is a contemporary one. Briefly, Carol Padden and Tom Humphries describe the difference as between a culture—​“Deaf”—​and a condition—​“deaf” or “deafness” (1–​10).4 Mary’s own family is a microcosm of Martha’s Vineyard as it includes both Deaf and hearing individuals, all of whom are fluent in the sign language that developed there. According to her notes, LeZotte relied heavily on Nora Ellen Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard to recreate Mary Lambert’s environment (273). Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) is now virtually extinct; thus, LeZotte uses her own knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) to approximate MVSL (271). In my discussion below, I simply use the term “sign language.” Part One of the novel focuses on Mary as a friend and daughter, living in a small town where everyone can sign. Readers learn of her sorrow over her brother’s death and her interest in the relationship between the English colonizers of Martha’s Vineyard and the Wampanoag people whom they displaced. At the end of Part One, Mary is kidnapped

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  49 by Andrew Noble, a wicked scientist. He takes Mary to Boston to study the causes of her “infirmity,” as he describes hereditary deafness. In Part Two of the novel, readers witness Mary’s agony at being separated from her family, rendered mute—​since there is no one who can understand her signs—​and forced into the roles of servant and medical subject. Finally, she escapes to an islander’s boat and makes her way back home. Show Me a Sign refutes ideas about deafness and disability, including stereotypes often applied more broadly to people who do not speak. It redefines muteness and challenges the medical model of disability. As with Out of My Mind and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, Show Me a Sign disproves the ableist notion that a person who cannot or does not speak is unintelligent. Lennard J. Davis discusses at length in Enforcing Normalcy the philosophical history connecting language and speech to what it means to be human, as expressed in Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s words that speech “distinguishes man among the animals” (Rousseau in Davis 17). Show Me a Sign employs the words “deaf and dumb,” a phrase widely used at the time of the novel. Though one may argue that the word “dumb” simply means unable to speak, it has long been connected to animals (“dumb beasts”) and to ignorance. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries note that both “dumb” in the phrase “deaf and dumb” and “mute” as a noun waned in acceptance among deaf people at the end of the nineteenth century, not only because both terms connote ignorance, but also because deaf people possess a range of speaking abilities (100). Show Me a Sign challenges the idea that deaf people live in silence. First, it reminds hearing people that deaf people feel vibrations, the root of sound. Mary describes both inner and outer vibrations. When her house is “alive with activity” she can feel its vibrations through the floor (46). She describes a corresponding inner vibration that emerges from joy: “If my mind and heart are full of energy and fun … I don’t feel silent at all. I buzz like a bee in good times” (46). The word “buzz” captures this inner pulsation. For Mary, silence comes from both beyond her and inside her. When her house is empty, it is silent—​no one is producing vibrations. When she feels sad, there also is silence. What Mary describes is like Aurora’s silence of absence in missing Frenchie. Second, Show Me a Sign also disputes the idea that deaf people themselves are silent, whether they speak or not. Mary tells us that she does not often “make vocal sounds” because other (hearing) people respond with a stigmatizing gaze (63). But to Mary, silence configured as muteness is not “the absence of oral speech but rather the condition of those who feel lost and unheard” (172)—​directly countering the medical model of disability. Mary’s nightmare is not being Deaf; instead, it is being unable to communicate through sign language. At the end of the novel’s first half, before

50  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism Mary is kidnapped and forced to leave Martha’s Vineyard, she dreams of her mouth contorting to produce speech: My mouth twists up in a grimace, and my tongue flaps. It hurts my jaw to try to say words correctly. I squeeze hot tears out of my eyes. In the dream world, I have forgotten sign language. I can’t scream, and I can’t signal for help. (142) Mary’s verbs present the body in agony: “twists,” “flaps,” “hurts,” “squeeze.” When she awakens, she consoles herself by signing. Her nightmare focuses on herself as the producer of sign language. In the second half of the book, Mary finds herself in dire circumstances because she is removed from her community. She can still sign, but there is no one who can understand her. Only when she is in Boston, unable to communicate through signing, does she use the phrase “deaf and dumb” to describe herself. She has a hard time recognizing herself in a store window: “Is that really me? I look like a vulgar beggar. A deaf and dumb one at that” (173). A deaf person without community and language might indeed end up begging in the streets. Mary’s forced separation from the Deaf community has alienated her from herself and produced her muteness. In Show Me a Sign, the word “speak” sometimes denotes metaphorically the practice of signing—​as it also does, fittingly, in Groce’s study mentioned above, titled Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language. For example, when Mary is trapped in Boston, she thinks, “What if I can never speak to someone in my own language?” (175). Within the text, sign language is often presented as dialogue; in other words, sign language is translated into English, but the reader understands either from the verb “signs” or from the context that the communication is in sign language. More importantly, LeZotte demonstrates through her prose that the sign language used in the text is not merely a translation of English into hand and body motions, as some hearing readers might think. Sometimes a sign is described; for example, Mary’s mother says “morning” to her with “one hand rounded like the sun, the other arm acting as the horizon it climbs” (8). Mary’s father has a special sign for her name, consisting of “brushing his right hand gently across his cheek” (54). Sometimes a sign is mentioned without description; “Thomas makes the sign for ‘conversation’ and the sign for ‘work’ ” (45). Sometime the reader receives the many words in English that are described succinctly in one sign. Thomas sympathizes with Mary’s sorrow over her brother’s death: “ ‘The loss of a loved one is the hardest thing to bear.’ He closes his fist on top of his heart, to demonstrate a pain I feel daily” (45). In “A Note on the Languages,” LeZotte indicates that she has tried to communicate the difference between

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  51 English and the sign language she employs in the text. Some sentences in the novel employ a different syntax than the usual one in English to reflect this linguistic difference. Mary’s mother tells her to “First pie eat” before filling the water jug (8). Mary asks her mother, “Church, go you?” (81). When Mary’s mother, who is hearing, signs and speaks at the same time to someone unfamiliar with sign language, Mary reflects that “[t]‌his makes her signs more like spoken English and less like our special language” (116), presumably because she uses English syntax. As with Aurora in Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, Mary also violates conversational conventions. Mary interrupts Ezra Brewer’s narrative of why “some of us are deaf and others are hearing” several times for clarification until he looks away from her and crosses his arms (26). Ezra Brewer’s narrative is crucial for readers to understand the Deaf history of Martha’s Vineyard. Mary’s interrupting questions and comments bring forth more information. Mary attempts to “keep quiet” (26), by which she means stilling her hands. When Mary and her friend Nancy are spying on others, Nancy “hushes” Mary’s hands (33). Conversational norms are violated in a more significant way when the novel’s villain, who feels himself superior to the deaf islanders, looks away from Mary’s father, who has posed a question, and delivers his answer to the hearing people at the table. Mary reflects that doing so is a breach of decorum, justified “only because he is unaware of our customs” (68). This moment is like those in Out of My Mind when Melody is not addressed by others who think she is incapable of understanding. It is another example of disability drift. All three texts addressed in this section critique the medical model of disability. Only in Show Me a Sign does the medical model, embodied in the ironically named Andrew Noble, play a critical role in the plot. The text uses him to raise important subjects in disability and Deaf Studies, including deafness as difference rather than disability and the turning of an individual into a specimen. Andrew Noble refers to deafness as an infirmity. Mary responds to this association with “Deafness is not an affliction. The only thing it stops me from doing is hearing” (95). Mary’s formulation echoes the phrase popularized by I. King Jordan, the first Deaf president of Gallaudet University: “Deaf people can do anything except hear.” In the novel, Noble’s assertion of deafness as an “infirmity” and “a reduced state” is rejected by the townspeople, who counter these assertions by saying deafness is “not a disease,” and that no one in their town is “suffering and dying from the inability to hear” (131). What Andrew Noble considers a scientific project is “nothing unusual” on Martha’s Vineyard (71). Andrew Noble is the book’s indirect way of approaching eugenics. Here readers would benefit from knowing that his sinister language mimics that of nineteenth–​and twentieth-​century eugenicists. When Noble is asked “do you mean for the deaf to disappear? Is it your opinion that deafness

52  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism is a scourge to eliminate, like yellow fever?,” he responds by saying that humans “must strive for perfection” (133). Noble’s ominous speech is met first by a reluctance to translate it into sign language, then “a long silence,” and finally Mary’s father signs his disapproval (133). Andrew Noble represents all those who wish to eliminate disability by whatever means necessary. His name suggests that some would view his project as noble. Although LeZotte never uses the name “Alexander Graham Bell,” Groce’s Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language discusses Bell’s research trips to Martha’s Vineyard (9–​11). To many hearing people, Alexander Graham Bell is the brilliant inventor of the telephone. Deaf people, however, point to his support for oralism—​the idea that deaf people should lipread and speak—​over manualism—​the use of sign language that is intrinsic to Deaf culture. Bell focused relentlessly on integrating deaf people into society and preventing them from signing. As Padden and Humphries note, Bell accused schools for the deaf of promoting sign language as well as marriage between deaf individuals (174). To Bell, “the ‘propagation’ of deafness by Deaf people was … ‘a calamity to the world’ ” (Bell in Padden and Humphries). To Show Me a Sign’s protagonist, however, “We are fine as we were made” (48), another clear rebuttal of Andrew Noble and the medical model. Show Me a Sign, like Out of My Mind and Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, connects disability and invisibility. Andrew Noble turns Mary into a case subject which also changes her condition from difference to disability. Mary views a letter which recommends that he “bring back samples and acquire a live specimen” (123). Once Noble kidnaps her, she quickly realizes, “I am the live specimen!” (153), and that this means she is not considered “a person” (156). Turned into a project, deprived of the ability to communicate, she “feel[s]‌invisible” (164). This metaphorical invisibility occurs at the same time that she is being examined head-​to-​ toe by a servant. If Noble is the wicked scientist, his foil in the novel is Dr. Minot. When Mary appears before him for examination, dressed in the clothes of Dr. Minot’s dead daughter, “[h]is sharp gaze softens” (194). He examines Mary’s mouth and jaws, but most importantly, he looks Mary in the eyes and sees her as a person (195). The novel connects Deaf and Indigenous people, suggesting that Deaf people are an ethnic minority, vulnerable to exploitation. Lennard J. Davis in “Deafness and the Riddle of Identity,” both defines and critiques the idea of “the deaf as a colonized, ethnic, linguistic minority.” However, no better fit for considering Deafness as ethnicity might exist than in the historical settlements on Martha’s Vineyard. Even that situation requires nuance, since the Deaf settlers on the island were colonizers. In Show Me a Sign, Mary wonders what would happen to Martha’s Vineyard if Andrew Noble discovers the source of deafness on the island. She imagines a

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  53 horde of busybodies arriving, “asking impertinent questions. Caravans of explorers will arrive to visit the land of the deaf! We have no leopard skins or ivory tusks. What trophies will they take away with them?” (104–​105). Thus, she imagines people with deafness being turned into curiosities and subject to an exoticizing gaze. Further, she reflects that this process is what her ancestors did to the Native peoples of the area, the Wamponoag (105). Show Me a Sign approaches directly the subject of race and the connection between owning land and power. Mary and her family are progressive in their acceptance of Black, Irish, and Native American workers, and Mary frequently ponders racial hierarchies. While her friend might state that someone “is just an Indian” (77), Mary thinks differently. Though she wants to believe that “We are all Americans now,” she considers the words of Thomas, an African American man married into a Wamponoag family, who tells her that “it’s not as simple as that” (128). Mary realizes when she is looking out over Boston that “all I survey was once Indian land” and that the seemingly serene view may be hiding the bones of the dead. That is its own kind of silence. Show Me a Sign is unusual among the texts I have discussed in this chapter because it openly discusses race and ethnicity. In the section on literary selective mutism, all the texts are white authored and all the protagonists are white, except for Jinna in The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang. White children are no more likely to suffer from anxiety disorders than Black children (Gordon-​Hollingsworth). In Anybody Here Seen Frenchie?, whiteness is mostly unmarked as is typical in American fiction by white authors. The cover presents Aurora as a white girl with red hair. The book attempts some diversity. Aurora’s new friend has a mother with an Indian accent and the family has a food truck—​Virani Family Indian Cuisine (51). Aurora’s adopted baby brother has “shiny black curls … that lay down like little o’s” (30). Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind is silent on the subject of race. Draper herself is African American and she usually writes about African American characters. However, the characters in her Out of My Mind are not marked racially. Melody describes herself as having curly dark hair. Her baby sister Penny is described as “copper-​bright, just like her name” (75). These are slender threads. Melody’s race is open to interpretation. Decentering Selective Mutism in Pet In closing this chapter, I return to the beginning. Books do exist with selectively mute characters that avoid the trap of LSM and its habit of turning disability into a metaphor, though they are hard to find. A significant example is Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, an Afrofantasy marketed as a young adult book that also crosses over into both adult and children’s fiction. Pet

54  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism features a protagonist with selective mutism named Jam, but her mutism is a given in the text, rather than taking center stage. Matter-​of-​factly the reader is informed that “[w]‌hen Jam was a toddler, she’d refused to speak, which was why they’d taught her to sign instead” (15). Sometimes Jam vocalizes to her mother. Sometimes, Jam writes notes. Usually, she signs. Her selective mutism precedes the opening of the novel’s action and presumably continues beyond it; indeed, absolutely no characters in the novel attempt to “cure” Jam or pressure her to verbalize. Blurbs of the book, including the front book flap, do not indicate that Jam is mostly nonverbal because this aspect of her character is insignificant to the plot. Her selective mutism is not a metaphor, just an everyday fact of her selfhood. The novel’s treatment of selective mutism and disability more generally is rare in children’s and young adult literature: Jam’s condition is neither hidden nor fetishized. Pet is significant for what it takes for granted—​a Black trans heroine with selective mutism whose friends and family learn sign language to converse with her. It is also significant for its fantasy genre. During the last decade, critics have discussed the lack of diversity in children’s literature. This lack includes authors and protagonists, but also types of stories. In The Dark Fantastic, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas refers to this dearth as an “imagination gap” that restricts young people “to single stories about the world around them” (6). Phil Nel states through a chapter subtitle in Was the Cat in the Hat Black? that “Genre Is the New Jim Crow” (167). Pet occurs in a utopia that has conquered racism and brims with allusions to Black culture. The city of Lucille has banned guns, torn down the statues of enslavers, and raised memorials to “the children whose hashtags had been turned into battle cries during the revolution” (2). Lucille’s “revolution cry” is the final lines of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Paul Robeson”: “We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond” (14). Jam’s mother reads to her the socially conscious science fiction of N.K. Jemisin (54). The name “Lucille” itself may allude to Lucille Clifton. Where this utopian society errs—​all utopias must do so if they are interesting—​is in assuming that monsters, meaning humans that behave monstrously, no longer exist. And, as the novel states, “forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back” (20). Jam’s mother tells her that “You can’t sweet-​talk a monster” into proper behavior (13). There are limits to what speech can do. Speaking is only one of several ways to communicate in this text. With the librarian, Jam writes down her questions, noting that “[t]‌hey didn’t need to talk, which was perfect” (5). From the time she is young, Jam employs “her hands and body and face for her words” (15). She signs to multiple people in the novel, including parents, her best friend Redemption, Redemption’s uncle (Hibiscus), and the librarian. Signing in

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  55 the text, denoted by italics, flows in the same way as speech. The novel’s titular character, Pet, who is an avenging angel in the form of a beast, speaks to Jam telepathically and can understand her thoughts. The novel’s most important revelation happens through an image. Redemption asks his little brother, Moss, if anyone has hurt him, and Moss draws a picture of a hibiscus flower. Pet must ask what the symbol means; Redemption and Jam know immediately who the culprit is. Jam reserves speaking for crucial moments and individuals. The book describes an angry outburst that she has as a three-​year-​old, when she responds to a compliment about being a “handsome little boy” by “screaming her first word with explosive sureness. ‘Girl! Girl! Girl!’ ” (16). This speech is required for her to claim her identity. Her mother, Bitter, is described as “one of the few people she voiced with” (10). Jam speaks aloud to Pet as the creature emerges from her mother’s painting because she thinks this might be the best way to help free it. When Redemption suspects his little brother is being abused, Jam “reached for both her voice and the revolution cry they knew and loved” (140). She whispers the community’s revolution cry to him and the words are described as “falling against the skin of his brow … like a small rain” (140). At the novel’s climax, when she and Redemption and Pet confront Hibiscus, Jam yells at him and then orders Pet not to destroy him. However, speech does not stop Pet; only Jam’s “loudest silent voice” does (183). Jam’s silent voice is her ability to communicate with Pet mind-​to-​mind. But there are other kinds of silences, silences connected to cover ups and lies, well-​intentioned silences and evil silencings. Jam notes that in discussing Pet’s arrival with her parents, they stop speaking and “exchanged looks stuffed with silent words” (63). Jam reflects that her parents have “loud conversations” in silence that they think she cannot interpret (63). They believe their silence is protecting themselves from reliving the past as well as protecting their daughter. This silence, the silence of refusing to discuss particular subjects, is also the silence that is challenged by characters in LSM plots. Jam herself makes the same mistake in withholding information from her best friend. Jam knows that Pet is searching for a monster in Redemption’s house, but does not tell him because the words are too awful to say. She ends up apologizing: “I was trying to protect you, but I should have told you the truth” (167). Most heinous is the abuser’s silencing of the abused child. Moss tells his brother that “he wasn’t supposed to talk about any of it, or people would get hurt” (169). This silence emerges from a power imbalance of the worst kind. Pet has a communal and an individual ending, both of which emphasize speech. The book focuses first on the importance of public speech. Hibiscus confesses; his encounter with Pet makes him eager to reveal the details of his crime. A hearing follows, in which sister confronts sister over

56  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism the hiding of Hibiscus’ proclivities. And the guardians of the city bring a new vigilance “meant to fix the blind spots they’d created by claiming that the monsters were gone” (199). Pet returns one last time to say good-​bye to Jam, and they communicate mind-​to-​mind, through gesture, and even through silence. Pet remains quiet when Jam asks whether “there will be more monsters” (202). The only solution is in the words Pet tells Jam to remember and repeat. To do so, Jam breathes deeply and then utters the important phrase: “Do not be afraid” (203). Pet does not end with Jam forgoing signing in favor of speech. She is not a silent child, and Pet is not a work with literary selective mutism. LSM texts depict muteness as a social problem, caused by a character’s environment but cured by a child’s force of will. Silence in these novels always carries meaning, meaning that the other characters, as well as readers and critics, must decipher. In Silent to the Bone, Connor says of Branwell, “I won’t say what his first words were until I explain what I heard during the time he said nothing” (Konigsburg 9). Paradoxically, LSM texts disrupt the binary between the “good” silent child and the “unruly” garrulous child, since these child characters are never more of a problem for adults than when they stop talking. The continuance of the child’s recovery is predicated on adults admitting that they have been at fault. In this model, the child has agency and can control not only his or her return to speech, but ultimately, adult behavior. This agency, however, carries as many risks as benefits. Not only is the child responsible for overcoming an anxiety disorder, but the disorder itself becomes a metaphor for the power struggle between adults and children. Though we may applaud the representation of the child–​adult power struggle, these works also pose problems, particularly from the standpoint of disability studies. The term “LSM” helps us name this reading experience. Surely, we now have enough of these stories to move on to other narrative plots and to throw this crutch away for good. Notes 1 Currently the Library of Congress applies the category of “selective mutism”—​ formerly “elective mutism”—​to approximately forty children’s books. This analysis is based on those that have received the most attention. In addition to the Library of Congress categorization, “selective mutism” or “elective mutism” is attached to the texts as follows. The term is mentioned explicitly within the text itself in Collins, After Zero; Fletcher, Flying Solo; Mahy, The Other Side of Silence; and Yang, The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang. The mentioned therapy suggests the diagnosis in Lean, A Dog Called Homeless, and McCutchen, Lightland. The term is applied by reviewers in the cases of Collins, After Zero; Fletcher, Flying Solo; Hannigan, True (… Sort of); Konigsburg, Silent to the

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  57 Bone; Lean, A Dog Called Homeless; and Torday, The Last Wild. The term is applied by scholars in the case of Mahy, The Other Side of Silence. 2 Critics have closely analyzed the complexities of an adult writer using a teenager’s voice and the novel’s handling of fairy tale and gender conventions. Barbara Tannert-​Smith discusses several of these subjects, including the relationship between adult author and the teen narrator and reader, trauma, and the use of fairy-​tale structures (as well as other intertextual references). Elisabeth Gruner writes on the use of fairy-​tale conventions in “Telling Old Tales Newly,” and on reading and writing in Constructing the Adolescent Reader. Don Latham and Elaine O’Quinn examine Speak and gender codes. Chris McGee superbly analyzes the complexities of adults overhearing the silent teenager and the pitfalls of the “empowerment narrative.” 3 For other examples of books which employ fish as symbols and on the cover, see Cynthia Lord’s Rules and Lynda Mullaly Hunt’s Fish in a Tree. 4 For more on this distinction and terminology—​which is decidedly not fixed—​ see the study by Kimberly K. Pudans-​Smith et al., Lennard J. Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy, and Ann Clare LeZotte’s own discussion in the peritext.

Works Cited Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868. Penguin, 1989. Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Little Mermaid.” The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1999, pp. 216–32. Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. Square Fish-​Farrar, 1999. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. “Silenced Women in the Grimms’ Tales: The ‘Fit’ between Fairy Tales and Society in Their Historical Context.” Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, edited by Ruth B. Bottigheimer, U of Pennsylvania P, 1986, pp. 115–​31. Butler, Lucy. “After Happy Ever: Tender Extremities and Tangled Selves in Three Australasian Bluebeard Tales.” Journal of Popular Romance Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2014, pp. 1–​23. Byars, Betsy. The Summer of the Swans. Viking, 1970. Capozzi, Flavia, et al. “Children’s and Parent’s Psychological Profiles in Selective Mutism and Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Clinical Study.” European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 27, 2018, pp. 775–​83. Collins, Christina. After Zero. Sourcebooks, 2019. Connor, Leslie. Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? Katherine Tegen, 2022. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. U of Michigan P, 2009. Davis, Lennard J. “Deafness and the Riddle of Identity.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 53, no. 19, 12 Jan. 2007. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/​apps/​doc/​A157109806/​OVIC?u=​viva_​jmu&sid=​ bookmark-​OVIC&xid=​a3f54104. —​—​—​. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995. —​—​—​. “Who Put the ‘The’ in ‘the Novel’?: Identity Politics and Disability in Novel Studies.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 31, no. 3, 1998, pp. 317–​34.

58  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism Day, Sara K., and Paige Gray. “Vision, Visibility, and Disability: Re-​Seeing The Summer of the Swans (1971) and The Westing Game (1979).” Dust Off the Gold Medal: Rediscovering Children’s Literature at the Newbery Centennial, edited by Sara L. Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl, Routledge, 2022, pp. 167–​85. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-​5. 5th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 2013. Dolmage, Jay. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse UP, 2014. Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-​Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge UP, 2003. Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet. Make Me a World, 2019. Fletcher, Ralph. Flying Solo. Clarion, 1998. Garland-​ Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson, Modern Language Association of America, 2002, pp. 56–​75. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-​Century Literary Imagination. 1979. Yale UP, 2020. Gordon-​ Hollingsworth, Arlene T., et al. “Anxiety Disorders in Caucasian and African American Children: A Comparison of Clinical Characteristics, Treatment Process Variables, and Treatment Outcomes.” Child Psychiatry & Human Development, vol. 46, no. 5, Oct. 2015, pp. 643–​55. EBSCOhost, https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​578-​014-​0507-​x. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. “Jorinda and Joringel.” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated and edited by Jack Zipes, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 227–​30. —​—​—​. “The Twelve Brothers.” The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated and edited by Jack Zipes, Princeton UP, 2014, pp. 27–​32. Groce, Nora Ellen. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard. Harvard UP, 1988. Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. Constructing the Adolescent Reader in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature, edited by Kerry Mallan and Clare Bradford, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. —​ —​ —​ . “Telling Old Tales Newly: Intertextuality in Young Adult Fiction for Girls.” Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature, edited by Michael Cadden, University of Nebraska Press, 2010, pp. 3–​21. Hannigan, Katherine. True (… Sort Of). Harper, 2011. Hunt, Lynda Mullaly. Fish in a Tree. Nancy Paulsen Books, 2017. Jordan, I. King and Angie Francalancia. “An Interview with I. King Jordan–​ Deaf President Now, the ADA, and the future for Disability Rights.” Johnson Scholarship Foundation, Dec. 23, 2020, https://​jsf.bz/​news/​an-​interv​iew-​with-​i-​ king-​jor​dan/.​ Keith, Lois. Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. Women’s P, 2001. Konigsburg, E.L. Silent to the Bone. Atheneum, 2000.

Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism  59 Latham, Don. “Melinda’s Closet: Trauma and the Queer Subtext of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, 2006, pp. 369–​82. Lean, Sarah. A Dog Called Homeless. Harper, 2012. Lord, Cynthia. Rules. Scholastic, 2008. Mahy, Margaret. The Other Side of Silence. Puffin, 1995. McCutchen, H.L. Lightland. Scholastic-​Orchard, 2002. McGee, Chris. “Why Won’t Melinda Just Talk about What Happened? Speak and the Confessional Voice.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 172–​87. Meyer, Abbye E. “ ‘But She’s not Retarded’: Contemporary Adolescent Literature Humanizes Disability but Marginalizes Intellectual Disability.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 267–​83. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/​chq.2013.0035. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. U of Michigan P, 2000. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Modern Library-​ Random House, 2008. Nel, Phil. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books. Oxford UP, 2017. O’Quinn, Elaine. “Voice and Voicelessness: Transacting Silence in Laurie Halse Anderson’s ‘Speak.’” ALAN Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2001, pp. 54–​58. Padden, Carol and Tom Humphries. Inside Deaf Culture. Harvard UP, 2005. Polutta, Melanie. “Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs [cataloging]: Is it Possible to Find Out When a LC Subject Heading Changed?” Received by Danielle E. Price, 13 Dec. 2022. Pudans-​Smith, Kimberly K. et al. “To Deaf or not to deaf: That Is the Question.” Psychology, vol. 10, no. 15, 2019, https://doi.org/10.4236/​psych.2019.1015135. Robinson, Douglas. Introducing Performative Pragmatics. Routledge, 2006. Smith, Katharine Capshaw. “Forum: Trauma and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature, vol. 33, 2005, pp. 115–​19. Talbot, Mary. Language and Gender. 2nd ed., Polity, 2010. Tannert-​ Smith, Barbara. “‘Like Falling Up into a Storybook’: Trauma and Intertextual Repetition in Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 2010, pp. 395–​414. Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York UP, 2019. Torday, Piers. The Dark Wild. Viking, 2014. —​—​—​. The Last Wild. Puffin, 2013. —​—​—​. The Wild Beyond. Quercus, 2015. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. “Margaret Mahy: Embodying Feminism.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 39, 2014, pp. 140–​49. —​—​—​. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. U of Iowa P, 1997. Wheeler, Elizabeth A. “No Monsters in This Fairy Tale: Wonder and the New Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 335–​50. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/​chq.2013.0044.

60  Disability and the Silent Child: Literary Selective Mutism White, E.B. The Trumpet of the Swan. 1970. Scholastic, 1987. Wilkie-​Stibbs, Christine. The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature. Routledge, 2002. —​ —​ —​ . “Intertextuality and the Child Reader.” Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​jmu/​det​ail.act​ion?docID=​ 259​048. Wohlmann, Anita, and Marion Rana. “Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media: Introduction.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 67, no. 1, 2019, pp. 3–​17. Wong, Priscilla. “Selective Mutism: A Review of Etiology, Comorbidities, and Treatment.” Psychiatry, vol. 7, no, 3, 2010, pp. 23–​31. Yang, Dori Jones. The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang. American Girl-​Pleasant, 2000.

3 Race and Speech Learning to Signify

In Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, monsters and angels are easily confused, and the African American protagonist, Jam, must discern the difference. The seemingly utopian community that Jam inhabits has banned guns, destroyed the statues of slave owners, and vanquished societal and political monsters. But evil remains. With her friend Redemption and a beast named “Pet,” Jam seeks a hidden monster and an abused child who has been bullied into silence. Jam and Redemption must learn to read what is hard to decipher: What are the signs of abuse? Which adults are trustworthy? How can children bring about justice? As discussed in Chapter 2, Jam herself is selectively mute. This does not, however, impede her ability to communicate—​she talks aloud to some people and telepathically to Pet, and signs and writes for others. Rather than focusing on how Jam communicates, the novel poses difficult questions about that communication. Jam must figure out how much to tell and to whom; and in the end, she advocates for a justice that goes beyond retribution. Unlike Pet, most of the significant texts in African American children’s literature do not occur in a future that has reckoned with its racist past. Thus young Black protagonists usually confront more challenging barriers to self-​ expression. Often they mature through close encounters with American racial history, including slavery, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement. Kenneth Millard, a scholar of American coming-​of-​age novels, writes that these books are “about knowledge of American history, and that knowledge itself becomes a significant part of the protagonist’s coming of age” (10). According to Claudine Raynaud, who looks specifically at African American maturation literature, that knowledge means “the discovery of American society’s racism” (106). Situating Black protagonists in important historical moments demonstrates the high stakes of their speech and presents systemic racism without directly naming it. While many works of African American children’s literature discuss speech and language to some degree, this chapter examines recent historical fiction that

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189312-3

62  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify explicitly calls attention to this subject. In particular, I analyze Christopher Paul Curtis’ Elijah of Buxton (2007) and Rita Williams-​Garcia’s Gaither Sisters Trilogy (One Crazy Summer [2010], P.S. Be Eleven [2013], and Gone Crazy in Alabama [2015]), with some attention to folktales in Sugar (2013) by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I also consider Jacqueline Woodson’s verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) as it reflects on the importance of speech. These texts make explicit what others only imply; namely, that coming of age in African American children’s literature is centrally concerned with manipulating speech. To thrive in a racially unjust world, African American child protagonists must learn to understand subtexts, indirection, subtlety, and to respond in kind; in short, they must learn to “signify.” Following Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey, I employ this term in the broadest way possible; thus, I understand signifying as a broad-​based linguistic practice including verbal play and trickery, complex figuration, and, at its roots, verbal coding and indirection. Gates himself acknowledges the work of linguistic anthropologist Claudia Mitchell-​Kernan, who makes the crucial point that signifying goes beyond verbal sparring or playing “the dozens” (Gates, Signifying 88; Mitchell-​Kernan 311). Though Gates writes that “learning how to signify is often part of our adolescent education” (“Blackness” 177), he is not concerned with its representation in children’s literature. In fact, critics have often reduced discussions of signifying in African American children’s literature to sparring or insults. Rudine Sims Bishop in her comprehensive Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature briefly discusses signifying in the writing of Walter Dean Myers; in particular, his use of “playing the dozens” and indirect insults in Fast Sam, Cool Clyde and Stuff (207, 244). Michelle Martin’s examination of African American picture books is a welcome exception. Like Gates, she draws extensively on Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Martin examines signifying and other rhetorical strategies; namely, call and response; narrative meandering; and signifying as insults, banter, and self-​enlargement. She writes that “these picture books can function in the same way that verbal training in black modes of discourse always has: to teach them [Black children] linguistic skills that will help them to survive and to negotiate relationships with other people” (175). I analyze coming-​ of-​ age novels where signifying is crucial. I agree with Martin that signifying provides “verbal training” but I look beyond the categories she applies to the larger sense of signifying. Summarizing Mitchell-​Kernan, Gates writes that signifying is “a pervasive mode of language use rather than merely one specific verbal game” (Signifying 87). He draws this distinction: “in standard English signification denotes meaning and in the black tradition it denotes ways of meaning” (89). Smitherman

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  63 breaks down these “ways of meaning” into eight categories that Gates reproduces in The Signifying Monkey: “indirection, circumlocution; metaphorical-​imagistic …; humorous, ironic; rhythmic fluency and sound; teachy but not preachy; directed at person or persons usually present in the situational context …; punning, play on words; introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected” (Smitherman 121; Gates, Signifying 104). Smitherman excels in delineating the smaller elements coming from the oral tradition, as well as the larger classes of Black discourse. All function, following Gates’ formulation, as “ways of meaning” and are essential strategies for survival and coming of age in a white world. The texts in this chapter play with the continuum between tales and truth, artifice and art, just as Gates traces his discussion of signifying back to folktale and myth. Indeed, some of the texts I analyze, such as Elijah of Buxton, are speakerly texts, which Gates, quoting from Russian formalist Victor Erlich, describes as texts that “emulate the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical patterns of actual speech and produce the ‘illusion of oral narration’ ” (Erlich in Gates, Signifying 195). In Elijah of Buxton, the story is told as if spoken. The language reproduces Elijah’s speech or interior dialogue. For instance, Elijah says of his mother, “She squozed my shoulders ‘cause being fra-​gile’s the biggest bone Ma’s got to pick with me” (10). Elijah uses nonstandard English—​“squozed on” instead of “squeezed”; he truncates and contracts words—​“cause.” He draws out the word “fra-​gile” to imitate his mother’s speech. These techniques create Erlich’s “illusion of oral narration.” Additionally, Elijah uses the second person, appearing to address a child reader of similar age: “If that don’t leave you scratching your head you got a better brain than me!” (28). Sugar also replicates the oral in its short sentences, contractions, and casual grammar, such as “Me and Billy run off” (29), while The Gaither Sisters Trilogy employs more complex sentences and precise grammar. Brown Girl Dreaming, written in verse that ranges from prose-​like to haikus, contains some compact fragments that sound like speech; for example, “No Halloween. /​No Christmas. /​No birthdays” (164). The text also incorporates dialogue: “Kids are mean, Dell says. /​Just turn away. Pretend we /​know better than that” (196). The texts I examine value not only the power of their protagonists to master certain speech moves but also the techniques of the speakerly text itself. The works I discuss are told in the first person and emphasize the spoken word and tale telling as crucial to maturation. Thus, they signify on the coming-​of-​age novel. As Darryl Dickson-​Carr notes, “countless African American authors have used their creative abilities to write against or parody—​to ‘signify upon,’ in black colloquial terms—​the same Western traditions that have attempted to write African Americans out of history” (3). Signifying in the cases I examine does not involve parody. These Black

64  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify child characters, who are written into history, are given additional linguistic requirements for maturation because they live in a racist world. The coming-​of-​age novel in children’s literature, with a protagonist who moves from innocence to experience, is a limited Bildungsroman, or more accurately, as Roberta Seelinger Trites discusses in her study of adolescent literature, an Entwicklungsroman, since the child does not reach adulthood (Disturbing 9–​10). I use these terms interchangeably here to emphasize that the experience in African American children’s literature must include verbal competence. Because the child narrators in this chapter recount events soon after they occur, they turn the reader into a trusted confidant. Most of these texts fit Andrea Schwenke Wyile’s useful category of “immediate-​engaging-​ first-​person narration,” a term that delineates the distinctive and common narrative features in contemporary children’s literature: immediate—​ a short amount of time between incident and narration; engaging—​ a narrator and focalizer who are almost indistinguishable, and who connect with the reader (“Expanding” 185–​92 passim). As an example, Wyile uses the narrator of Christopher Paul Curtis’ earlier work, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 (“Expanding” 189–​90). Wyile further adds “active” to her adjectives for those texts in which the speaker directly addresses the reader (“Expanding” 198), such as Elijah of Buxton. Brown Girl Dreaming is harder to categorize. A memoir-​in-​verse and a Künstlerroman covering the author’s birth to about age eleven, it does not take place within the year that Wyile argues is usually the limit for immediate narration; however, Woodson uses the present tense throughout which gives a feeling of immediacy to her individual poems. Only at the end, in the final two poems, does she summarize her experiences and explain what she has learned from them. According to Wyile this type of reflection usually is missing in immediate-​engaging-​first-​person narration because, as she states, “the narrator-​focalizer has not had sufficient time to digest the experiences being related,” and therefore, it is the reader who must be reflective (“Value” 139). Although sustained reflection may not be present in the texts I discuss, there are certainly moments of realization, epiphanies, which crystalize around the use of language. Because I analyze Elijah of Buxton and One Crazy Summer in some detail, brief plot summaries may be helpful. Christopher Paul Curtis sets Elijah of Buxton in southwestern Ontario in 1860. The Elgin Settlement or Buxton was founded in 1849 by the abolitionist Reverend William King (1812–​95) to provide a home for former Black slaves, fifteen of whom he had inherited or acquired. Buxton became a terminal on the underground railroad and drew settlers from these formerly enslaved people. The settlement grew to 2,000 people at its height just before the Civil War and received commendations and visits from famous abolitionists such

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  65 as Frederick Douglass, who praised Buxton for being “one of the most striking, convincing, and gratifying” signs that Black people could prosper without white domination (2). The novel recreates settlement lives and informs readers about this historical site while focusing on the fictional character of Elijah Freeman. As the settlement’s first freeborn child, Elijah has status; however, though he is well educated by the settlement school, he lacks a first-​hand knowledge of slavery and the ability to understand adult speech. His parents fear that he is so temperamentally weak that he will have a hard time in life, and they doubt he would have survived enslavement. Elijah’s mother states in the opening chapter that he has “got to learn to get control” of himself and become stronger (10). This same chapter introduces the novel’s trickster, a figure known as “The Preacher,” who preys on Elijah’s credulity, good nature, and desire for adventure. The Preacher, referred to by the adults as Zephariah, interrupts the novel’s mostly episodic structure by motivating Elijah to undertake two journeys: the first to a fair, and the second to an American stable holding captured slaves. Both journeys develop Elijah’s sense of self and his ability to understand the adults around him. At the end of the novel, Elijah returns to Buxton carrying a baby named “Hope.” One Crazy Summer is the first book in Rita Williams-​Garcia’s Gaither Sisters Trilogy. The book opens with the three Gaither sisters flying from New York to California to spend the summer of 1968 with their mother, who had left them when they were young. Eleven-​year-​old Delphine has grown up under the stern eye of her grandmother and father. At the airport her father reminds her to take care of her sisters, which Delphine notes is the usual state of affairs. Sensible and responsible, Delphine has been trained by her grandmother, “Big Ma,” to complete household chores and maintain order. In Oakland, California, Delphine helps her sisters adjust to their poet mother and the politics of the Black Panther movement. On excursions in the neighborhood and into San Francisco, and eventually in conversations with her mother, she learns how to speak up for what she and her sisters need. The novel moves toward two defining events that occur in the same week: the arrest of Delphine’s mother and the Black Panther rally to support Huey Newton. At the rally, Delphine and her sisters recite their mother’s poetry. Delphine’s sisters step into the spotlight, but it is Delphine alone who has a serious conversation afterwards with her mother. Even though Delphine realizes that she herself does not quite understand everything her mother is telling her, she does reflect upon her own anger and her mother’s complexity. One Crazy Summer provides the foundation for the two books that follow: P.S. Be Eleven, which covers the next seven months of the Gaither sisters’ lives back in Brooklyn, including their father’s marriage and their uncle’s return from the Vietnam War; and Gone Crazy in Alabama, which takes place the next

66  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify summer at their great-​grandmother’s house in rural Alabama and treats family history and sibling relationships. Elijah Freeman and Delphine Gaither narrate their own comings of age. Both protagonists are eleven years old and on the verge of adolescence. Their development results from journeys connecting them to pivotal moments in African American history. Born free in a Black Canadian settlement, Elijah travels by horse and ferry into the heart of darkness that is antebellum America. Delphine flies to California and attends a Black Panthers’ summer program in 1968. Roughly a century separates these two expeditions but both are, as in many Bildungsromans, crucial narrative devices that allow Delphine and Elijah to imaginatively reconfigure themselves. Elijah encounters the horrors of slavery and must maintain his sensitivity but also have agency. Delphine sees the civil rights movement in action and transcends the role of caregiver to her sisters. Both texts triumph in depicting gradual changes in their young first-​person narrators, doing so with humor and sympathy. Learning to signify is an essential part of this growth and helps Delphine and Elijah understand and inhabit their names and history. Though I focus on Elijah of Buxton and the Gaither Sisters Trilogy, I will round out this discussion with Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming and Rhodes’ Sugar. The former charts the protagonist’s growth to about the same age as Elijah and Delphine. This verse memoir moves between South Carolina and Brooklyn and weaves life and history during approximately the same time—​the late 1960s and early 1970s—​as the Gaither Sisters Trilogy. The latter features an eponymous protagonist whose life has been determined by the very substance her name denotes. Set on a plantation during Reconstruction, the novel depicts the hardships of the formerly enslaved and concludes with Sugar convincing her adopted family to go north. The novel also traces Sugar’s shifting relationship to her own name, from hatred to acceptance. All the texts treated here probe the subject of names—​their significance, power, and reflection on identity. Hoop Snakes and Hyperbole: Trying to Understand Adult Speech In these coming-​of-​age novels, the movement from innocence to experience involves understanding adult speech and signifying. Elijah of Buxton provides an example of the complexities involved. Within his community, Elijah struggles to understand both others and himself. Though he holds a prominent position in the settlement as the first freeborn child, he has done nothing to earn that prominence. He must prove he deserves such status and move from being a child to a young man. To do so, he must comprehend adult language and the motives of the people who use it, as well as gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of formerly enslaved people. In

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  67 addition, he must come to terms with what he and others view as his great weaknesses: his fear, impulsiveness, and sensitivity. Indeed, Elijah’s mother tells his father that Elijah’s fragility would not have allowed him to survive slavery (191). Elijah has to prove this statement wrong—​to himself, to his parents, to the community, and to the reader. The eleven-​year-​old protagonist often cries, yells, or runs when faced with adult speech. He must learn to understand subtexts, indirection, subtlety, and to respond in kind; in short, he must learn to signify. The book moves from a misunderstanding of adult speech to a maturation test that hinges on deciphering the words of an enslaved woman (320). Elijah’s new-​found linguistic understanding allows him to respond with his own linguistic subterfuge. Protagonists of these novels must understand a range of verbal moves and distinguish between tall tales, hyperbole, flattery, and outright lies. This understanding is central to their development rather than peripheral. The opening chapter of Elijah of Buxton exposes Elijah’s difficulties in this regard. Elijah is all too ready to accept as credible Zephariah or the Preacher’s tall tales; in this case, a story of dangerous “hoop snakes” that have supposedly found their way into the community along with recently arrived settlers (4). The Preacher stretches out this tale for maximum effect on Elijah and his friend Cooter. He details the snakes’ predation—​“Once they’ve bitten their tails, they form the shape of a circle then stand up like a wheel or a barrel hoop and commence rolling after whatever they’ve decided to kill” (5). He describes the effects of their poison—​“after exactly seven and a half days the pressure in your body becomes too great and you explode like an overheated steam boiler” (6). He dramatizes the duration of suffering—​“Two weeks! It’s fourteen endless days after your explosion before you pass on” (7). This account has all the marks of a tall tale: a type of folktale with hyperbolic details. Every question that the boys pose to the Preacher becomes an opportunity for him to spin his web of lies. This opening scene establishes Zephariah’s character and the potential danger of language. The Preacher takes advantage of situations and uses rhetoric to manipulate others in trivial and serious situations. He is indifferent as to whom he tarnishes; in this case, the former slaves he accuses of introducing the hoop snakes. That he subtly wipes out the tracks of the supposed animals suggests that even in this comedic episode he is erasing evidence that would implicate him. Not surprisingly, he turns out to be the metaphorical snake in this almost utopia. In Elijah of Buxton, then, the antagonist is a deceiver who manipulates language to his advantage. If only Elijah had heard more folktales he would recognize the Preacher as a type. The Preacher’s assumed name, “the Right Reverend Deacon Doctor Zephariah Connerly the Third” (3), and sly dealings connect him with the American tradition of the con man and the African American tradition of the trickster. Gates writes at length about the descent of the African American trickster from the

68  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify Yoruba divinity Esu-​Elebgara. Esu’s characteristics include “individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-​endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture” (Signifying 7). Though African American and Native American tricksters share certain elements (see Brennan’s When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote), the dominant characteristic of the African American trickster is his ability to manipulate others rather than fulfilling a sacred function. The Preacher in Elijah of Buxton is a master manipulator. His moniker connects him with other nineteenth-​century historical and literary figures who inflate their status to trick others, including the white tricksters known as the “duke” and the “dauphin” in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Zephariah will meet his match in a white con artist, “Charles Mondial Vaughn the Fourth, Knight Commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath” (135). In The Annotated African American Folktales, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar explain that preacher tales constitute their own subset of African American folklore, and are filled with a host of clergymen who are greedy, deceitful, promiscuous, and dishonest. Their pranks range from wolfing down all the food on the table while no one is looking to seducing wives while their husbands are at work in the fields. No form of authority is sacred when it comes to folklore and storytelling. (Gates and Tatar 430) The Preacher in Elijah of Buxton, who does not have a congregation, is like those in folktales who seek to avoid hard labor by finding their “calling,” several of whom appear in Gates’ and Tartar’s collection. As Gates and Tartar make clear, African American folktales, which spring from African stories that employ “artful dodging,” deal in signifying, the “principal weapon in the arsenal of tricksters” (lxxvii, lxxix). Elijah’s unfamiliarity with the subgenre means that he cannot identify the Preacher’s story as fiction, nor recognize him as someone likely to lie. But the Preacher is only one half of the problem. Elijah’s acceptance of the tale points to his inability to understand signifying. He does not elaborate on Zephariah’s tale or question it; instead, he runs home screaming. Elijah’s mother instructs him to “start thinking things through” (10). She wants him to consider whether these stories are believable. When he was younger, she stated to him, using a folksy idiom, that “life’s gunn be a tough row to hoe” if he does not distinguish between truth and fiction, even when the information comes from adults (28). Though she blames the Preacher for frightening children with “nonsense stories” (10), her focus is on Elijah’s naivete and weakness. Her maxim, which does not provide much comfort

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  69 to Elijah, is “a coward die a thousand deaths, a brave boy don’t die but once” (9). Smitherman notes that African American mothers, drawing on a tradition rooted in African linguistics, often tell such proverbs to their children in order “to teach rapidly and in no uncertain terms about life and living” (95). The difficulty for Elijah is that he perceives conflicting messages. On the one hand, he should obey all adults; on the other hand, he should understand when they are not telling the truth. Elijah comments, Elijah comments that this discrepancy leaves him perplexed (28). What Elijah will come to see is that growing up means understanding the nuances of these conflicting messages. Delphine also must learn to perceive and reject hyperbole and falsehoods. In One Crazy Summer, Delphine clearly knows more than her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, and more than her younger self. She takes the role of oldest sister seriously. The novel opens with Delphine trying to protect her sisters when their airplane hits turbulence: “I anchored myself and my sisters best as I could to brace us for whatever came next” (1). Through this novel and the rest of the series Delphine safeguards her sisters—​she is their anchor—​even when she herself is frightened. Indeed, part of this care emerges in her own tall tales; in this case, she concocts a story of the angry clouds pushing against the airplane (2). But Delphine does not know everything. She knows she has moved beyond her six-​year-​old understanding. Her grandmother has said that Delphine’s mother, Cecile, “lives on the street, in a hole in the wall, sleeping on park benches next to winos,” essentially a vagrant (23). Delphine knows that “these were expressions and not the plain factual truth” (24), but she still expects her mother to be quite poor, perhaps not living on the streets, but close to it. When she arrives at her mother’s Oakland house, her green stucco house with a baby palm tree, she has to adjust her perspective. Her grandmother’s words do not constitute reality. Big Ma’s words are at best hyperbolic, at worst false. Perhaps she is trying to lessen the sting of Cecile’s departure, or perhaps trying to paint Cecile as an unfit mother. Only gradually does Delphine reassess some of Big Ma’s other words and ideas. But not until the end of the novel will Delphine ask her mother about one of Big Ma’s most painful statements: that she, her mother, left because she was not allowed to name her third child, Delphine’s youngest sister. Delphine and Elijah’s situations could be summarized by the words of Jackie’s grandmother in Brown Girl Dreaming: Don’t believe everything you hear, Jackie. Someday, you’ll come to know when someone is telling the truth and when they’re just making up stories. (115)

70  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify The “stories” referred to are ones told by superstitious children who say that stepping on a particular mushroom will summon the Devil. The wisdom of Jackie’s grandmother, though, extends beyond the situation and its actors, and even that one text, to provide a gloss on other works of African American literature. Delphine and Elijah both occupy favored positions that bring them benefits as well as burdens. Delphine is the oldest sister; Elijah is the first freeborn child in Buxton. Along with these positions come expectations of maturity and understanding. Delphine’s father and grandmother, and even her mother, require her to watch over her younger sisters. Frederick Douglass held Elijah as a baby because he was the first freeborn child in the settlement, but paradoxically, this event leads to Elijah’s shame. He threw up on the renowned abolitionist, which suggests that even as a prelingual baby Elijah lacks control over what comes out of him. The privileged positions of Elijah and Delphine come with assumptions of knowledge that the protagonists themselves refute, directly and indirectly. In Delphine’s case, her acceptance of certain ideas reveals her misunderstanding. In One Crazy Summer, for example, Delphine believes that the dictionary was written by a “Miss Webster” who created the dictionary rather than giving birth to children. In P.S. Be Eleven, to her great shock, her mistake is revealed: “I had to leave Miss Merriam Webster and all my pictures of her behind” (127). But there are also many moments when Delphine herself is aware of her limited knowledge. When her mother states under her breath that she “should have gone to Mexico to get rid of you when I had the chance” (One Crazy Summer 26–​27), Delphine reflects that she does not know what her mother means; she is unaware that Mexico was a destination for American women seeking abortions. As the oldest she feels she owes her sisters an explanation, so she concocts a story about rich people purchasing babies from Mexico. Similarly, Elijah overhears his mother’s narrative of her time in and escape from slavery as his mother retells this history to a neighbor. Elijah clearly understands some aspects of this narrative, but only interjects to comment for the reader once: “It’s hard to picture your ma begin gave to a little white girl to play with like a pet, but that’s what happened” (206). But there is no such interjection in the part of the conversation where his mother recites what her own mother said to her: “What make you think I wants to see you down here knowing them …” Ma looked in the back of the buckboard and spelt out, “them d-​a-​ m things Massa got in store for you? Ain’t you got no inkling what he waiting on you to get old enough for?” (210; ellipses in original)

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  71 Elijah’s mother pauses in her formulation to ensure that no one is listening, spells out her mother’s curse word, and does not herself say what her mother meant. There is no need for her to explain to another adult woman that her own mother was trying to prevent her from being raped. This conversation between mother and daughter occurred when Elijah’s mother was only slightly older than Elijah. Elijah himself does not have an inkling of what is meant, nor any sense that a glossing of the scene is necessary. The more experienced reader would be brought to a stop. The words of Elijah’s mother, like those of Delphine’s, require a linguistic sophistication that the protagonist is not yet capable of. Jani L. Barker, in one of the few sustained analyses of Elijah of Buxton, reads these lines from the novel as evidence of what she calls a “double narrative”: the combination of naïve storyteller and storyline with more adult subject matter as a way of being true to history without overwhelming the child reader (174–​75; 190–​91). I would argue that the text presents not double narratives but an appeal to different readers, whether adults and children, or more experienced and less experienced readers. Tall Tales

Delphine and Elijah’s limited understanding comes up against all types of difficult adult speech. Elijah of Buxton establishes storytelling and hyperbole as part of the birthright of enslaved people and their descendants. Elijah is confused by the stories, essentially tall tales, that have sprung up from his misadventure with Frederick Douglass. Essentially, the community members signify on the occasion, creating one more incredible story after another; for example, “Mr. Polite said I throwed up so plentiful that ain’t no deers nor rabbits die in the woods for five years after” (26). To Elijah, these tales are nonsensical. His mother has tried to explain the roots of this creative embellishment, which she calls “prettying up” a tale (25). She tells Elijah that enslaved people relished this kind of hyperbole because it was “near the only thing they use to get to do without no white person telling ’em how or when” (25–​26). In other words, linguistic freedom was one of the only freedoms they had. Thus, they love making a summer day a lot hotter than it really was, or making rain or drought last a whole lot longer than they really did, and they ’specially love telling you how their great-​great-​grampa or gramma use to be the king or queen of Africa. (26) What Elijah’s mother describes—​ the oral inventiveness of enslaved people—​has been noted by historians. Lawrence W. Levine writes that

72  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify these “acts of creation were both individual and communal, looking both back to the African cultures from which they had come and around to the American cultures they lived amidst” (xvii). In The Signifying Monkey, Gates refers to H. Rap Brown, who, though he acknowledges that “some of the best Dozens players … were girls,” states that the height of signifying resides in community storytelling, “when brothers are exchanging tales” (Brown in Gates 79, 81). Brown’s focus is on men—​brothers—​ telling stories. Delphine’s experience with this type of signifying occurs in Gone Crazy in Alabama, set in the rural South, where Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern are spending the summer with their grandmother, Big Ma, and great-​ grandmother, Ma Charles. The third book of the Gaither Sisters Trilogy features women as the tale tellers in what we might describe as a storytelling competition between two African American great-​grandmothers, who are the matriarchs of their respective families and also half-​sisters. During the day, the three girls visit their great aunt, Ruth Trotter, who will not speak to her half-​sister, Ma Charles. But their great aunt uses their visits to tell them family stories that she knows they will repeat to their great-​grandmother. Their great-​grandmother responds in turn. Vonetta, in particular, becomes the conduit for this rival storytelling. She musters all her performance skills to retell the stories of each elderly woman to the other. As Ma Charles and Ruth Trotter compete for their version of family history, they also communicate both what that history is and how differently it could be perceived. Ruth Trotter states of her father that “No jail could hold him. And he became a crow and flew between the bars” (117), connecting him to the folklore tradition of flying African Americans. When Vonetta relays this information to her great-​ grandmother, Ma Charles responds, “My father was a God-​ fearing colored man. He didn’t turn into a crow like some demon. No sir!” and proceeds with a counter narrative. Punning on the word “yarn,” Delphine couches this “dueling between the two sisters” (116) as akin to her own storytelling or “spinning straw”: “Talk about spinning straw. Suddenly, the little bit of family history Vonetta had first recited spun itself into a long, winding yarn” (95). This spinning complicates the Gaither sisters’ understanding of their family history. In the peritext, the family tree includes not only Black ancestors but also Native Americans and a white plantation owner. The girls gradually understand the complexity of this genealogy and its connection to African American history. There are painful elements to be found in its branches: the Gaithers are descended in part from a slave owner; the white Sheriff in town who condescends to them in the daytime and who rides with the KKK at night is a relative; Native American relatives sold into slavery their darker-​skinned biracial offspring. The violence and sorrow of American history, which comes from the interweaving

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  73 of Native American, African American, and white histories, intersects with the personal histories of the two tale tellers. Only when a tornado devastates Ruth Trotter’s house and Vonetta is feared dead do the two sisters come together, and then they begin creating stories together, echoing and building on each other’s words, both convinced that sending Apollo 11 to the moon has led to devastating consequences: “Didn’t I say don’t go poking in the sky?” “Though God’s heavens,” Ma Charles said … “I knew it was trouble when I felt that air, sister.” “Cold here,” Ma Charles said. “And heat stirring there,” the other finished. “It’s all that stirring up. Sending men into space and hurling them back down. Poking holes where they need not poke holes.” “Electric storm is the ma and pa,” one said. “And the tornado is its wayward child,” the other said. (220) Reconciliation means compromise and co-​creation, noticing the similarities in their perception, and building on each other’s words rather than disputing them. Trickery and Righteousness

Elijah and Delphine must both uncover trickery that is cloaked in seeming righteousness. In Elijah of Buxton, the Preacher employs religious rhetoric to trick others. When he notices Elijah’s skill with rock throwing, a strategy for catching fish, the Preacher tells him he has a God-​given gift, comparing his talent to Jesus’ ability to multiply fish and loaves (47). He cons Elijah out of four of his ten fish by telling Elijah to tithe and then creates a tithing system that will give him the amount of fish he wants. Within this scene duplicity follows flattery, and even Elijah knows he should be careful. When the Preacher says to Elijah, “I should quit treating you like a child and start treating you like the man you truly are” (48), he preys on Elijah’s desire to be perceived as more mature. Elijah recalls but ignores his father’s warning: that such “sweet-​talking is like a rattling-​ snake’s rattles … a warning that you’re ’bout to get bit” (48). Once again, the connection between the Preacher and snakes is reinforced. In One Crazy Summer, trickery is hidden in the rhetoric of activism. Delphine’s version of the Preacher is “Crazy Kelvin,” an avid Black Panther she encounters at the Oakland People’s Center. From the start, Delphine senses that Kelvin is trying too hard, that he is “putting on a show” for the other Black Panthers (64). Kelvin criticizes Fern’s white

74  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify doll and her use of the word “colored” rather than “black” to define herself (65). Kelvin states in fact that they all “need some reeducation” (66). At first, this attack reinforces sisterly bonds: “Vonetta and I threw our ‘colored’ on top of Fern’s like we were ringtossing at Coney Island … If one of us said ‘colored,’ we all said ‘colored’ ” (65). Similarly, Delphine rebuts Kelvin, saying that Fern’s doll is not a sign of “self-​hatred” (66). Delphine reflects that only she and Vonetta are allowed to “call Fern a Big Baby”; essentially, it is one of the privileges of sisterly speech (67). Though the sisters are initially brought together by Kelvin’s words, their unity dissolves when Vonetta colors the doll’s skin with a black marker. Kelvin’s influence, then, extends beyond the community center. In some ways, he forces Fern’s maturation; she no longer brings the doll to the center with her. He also dispels Delphine’s ideas of racial harmony after she sees the Black Panthers chatting in friendly fashion with the white food deliverers only to have Kelvin refer to them later as “racist dogs” (87). At the time, Delphine does not know that Kelvin’s inflamed rhetoric is a pretense, a cover for his actual role as informant, but his speech also forces the sisters to examine their assumptions. Characters like the Preacher and Crazy Kelvin are necessary figures because their skullduggery provides opportunities for the protagonists to question what they think they know. The crucial section of the first half of Elijah of Buxton occurs at the travelling fair, the “Carnival of Oddities,” which the Buxton adults have stated is off-​limits. The Preacher convinces Elijah to sneak out at night and accompany him to this fair by offering to pay Elijah’s entry fee and telling him that this expedition will benefit the settlement. After the Preacher makes Elijah an offer that he cannot refuse, Elijah demonstrates some capacity for self-​assessment when he notes that “there’s accidentally getting painted in a corner and there’s not minding getting painted in a corner” (105). As the narrative slows down to focus on the fair, which occupies three chapters, so should the reader, because the carnival provides an intricate look at language, trickery, and whitewashing. The Preacher’s linguistic duplicity forms only part of the deceit Elijah witnesses in an evening that forces him to take another look at himself. Heterotopias: The Carnival of Oddities/​San Francisco

As in many Bildungsromans, the protagonists must leave home in order to mature. In One Crazy Summer and Elijah of Buxton, the main characters travel to heterotopias that incorporate spectacle and make them feel the weight of double consciousness. These places force them to speak up and prepare them for later conversations. Though One Crazy Summer is most broadly about the Gaither sisters’ trip from Brooklyn to Oakland, the

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  75 sisters also take a bus to San Francisco. In Elijah of Buxton, two significant journeys foster Elijah’s growth, the first to the fair and the second across the border to the United States. In the first, Elijah accompanies the Preacher to the Carnival of Oddities, a place with the qualities of a dream world. The carnival and San Francisco function as heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense; namely, “other places” or counter-​sites. The Carnival of Oddities immediately induces in Elijah a heterotopic disorientation. To Elijah, “it was like we’d fell off a cliff right into a whole ’nother world” (116). The fair’s sights and sounds confound him, almost dizzy him. The carnival brings together not only places, even species, remote from each other in the “real world” but also alternatives for Elijah, as if he were reflected in funhouse mirrors. The chapters on the Carnival of Oddities are worth examining in detail as they introduce several characters who function as doubles of Elijah and suggest other possible lives, none of which are as stable and pleasant as his own. In this way, the novel echoes the significant theme in African American writings of “double consciousness,” established by W. E. B. Du Bois as “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” as a sense of “two-​ness” that comes from being both American and Black (194). Bernard W. Bell casts double consciousness as the salutary effect of the mixture of cultures and races that produced the African American (xvi, 3–​36), but it can also be painful and signal exclusion. In Elijah of Buxton, double consciousness displays itself not through self-​division within Elijah but through the potential other selves he discovers in his heterotopias. Double consciousness, thus, is framed not as Elijah’s problem but as society’s. Elijah’s encounters with doppelgängers strengthen his sense of identity rather than reveal its fragmentation. The first of these meetings occurs when Elijah views Madame Sabbar, billed as the woman who, with a slingshot, “has killed five hundred and forty-​one of the fiercest beasts in all Europe, the dreaded Swedish moth lion!” (107). Seemingly the circus consists of the reification of tall tales. One of Elijah’s white schoolmates, Jimmy Blassingame, plays the role of chief of “the Swedish Mobongo tribe” (111), a “cowardly savage” named MaWee (113) who is utterly humiliated on stage by Madame Sabbar. The performance ends with Jimmy almost choking to death and then sitting on the stage and crying so hard that his makeup runs down his body. The next child, Sammy, is described by Elijah as a white boy of about the same age. He speaks with an American accent and seems, at least initially, to be a combination of child and man with his self-​assertion and smell of tobacco. Sammy plays the mesmerist’s subject, but he is forced to engage in increasingly humiliating acts, culminating in removing his clothes on stage and revealing a half-​starved body to the mocking crowd. The sad states of both these children contrast with the healthy and protected body of Elijah, who was also

76  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify raised with a strong enough moral compass so that he pities rather than laughs at these two boys. Jimmy and Sammy teach that whiteness cannot save a child from poverty and exploitation. But more doubles for Elijah appear. Sammy spins a tall tale for Elijah about a twelve-​year-​old from nearby Chatham who goes by “Elijah” and will not even allow other children to have names that start with the same letter as his. This Elijah, who has supposedly already killed a “full-​growed Indian man” (123), is aggressive and murderous, a caricature of masculinity—​not the kind of boy that the sensitive protagonist should aspire to be. The “real” MaWee is the carnival owner’s slave, kept offstage in Chatham because the locals would not approve. The Preacher advertises Elijah’s rock-​throwing skills to the carnival owner through an obvious fiction that Elijah is really “little Ahbo,” the last surviving member of an African tribe distinguished for that skill (136). In doing so, the Preacher tries to profit by Elijah’s talent, which Elijah has honed to benefit his family and community. In essence, the Preacher is marketing Elijah by selling his skills as well as creating a false identity for him. MaWee instantly sees this Ahbo as competition and believes Elijah is trying to replace him. Uneducated, a slave who does not know he is a slave, MaWee indicates to the reader, if not to Elijah, the accidents of history. In this chapter, Elijah is on the brink of being objectified for his talent by the circus world, where dehumanization is the name of the game. But more importantly, Elijah could have been born into slavery. Elijah could have been MaWee. This heterotopia reveals a spectrum of dehumanization and objectification—​ from slavery to enfreakment—​ and a subtext of racist ideologies. The first part of the carnival scene plays out for comic effect by substituting a white child for the slave who usually plays the part of the savage. When the announcer refers to Jimmy Blassingame as “that black-​hearted barbarian” (113; italics in original), the knowing reader understands that a sleight of hand has occurred. When the announcer says, “Look at the cowardly savage! He’s preparing to attack! … How shall we save this innocent white woman?” (112), that same reader understands that racist rhetoric has and continues to paint the white woman as innocent and in danger of rape by predatory black men. This is the myth that covers up the actuality—​the rape of enslaved women by white men—​ expressed elliptically by Elijah’s mother as “them d-​a-​m things Massa got in store for you” (210). The Carnival of Oddities has some additional lessons in store for Elijah. That the carnival has undergone an unpersuasive whitewashing by its proprietors becomes obvious as the scene moves toward its conclusion. The white owner offers to buy Elijah from the Preacher. Soon after, MaWee removes the sheet over the sign usually used to entice customers to watch

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  77 Madame Sabbar, and instead of references to Sweden, the ostensible location of the act as performed in Chatham, Elijah reads the following: “The Jungles of Darkest Africa!!! Help Madame Sabbar Capture MaWee, the Chief of the Pickaninnys!!!” (147). Even the Preacher, exploitative rogue that he is, cannot countenance either the selling of Elijah or the sign with its derogatory references to Africans and its dramatization of slavery. Immediately he and Elijah leave, and all the Preacher’s schemes for Elijah vanish. After the Preacher learns from Elijah that MaWee is a slave, he returns on his own to rescue MaWee. The most thrilling excursion Elijah has ever had is also the most educational. MaWee, the Preacher states, is not just a slave but an ignorant one, unaware of his own position (148). Elijah’s own ignorance, however, has decreased. During this visit to the Carnival of Oddities, Elijah articulates his own identity as Elijah and as Elijah of Buxton. In the course of his tall tale, Sammy asserts that the ferocious Elijah in Chatham will not like encountering Elijah, especially since he’s “a slave boy from Buxton” (123). Elijah responds, “I waren’t never a slave. I was freeborn” (123), first using a negative construction, and then an affirmation. When MaWee suggests that Elijah is going to replace him at the carnival, Elijah responds by speaking of his family and community bonds, and tells MaWee that his parents would never let him join the circus: “Buxton’s my home” (140). Elijah’s affirmation of himself and his home finds a parallel in Delphine’s response to her daytrip to San Francisco in One Crazy Summer. The city proves to be the Gaither sisters’ “Carnival of Oddities,” a spectacular place or place of spectacles that instills disorientation, wondrous juxtaposition, and double consciousness. The chapter title, “Wish We Had a Camera,” emphasizes the excursion as a series of visual encounters and reflects Delphine’s frequent wish to record them. This desire begins with the hippies that Delphine and her sisters view as soon as they get off the bus. Delphine notes that that they cannot help staring at these countercultural figures as if “they were in an exhibit” (159). She describes them further as “a whole tribe” (159). The sisters move from the flower children near the bus station to Chinatown where they marvel at the tiled roofs and dragons, eat Chinese food, and gape at store windows. San Francisco animates people and places that Delphine has previously only imagined. “The Flower Girl” is just like the “hippie girls with flowers in their hair” that Delphine has heard about in popular songs (160). The Chinese architecture she has viewed in reference books and magazines, though the reality—​“the roofs, like tiled lamp shades or hats” and the “[d]‌ragons of every color”—​is far more exciting (161). Delphine and her sisters view Chinatown as a place of fantastic architecture and fortune cookies.

78  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify Seeing Chinatown as exotic is disrupted by the realization that exoticism is a matter of perspective and knowledge. In their mother’s Oakland neighborhood, the girls buy food from the woman who runs the Chinese restaurant and though they refer to her throughout as “Mean Lady Ming” their opinion of her shifts, from foreign and frightening to community member (37, 92, 183). In Chinatown, Delphine and her sisters find themselves stared at by a tall, very pale family, who seem different from the usual white people they have encountered, and who speak a language Delphine does not know, but describes as “flugal, shlugal words” (162). Although Delphine originally worries about their intent, the tourists smile and wave at Delphine and her sisters. They then pull out their cameras and take pictures of Delphine’s family rather than the Chinatown scenery. This moment suggests that both groups are exotic to the other and that the Scandinavians come from a homogenous white society. But Delphine does not want to be stared at, she does not want to be objectified, and she pulls her sisters away. This moment of being stared at with its comic undertones prepares the reader for another encounter later on the same day. In the sisters’ final stop, at Fisherman’s Wharf, Delphine experiences double consciousness and, empowered by her association with the Black Panthers, speaks up against racial profiling. Right before this happens, she has a moment of pure escape from her responsibilities. Just as she wants a camera to take pictures of San Francisco, she also wishes she could bring home the distinctive smells of Fisherman’s Wharf. Immersed in her surroundings, Delphine stops thinking about her sisters. Quickly, though, she recalls her father’s injunction and reflects, “I stopped myself from falling into the whiff of salt air and flying off with the seagulls like some dreamy flower girl” (164). Here the African American flying motif surfaces, only to be denied as Delphine comes back to reality. This existential moment is quickly followed by her experience in a souvenir shop on the wharf where the clerk scrutinizes Delphine and her sisters with a “hard stare”(164). Delphine tells her sisters “to be extra well behaved” (164). Then she realizes they are scrutinized not for being without an adult, but “for the other reason store clerks’ eyes never let up. We were black kids and he expected us to be in his gift shop to steal” (164). While the Scandinavian tourists view Delphine and her sisters as exotic, this clerk, like others from Delphine’s past, marks her as a potential thief. Both gazes force Delphine to see herself through the eyes of others; thus, to experience double consciousness. In Brown Girl Dreaming, one of Jacqueline Woodson’s haikus describes the same situation in Greenville, South Carolina: “In the stores downtown /​we’re always followed around /​just because we’re brown” (82). The exception is the fabric store, where “the white woman /​knows my grandmother,” where

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  79 we are not Colored or Negro. We are not thieves or shameful or something to be hidden away. At the fabric store, we’re just people. (90–​91) Jacqueline Woodson’s grandmother keeps her family away from the shops and restaurants where they are treated with suspicion and dislike. In One Crazy Summer, Delphine responds assertively to the store clerk. When he asks what they want, she replies, “We are citizens, and we demand respect” (164). Delphine echoes and claims the words of her instructors at the Black Panthers’ summer program. She asserts herself into being. Respect and Address

Maturation means learning to decode interactions and deciding what can and cannot be said. Delphine’s words to the clerk reveal her developing self-​ actualization. Elijah transgresses the limits of acceptable speech in an early scene in the novel when he converses volubly with one of the hardworking men of Buxton, Mr. Leroy. Talking without thinking, Elijah makes a crucial error: “I said, ‘And me and all ’em other little nigg—​’ ” (96). Mr. Leroy hits Elijah across his mouth, briefly knocking him out. Then he delivers a lengthy lesson to Elijah on the objectification and hate inherent in the word, regardless of the race of the person who uses it. Mr. Leroy tells Elijah that the word was spoken when Mr. Leroy was branded on the chest, when his daughter was sold, and when his wife was given to another man; in short, the word is fundamentally connected to the dehumanization of slavery. Here Curtis uses Mr. Leroy to give his authorial opinion on contemporary debates about the N-​word. Beyond that debate, this chapter of Elijah of Buxton brings home the larger message of the book’s previous chapter, in which the schoolteacher tries to instruct students that they must respect him at all times. As with many children’s novels, the protagonist’s “real learning” occurs outside the classroom; ­chapter 7 is entitled “Mr. Leroy Shows How to Really Make a Lesson Stick” (93). Elijah’s experience with the N-​word, though it leads to corporal punishment, does not threaten his life. Instead, Elijah, who speaks unthinkingly and to a Black member of his own community, learns not to utter the word again. Far more dangerous though less explicit is the example in One Crazy Summer, when the reader assumes that a white police officer uses the N-​word to demean and implicitly threaten Delphine’s father. Delphine recalls a trip with her father to visit family in Alabama when the state policeman does not speak respectfully to her father: “He hadn’t called Papa ‘Mr. Gaither, sir,’ or ‘citizen’ like the helpful police office in our civic-​pride film” (124). Delphine

80  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify tells us what is not spoken and not heard, but does not repeat what is actually said and what she does hear: “I heard what that state policeman called Papa” (124). She fears her father “might talk back or fight back” (124). The text is silent on the policeman’s language; that is, it does not repeat it, as is appropriate. Furthermore, from her father’s silence Delphine learns that there are times when not speaking is necessary and places where it is too risky to speak up. In Gone Crazy in Alabama her father warns her and her sisters as they are about to leave for the deep south: “Once you cross the line from North to South all of that black power stuff is over” (11). He advises Vonetta not to speak if she is called names, noting that the sisters “have some mouths on you” (11). In other words, backchat can be dangerous. This is one of the types of silence discussed by Roberta Seelinger Trites in her analysis of Mildred Taylor’s Let the Circle Be Unbroken, part of the Logan Family Saga. It is “the silencing of an entire people” (Waking 49). Though the N-​word is the most potent word alluded to in these texts, many of them also grapple with spoken forms of address that slide from respect to subservience and are connected with southern customs. The Gaither Sisters Trilogy and Brown Girl Dreaming are particularly interested in forms of address to white people. Delphine is irked by her southern cousin’s use of “sir” in dealing with the white sheriff in Gone Crazy in Alabama (125). Delphine’s response to her cousin’s “sir” is similar to her mother’s dislike of the word “ma’am” in One Crazy Summer. When Delphine reflexively uses the term, her mother accuses her of sounding like her grandmother, “like a country mule” (135). “Ma’am” is part of Delphine’s grandmother’s vocabulary; it comes from her southern background and her investment in the politics of respectability. Delphine consciously omits the word at certain moments, aware that the word suits her grandmother but not herself. In an exchange with a fawning white woman, Delphine reflects that she behaves as her grandmother had instructed her “in our many talks on how to act around white people. I said, ‘Thank you,’ but I didn’t add the ‘ma’am,’ for the whole ‘Thank you, ma’am’ ” (16). When Delphine demands respect from the store clerk, she is conscious that her grandmother would insist on a “ ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Please, sir’ to show him we were just as civilized as everyone else,” but she does not add the respectful form of address (164–​65). At that moment, Delphine demonstrates that she is simultaneously steeped in her grandmother’s conditioning and forging her own way. In Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, “ma’am” is one of many words that Jackie’s mother forbids her children to say: Never ma’am—​just yes, with eyes meeting eyes enough to show respect. Don’t ever ma’am anyone! (69)

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  81 Here verbal and nonverbal prescriptions are intertwined—​“yes” rather than “yes ma’am”—​with enough eye contact to indicate respect but not subservience. Although they are living in the south at this point in the text, Jackie’s mother insists that “You are from the North …/​You know the right way to speak” (69). As in the case of Mr. Leroy’s response to Elijah’s use of the N-​word, Jackie’s mother enforces her own words with corporal punishment (68–​69). This subject of addressing white people is less of a concern in Elijah of Buxton, which focuses on discourse within the Black community. Occasionally Elijah has interactions with white people, and these are shown as generally respectful on both sides. When he picks up the mail in Chatham, he addresses the Scottish clerk as “sir,” but this comes after a mutually respectful exchange between the clerk and Elijah (184–​85), and the “sir” is a title that a child would bestow as a matter of course upon an adult who is not a family member. Elijah of Buxton pays more attention to how Elijah and his friends address and speak to Black figures of authority, devoting two chapters to this subject. As mentioned previously, Mr. Leroy hits Elijah when he uses the N-​word in casual conversation. Just before this event, Elijah watches Mr. Travis, the schoolteacher, discipline his friend Cooter for neglecting to show respect in his actions and his words. Cooter and Elijah are both swatted and forced to write out the line “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” (92). Mr. Travis emphasizes the respect that he is owed by virtue of his superior education and position and describes Cooter’s bad manners as a sign of ignorance not befitting someone raised in freedom (91). Understanding “The Back Side” of Words: Learning to Signify The books I examine feature protagonists who gain an understanding of adult speech, who move from confusion to some knowledge of what Elijah calls the “meaning on the back side” of words (320). This hidden meaning presents opportunities for interpretation and for responding in kind. In Elijah of Buxton, Elijah has an epiphany; in The Gaither Sisters Trilogy, this understanding is spread out through several texts. In Sugar and Brown Girl Dreaming, the protagonists’ tour de force with language comes near the very end. The most important discussions often occur with mothers or mother figures. As in many children’s books, journeys far and near are a catalyst for growth, and increase characters’ ability to signify and use language strategically. In these books knowledge is hard won, and the almost adolescent characters must demonstrate their capabilities regardless of their flaws. Elijah is tested by his heterotopic encounters to move from innocence to experience, to decode adult language, and to show agency despite his

82  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify frailties. The second half of the novel takes Elijah across the border to Michigan. Once again, this is a journey instigated by the Preacher, who has absconded with the fortune meant to buy Mr. Leroy’s family their freedom. Once again, Elijah embraces the convenient fiction that he is forced on this journey: I ain’t got no choice, sir? … I know if Ma and Pa found out I went to Michigan on my own accord, they’d skin me alive once I got back! This way I can tell ’em, and tell ’em true, that I got kidnapped. (264) Elijah’s truth here is a constructed fiction. Elijah has plenty of opportunities to take himself out of this adventure, but he chooses not to; ultimately, he goes of his own free will. This border crossing takes Elijah back not only to his parents’ past in the United States but also back into history and literary tradition. Like classical heroes who travel to the underworld, Elijah must cross a river and contend with a ferocious guard dog. The journey fulfills the requirement of the coming-​of-​age novel as it brings Elijah closer to slavery in an encounter that has coded references to sex and to death. Elijah must see slavery first-​hand. He must be a witness in the many senses of this term—​as someone who observes an event personally, can testify to that event, and become a sign of it. Not long after he and Mr. Leroy travel to the United States, Mr. Leroy dies of a heart attack. Now Elijah is truly on his own—​he is, in effect, orphaned, as befits the role of the child adventurer—​and he continues the quest for the Preacher and the money on his own, a quest which leads him to a stable that contains horses, a sleeping slaver, the dead body of the Preacher, and shackled human beings. Elijah’s perception of the chained individuals evolves from defamiliarization to a full acknowledgment of them as human beings. For a moment, Elijah could be back at the carnival, with its banners illustrating such “freaks” on display as a woman who appears to have “some child’s arms and legs poking out of the side of her neck” (118). At first, Elijah believes that one of the stable bundles has “four live, moving arms,” two big and two small (294). As Elijah falls to the ground in fear, the “bundles” awake and make uncanny noises, so that Elijah thinks they are demons. Ultimately, the “haints” (ghosts) or demons prove to be captured slaves, including a mother holding her child, and Elijah is just as unreal to them as they are to him. Perhaps this is the unreality of the historical encounter, with the narrative functioning as a type of time travel for a reader to whom the people of the past are but ghosts, and vice versa. The close quarters and eerie atmosphere connect this stable scene to the tradition of the American gothic, more particularly the African American gothic, often used to reveal the horrors of slavery. Maisha L. Wester

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  83 writes that the Black gothic displays the horror of the past intruding on the present (27). Here the temporal collapse is also spatial. The stable is a haunting symbol of plantation slave quarters, places that functioned as counter-​sites to the supposed gentility of the plantation “Big Houses.” The darkness, smells, fear, nakedness, and chains of the stable also look even further back, to the cargo holds of the Middle Passage. In the case of those wrenched from their African homelands, represented most directly in the novel by Kamau, the ship is paradoxical, denoting both mobility and stasis. It is no less than a floating dungeon. As Marcus Rediker writes, the slave ship symbolized “the new, modern economic system in all its horrifying nakedness, capitalism without a loincloth” (339). Thus the stable brings together history, literature, and myth, setting Elijah’s epiphany in a place central to the Christian mythos and its paradoxical tenets: the manifestation of divinity in a place meant for housing animals. As is the case with Elijah’s trip to the fair, the stable also functions as a heterotopia, in this case, what Foucault might categorize as a “crisis” heterotopia, a “privileged or sacred or forbidden” site for those such as “adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, [and] the elderly” who exist at the social margins (24). Within the stable, Elijah is guided by his increasing knowledge and by the sole woman, Chloe, who talks to him in the no-​nonsense way his mother would. “Cut that foolishness,” she says to him, and then directs him to stand up and bring water to her and the others (298). In another moment of externalized double consciousness, Elijah sees himself as akin to the shackled boy to whom he gives water, noting that this child is only slightly younger than he is, and he feels embarrassed at the effusive reaction of the child to this small gesture of kindness. He understands that these people are “the same as me and Ma and Pa” but for their chains (308). He decides that he will never again engage in a favorite pastime of the Buxton children, that of playing at being abolitionists and slavers. Elijah’s test in these chapters is to understand the subtext of Chloe’s words, her signifying and her silences. But Chloe does not speak plainly. She asks Elijah to hold her baby and claims that the baby does not cry because she recognizes Elijah as her brother. Elijah knows this claim of kinship is false. He knows the baby cannot cry because she is sickly and so he cannot understand why Chloe repeats that the baby loves him. His first realization is that there is a subtext to this speech: “This was some of that talk that growned folks do where they’re saying one thing out loud but you’re supposed to be hearing lots of other things at the same time! This woman was treating me like I was growned!” (320). He knows there is a subtext, but at first he does not know what it is. Only as Elijah is riding back toward the river and Canada, feeling as if he has failed, does the light dawn on him and the meaning of Chloe’s words becomes clear. He realizes

84  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify what Chloe actually means and why she is talking in this way. While it was the Preacher who returned on his own to the carnival to forcibly rescue MaWee, now it is Elijah who returns to the stable with a plan of his own, a plan based not on force but on the subtleties of language. Elijah not only understands Chloe’s signifying but also sees that he must use signifying in response. Realizing that his own linguistic subterfuge will be necessary to fulfill her wishes, Elijah fabricates his family history, and tells her that “[i]‌t came to me that that there girl’s the spittin’ image of my baby sister that died of the fever two years pass!” (331). Elijah elaborates on this story, watching Chloe’s reactions to make sure his words sink in, and “trying to talk this secret language” (332). Instead of falling to pieces—​“I was ’bout this close to slipping into another on n’em fra-​gile spells” (334)—​he asks Chloe if he can take her baby to Buxton to comfort this mother. His request is exactly right. He cannot rescue all the enslaved people in the stable, but he can save this baby. In the Gaither Sisters Trilogy, coming to understand adult speech and responding in turn takes longer than in Elijah of Buxton. Rather than one moment, there are several, spread out over the three texts. In One Crazy Summer, as mentioned earlier, Delphine is already accomplished at some types of signifying when the novel opens. This is part of her adeptness at performing adulthood for her sisters. Delphine is the only one of the three who wears a watch, a symbol of her maturity and her investment in adult time (8). She is the one who keeps her sisters on schedule and keeps the peace between them. She reads to them and supervises their baths. Delphine’s sisters acknowledge her position by always looking at her to gauge how they should respond to situations (58). But Delphine is also taxed to understand and respond to adult speech. Three significant moments occur near the end of One Crazy Summer, requiring three different types of signifying. In the first, Delphine and her sisters return to their mother’s house to find their mother, along with two Black Panthers, being handcuffed by the police. There is some irony in this moment, uncommented on by the sisters, because Cecile had warned the girls as they left for their daytrip to San Francisco that she would not come to the police station if they were arrested for stealing. As the sisters approach, their mother loudly proclaims that she has no children, and that these must be a neighbor’s. Delphine immediately understands that she must repeat her mother’s formulations, and she states, “She’s not our mother. I’m Delphine Clark” (169). Delphine’s two sisters, already practiced at responding to her statements in call-​and-​response fashion, echo her response. To Delphine’s assertion that they do not live with “this lady,” Vonetta responds, “Not with her,” and Fern, “Surely don’t” (169). This signifying allows the three sisters to remain together at their mother’s house.

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  85 The second opportunity occurs when the sisters find one of their mother’s poems and read it at the rally held in support of Huey Newton and commemorating Bobby Hutton. As Elijah has moments of externalized double consciousness in which he sees children whom he could have been, Delphine has a similar realization when she learns about the death of Bobby Hutton. She notes that Bobby Hutton was only six years older than she is and that her own height might lead the police to see her as someone older, someone whom they might shoot before getting all the facts, before she could speak up for herself (127–​28). Just as Elijah could have been an enslaved child, Delphine realizes here that she could be a victim of police violence. In preparation for the rally, Delphine and her sisters practice reciting their mother’s poem, found when they are cleaning up the mess left by the police. They connect “I Birthed a Nation” to themselves, interpreting the poem as “about Mother Africa losing her children like Cecile had lost [them]” (176), though Delphine holds back her critical response, that their mother did not lose them but left them. At the rally, the sisters recite the stanzas in turns and read the last one together. In doing so, they bring to life their mother’s words and draw her into their trio: “Saying Cecile’s words, one after another, felt like we were bringing her into our conversation instead of turning our voices on her, like we had” (197). Uttering their mother’s words, adding their own touch—​they sprinkle the word “Black” liberally throughout—​the sisters claim their mother, her identity as a poet, and her chosen name: “ ‘I Birthed a Black Nation,’ by our mother, Nzila, the black poet” (195–​96). One Crazy Summer draws to a close with Delphine’s third major challenge to understand and respond to adult speech. Delphine and her sisters followed their mother’s lead in claiming not to be her children; they then proved themselves to be exactly that by reading and riffing on her poetry at the rally; finally, Delphine will have a serious conversation with her mother about why she left them. If Elijah of Buxton has to lie to bring change, Delphine has to tell the truth about how hurt she is. She must talk back to her mother. Thus, when her mother criticizes her, Delphine replies, “I’m only eleven years old, and I do everything. I have to because you’re not there to do it. I’m only eleven years old, but I do the best I can. I don’t just up and leave” (206). In response, Cecile narrates her life, from the death of her own mother when she herself was eleven, to being homeless at sixteen, to the birth of her three children, and her sense that she had to leave. Delphine gains some understanding of her mother’s life, but also of her own anger: “all I could think about was my own self. What I lost. What I missed … I was still mad. Maybe I’d been mad all along but didn’t have time to just be it” (209). Delphine must acknowledge her anger before she can form a stronger bond with her mother.

86  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify Delphine also realizes that there are elements of adult speech that are not yet comprehensible. She responds to her mother’s revelations by acknowledging that her mother is sharing with her “more than I could remember, understand, picture” (One Crazy Summer 209). Delphine sees that her mother has given her information to be pondered in the future: “She told me everything I wanted to know and too much. It was too much. I’d have to take it out one piece at a time to look at it” (210). It is as if she has been handed a treasure box that she must carefully go through. Cecile tells her that she will not understand until she is an adult. Elsewhere she also tells Delphine that she is not entitled to know everything about her parents. In P.S. Be Eleven, Cecile’s spoken words are replaced by her letters to Delphine, but the tone and message are consistent: “My feelings about your father are mine. They are not feelings that can be understood by a young girl. They are my feelings. Mine … Have your own things … P.S. Be eleven” (46). Cecile continues to instruct Delphine to “be eleven” even after she turns twelve. “Be eleven” stands for eschewing adult roles, and particularly adult female roles, and it is a phrase that Delphine will wrestle with: “I was eleven. How could you become what you already were?” (P.S. Be Eleven 59). In the last book of the trilogy, Cecile tells Delphine not to worry about her as she walks into the night: “You’re twelve, Delphine. I’m grown” (Gone Crazy in Alabama 265). These exchanges demonstrate that unlike Elijah, who should emulate his parents in certain ways, Delphine, though she should treat her sisters kindly, needs to take less responsibility for them. Delphine and Elijah’s maturation includes, paradoxically, understanding that they do not completely understand adult speech. Delphine’s sense at certain moments that she has been told “too much” finds a corollary in Elijah’s partial interpretation of Chloe’s words. His ability to understand adult speech and to respond in kind constitutes a leap in development; nevertheless, there are further manifestations of adult speech in this section that are not fully explained, perhaps because they depict a world of adult choices so horrific that they cannot be stated fully. Elijah has turned over the Preacher’s gun to Chloe, the only enchained person whose arms are not bound. She proclaims as “perfect” that the revolver can shoot six bullets (316). Elijah realizes that there are six enslaved people in the stable and wonders if instead of killing her capturers, she “was gonna use the gun to shoot …? I couldn’t even think ’bout that” (317; ellipsis in original). Chloe does not say what makes the gun perfect, and Elijah does not ask her. Later, when Chloe turns the baby over to Elijah, she tells her infant daughter that she had sworn she would not return to slavery: “You know I never would’ve done nothing to hurt you ’less it would spare you a whole life of hurt, don’t you?” (335). Elijah does not interpret this speech. It is up to the experienced reader, then, to conclude that Chloe would have killed

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  87 herself and the others to foil what she saw as a fate worse than death: going back to plantation slavery. The scene has an eerie connection to the overheard discussion mentioned earlier when Elijah’s grandmother urges her daughter not to return. The adult reader may also connect the scene to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which a mother kills her young daughter to preclude her return to captivity. Both texts, therefore, are silent on certain subjects, and readers must decipher those silences. They may be indicated by ellipses or indications of careful speech. In One Crazy Summer, elements of Cecile’s story are veiled, and as is the case with Elijah of Buxton, these elements are often connected to sexuality or sexual violence. Cecile tells Delphine of the aunt who made her move out because “it wasn’t good for a big gal like me to be in her house, seeing she had a husband” (207) and of the difficulty of being “a teenage girl, no matter how big and tall she is” on the streets (208). Cecile’s rescue from the streets by Delphine’s father and uncle hints at sex as barter: “ ‘Louis never bothered me. Didn’t ask me to do much but cook. Sweep. Wash his clothes.’ She paused. ‘I had you the next year. Six years from where you are now’ ” (208). In that pause the adult reader infers that sex was part of a relationship entered into out of necessity and that Cecile wants a more fulfilling life for her daughter. Delphine and Elijah must deal with the world of adult language while holding onto elements of childhood. Significantly, Elijah is not transformed into a stoic young man. He is as emotional as ever, a characteristic that Chloe connects with his tangibility, his humanity: “Don’t seem like a haint or a dream would be fainting and crying much as you do” (336). What matters is that Elijah can cry, speak, and act. On his journey back to Buxton, Elijah performs the role of mother and father for baby Hope and shows himself to be both capable and caring. Elijah empties his tote sack of its weapons, though prudently he places two of the stones in his pocket. He then carefully places the baby in the sack and ties it and her to his back, as the women in Buxton would do. When he can see Canada, he speaks to Hope in the ritualistic words that his father uses to welcome all the formerly enslaved to Buxton: “Today, you’re truly free, and you choosed the most beautifullest, most perfectest day for doing it” (341). When he lifts baby Hope over his head and proclaims his father’s words of welcome, she responds by smiling and spitting up water on Elijah. This baptism signals Elijah’s coming of age and mirrors his own experience with Frederick Douglass. But now Elijah has lived up to his status as the first freeborn child of Buxton, and he knows he will be famous for rescuing Hope. While Elijah performs adulthood in this ritual, Delphine has been performing adulthood all along, hiding her fear and anger from her sisters. What she needs to do is let go. One Crazy Summer opens with Delphine

88  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify reflecting that there was “no need to let anyone know how frightened I was” (1). While Elijah gives up the childish game of slavers and abolitionists, Delphine abdicates responsibility and embraces joy when she rides in a friend’s go-​kart. Though frightened, she allows herself to be pushed in the cart by her friend and sisters, and then opens herself the pure thrill of the ride. She indicates her pleasure with sound beyond speech: “I screamed. So loud I startled myself. I had never heard myself scream … Screamed and hiccupped and laughed like my sisters” (190–​91). To be like her sisters is to be able to lose herself in play. Both Elijah and Delphine gain expertise at using language in the crucible of racist experiences. Elijah enters history when he walks into the stable, which is a haunting symbol of plantation slave quarters and the cargo holds of the Middle Passage. Elijah takes the reader with him to this world. If historical fiction generally presents a kind of time travel, this movement in the book magnifies this sense. Although the settlement of Buxton and American slavery coexist, for Elijah and for the reader slavery seems like something in the past, something that entrapped older generations, something remote from the self, a notion that Elijah is quickly disabused of as he realizes that the people in the stable differ from him only in their situation. And Elijah represents the future to the enslaved people in the stable—​not Chloe’s future, but the future of her descendants. Chloe remarks that Elijah’s speech—​ “the ed-​ u-​ cated way” he talks—​ makes him sound as knowledgeable as any child of a plantation owner (312). Together, Chloe and Elijah fabricate the story that Chloe’s baby daughter looks like Elijah’s (fictional) sister. Chloe’s support of Elijah’s story allows Elijah “to lie some more, to keep trying to talk this secret language” (332). Delphine begins already skilled at fabricating stories for her sisters. But dealing with adults is trickier. Her immersion in the Black Panthers’ summer program gives her a vocabulary and bearing that allow her to stand up for herself and her sisters, both with her family and with strangers. In P.S. Be Eleven, as she and her sisters beg for Jackson Five tickets, she muses, “If we learned anything from our summer with the Black Panthers, we learned to be clear about what we wanted, and to be willing to do what was necessary to get it” (76). In One Crazy Summer, Delphine uses her “calm, steady voice” to request that Cecile—​over thirty and therefore “the Establishment” (117)—​provide a television set. In Gone Crazy in Alabama, Delphine refuses to starch and iron the sheets, though she utters her refusal tentatively (54). More importantly, Delphine’s lessons at the summer program teach her to recognize and respond to racism. Thus, she can respond to the racist store clerk “like I was at the Center, repeating after Sister Mukumbu or Sister Pat: ‘We are citizens and we demand respect’ ” (One Crazy Summer 164). These lessons also lead to a change in the language of identity, so that in P.S. Be Eleven, which picks up right where

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  89 One Crazy Summer ends, Vonetta reponds to “Stop those Negro girls!” with “We’re black girls!” (4), and in Gone Crazy in Alabama, Delphine states that they went to Oakland to “be strong black girls” (11). They have put aside the term “colored,” just as Fern no longer needs her white doll. They have redefined themselves. Strategic Storytelling

The characters in these African American coming-​of-​age stories learn to tell their own truths, but they also learn to strategically lie, and this type of lying is connected to storytelling. Rather than following an adult morality that insists on children telling the truth, these texts demonstrate that lying is necessary. Kerry Mallan writes at length on the subject of prevaricating in children’s literature. Her Secrets, Lies and Children’s Fiction discusses “secrets, lies and deception as key survival strategies” (1), but does not directly address race. Her assertion that “in children’s fiction, lying may be justified as a survival strategy when a character is faced with extreme circumstances of life or death, but telling the truth will always be valorized as the moral, and therefore, superior course of action” (42) does not hold true for the texts I analyze here. In Gone Crazy in Alabama, Fern, the youngest Gaither sister and a budding poet, writes, “What is a word for a lie? /​A story” (59). The books under discussion all feature signifying moments that blur the distinction between lying and storytelling. Elijah signifies to save Hope from slavery. Delphine “spins straw” to placate her sisters. Brown Girl Dreaming, for all its focus on Jackie’s development as a writer, also considers the importance of signifying and the power that can accrue to the signifier. Jackie becomes adept at telling tales to protect herself, sometimes describing this as lying; for example, she explains her father’s absence by saying he died in an accident and her uncle’s imprisonment by saying he moved away (170, 266). These stories find their written component in the tales Jackie fabricates about her summer vacations—​ “each autumn, I write a story” (291). She learns that stories bring her power. The power to captivate her siblings by relaying overheard adult stories, filling in the gaps with her own imagination (99). The power to comfort her ailing grandfather with stories, as he once comforted her (134). Her mother and uncle take opposing views on Jackie’s storytelling: “Keep making up stories, my uncle says. /​You’re lying, my mother says” (176). For Jackie, “Maybe the truth is somewhere in between” (176). In Brown Girl Dreaming, Jackie Woodson associates storytelling with speech, and claims that “It’s easier to make up stories/​than it is to write them down” (217). The spoken tale she describes in terms of abundance. “When I speak,” she writes, “the words come pouring out of me” (217). These words form themselves into a story that “wakes up and walks all

90  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify over the room. Sits in a chair, /​crosses one leg over the other, says, /​Let me introduce myself ” (217). While uttering stories aloud is connected with life-​imbuing power, writing leads to second-​guessing about the mechanics of language: How do I Spell introduce? Trying again and again until there is nothing but pink bits of eraser and a hole now where a story should be (217) Rather than the tale that introduces itself, here we have hard labor and self-​doubt. Not only does the oral come more easily than the written, it is also described as its origin, complement, and finish. The stories and poems that are read aloud to her motivate Jackie to be a writer. In one significant example, she listens to her teacher read Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant.” Overcome by the story’s poignancy, Jackie borrows the book from the library, reads and rereads it, and then recites from memory the entire tale to her classmates (246–​47). The story has become part of her, and Jacqueline Woodson now understands what she could not articulate then: “How can I explain to anyone that stories/​are like air to me, /​I breathe them in and let them out /​over and over again” (247). This Künstlerroman draws to a close when Jackie’s fifth-​grade teacher proclaims: “You’re a writer” (311). But Jackie’s poem is not just a piece of writing. Jackie reads her poem of racial empowerment out loud to her classmates: “Black brothers, Black sisters, all of them were great” (312). In some cases, protagonists learn how to participate in, recite, and ultimately manipulate folktales.1 Before turning to Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Sugar, in which folktales are particularly important to the plot, I would point out that the texts mentioned in this chapter allude to tales of flying Black people, as do so many works of African American literature. The basic elements of the tale, as found in renditions such as Virginia Hamilton’s “The People Could Fly,” are as follows. An enslaved young woman and her baby are whipped by the plantation enforcer. They fall to the earth. An older Black man says the African words that cause them to rise up into the air and fly away. This act is repeated until all the enslaved who can fly away depart. Those who cannot fly remain as witnesses and tell the story to their descendants. This tale “asserts the value of orality,” as Oliva Smith Storey notes (Storey). Storey points to the use of magic speech, describing it as language that “functions like technology” (Storey). These magic words constitute a speech act, since the incantation brings into being the reality

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  91 it ostensibly describes. The “value of orality” also concludes the tale, since those who cannot leave tell the story of those who did. The most powerful African American folktale combines, as Brigette Fielder states, “folk and fantasy genres” and “realist Black history with the incredible” (427). The flight can be read symbolically as escape via the Underground Railroad, return to Africa, transcendence through stories, or, most grimly, death. The books here allude to the story to different degrees. The folktale characters in “The People Could Fly” are compared to birds through similes, so that Sarah “rose just as free as a bird” and she flies “like an eagle” (169). The characters also become birds: “They flew in a flock that was black against the heavenly blue. Black crows or black shadows” (169, 171). Crows, as Fielder writes, are central in both racist and recuperative depictions of Black people because of their presumed trickster nature (416). In Gone Crazy in Alabama, as mentioned earlier, Delphine’s great-​grandmother and great-​grandaunt argue over whether their father turned into a crow to escape from jail (117). While Ruth Trotter sees this as a sign of her father’s ability to move “between worlds,” Ma Charles views such shape shifting as “demonic” (117). In Sugar, the protagonist recollects how “Mister Beale told a tale of slaves who decided to become blackbirds and fly back to Africa” (145). According to Olivia Smith Storey, the image of flying Africans goes beyond the folktale because of “its range, its fluidity, and its exceptional vitality” (Storey). “Is it,” she asks, “a legend, a narrative, a memory, an image, or a trope …?” (Storey). She considers it a trope and it appears as such in the other texts from this chapter. As Fielder’s essay shows, flying and birds are associated with freedom, a connection that is longstanding in African American literature. In One Crazy Summer, Delphine prevents herself from “flying off with the seagulls” (164). The protagonist of Sugar sits out on a tree branch and wishes she could fly (145). Sugar spends her free time looking for eagles’ nests and when she spots an eagle far above she rejoices that it is “Flying free” (94). In Elijah of Buxton, Mrs. Holton hires Elijah to write a suitable memorial for her husband, who was whipped to death. Elijah’s words are carved into wood and accompanied by natural designs including a bird. Elijah writes that John Holton “still lives. The body is not meant to endure. There’s something inside so strong it flies forever” (221). John Holton’s spirit has found its freedom in death. Just as these texts employ flying birds to signal freedom, they use caged birds or those with broken wings to indicate imprisonment. Paul Dunbar’s 1899 poem “Sympathy” provides the most famous examples. The poem moves from “I know what the caged bird feels,” to “I know why the caged bird beats his wing,” to “I know why the caged bird sings,” suggesting captivity, rage, and finally, emerging from these states, the production of art, the poem itself (ll. 1, 8, 15). When Sugar sees the Chinese workers in chains, she remembers her

92  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify father also in chains, and reflects, “Chains are awful. Like eagles with broken wings” (101). Jacqueline Woodson begins Brown Girl Dreaming with an epigraph by Langston Hughes counselling readers to hold onto their dreams, “For if dreams die /​Life is a broken-​winged bird /​That cannot fly” (ll. 3–​5). Brown Girl Dreaming is a book where dreams do not die and where storytelling provides wings. In Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Sugar, folktales provide a link to the past, a way of thinking about the present, and a bridge to the future. The protagonist’s maturation is marked by her ability to use folktales in ways that influence others. Rhodes sets her novel on a Louisiana plantation following the Civil War, where life continues to be brutal for African American workers. No longer slaves, they are also not really free. Ten-​year-​old Sugar has been living with the Beales since her mother died two years before. Mister Beale, Sugar’s de facto adoptive father, tells her stories of Br’er Rabbit and Hyena even though his wife “thinks they’re useless” (10). The entire book refutes her judgment. Mister Beale remembers his African childhood, before he was captured and enslaved, and the stories he recites of Br’er Rabbit and Hyena provide a link to his own past and to that of African Americans more generally. As Mr. Beale states to a gathering crowd, “Now, you all know this here tale came from Africa … In Africa, there’re hyenas. Bigger than a fox, wilder than any rabid dog. My father told me this story. Now I’m telling you” (50). As he tells the story of Br’er Rabbit, Hyena, and the Tar Baby, his words are supplemented by those of the listener-​participants: “He set a trap,” shouts Lizzie. “That’s right. A trap for proud Rabbit!” “Rabbit walked by Tar Baby,” says Missus Thornton. “And said ‘hello,’ ” calls Reverend. “But Tar Baby didn’t answer back,” I shout. (51) When Mr. Beale arrives at the part of the story where Rabbit tricks Hyena by asking him not to throw him into the briar patch, Sugar begs to continue the story (52). At the end, the listeners chant: “Trickster Rabbit outsmarted the powerful but dumb Hyena” (53). The rabbit, whose wits defeat larger and fiercer creatures, is the signature animal of the enslaved and downtrodden. Folktales help Sugar define herself and form alliances. Linked to Br’er Rabbit by her own words and those of other characters, Sugar adopts Br’er Rabbit’s strategies to be with her friend, the white son of the plantation owner (50, 70, 173). Further, she learns how folktales can bridge cultures and motivate people. The plantation owner has hired Chinese men to work alongside the established African American laborers. Sugar

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  93 fearlessly reaches out to the newcomers, discovers that they too have folktales, and draws connections between Chinese and African American stories. She notes that when Master Liu explains the Chinese calendar, “You told me a story … About animals. Like Mister Beale. Like Br’er Rabbit and Hyena” (127). Later, as she adds to Master Liu’s recitation of how animals became connected with years on the Chinese calendar, she states, “Rabbit’s smart like Br’er Rabbit” (157). Sugar and the reader understand that the similarities found in these oral tales stands for larger connections, such as a pride in traditions, roots in faraway places, and their current suffering on the plantation. Disparities emerge as well. The Black Reverend asks, “You came across the sea? Like Africans?” (140). The Chinese men who respond note that this is the case but with a crucial difference, that although “some did die … we choose to come. Not captured” (140). Sugar’s ability to connect across cultures means that the African Americans are not outdone by the new Chinese workers and thus punished by the overseer. As they work together planting sugarcane, Sugar sees that the Chinese men are moving much faster than the older African Americans. She creates a song, the other African American workers join in, and the Chinese workers understand that they should slow their pace. Sugar reflects on this through a folktale lens: “Like Br’er Rabbit, grown folks are tricking Mister Wills and Overseer Tom. They’re not being lazy, just making sure everyone—​young and old, Chinese and African—​work the same amount” (132). She understands that Br’er Rabbit is a trickster out of necessity. Folktales help bridge the cultural gap between the African American families and the Chinese men. Sugar and Beau become each other’s first American and Chinese friend respectively. Unlike One Crazy Summer, where Delphine finds San Francisco’s Chinatown exotic, in Sugar the attitudes of the Black workers change as they get to know these men from Sichuan. Othering and fear give way to understanding, alliances, friendship, and even kinship. Sugar herself plays a central role in these transitions. Though Mister Beale says that “folks get along best with folks like them” (118), Sugar crosses the yard to speak with the newcomers. The Black and Chinese workers will exchange names, stories, customs, and food. They celebrate Chinese New Year together and honor Sugar’s mother at her grave. When the plantation overseer tries to whip Sugar, Beau throws himself between Sugar and the whip. He saves Sugar and Billy from the same man’s anger. He teaches the two children how to fly a Chinese kite that is “prettier than a flock of birds” (207). Eventually, the two groups—​Chinese and African American—​become so integrated that Sugar refers to the totality as “my River Road family” (224). When Sugar wishes she had a brother, Beau says, “Why not me?” (224). He calls her “Sister Sugar,” and she replies, “Brother Beau” (225). Most importantly,

94  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify Beau encourages her dreams; he gives her a map and tells her she can go “Anywhere” (227). From the first exchange of tales, Sugar understands that the world is big but people are connected by and through stories. Sugar wields her knowledge of folktales to encourage reflection, first with Billy, the son of the plantation owner, and later with her adoptive family. She describes the story of Br’er Rabbit and Hyena as a gift: “Billy Wills, I’m going to give you something you don’t have. A Br’er Rabbit tale” (183). She begins the story by saying that “all the animals need to help with the gardens,” and that “much as I love Br’er Rabbit, he’s lazy” (183). Billy, recovering from a brain fever, says without much thought, “Like me … I’ve been lazy all week” (183). Throughout the tale, Sugar emphasizes the importance of working together: “But the rule was: Everyone works, else you don’t eat!” (184). Later, Billy decides, to the dismay of his parents, to cut sugar cane with the African American and Chinese workers. Clearly Sugar’s tale has sunk in, and the consequences allow Sugar to define and articulate her own position. Billy’s mother watches him in the field. When he injures himself, she shouts, “This work isn’t meant for a child” (197). She compensates by bringing additional food and beverages to all the workers. Sugar takes the opportunity to “look straight into Missus Wills’ bright blue eyes and say, ‘I’m a child, too’ ” (199). Her words, which leave everyone speechless, reveal the usually unspoken: that childhood in this place and time is a special category reserved for white children, particularly white wealthy boys. Here Sugar claims it for herself. Sugar also manipulates folktales to steer her family’s future. The Wills family sells the plantation and leaves for New Orleans. The workers have to decide whether to stay or leave. Sugar’s Chinese friends are departing for Hawaii. Sugar wants to move but the Beales want to stay. Somehow, Sugar has to give them the courage to leave. She knows her own heart: “I want more. I want to do something else, see the world, and be free of sugar” (267). First she says, “We’re going north” (267). But when this idea is rejected, she uses folktale characters to convince them: “You’re both acting like Hyena … Hyena wouldn’t leave if his village caught fire. But Br’er Rabbit would tell everybody, ‘Go.’ Turtle, Tiger, and all the animals would leave. Find another home” (268). The Beales retort with a proverb that they complete together: “ ‘The bad I know …’ ‘… is better than what I don’t’ ” (269). Sugar then shows them the map and the river route to St. Louis, reminds them of how hard they work to cut sugarcane, and holds out the possibility of finding their children. The very persistence that made her difficult for the Beales to handle now rescues them: “You know I won’t stop pestering you until you say yes” (270). And they do. Folktales cement Sugar’s relationship with her de facto adoptive family. Throughout the book, Sugar evaluates her relationship with the Beales. When Mister Beale tells her to stay away from the Chinese men, Sugar

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  95 responds “You’re not my pa” (118), denying his authority over her. She reflects at another moment: “Sometimes I think the Beales think they’re my grandparents. But they’re not blood kin” (169). Finally she realizes that families can be chosen. Her family can include Beau as well as the Beales (265). Sugar accompanies her persuasive story telling with a meal for the Beales. Missus Beale eats and states, “You’re a good cook … Like my daughter” (267). Sugar had comforted her dying mother by telling her folktales, and one day she will use them to entertain Mister Beale when his vision goes (47). This anticipated moment in Sugar finds its complement in Brown Girl Dreaming when Jackie responds to her ailing grandfather’s plea to “Tell me a story” (134). The storytelling tradition has been passed on. Naming

No aspect of speech is more important than the uttering of one’s own name. As Ralph Ellison states, “it is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world. Our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own” (147). Doing so—​claiming one’s name—​has often been central to the Bildungsroman tradition. As Delphine states in One Crazy Summer, “A name is important … Your name is how people know you. The very mention of your name makes a picture spring to mind” (80). All the texts here confirm that and take their place in the complicated history of African American naming practices. While an elaboration of these practices is beyond the scope of this chapter, the texts here illuminate them and cover the major movements in African American naming. According to John C. Inscoe in his study of slavery and naming in the Carolinas, enslaved people bore a mixture of names: West African names brought with them across the Middle Passage, as well as European names, often Biblical or classical, originally foisted on them by slave owners, but then passed down by enslaved people themselves. In Elijah of Buxton, Elijah is told both the African and the American name of the baby he rescues. She is called “Toomaheenee” by her African father, and “Hope” by her mother. Her father’s name is Kenyan—​“Kamau”—​and her mother’s name the classically derived “Chloe.” Elijah speaks all these names aloud so he can remember them, an act that echoes Christopher Paul Curtis’ dedication of the book to the formerly enslaved settlers of Buxton, whose names are all given, and to the settlement’s founder. This type of memorializing continues in protest marches for Black Lives Matter and particularly in the expression and hashtag “Say Their Names.” These texts transcend concerns with naming as signifying in its more common sense of “meaning,” to focus on the additional power in the utterance of names. In Elijah of Buxton and the Gaither Sisters Trilogy,

96  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify the main characters want to distinguish their names from those of other people. Elijah utters his name in both heterotopias in response to others’ queries. During his visit to the Carnival of Oddities, Elijah states “I’m Elijah” (122). As mentioned earlier, in the course of his own tall tale, Sammy asserts that the ferocious Elijah in Chatham will be peeved that another boy, an enslaved boy at that, bears his name. Elijah responds, “I waren’t never a slave. I was freeborn” (123). “I was freeborn” is reflected in Elijah’s surname “Freeman,” a name chosen by some African Americans after the Civil War (Inscoe 552). “Freeman” also implies what Elijah needs to achieve: a maturity derived from a fuller understanding of what it means to be free, and by implication, what it means to be enslaved. This maturity comes, paradoxically and symbolically, in the stable. As Elijah prepares to leave, carrying Chloe’s baby, she asks him his name. Elijah tells her, but then reflects on the earlier moment at the fair, and continues: “Then, so if she did bust out and got to Canada, she wouldn’t make the mistake of asking for the other Elijah, the white one up in Chatham, I told her, ‘I’m Elijah, Elijah of Buxton, ma’am’ ” (337). This last moniker is how Chloe then refers to him: “You done lift something heavier than any wagon of stones off my heart, Elijah of Buxton. Thank you” (337). He never was Elijah from Chatham or Little Ahbo, and he is no longer the baby Elijah who threw up on Frederick Douglass. Elijah might share his first name with someone else, but there is only one Elijah of Buxton, and he can help Chloe because he was born there. One Crazy Summer engages the subject of African American naming practices more directly, participating in what Margaret G. Lee lays out as the flourishing of creativity that sprang from Black Nationalism in the 1960s (126). In particular, Lee notes the attention paid to the individuality and sound of names: “the African practice of giving the most unique, unusual, and elegant names possible, where sound is as important as meaning, is an integral part of the African American oral tradition” (126). Delphine describes Vonetta’s name as her mother’s tribute to the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. Delphine had thought of her own name as unique, as her mother’s poetic creation. But when some Flipper-​watching classmates tease her and ask her to “speak in dolphin,” she discovers her name and its etymology—​it can mean “dolphin”—​in the “Given Names” section of the dictionary and cries (82). Even after she learns that her mother had not “reached into her poetic soul” and conjured this name, Delphine is proud that she shares it with no one else in her school; she still feels that “there was only one Delphine” (82). Elijah grows into his name; Delphine herself feels that her name is something to grow into. “Delphine,” she thinks, “had a grown sound like it was waiting for me to slide into it, like a grown woman slides into a mink coat and clips on ruby earrings” (82).

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  97 More contested in One Crazy Summer are the names of Delphine’s youngest sister and her mother. The question that hangs over the book is whether Delphine’s mother, Cecile, left her family because she was not permitted to name her third child. Cecile reveals that she wanted to call Fern “Afua,” a Ghanaian name that means “born on a Friday,” and although Cecile does not provide the name’s meaning she does say that Fern was born on that day. In choosing “Afua” Cecile was returning to a tradition common in West Africa and taken to the United States with enslaved peoples; that of “day names,” naming children after the weekday on which they were born (Lee 124–​25; Inscoe 536). Delphine’s father had rejected this name, declaiming “no more of those made-​up, different names” (81). What is not revealed until the final book of the trilogy is that “Fern” is Big Ma’s middle name. Delphine’s father was insisting on naming the baby after his mother, rejecting Cecile’s chosen name in favor of one reflecting his lineage. For Cecile, this may have been the final straw, the final erasure of herself. Brown Girl Dreaming also presents parents who quarrel over their child’s name. Jacqueline Woodson’s father wants “Jack” for his daughter, after himself. Together, he and her mother agree on “Jackie,” and then her mother gives the name a further feminine inflection: Jacqueline (6–​7). As with the name “Delphine,” Jacqueline is a French name and carries a French elegance in its “ine” ending. In The Gaither Sisters Trilogy, acts of naming constitute adult speech that Delphine does not fully understand. What Cecile could not do with her baby, she does with herself. She names herself. In doing so, she shows Delphine that adults can make significant choices about their lives, that they are not compelled to take what was given to them. In P.S. Be Eleven, Delphine’s exchange teacher informs the class that his country had a revolution and changed its name from Northern Rhodesia to Zambia. Delphine’s mother has chosen the name “Nzila” in her own act of decolonization, an act that Delphine dislikes, at least at first: “She was Cecile Johnson to me, and I didn’t appreciate her so-​called new self or her new name” (One Crazy Summer 80). In doing so, Cecile joined other African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s who changed their names to embrace the African component of their identity. Cecile tells Delphine that her new name is “a poet’s name,” “the path” in Yoruba, and that her poems reveal these true paths (One Crazy Summer 76). When Delphine’s teacher tells her the name means “born on the road,” on the way to the hospital, this discrepancy angers her, and she accuses her mother of lying (P.S. Be Eleven 105). Her mother explains in a letter that “words do more, mean more, than how they are defined … My name is growing up with me” (P.S. Be Eleven 108). Cecile’s words show Delphine that she will also be free to choose her own path. At the rally near the end of One Crazy Summer, the three sisters recite Cecile’s poem and refer to her as “our mother, Nzila, the

98  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify black poet” (196). Just as Cecile’s children must adjust to her poet name, Cecile must accept her third child’s name. For most of One Crazy Summer, Cecile refers to Fern as “Little Girl,” refusing to utter the name she did not choose. Only once Cecile has told her story to Delphine, and uttered the name she wanted for Fern, can she then proceed to use the name “Fern.” And in the third book of the trilogy, Fern will adopt “Afua” as her poet name, paying homage to her mother’s calling and choices. Jacqueline Woodson’s growth as a writer originates in her efforts to print her name. At age three she can only print the letter “J,” and that with her sister’s hand guiding hers (Brown Girl Dreaming 62). But she senses the power that comes from the infinite number of words that exist. When she writes her entire name on her own she knows that she “could write anything” (156). She describes the classroom moment when she is asked to write her name on the blackboard. Worried about the cursive “q” in Jacqueline, she writes “Jackie” instead, and when the teacher asks if that is what she wants to be called, she lies and says yes, instead of what she wants to utter: “No, my name is Jacqueline” (218). But when she makes her own book of poems about butterflies, she prints “Jacqueline Woodson” on the cover (252). Later, she develops a keen sense that her name and her being are the result of history and place: “I didn’t just wake up and know how to write my name” (298). She also learns that one’s name can be taken away, as in the case of her imprisoned uncle who has become the numbers on his uniform (271). In the book’s final two poems, “what i believe” and “each world,” Woodson presents her growth as a person and a writer as a synthesis of binaries, in which she is both “listener and writer /​Jackie and Jacqueline” (320). The later edition of Brown Girl Dreaming includes new poems, and ends with one that has the same name as the book’s title. Here the final words describe reciting a poem “inside a room where people will know my name” (349). In Sugar the protagonist is challenged to accept her unconventional name and to understand what others see in it. Sugar is torn at first because though her mother named her, she hates what her name denotes. Although “Everybody likes sugar” (3)—​the novel’s first line—​she herself despises it (3), feeling enslaved to its production. The reader might wonder why any parent would name a child after a substance connected to the commodification of human beings. But there are clues in the text about why Sugar’s mother named her so. In the days before she dies, Sugar’s mother tells her, “Do. See. Feel” (41). Right before she dies, she adds another word: “Survive” (163). Sugar’s mother thinks of the substance not as something sweet but as something challenging, encompassing the hidden Black history of the name: “Most folks think sugar is something in a tin cup or a china bowl. They don’t know sugar is hard … Months of planting, hoeing, harvesting. Bones aching, sweat stinging your eyes” (4). When

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  99 Sugar angers, she describes herself as “like sugar, ready to boil over” (172). When Sugar’s new friends from China ask her for her name, she wishes she “could make up a new name” and utters her name quietly (121). But transcribed into a Chinese character, her name “looks beautiful—​a tiny picture; a perfect sign” (122). To her Chinese friends the name “Sugar” is a “nice name for a nice girl” (122). Sugarcane brings these men to Louisiana and gives Sugar the sense of the world as a big place that she might one day explore. Once Sugar is free of the plantation and sailing north, she appreciates her name because it connects her to her mother. The ending of the novel with its voyage north occurs because Sugar is persistent; she is a balance of hard and sweet, and has grown into the full meaning of her name. Playing the Dozens and Call and Response

Although this chapter deals with signifying in its broadest sense, such well-​known categories as “playing the dozens” and “call and response” also occur in these texts, particularly in the Gaither Sisters Trilogy. P.S. Be Eleven portrays Delphine’s increased skill in the verbal battle that is “playing the dozens” or just “the dozens.” The dozens often take the form of signifying about “your mama,” which Delphine reveals caused her to lose a previous contest because she had no good reply to a classmate’s taunt that “You don’t have a mama” (P.S. Be Eleven 157). But her older self can respond by asserting the value of her mother’s countercultural stance: I [Delphine] said, “The subject is ‘What if a woman ran for president?’ Not ‘what if your pie-​baking mama ran for president.’ ” And before I knew it I had thrown down the glove like they did in the Three Musketeers. Instead of fencing, there was a war of the Dozens between Danny the K and me. So he said, “At least my mama can shake and bake. Your mama can’t bake a pie because your mama don’t exist. Your mama’s the invisible mom.” He couldn’t shut me up like he did last year. I said, “My mother don’t bake no pies. My mother writes poems about the revolution. My mama exists. Your mama’s invisible.” (P.S. Be Eleven 171) Delphine’s participation in the dozens lands her in detention. But the gender politics of her exchange are important. The contest occurs as she discusses the subject of a woman running for president. Though Delphine initially responds with incredulity, she uses the dozens to counter Danny

100  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify the K’s jocular response to the idea. In doing so, Delphine claims her mother and lauds her mother’s work. Delphine’s participation in the dozens, particularly at this time, transgresses gender norms, since it was typically a male activity. Writing in 1971, Claudia Mitchell-​Kernan states that “Verbal dueling, as a speech event, occurs, if not exclusively between males, almost so … women cannot be suitably competitive because other social norms require more circumspection in their verbal behavior” (328). In other words, codes of normative femininity stifle women’s speech. Though Delphine does not abide by these strictures, she is aware that the dozens fall outside of polite speech and thus cannot be discussed at the dinner table (183). There is a time and a place for certain types of speech. While the dozens consists of competitive speech between peers—​in the case of children, often on the playground—​“call and response” or “call-​ response” builds community. Smitherman defines this type of signifying as “spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker’s statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener” (104). In the Gaither Sisters Trilogy, call and response reflects the tight bond between Delphine and her sisters, with Delphine usually in the position of initiator and her sisters the responders. As Delphine says, “When my sisters and I speak, one right after the other, it’s like a song we sing, a game we play. We never need to pass signals. We just fire off rat-​a-​tat-​tat-​tat. Delphine. Vonetta. Fern” (One Crazy Summer 77). Thus, when Delphine tells her mother, “We have to call Pa. Let him know we arrived,” Vonetta and Fern follow with “Safe and sound” and “On the ground” (One Crazy Summer 33). Fern’s response in support of her sister often includes the word “surely”: “Surely don’t”; “Surely should have”; “Surely couldn’t” (One Crazy Summer 31, 27, 78). In P.S. Be Eleven the girls’ new stepmother notices this trait enough to ask about it, and the sisters respond in call-​and-​response fashion: “It’s just a thing Fern says.” “Because it’s Fern’s thing.” “Surely is.” (239) As Delphine explains to the reader in Gone Crazy in Alabama, We spoke almost like one person, one voice but each of us saying our own part … We’ve been laying our voices down, catting and scatting, and following variations of the same notes for so long we didn’t always know we were doing it. (5)

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  101 Along with this linguistic harmony, the verbal interaction of Smitherman’s definition, the younger sisters often eye Delphine for hints on how to respond—​ Smitherman’s nonverbal interaction. As mentioned above, this interaction signals Delphine’s position among her siblings. Delphine comments, “Vonetta and Fern looked at me for what to do next, and Cecile noticed this. There was no lip smile from Cecile, but her eyes found it funny that they always looked to me first” (One Crazy Summer 58). Delphine and her sisters constitute a unit, with Delphine as the leader, in part because she has been a substitute mother for them. Just as Delphine learns to stand up for herself, she also learns that her sisters need to develop their own ability to speak up. At the end of the trilogy, Vonetta musters the courage necessary to confront a classmate who has taken her watch. Delphine and Fern accompany Vonetta, but Vonetta tells Delphine to remain in the background. Delphine listens and understands. The reader assumes that just beyond the book’s ending Vonetta will reclaim her watch and prove that she can advocate for herself. Near the conclusion of Gone Crazy in Alabama, Cecile says to her youngest daughter, “Enough people in the world trying to silence us. Girl, you better speak up” (238). In the texts discussed here, speaking up—​and speaking sideways—​are necessary tools for survival in a racist world. Delphine reflects that at the People’s Center in Oakland she learns “the word for the opposite of power: Oppression. The power to do nothing but keep my mouth shut” (P.S. Be Eleven 13). She feels the power of expression at the protest rally where she joins with others to shout “FREE HUEY!” and “POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” (P.S. Be Eleven 13). Brown Girl Dreaming alludes to the work of the Black Panthers and their Oakland breakfast program. Jackie and her siblings watch on the television set as the children sing songs about how proud they are to be Black. We sing the song along with them stand on the bases of lampposts and scream, Say it loud: I’m Black and I’m proud. (Brown Girl Dreaming 304) All the texts discussed in this chapter end with a reinforcement of community and family. This emphasis is an essential marker of African American children’s literature since its inception, according to Rudine Sims Bishop in her survey of the same. If Elijah literally carries Hope, the other texts do so metaphorically. Elijah returns to Buxton with a baby, secure in the knowledge of that community’s love and his own abilities. The last book of the Gaither Sisters Trilogy finds the three sisters supporting each other, confident that the mother who does not live with them loves them. Cecile’s

102  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify last letter to Delphine makes this clear: “Even if she leaves without the child in her arms, she carries the child with her. All of her children. With her. In her” (Gone Crazy in Alabama 280). Cecile’s words apply to Chloe, who sends her infant daughter with Elijah, to Jacqueline’s mother when she temporarily moves north for work, and even to Sugar’s mother who has died. At the end of the novel, Sugar pictures her mother embracing her and feels free. Brown Girl Dreaming ends with a call to the imagination and to the wisdom that “even as the world explodes /​around you … you are loved” (319). The protagonists are now ready to encounter the world. They signify. Note 1 Recent works of African American children’s fiction that incorporate folk tales include Sharon M. Draper’s Stella by Starlight, which employs tall tales, storytelling, and allusions to flying African Americans, and Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky (2019), which follows the protagonist’s adventures to a fantasy world filled with African American folktale heroes as well as west African gods.

Works Cited Barker, Jani L. “Naïve Narrators and Double Narratives of Racially Motivated Violence in the Historical Fiction of Christopher Paul Curtis.” Children’s Literature, vol. 41, 2013, pp. 172–​203. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-​American Novel and Its Tradition. U of Massachusetts P, 1989. Bishop, Rudine Sims. Free within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Heinemann, 2007. Brennan, Jonathan, editor. When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-​ Native American Literature. U of Illinois P, 2003. Curtis, Christopher Paul. Elijah of Buxton. Scholastic Canada, 2007. Dickson-​Carr, Darryl. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. Columbia UP, 2005. Douglass, Frederick. “The Elgin Settlement at Buxton, Canada West.” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, New York), 25 Aug. 1854, p. 2. African American Newspapers, Series 1, 1827–​1998. Draper, Sharon M. Stella by Starlight. Atheneum Books, 2015. Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “Sympathy.” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dodd, Mead, 1922, p. 102. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenb​erg.org/​ cache/​epub/​18338/​pg18​338-​ima​ges.html#Page_​102. Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1897, pp. 194–​98. Ellison, Ralph. “Hidden Name and Complex Fate.” Shadow and Act, Random House, 1964, pp. 144–​66.

Race and Speech: Learning to Signify  103 Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet. Make Me a World, 2019. Fielder, Brigitte. “‘As the Crow Flies’: Black Children, Flying Africans, and Fantastic Futures in The Brownies’ Book.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, pp. 413–​36. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics, vol.16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–​27. JSTOR: https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. Accessed 29 June 2015. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, edited by Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, Duke UP, 2005, pp. 177–​99. —​—​—​. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-​American Literary Criticism. 25th-​Anniversary Edition. Oxford UP, 2014. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Maria Tatar, editors. The Annotated African American Folktales. Norton, 2018. Hamilton, Virginia. “The People Could Fly.” The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. Illustrated by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon, Knopf, 1993, pp. 166–​74. Hughes, Langston. “Dreams.” Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, Puffin, 2016. Inscoe, John C. “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 4, 1983, pp. 527–​54. Lee, Margaret G. “African American Naming Practices.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 5: Language, edited by Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson, U of North Carolina P, 2014, pp. 124–​27. Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-​ American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. 1977. 30th-​Anniversary ed., Oxford UP, 2007. Mallan, Kerry. Secrets, Lies and Children’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Martin, Michelle. Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–​2002. Taylor and Francis, 2004. Mbalia, Kwame. Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. Rick Riordan Presents, 2019. Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh UP, 2007. Mitchell-​ Kernan, Claudia. “Signifying.” Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-​American Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes, UP of Mississippi, 1990, pp. 310–​28. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987. Raynaud, Claudine. “Coming of Age in the African American Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, edited by Maryemma Graham, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 106–21. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship. Viking, 2008. Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Sugar. Scholastic, 2015. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. 1977. Wayne State UP, 1986.

104  Race and Speech: Learning to Signify Storey, Olivia Smith. “Flying Words: Contests of Orality and Literacy in the Trope of the Flying Africans.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 5, no. 3, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1353/​cch.2004.0090. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. U of Iowa P, 1998. —​—​—​. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. U of Iowa P, 1997. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Sterling, 2006. Wester, Maisha L. African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places. Macmillan, 2012. Williams-​Garcia, Rita. Gone Crazy in Alabama. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2015. —​—​—​. One Crazy Summer. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2010. —​—​—​. P.S. Be Eleven. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2013. Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. 2014. Puffin, 2016. Wyile, Adrea Schwenke. “Expanding the View of First-​ Person Narration.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, pp. 185–​202. —​—​—​. “The Value of Singularity in First–​and Restricted Third-​Person Engaging Narration.” Children’s Literature, vol. 31, 2003, pp. 116–​41.

4 Ecology and Speech Talking to the Animals

Children’s literature is full of talking animals, displacements for problems of articulation writ large. This chapter examines works featuring children who speak to and on behalf of animals and the natural world. In Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, the titular character is an angel in the form of a beast who accepts Pet as its name, an ironic gesture since the creature is most unpetlike—​fierce, wild, with claws and metal feathers. The world that Pet enters seems to be a utopian “good place” but actually demonstrates utopia’s other meaning of “no place.” There is no utopia, even in a world that has reckoned with its history. Though Pet emerges from a painting created by Bitter, Jam’s mother, Pet chooses to communicate primarily with fifteen-​year-​old Jam. Adults do not want to hear that their world is imperfect. Pet has access to Jam’s thoughts because, as it says, “We are connected, little girl” (109). The novel focuses on child abuse as the hidden sin. Its characters and plot, however, mirror those of other kinds of children’s fiction with social justice aims. Environmental children’s fiction addresses such pressing subjects as climate change, species extinction, and pollution. Those that use talking animals to help communicate an environmental message often place children as intermediaries between animals and adults, employing the same sense of connectedness that Pet mentions above. This chapter places Piers Torday’s The Last Wild Trilogy (2013–​15) in the tradition of the “talking animal story,” reads it as a reflection of crucial environmental issues, and considers it as a generic model alongside similar texts. Contrary to Pet’s utopian opening, The Last Wild Trilogy takes place in a dystopia ravaged by capitalist greed, climate change, and an ominous virus known as the “red eye” that has killed most animals. A prequel, published in 2021, presents the start of the plague. In the trilogy, the young protagonist, Kester, discovers that he understands animals’ thoughts and they understand his. He has, though, been unable to speak to any human since the death of his mother. His silence, like that of many child characters

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189312-4

106  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals with literary selective mutism, symbolizes the powerlessness of the child; in this case, against a world wrecked by adult fear, greed, and evil. Along with Torday’s trilogy I analyze other contemporary environmental texts in which children and animals talk to each other or in which children are positioned to speak for animals. These contemporary texts employ different genres to cover a range of overlapping environmental topics, including extinction, ecosystem disruption, climate change, resource depletion, and pollution. Greta Gaard suggests that an “interspecies feminist ecocritical perspective” includes these inquiries: “how does this text handle the problem of speaking for other species? Does the text depict other animal species as passive agents who need human saviors, or does the text depict the agency of other animal species?” (New Directions 9). In examining children’s literature in particular, Gaard asks whether “nature is an object to be saved by the heroic child actor?” (“Children’s” 330). Alongside Gaard’s questions, I pose this additional one: what does it mean to speak with as opposed to speaking for something? Although my focus is on environmental fiction where animals are granted the power of speech, I also refer to texts where animals communicate with children without using words. Recent texts where talking animals take center stage include, along with Torday’s trilogy, Lev Grossman’s The Silver Arrow (2020), Sam Thompson’s Wolfstongue (2021), Alan Cumyn’s North to Benjamin (2018), and David Robertson’s The Barren Grounds (2020). Texts where children and animals understand each other without talking include works with no animal speech, such as Katherine Applegate’s Willodeen (2021) and Hannah Gold’s The Last Bear (2021) and The Lost Whale (2022), as well as those where animals speak to each other but not to humans, such as Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee’s Maybe a Fox (2017) and Sara Pennypacker’s Pax (2016) and Pax: Journey Home (2021). I will briefly refer to Nicole Penfold’s Where the World Turns Wild (2020) and Between Sea and Sky (2021), two examples of dystopian environmental fiction where animals are important but not central. Aside from Penfold’s novels, the books I analyze are all animal fantasy tales with varying degrees of realism. The Silver Arrow, Wolfstongue, and The Barren Grounds feature protagonists who enter a secondary world or who experience a secondary world intruding on the primary one. Torday’s trilogy, Pax, and Pax: Journey Home are dystopian fiction. Willodeen is, as Nathaniel Rich describes it, an “eco fairy tale.” North to Benjamin, The Last Bear, The Lost Whale, and Maybe a Fox hew closely to the “real world” except for the relationship between the protagonist and a particular animal. The Last Wild, published in 2013, brings together animal speech, selective mutism, and environmental degradation. The book depicts a planet that “grew too hot, and cracked open in the sun” (5); polluted

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  107 oceans; the disappearance of most animals, insects, and plants; and a fatal disease that supposedly spreads from animals to humans and necessitates a Quarantine Zone. Needless to say, the book was prescient. The initial book in the series of the same name, The Last Wild is the first-​person narrative of Kester Jaynes who for the previous six years has been unable to talk and has been imprisoned in “Spectrum Hall for Challenging Children.” When the narrative begins, he is addressed by “vermin” and realizes he can communicate with animals by speaking to them in his mind. These supposedly contagion-​carrying creatures help Kester break out of the institution and take him to an unspoiled wilderness where he is met by a group of animals who constitute “the last wild”—​the last gathering of animals. The animals charge Kester with finding a cure for the “red eye,” believing he can intercede on their behalf because he has “the gift of the voice” (66). The first book follows Kester’s journey home to his veterinarian father. There Kester says his first word aloud in six years: “No.” In the second book, The Dark Wild, Kester unites the animals and learns to say “yes.” His speech returns in The Wild Beyond, which concludes with most people leaving for another planet. Kester, his friend Aida, and a small number of humans and animals remain on an earth that has passed through fire. The ending presents two fantasies of starting over but privileges staying on earth. At this point, Kester’s ability to speak to animals disappears. In Torday’s fictional world, animals have a collective wisdom, passed down through song and dream, of what will happen on earth; they foresee the world ending in a ball of flame because of human actions. Animals, as Claude Lévi-​Strauss writes, “are ‘good to think’ [with]” (89), and various philosophers have placed animals at the beginning of human language and meaning making. In the western tradition, animal stories go back to Aesop’s fables of the sixth century bce, in which animals are used to impart morals to humans, a process in which, as Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman note, “Animals simplify the narrative to a point that would be found flat or at least allegorical if the same tales were recounted about humans” (9). As Seth Lerer states, “No author has been so intimately and extensively associated with children’s literature as Aesop. His fables have been accepted as the core of childhood reading and instruction since the time of Plato” (35). Many critics, on considering the prominence of animals in children’s literature, have noted that Aesop’s tales were regarded as ideal for children by John Locke, making them a candidate for the beginning of children’s literature (see, for example, Colleen Glenney Boggs). In the eighteenth century, with the rise of children’s literature proper, storybook animals were enlisted to teach children how to behave kindly toward animals and to occupy their “God-​given” position above them. Scholars of children’s literature, and animal stories in particular, give prominence to Sarah Trimmer, who was influenced by Anna Barbauld,

108  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals and in particular Trimmer’s The Story of the Robins, originally published in 1786 as Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals. With frequent reminders of the place of animals below human beings, Trimmer “recommend[s]‌the practice of general benevolence” in dealings with animals (10). She indicates that children should not be misled on the subject of animal speech, writing that “before Henry and Charlotte began to read these Histories, they were taught to consider them, not as containing the real conversation of Birds, (for that is impossible we should ever understand) but as a series of Fables” (10; emphasis added). This curious formulation bears examination for stating both that the birds’ speech in The Story of the Robins is fabricated, but also for suggesting that the birds might well have their own language, though it is one that humans do not comprehend. Mrs. Benson, moral teacher and stand-​in for the author, addresses a motherless girl on the necessity of kindness to birds, which rests on their ability to communicate: Though they have not the gift of speech like us, all kinds of birds have particular notes which answer in some measure the purpose of words among them, by means of which they can call to their young ones, express their love for them, their fears for their safety, their anger towards those who would hurt them, and so forth . . . . (62) Here the text reinforces the distinction between humans and animals, but also suggests that the emotional similarity between birds and humans, expressed in birdsong, compels humans to treat birds with compassion. A summary of Trimmer’s position on animal language might be: children wish animals could speak, but they cannot, though birds approximate it in song; it would be helpful if someone could speak for animals, and indeed a moral act to imagine what animals would say if they could talk. In Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–​1914, Tess Cosslett lays out the defining elements of Trimmer’s texts, some of which persist in today’s environmental literature. The first is the text’s self-​ referential aspect. In The Story of the Robins, a character desires that animals “had somebody to speak for them” (144), which is exactly what Trimmer does in her book (Cosslett 42). In the books I examine, this self-​referential aspect takes place not in the narrative, where it would be unnecessary because animals do talk or communicate with humans, but in the peritext. There authors will often write about the importance of “listening” to the animals, when it is the authors themselves who construct talking animals and the child characters who do in fact listen. Second is the

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  109 literary tradition of animals who communicate with each other in English, but are only comprehensible to the narrator and the reader (Cosslett 43). The books I examine add child protagonists who can also understand animals; today’s writers are not concerned with fidelity to reality in the same way as Trimmer and her fellow eighteenth-​century authors (Cosslett 43). Voices more critical of Trimmer will note, as Catherine Elick does, that Trimmer’s didacticism “erodes the subject status of her robin family” (7), but we might rest on Margaret Blount’s formulation in her consideration of Trimmer from almost fifty years ago that “[p]‌erhaps the real moral is that animal nature is there for our use, after all, whether as an example to the young, or as something to eat” (47). In the contemporary books I examine, animals are used to raise environmental awareness and to encourage child readers to consider subjectivities other than human ones. Cosslett notes that Trimmer’s study of birdsong reveals that it is feeling that the animals share with us, and through sympathetic feeling we can interpret their language. Interestingly, animal language is seen by Mrs. Benson in terms of expression, rather than communication, an emphasis that persists up to Darwin and his book Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. (43) In fact, Trimmer anticipates Darwin’s analysis in The Descent of Man of birdsong as “the nearest analogy to language,” since birds of the same species use the same calls, calls that are learned in the nest, and the initial sounds of baby birds are like an infant’s lallation; in other words, both birds and humans learn language through a combination of instinct and education (Darwin 55). More broadly, Darwin examines the idea that language “has justly been considered as one of the chief distinctions between man and the lower animals” (53) but as with his discussion of “mental powers” more generally, he rests on the claim that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties” (35), even though humans have an articulate language distinctive by virtue of the “large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas” (54). Darwin’s ideas about birdsong are supported by contemporary researchers who note not only the similarity between the acquisition of songs and language in baby birds and baby humans, but also posit that human language itself arose from a synthesis of expressive language like that of birds and an informational system like that of primates (Williams College; Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Language, however, has long played a central role in constructing the human–​animal divide. As animal studies philosopher Matthew R. Calarco

110  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals puts it, “Of the various markers used to distinguish human beings from animals, language is perhaps the most enduring and ubiquitous” (Animal Studies 89). Contrary to Darwin’s position that differences between humans and other animals are matters of degree rather than kind, many thinkers promote human exceptionalism. Linguist Victoria Fromkin and her cowriters, for example, begin their textbook on language by stating that the “capacity for language, perhaps more than any other attribute, distinguishes humans from animals” (1). They argue that though animals have “communication system[s]‌ ,” these systems lack “creativity,” the infinite flexibility of human languages; “discreteness,” they cannot be separated into distinct sections that can be rearranged; and “displacement,” they do not refer to circumstances beyond the present (16–​19). On the question of whether animals can be taught to communicate with humans, here again Fromkin et al. claim that the three distinguishing aspects of human language are absent (19–​22). In sum, linguists follow Noam Chomsky’s view that language is “the human essence” (quoted in Fromkin 1). This perspective forms a major part of the western philosophical tradition from Aristotle to the present (Calarco, Thinking). Recent research on animals from prairie dogs to dolphins disputes this view. For example, Calarco summarizes the work of Con Slobodchikoff’s team, which concluded that prairie dogs can “invent new words, have their own regional dialects, and are able to communicate such fine-​grained details as the speed and size of approaching predators” (Animal Studies 91; see also Slobodchikoff et al.). In The Story of the Robins, the proper relationship between children and animals springs from moral teachings about the kindness owed to lesser creatures. In this text and at this time, children themselves are viewed as lesser creatures, though this would later be challenged by Romantic ideology. The industrial revolution brought not just the Anthropocene but the Romantic idea of children as closer to a natural world that the industrial revolution was destroying. As Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd note, “Wordsworth’s 1807 ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ is routinely cited as a baseline for this perspective on childhood” (6). Wordsworth’s ode establishes a simultaneously nostalgic and revolutionary view of childhood when the speaker proclaims that as a child, “meadow, grove, and stream, /​The earth, and every common sight,” appeared to him with “[t]‌he glory and the freshness of a dream” (ll. 1–​2; 5). What he saw in the past, however, he “now can see no more” (l. 9). The Edenic, unfallen relationship of the child to nature hovers over many works of children’s environmental literature past and present, as does the idea of an untarnished earth that once existed, and of the mournful adult who yearns for what used to be, despite other compensations. This intuitive connection between the child and nature adds another strand to that of didacticism,

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  111 and it is not surprising to find them twined together in canonical children’s literature. From the golden age of children’s literature on, talking animals in such books as Alice in Wonderland (1865), The Jungle Book (1894), The Wizard of Oz (1900), and Charlotte’s Web (1952) help children figure out who they are and, by implication, delineate who adults are. Animal–​Human Communication In considering animal speech in contemporary children’s literature, I distinguish between animal-​to-​animal speech, which frequently goes unremarked upon, and animal-​to-​human speech, often regarded as something extraordinary; however, there is considerable overlap in my discussion of these two forms. Catherine Elick states of the children’s books she analyzes, all published between 1865 and 1975, that “[t]‌ o ascribe language to animals, as all these novels do, is to grant them subject status at the start. When authors include animal utterances competing with human ones, a novel’s world becomes more equalitarian, its sense of truth more dialogic” (19). Perhaps, but such statements also reinforce an anthropocentric—​ human-​centered—​perspective: only if animals are depicted like humans should readers attempt to see the world from their perspective. Unlike Trimmer, contemporary writers who create talking animals do not preface their texts with statements about the fictionality of what they describe. In these books, typically there are no remarks about what Cosslett notes in Trimmer: that animals communicate with each other in English and across species. This ability is seen as unremarkable and often without an origin. My analysis denaturalizes what contemporary readers take for granted in animal fantasies—​namely, the depiction of animals speaking across species—​and analyzes what techniques authors employ to do this. In The Last Wild Trilogy, for example, animals share a common language that extends from insects to birds to pets. This language is spoken telepathically, which is indicated in the series by enclosing this speech in asterisks rather than quotation marks, and, in the first two volumes, also placing these words in italics. The animals have their own vocabulary for some things and they lack specific words for distinctions that are unimportant to them. Their unique diction includes compound words like “tall-​home” for tree, “fish-​road” for river, and “firestick” for gun (Last Wild 93, 161, 179). These word phrases resemble Anglo-​Saxon kenning. Torday’s method finds its height in the female blue whale who foretells the future in The Wild Beyond. Apparently, water creatures are not fully understandable to land creatures; however, the whale’s speech is difficult but intelligible to Kester and hence to the reader. The whale’s speech is regarded as so ancient as to be distinct, “an underwater animal tongue of her own … like a language from very long ago; half sung, half spoken, a strange poem” (Wild Beyond

112  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals 55). The whale’s speech is even more kenning filled than that of the other animals: “*Tossed in the great-​wet, I was near death-​dashed on stone-​ cliffs by sea-​surges. Under frost-​wastes, ice-​chains wrapped themselves around me*” (56). Employing this early medieval method of word formation suggests that the animals think and speak poetically, metaphorically, and analogically, in ways we might imagine are akin to preindustrial humanity. That the blue whale’s “heart-​song” (55) is the most metaphoric acknowledges the species’ long lifespan and status as the largest animal ever; and, in The Wild Beyond, acknowledges the singularity of this whale, the last one remaining. Animal language in other texts shares this sense of understanding across species, sometimes with distinctions between animal characters. In Grossman’s The Silver Arrow, the snake is singled-​out by its sounds. While all the other animals speak just as humans do, the snake has extra hissing sibilants as befits our onomatopoetic stereotype: “That’sssssssss too bad … It’ssssssss because I’m venomoussssss, I know” (93). The narrator accentuates the complication of replicating the snake’s sound by parenthetically addressing the implied reader: “I’m not going to keep typing all the extra s’s, so just keep in mind that the snake hisses a lot when he talks” (93). No other animal is distinguished in the same way. The snake therefore seems more “animal-​like” than the others. In Thompson’s Wolfstongue, fox and wolf are distinguished by their rhetorical competency, with the fox—​as befits its trickster status since Aesop—​able to use language as a way of mesmerizing and controlling other animals, including humans. Morgan of Robertson’s The Barren Grounds points out that she thought animals would speak differently from herself. On listening to Ochek, the fisher, Morgan reflects, “You talk exactly how people talk. Humans,” after suggesting that she expected to hear phrases like “many moons” instead of two weeks (98). To Morgan’s suggestion that Ochek should use words that sound like a caricature of dialogue from old westerns, Ochek responds, “That’s silly … Who would talk like that?” (98). The Barren Grounds distinguishes between highly anthropomorphized animals who speak and walk upright and may wear clothes—​the fisher, the bear, the squirrel, the turtle, the owl—​and others depicted more naturalistically that might become food and do not speak. The dogs in Cumyn’s North to Benjamin talk to each other, though most humans except the protagonist would just hear barks. Benjamin, the dog at the center of the story, and his caretaker Edgar, can also talk to and understand the predatory wolf. Books with animal-​to-​human communication but not speech may also depict language between animals as dialogue. Sara Pennypacker’s Pax and its sequel, Pax: Journey Home, have the following note on the copyright page: “Fox communication is a complex system of vocalization, gesture, scent, and expression. The ‘dialogue’ in italics in Pax’s chapters attempts

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  113 to translate their eloquent language.” The narrator is the translator of fox communication, which appears in italics rather than quotation marks. The foxes in the novels converse with each other, beginning with a vixen who tells the fox Pax that “This is my territory” (Pax 35). Occasionally, a fox will report that he has learned something from the crows. The wise old fox, for example, tells Pax that “The crows carry the news” (Pax 66). Initially, Pax does not understand what the crows are saying. Unlike his instant understanding of other foxes, Pax has to learn to decipher the calls of crows, a skill that he then teaches his own kit in Pax: Journey Home: “Listen … Crows travel quickly and far. They know everything that is happening. And they are generous—​they share the news … What do you hear?” (134–​35). This is Pennypacker’s attempt at verisimilitude. She states in an interview that her research on foxes taught her that foxes can understand crow communication as well as that of other species (“Left”). In Appelt and McGhee’s Maybe a Fox the fox family members also speak to each other “in the language of fox” (76). This language is like human language but more direct, and again, represented in italics without quotation marks. The fox parents, for example, tell Senna, a fox who is one of two “Kennens” in the book, an animal “linked to the spirits,” “Never” to go near the place where the roiling water disappears under the earth (66, 122). This command echoes that given to the book’s human protagonist, Jules, by her father: “Do not, under any circumstances, go near the Slip” (20). The breaking of this rule causes Sylvie, Jules’ sister, to plunge to her death at the beginning of the book, and leads to the birth of a fox, Senna, who is connected to Sylvie. Senna is also able to talk to a catamount, thus, another animal connected deeply to a human being, in “the language of Kennen” (141). Most of the texts discussed in this chapter do not provide an origin for animal speech. It simply exists. The exception is Thompson’s Wolfstongue, which is concerned most directly, as the title implies, with the derivation of animal speech and with its power and pitfalls. In this text, animal language arises from foxes imitating humans which begins when foxes find themselves trapped in human stories: the words of the human being had this curious power, that once they had been spoken they could not be undone. The fox found that he was cunning, just as the human said. He was no longer a creature without a name, free of meaning. (162) While the novel addresses how human stories transform animals, it suggests, beyond Reynard’s words here, that these stories change how humans regard and treat certain species. Reynard, the book’s sly

114  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals antagonist, tells Silas, “We taught the wolves to speak, but the words came from you in the first place” (61). The animals in the text speak the same language, but the fox uses it more persuasively, mesmerizing and controlling other animals. Reynard’s name refers to the craftiest trickster of medieval literature, who carried with him and intensified the attributes of Aesop’s fox. Wolfstongue’s Reynard himself states, “I know what they say about me … Crafty. Cunning. Tricky. Sly” (57). Wolfstongue is hence unlike many contemporary books with foxes, which give us a rehabilitated image of the fox, a shift that Lucy Jones attributes to the fox hero of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970).1 Wolfstongue depicts language as both a gift and a burden, making the wolves more than what they were before, but also distancing them from their true natures: “Until the foxes taught them the words for sadness and fear, they had not known what it was to be sad and afraid. But now they knew, and because of this they began to lose their strength” (35). Entering language is akin to the Edenic Fall. The story moves toward a disentanglement of the wolves from the trap of language. Wolfstongue is one of the few texts to present animal speech as a burden. English-​ language texts with talking animals conventionally have them speak in English. The exceptions are worth noting. Robertson’s The Barren Grounds is an Indigenous portal fantasy in which thirteen-​ year-​old Morgan and twelve-​year-​old Eli slip through Eli’s drawing to a wintry world where summer has been held captive. Robertson draws on and expands the traditional Cree tale of how the fisher, an animal called “ochek” in Cree, brings summer to a place of eternal winter and becomes the constellation known as Ochek (the Fisher constellation, also called the Big Dipper; see Buck). A diagram of this constellation indicates breaks in time within a chapter, suggesting its importance throughout the text. The talking animals of Robert’s novel speak Cree and English. Clearly Cree is the preferred language, for it is referred to as “the good words” (101) while English is “the other words” (138), and the ability to speak Cree is what separates the anthropomorphized animals from all others: “Creator gifted some of us beings with the good words, and left many without them. Those creatures have always provided for us, and we honor them for it” (128). The animals refer to themselves by their Cree names: Ochek (fisher), Arik (squirrel), Muskwa (bear). As Morgan points out, “So, every being on Askí [Earth] is literally named after what they are” (105), a point that Ochek disputes but does not contradict. The animals only speak “the other words,” peppered with Cree, because Morgan does not remember Cree, an important plot point in the novel. Morgan entered foster care at a young age and struggles with her identity, but in the secondary world she dreams of her mother speaking Cree to her. The text thus draws our attention to the forced assimilation of Native-​language speakers in residential schools

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  115 and the removal of Indigenous children from their families to be placed in foster care. Several talking animal texts go beyond a shared animal language to an animal culture. This shared culture may enable cross-​species alliances, which emerge in many children’s animal books. As Elick points out, “Sometimes animals suspend predation among themselves to unite against humanity as the common enemy, as they do in The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH” (20). The Barren Grounds features an animal culture that is based on Indigenous (Cree) human culture. When the animals hold a council, the bear begins with a smudging ceremony and the owl leads a prayer to the creator (138–​39). A prayer is also said before eating an animal (226). The animals uphold the oral tradition, passing down their stories from generation to generation (170). The Last Wild also presents animal language as only one aspect of a shared animal culture. This culture is transmitted in calls and dreams, and so deeply embedded in the natural world that “*Whenever an animal dies … the sky weeps tears*” (Last Wild 91). Calls allow animals to “summon one another in a time of need” and to express their “deepest feelings” (Last Wild 90). At one point the pigeons sing “a call of mourning” for all the bird species that no longer exist, beginning with “*O lapwing, kestrel, turtle dove, cuckoo, hawfinch …*” (Last Wild 177), an elegy corresponding with a contemporary reality—​the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ list of threatened birds. Dreams are animal stories that resemble prophecies. They are characterized as “sacred animal knowledge, for animals alone” and sound like biblical foretelling: “*Wildness, the dream said the son of the man who talked would lead us over earth and rock, through water and fires, to save a wild*” (Last Wild 91, 320). In Wolfstongue, dreams and stories, including some that are communal, follow from the acquisition of language (80). These books all feature cross-​species cooperation against threats posed by humans or another predatory animal. In many children’s books that feature talking animals, the ability of animals to speak to each other is not extraordinary. The ability of humans to understand them is. Only what Elick refers to as “exceptional humans” traditionally become part of the animal pack or pact (20). To communicate with animals, humans have to be receptive to the consciousness and speech of others. The pigeons of The Last Wild say to Kester, “*You can talk to us. Let your mind go free. Let us in, Kester. Let us hear your thoughts*” (Last Wild 29). After six years of inner and outer silence—​no talking, but also no inner speech—​words start to form in Kester’s mind, and he realizes he can speak to animals in his head. The stag, the leader of the animals, indicates that Kester has a special talent: “*You are a boy who can hear us and speak for us … The human has many ways of making himself understood … But we only have you … You have the gift of the

116  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals voice*” (Last Wild 66). Kester is positioned as unique. Though his father can also speak to animals, the animals do not turn to him for leadership. Kester is in some ways similar to Silas, the protagonist of Wolfstongue, because both have been mentioned in animal prophecies. Named by the fox after the dull-​witted wolf of medieval fable, Isengrim the wolf tells Silas his coming has been foretold: “We had a name for a certain human child … who would walk side by side with the wolves and would know our silence and speak for us. The child would be our voice” (80). In North to Benjamin, Edgar is not alarmed that he can speak to and understand the dog, since he had a feeling that there would be an “unusual connection” between them (51). In The Silver Arrow, Kate is, according to the fox, one of the few “humans who are worth talking to. No offense” (46), and at the end of the book, the fishing cat tells her that she is “special”: “You are strong and smart and good, and the world needs you” (224). In The Barren Grounds, understanding animal speech is not as extraordinary as entry into Misewa (Cree for “all that is”). Few humans have made the journey. Once in this land, however, Morgan and Eli become essential participants in the mission to return summer to Misewa. Their Indigenous heritage makes them suitable questers. In books where animals communicate through means other than speech, child protagonists are also viewed as special. Willodeen, in the book of the same title, is told, “You see the world differently. You care. That’s a gift” (72). Hannah Gold’s two novels both feature protagonists with unique abilities to bond with animals. In The Last Bear, eleven-​year-​ old April Woods invites birds to eat from her hands because, as she says, “I’ve just learned how to make animals feel safe with me” (14). April’s ability to connect with animals also links her with her dead mother who loved the outdoors, was “different” from others, and had, according to April’s father, “a rare affinity” with animals (28). In The Lost Whale, Rio Turner can hear the below-​human pitch of gray whales, a talent that the book’s sailor calls having “the ocean’s ear” (172). When he jumps into the water to rescue White Beak, his “heart slowed, in rhythm with hers, so part of him was no longer a boy but had become a whale” (287). Peter, who had rescued a motherless fox cub in Pax, also has moments of such deep empathy that he feels, on occasion, that he and the fox are one being, and thus he experiences the world the way his fox does (14). According to his father, he has “a way with animals, nearly magic” (Pax: Journey Home 234). As in many children’s books, protagonists in these texts are outsiders compared to their peers, and this position encourages a connection with animals. The protagonists are like Kester in The Last Wild, who is bullied by the other children at Spectrum Hall, so much so that he prefers the company of a cockroach to anyone else. Silas in Wolfstongue is treated

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  117 similarly. Morgan and Eli, new to their school in The Barren Grounds, isolate themselves from other students. Edgar in North to Benjamin is a loner as is Peter in Pax. April of The Last Bear prefers the outdoors, but she also lacks friends at school. Rio’s school chum betrays him in The Lost Whale. Willodeen describes herself as someone who does not “need the complications and confusion that might come with friendship” (25). Kate of The Silver Arrow finds ordinary life with its ritual of school and after-​school hobbies supremely boring; no human friends are mentioned by name in the book. The death of her sister keeps Jules home from school in Maybe a Fox and isolates her from schoolfriends who do not understand her circumstances. While these children possess an aptitude for communicating with animals, often they have difficulty doing so with other humans. These difficulties include speech impediments such as selective mutism and stuttering, problems with social cues, and self-​silencing. As discussed in Chapter 2, Kester has selective mutism and cannot fully converse until the end of the trilogy. He has not talked, or even experienced inner speech, since his mother died. Called a “freak” and “Dumbinga” (dumb and a ginger/​ redhead) by the other children at Spectrum Hall, Kester compensates for his loneliness by paying attention to a persistent cockroach (12, 13, 14). Similarly, Silas in Wolfstongue is bullied for his inability to speak up at school. He wants to speak but often “the words he meant to say got stuck” (5). His peers mock his fluency disorder, calling him “ ‘SS-​s-​s-​s-​s-​Silas’ and ‘Silent Silas’ and just ‘Silence’ ” (5). He interprets his disability as a personal failure and “never tried to speak when he could keep quiet instead” (5). The text is focalized through Silas, so such judgments as “his words failed again” (5) or “all he managed were a few stupid-​sounding noises” (6) are coming from himself. Silas speaks most fluently when he must inspire the wolves to act. In this dangerous moment, “Silas kept expecting to stumble and fall silent, but with every word his voice was growing stronger and surer” (167). His experiences in the secondary world, however, do not change his speech difficulties in the primary one. At the end of Wolfstongue, the wolf Isengrim reveals that the struggle with language has been necessary, because it would “bring understanding, which ease does not” (193). Paradoxically, because Silas “knew what it was to live in silence … this meant he could speak for the wolves” (193). His ability to speak with and for the wolves emerges from his difficulties speaking to humans. Unlike characters with literary selective mutism (discussed in Chapter 2), Silas continues to live with his disorder. Rio of The Lost Whale also struggles to say what he wants to. The words are “stuck in his throat,” or he feels “tongue-​tied,” unlike his chatty friend Marina, who “never seemed to run out of words” (19, 57, 184). Sometimes he repeats the initial sounds of words—​“Th-​th-​thank you”; “Sh-​sh-​she’s going to get better”—​and the

118  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals texts tells us that he hates how “his voice wobbled whenever he felt nervous” (19, 24). His discomfort speaking—​ his disability—​ produces his ability to be quiet and therefore to hear the whales. Other protagonists falter in conversations because they strain to read social cues or address complicated subjects. In Willodeen, the title character misinterprets common signs as they relate to speech. She reflects that “most folks had a sort of clock in their heads. It told them when it was time to laugh at a joke. When to step closer for a whispered confidence. When to start a conversation, and when to say farewell” (17). Willodeen believes she lacks that ability. She does not speak much even with the two kind women who took her in after the death of her family. Peter in the Pax novels withholds his words along with his emotions, a state that precedes the opening of the narrative action. When he attended therapy after the death of his mother in a car accident, he would spend the time crashing toy cars into each other rather than talking because “he just hadn’t known how to shrink that kind of loss into words” (Pax 47). In Pax: Journey Home Peter only inadvertently reveals his plans to live by himself, a secret he had been keeping from his fellow workers and friends. Words have often been “blocking his throat” (203). At his mother’s grave, holding his father’s ashes, he cries and talks to his parents, “both at once for the first time in six years” (226). Here also he decides to save Pax’s fox cub and he imagines a new, more expressive future for himself. In The Last Bear, April conceals her feelings and words from her father, worried that there is something wrong with her desire for her father to remarry and thinking “[s]‌he would never be able to forgive herself if she had hurt him with her words” (119). North to Benjamin’s Edgar, anxious about his destructive mother, finds himself unable to speak in English. Though he tries, all that emerges are variations on “woof” or a “doggie sort of whine” (94–​95). Therefore, he speaks as little as possible. Edgar’s mother has always considered her son “a strange boy,” or as she says to the doctor later, “just plain weird” (98, 103). To his list of other problems with speech, including not talking or speaking strangely, she adds “barking” (98). She encourages him to “just be quiet, normal, ordinary, adorable” (105), but Edgar cannot. His ability to speak only in dog language continues until close to the end of the book, when Benjamin the dog dies. During the period when Edgar speaks dog, he has no problem communicating with Benjamin. For all these child characters, animals are easier to relate to than humans. How is communication between children and animals portrayed if not through language? In these texts the child protagonist has to become a translator of animal codes, comprehending these and stating their meaning so that the reader can also understand. Animal communication often occurs through nonspeech sounds, through movement and touch, and through the eyes. In some texts, one method of communication is

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  119 privileged; in others, all are present. The Lost Bear presents all these types of animal communication and considers the subject overtly, so it is worth examining in some detail. In this novel, eleven-​year-​old April Woods and her father move to an Arctic island so that her father can monitor the weather station and study climate change. Though the island is called “Bear Island” (based on an actual place), apparently there are no bears. April thinks otherwise, searches for a polar bear, and discovers one with his paw bound in plastic. She frees and befriends this wild creature whom she calls “Bear” (118). April spends her summer days with Bear, and when her father says they must return to England, she attempts a risky and improbable sea voyage to bring Bear back to his northern colony. Both she and Bear are rescued, and Bear is taken to his proper Arctic home. The Last Bear states overtly what some other texts only hint at. April speaks aloud to Bear: “Of course, I know you can’t really speak to me … But there has to be some kind of interpretation between us. It’s like being a code breaker—​I just need to decipher the signs” (74). If Bear does not understand exactly April’s words, she believes he, like other animals, can sense how she feels: “Animals were smart like that. Not academic smart—​they wouldn’t pass any exams. But they read the world—​and the people in it—​in a different way. They read the world with their feelings” (122). The Lost Bear also shows the limitations of spoken language by stating there are things language cannot quite reach; Bear tells April his history, “Not in words, because polar bears can’t speak, but he didn’t need words anyway. Sometimes all the words in the world can’t tell a story” (177). Many of these texts where animals do not speak present the desire that they could. In Pax: Journey Home, Peter yearns “that Pax could talk to him,” even though Peter is skilled at understanding what the fox means (188). In his final meeting with Pax, in which Pax leaves his sick cub to Peter’s care, Peter understands that “something passed between the father fox and the daughter, and Peter didn’t need a translator. Pax was reassuring her, telling her that he loved her, that it was all right” (Pax: Journey Home 218). Without animal speech, however, Peter, like April, must rely on other means. The most obvious alternative to speech is animal sound or bioacoustics. The Lost Bear focuses on Bear’s roars. After April removes the plastic from Bear’s paw, Bear roars, and April responds: “I know you’re just saying thank you” (84). As their friendship develops, April responds to Bear’s roar with one of her own, offering the roar as a sign of greeting (110–​11). Then she tries to model her own stance and roar on his, practicing at their every meeting, and becoming each time, “a little bit more bear and little bit less human” (152), until, at the end, when they are separated, Bear roars to her one last time, and April will roar so loudly that the sound travels for magical miles and reaches Bear. Bear’s final roar embraces April, just as hers does him. The decoding of animal sounds

120  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals also occurs in Willodeen, in which the title character’s pet hummingbear Duuzuu produces three types of sounds in response to Willodeen’s conversational overtures. Although Willodeen herself cannot figure out exactly what Duuzuu’s sounds mean, her friend Connor does: “I’ve decided Duuzuu makes three distinct noises … One for yes, one for no, and one for maybe” (181). Connor’s ability signals that Duuzuu should live with him. Connor also communicates with the screecher, exchanging words for “coos” (178). Pax and Pax: Journey Home are told with alternating focalizers—​boy and fox—​and thus we also experience how Pax receives Peter’s speech: “mostly what Peter did was vocalize—​much more than he used to—​in a variety of tones, from pleased to distressed. Pax contributed a companionable grunt or purr when his boy seemed to want it, but otherwise was quiet” (Pax: Journey Home 183). When Pax had lived with Peter, he would bark and whine for him. Rio of The Lost Whale has, as mentioned earlier, the amazing ability to hear the “strange rumbling, groaning noise” of the whales (140), and when he falls into the water, he knows that the sounds he hears from the starring whale in the book, White Beak, are soothing rather than aggressive. Ultimately, the desire for animal speech is a desire for increased intimacy. All these texts with nonspeaking animals also employ eye contact as a means of communication, as well as other forms of body language. Bron Taylor describes the paradigm-​ shifting consequences for such humans as primatologist Jane Goodall, biologist Marc Bekoff, and activist Paul Watson when they look an individual from another species in the eye (24, 98). Taylor “musingly” refers to these moments as “eye-​to-​eye epiphanies” (24). His punning on “eye” and “I” adds to the philosophizing on the human–​animal gaze by John Berger and Jacques Derrida. Berger describes human and animals of the past as “looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-​comprehension” in a way that could never happen between two humans because of “the existence of language” (3). Nowadays, according to Berger, we live without animals and the gaze between animal and humans “has been extinguished” (13, 26). Derrida confronts the unsettling sensation of his cat looking at him and, as Philip Armstrong puts it, the cat’s gaze “invites Derrida to deconstruct the most formidable and durable of distinctions used to reinforce the boundary between humans and (other) animals: language” (195). According to Armstrong, Derrida asks us to expand our idea of language so that we see the animal’s gaze not “as ‘speech’, but as ‘response’ and ‘address’ ” (195). Several of the novels in this chapter depict “eye-​ to-​ eye epiphanies,” nostalgic perhaps for the lost gaze described by Berger and, contrary to Derrida’s injunction, interpret the gaze metaphorically as speech. In The Last Bear, the narrator states that “Bear’s eyes spoke of hunger and desperation. Perhaps loneliness too” (83). April reflects briefly on her

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  121 anthropomorphizing interests when she considers that the loneliness that she sees in Bear’s eyes might be “a reflection of her own feelings” (83). Regardless, she interprets what she sees in his eyes as “the kind of expression that encouraged her to speak” (118). Jules in Maybe a Fox stares at the fox who looks back at her (192), and later the fox stares into Jules’ eyes and signals by her glance that she wants Jules to follow her (217). In The Lost Whale, White Beak the whale gazes at Rio with love after Rio has fallen overboard, and at the end of the book, when Rio has helped to find and rescue White Beak, the two share a soul-​deep gaze that Rio understands: “You’re just saying thank you, aren’t you? Because we freed you?” (150, 291).2 In these texts, other gestures also signal communication. When April injures herself, Bear gently pushes her to indicate that she should climb on him. Similarly, White Beak nudges Rio back to the boat after he has fallen overboard. Pax rubs himself against Peter. These wild creatures also allow themselves to be touched, indicating the privileged position of the human protagonist. Bear carries April on his back. White Beak lets Rio touch her. When Jules strokes Senna the fox, the fox does not move. Duuzuu the hummingbear sits on Willodeen’s shoulder. These moments depict the strong human desire for contact with animals. In many animal fantasy texts, animals speak, but humans do not listen. In The Last Bear, April understands Bear’s story because she knows that “It was just a matter of sitting down and listening properly” (177). Of course, this formulation is usually not literal, although occasionally it is. In the classic animal fantasy Charlotte’s Web, for example, Mrs. Arable consults Dr. Dorian because Fern claims to understand the conversation of farm animals. When Mrs. Arable asks Dr. Dorian whether he believes animals can talk, he leaves open the possibility: I never heard one say anything … But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grownups. (110) Dr. Dorian’s formulation fits with Romantic ideals of children as closer to nature. Often, however, postulating the idea of animals speaking is really a way of saying that animals are trying to communicate. Speech here is a metaphor for interspecies connection. In The Last Bear, April’s father describes her mother as someone who “loved animals too, especially those in the wild. She had a rare affinity with them … She even said they could talk—​but most humans had forgotten how to listen” (28). Later in the novel, April says to Bear: “We can still communicate. People say animals can’t speak, but I know that’s not true. What was it my mom said? We

122  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals just have to find a different way of talking, that’s all” (74). The “different way of talking” means communicating in ways other than speech, which implies that her mother’s statement was metaphorical. In The Silver Arrow, where the animals do speak to Kate and her brother, the fox explains that animals talk occasionally, “just not around humans,” because there are not many people “who are worth talking to” (46), an echo of Dr. Dorian’s remarks. The text also suggests that most people are too absorbed in their electronic devices to notice anything out of the ordinary. When the train with all its animals passes through a subway station, the humans are unaware because they are so engaged with their phones (156). The back matter of Torday’s The Wild Beyond advertises the two other books in the series with “The animals have something to say … are you listening?,” an ambiguous formulation that is also found in the last sentence of the afterword: “we should always listen out for them [other species], because you never know …” (401; ellipses in original). The claim that animals talk but humans do not listen is made not only by children’s book authors but also by some popular science writers and animal philosophers. In an interview with The Guardian, philosopher Eva Meijer proclaims of animals, “Of course they speak. They speak to us all the time. The only thing is that we don’t really listen.” Here again Meijer speaks metaphorically. When she states in When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy that “[l]‌earning about the languages of other animals can help humans to understand them better and build new relations with them” (2), “languages” means other forms of communication, since humans must “take into account the multitude of non-​human animal expressions and ways of creating meaning” (5). Indeed, Meijer wants to challenge the status we give to speech, seeing the human emphasis on it as anthropocentric. Contemporary children’s fiction maintains the illusion of animal speech. Unlike Sarah Trimmer, who prefaces her story of the robin family by reminding her readers that animals do not actually speak, today’s authors are firmly on the side of the imagination, at least within the bounds of their narratives. Piers Torday wryly comments on his trilogy as follows: “I would argue that the only truly fantastical element in my books is that the animals talk. To one boy. I accept that is not a wholly realistic proposition” (“Why Writing Stories”). After analyzing the conventions for depicting animal speech, I return to the question of whether this narrative strategy breaks down the human–​ animal divide. To recall Greta Gaard’s question: “Does the text depict other animal species as passive agents who need human saviors?” (New Directions 9). Usually, the answer is yes. While Torday’s talking animals might generate sympathy for animals more broadly, they do not dislodge human exceptionalism. The first words Kester hears from a creature are

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  123 “*Help! … Kester! Help … Please. You must help*” (Last Wild 17). Humans, or at least special humans, are the saviors of animals. The first book ends with Kester’s father reminding him that humans are the only animals that can truly help others, in an example that the reader might find ironic. After treating a wolf cub’s bullet wound, Kester’s father remarks, “No other animal can do that—​you know—​help and save another one in that way” (Last Wild 301). He does not state that the wolf only needs saving because a human has shot him. Children save animals in most of the texts discussed in this chapter. The situation differs in texts which share focalization with animals. In Maybe a Fox, Pax, and Pax: Journey Home, foxes save humans, literally and psychologically. These are all texts in which foxes interact with humans without speech. The narrative device privileges the reader with knowledge of animal consciousness. Beyond the scope of this chapter are books which are focalized entirely through animals.3 Although Torday’s novels give us the child as rescuer, they also portray animals as individuals, in part by distinctive uses of speech. To illustrate: the pigeon who rearranges word order; the wolf cub, full of bravado, who always needs reassurance that he is the best—​“*Am I the best in the world at recovering from a firestick wound?*”; and the cockroach who often speaks in the imperative, so much so that Kester nicknames him “the General” (Last Wild 30, 317, 38). Within the text, animal speech moves children to rethink how they have thought of animals. On the one hand, speech domesticates what was thought of as wild; therefore, Kate in The Silver Arrow reflects that she “had gotten so used to animals talking politely that she’d almost forgotten that they were wild creatures” (111). On the other hand, Kate acknowledges that “if animals were going to talk to her, she supposed she shouldn’t think of them as its” (79). Animals are granted subjectivity. Overall, animal speech in The Last Wild Trilogy is a means to an end. Within the trilogy, that goal is to prompt humans to save the world from human-​induced climate change and disease. At the end of the trilogy, Kester’s ability to understand and speak to wild animals expires: “A channel in my brain closes, no longer receiving a signal. The earth is renewed, the gift has run its course” (Wild Beyond 396). Eva Meijer claims in her interview that listening to animals “is really important, not just for their sake but for ours because there is a limit on how far we can use the planet and its natural resources” (“Of Course”). She does not explain how listening to animals will help the earth. The books I analyze in this chapter employ talking animals for exactly this purpose. The second part of this chapter analyzes how they try to do this by educating young readers on climate change, extinction, and alienation.

124  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals Animal Fantasies and Environmental Education In “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy,” Greta Gaard establishes ways of assessing the environmental politics of children’s literature. She begins with Richard Kahn’s desire for an “ecoliteracy” that includes “environmental literacy,” “cultural ecoliteracy” (what makes for a green culture), and criticism of the structures responsible for our environmental catastrophes (326). Contributing to a structural ecocide is “defining humanity over and against all that is ‘other’—​lesser humans, animals, and nature” (326). The texts I discuss employ animals to increase environmental literacy and to drive home the seriousness of climate change, extinction, the exploitation of the planet, and nature-​deficit disorder. My central books remain The Lost Wild Trilogy, with support from the other novels mentioned above. Climate Change

Most of the texts analyzed in this chapter directly mention climate change, or more accurately, “anthropogenic global warming” (Ross 37). J.K. Ullrich and others credit Dan Bloom for introducing the term “cli-​fi” in 2007, and Margaret Atwood for popularizing it, to describe narratives driven by climate change (Ullrich). Piers Torday argues for “cli-​fi” as the best genre for The Last Wild Trilogy in his newspaper article “Why Writing Stories About Climate Change Isn’t Fantasy or Sci-​fi.” As he states, “[e]‌very effect of climate change in the books—​from the rising sea levels of The Dark Wild to the acidic and jellyfish filled oceans in The Wild Beyond, is happening right now, albeit on a lesser level” (“Why Writing Stories”). Other texts where the plots are affected by climate change include Willodeen, The Last Bear, The Lost Whale, The Silver Arrow, North to Benjamin, and The Barren Grounds. Of the animal fantasy novels analyzed in this chapter, The Last Wild Trilogy treats most compellingly the consequences of unbridled capitalism. A company called “Factorium” controls what would normally be delegated to government as well as everything else: “First the government asked them to take care of the red-​eye, and then they ended up taking care of the government. They run the country now, from hospitals to schools” (Last Wild 9). Factorium produces and distributes the only food, a chemical slop called “Formul-​A.” Through Factorium the trilogy critiques the seeping encroachment of mega companies like Amazon and Meta into our lives and minds. Factorium shapes people’s reality through control of the media, which it uses to disseminate such falsehoods as the plague’s danger to humans. The main city, divided in two by the River Ams—​surely an allusion to the Thames—​is a dystopian version of London. Called “Premium,” a name suggesting an upgrade from Amazon Prime, the

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  125 city is a “forest of glass towers” (264). Climate change and environmental degradation magnify the “bad place” aspects of the novel through floods, drought, fire, forced human migration, and dead oceans. The Last Wild Trilogy demonstrates the effects of climate change through animal speech and symbols. It presents species devastation, setting out the logic of a grand trophic cascade—​the spiraling effect on an ecosystem of decimating a species: “First the animals we eat went, and then the bees went, and then the crops and fruit went” (Last Wild 11). Animal speech allows Kester and the reader to hear directly from the creatures most affected by climate change and a human-​induced plague. The impact of these forces affects creatures of the air, land, and sea. Therefore, the book presents the birds with their elegies for lost species, the stag who succinctly states for the animals that “*Once we roamed far and wide*,” and the blue whale who describes an ocean that “*tasted of metal poison*” (Last Wild 62, Wild Beyond 60). Even the speech of those creatures who seem to benefit from environmental destruction implicitly condemns humans. The jellyfish tells Kester, *Human destroyed world of wet. Look around. All empty. Used to be so much colour, so much life. Whale, shark, fish, crab, bug. So many enemies to jelly. Now only fake duck, weed and dead bodies crumbling into water—​this good for us.* (Wild Beyond 207) A yellow plastic duck that Kester thinks is alive symbolizes environmental catastrophe in the oceans. Kester’s companion sees the irony: “That the only animal left in this whole ocean? A toy duck?” (Wild Beyond 199). The plastic duck, a replica of an animal made from petrochemical plastics—​ a substance responsible for killing incalculable numbers of seabirds—​ symbolizes human frivolity, consumerism, pollution, and alienation from the natural world just as much as the giant garbage dump depicted in the second book of the trilogy. Torday’s The Wild Beyond uses a “charismatic species” for its most dramatic depiction of climate change. Generally, according to Céline Albert and her team, a charismatic species is “preferentially—​but not necessarily—​ a large, terrestrial, and exotic mammal.” These are the animals that end up as symbols for wildlife organizations—​like the World Wildlife Fund’s panda—​and many of them are easy to anthropomorphize (Albert). Albert views these animals and their appeal as opportunities to raise awareness for conservation. Two such charismatic creatures are the blue whale and the polar bear, both of which respondents categorized as “endangered” in Albert’s study. The most impressive creature in Torday’s The Wild Beyond is the blue whale, who tells Kester that humans disrupted

126  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals nature’s harmony, slaughtered the whales, and altered the ocean itself (57, 59). Hannah Gold’s animal fantasies allow the protagonists to get up close to a polar bear and a gray whale—​not a blue whale, but still an impressive creature. In The Lost Whale, Marina and her father explain to Rio that rising ocean temperatures are among the factors killing whales (174–​ 75), and Rio ends up (twice) in the water face-​to-​face with a whale called White Beak. In The Last Bear the entire plot is driven by climate change and a friendship with a charismatic animal. April and her father move to an Arctic island so that her father can collect data on rising temperatures. The titular polar bear is stranded far from his original colony because the polar ice has melted. Though Bear does not speak, April reads his body language, interprets his sighs, and constructs a narrative, which she speaks out loud to him, as to how he ended up stranded and alone. She tells him that humans have not intended to harm animals, but they “just don’t know what to do about the ice caps and the plastic and the animals … who are suffering” (181). Finally, Lev Grossman’s The Silver Arrow includes a polar bear who wants to board the train. Kate and Tom help the exhausted creature come aboard. Only later do the other animals explain to Kate that the melting ice left the polar bear swimming and emaciated. Extinction and Endangerment

Climate change is often linked to extinction in the novels analyzed. I focus here on the novels where animals themselves become the teachers on this point, educating the child on human responsibility for endangering or extinguishing whole species. At these moments, the language shifts from addressing an individual protagonist to all humans. “Humans” may be stated indirectly, replaced by other nouns, and seemingly separate from the protagonist, in which case the child and reader have to make the logical inference; other times, the address uses an inclusive second person. In The Wild Beyond, the blue whale tells Kester that the animals lived in peace until the arrival of a “beast” who would not “share the world” (Wild Beyond 57). The whale uses a term applied to animals but also suggesting a monster, and eventually reveals what Kester knows, that this beast was “Man” (58). Similarly, in The Silver Arrow, the animals discuss invasive species with Kate. The heron tells her that the worst invasive species is “a kind of ape” with “weirdly enlarged heads and hardly any fur” (192). The cat adds that “those apes are making a dozen species extinct every single day” (193). The animals themselves weaken the human-animal divide by categorizing humans as animals. In both cases, the protagonists respond to this portrait of humanity with shame and with a desire to help. The creatures themselves switch to the second person to provide hope. This is in the form of the singular “you” in The Wild Beyond: “All I could do was

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  127 sing what was in my heart, hoping there were minds left alive to listen. And you came” (61). In The Silver Arrow, the animals begin with the plural you, telling Kate that they are not worried because human beings “are the most successful animal there ever was. You’re better than us at everything. If you want to fix this problem, you will” (197). Kate responds, including herself in her censure: “We’ve done such terrible, terrible things!” (197). The animals tell her that though that is true, human beings are a diverse bunch, including the “terrible” and the “almost good” (197). They promote human exceptionalism and prompt Kate to act on their behalf. The strategies employed in The Wild Beyond and The Silver Arrow allow Kester and Kate to stand apart from other—​presumably adult—​humans. Wolfstongue, however, uses the second person to indict Silas and readers as members of the human race. According to its author, Wolfstongue is set in a combination of Oxford and Belfast (Parkinson); in the United Kingdom, wolves have been extinct for centuries. The contiguous fantasy world that Sam Thompson creates has only a few wolves—​Isengrim, Hersent, and eventually their wolf cubs—​though hope is held out that there may be others. Reynard the fox, though he is a liar, speaks the truth to Silas on human violence toward wolves: You humans are odd about wolves … You’re so frightened of them, but you’ve hurt them far more than they could ever hurt you. Do you know there have been times when your species has declared war on the wolf? Your governments pay money for their corpses. You kill them for sport. You break their bones with your traps and blow their brains out with your guns. You feed them poison so whole packs die in agony. You chase them with helicopters until they drop dead from exhaustion, and you think it’s fun. (63–​64) All the practices the fox mentions have been carried out (see, for example, Ted Williams on “American’s new War on Wolves”). Reynard points out the irony that at the same time people have been killing wolves, they are “telling one another stories about what savage beasts they are” (64). The dangerous wolf story, stretching back to Aesop, found in bestiaries and fairy tales, contributes to and reflects a culture that waged war on the wolf.4 Silas cannot articulate a response to Reynard’s charges. Though there are many endangered species in The Silver Arrow, the book focuses on one in particular—​the pangolin—​to stand for the many. Kate does not know what type of animal the pangolin is, and her ignorance allows the other creatures to inform her and the reader of the pangolin’s distinctiveness and plight. The heron tells her that pangolins are uncommon and “the only mammal in the world with scales” (101), that new pangolins

128  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals are named “pangopups” (117), and, most importantly, that pangolins have almost been wiped out for their (nonexistent) medicinal properties (193). This information is only conveyed after the reader has been exposed to several scenes where the baby pangolin is nurtured, fed, and played with—​ increasing the emotional impact. Unlike the other animals, who can be let off the train at certain stations, the pangolin is left on a cloud in the sky under a sign that says “Someday” (214). As the fishing cat explains, currently no place exists that is safe for a pangolin. The text posits that education is the key. Kate reasons, “But it wasn’t that people wanted to hurt him … Not really. They just weren’t paying attention to him. They didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about baby pangolins, they were just thinking about themselves” (214). Kate blames human selfishness and pledges that “always, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would remember baby pangolins” (215). This pledge suggests that individual action, or even just thought, is what matters. But Kate also frames this pledge as a talk to herself, and it also reads as an injunction to the reader: “But you have to think about them. You can’t forget them” (215). Greed and Resources

Many of these texts are concerned with human greed and with the folly of seeing nature—​animals and plants—​only as a resource. The Barren Grounds merits particular attention on the use of natural resources. In retelling and expanding the Cree legend of the Fisher constellation (mentioned above), the text draws out and emphasizes the story’s teachings. As Indigenous scholar Wilfred Buck states, “the Creator placed the Fisher in the sky to remind us of what was then, what is now, as well as the possibility of what could be again if we do not respect what is loaned to us” (72). The Barren Grounds emphasizes the respect owed to the natural world and the catastrophe that ensues when that respect vanishes. Ochek joins the other animals to educate humans on environmental problems. As Ochek tells Morgan and Eli, in the “Green Time” of the past, “birds and fish and four-​legged animals were plentiful, and the land provided everything that we needed” (98). The Green Time was disrupted by the arrival of a white man—​referred to as “the man”—​who represents settler colonialists more generally. At first this man insinuated himself into the trust of Ochek and the other talking animals and was taught by them how to live off the land. Eventually, however, the man was not satisfied with taking only what he needed: “But there came a time when all that was provided to him, which is all anybody would need to live the good life, wasn’t enough. He began to want more, and so took more” (99). The man’s greed meant fewer resources for everyone else and an acceleration of his own voracity: “the more he took, the more he needed” (99). Before he could be banished, he

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  129 departs and takes with him Crane and the summer birds, disrupting the cycle of the seasons. The Barren Grounds only mentions climate change directly once—​when Morgan is upset with her foster parents and reflects that “there are worse things in the world. Climate change, for example” (51). However, the text surely leads the reader to consider it. The world of the Barren Grounds is preindustrial, but suggests the Anthropocene. The winter that has arrived and will not depart directly relates to the overuse of nature. Even in the Green Time, where the white man lives, the earth, water, and air have no creatures. Ochek states, The land provides everything that anybody would need. If you take only what you need, the land renews itself so that it can provide more. Medicines, water, plants, meat … When you take more than the land can provide, it stops giving. It can’t give. That’s what’s happened here. That’s what happens with humans. (190) Ochek grudgingly distinguishes between Indigenous visitors to this land, who have lived in harmony with it, and this newcomer, who destroyed it. The man’s destructiveness is rooted in his belief that the land which he has happened upon belongs to him. After the man yells at the children and Arik (squirrel), telling them that “the land is [his],” Morgan responds with “Nothing is yours! The land belongs to nobody” (212–​13). Morgan notes that this man, whom she describes as “an ordinary, middle-​aged white man” (213), though he took everything, is also starving: “You’re always going to starve, no matter where you go, no matter how much is there for you” (217). The white man says he will eat all three of them, his cannibalistic turn another symbol of his all-​consuming nature, and an ironic twist given historical portrayals of Indigenous people—​usually islanders—​as cannibals.5 Greed is often the route to environmental destruction in these novels. The Last Wild Trilogy blames corporate greed, giving it a face in the corporate chief of Factorium, Selwyn Stone. His last words are “All I have ever wanted to do is make a profit” (Wild Beyond 374). With a heart of stone, he wins by selling. Selwyn Stone’s greed combines with his hatred of the natural word, arising from his brother’s death from a wasp sting. He views the world as dangerous because out of his control. This sense is compounded because he is unable to connect to nature. His remaining sibling explains: He hated nature for what it had taken away from us. Wild animals, plants—​in his eyes they were unpredictable and unreliable. He couldn’t

130  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals communicate with them, he couldn’t reason with them, so he had to contain and dominate them … in the end … he wanted to dominate … Everything. (Wild Beyond 259) This inability to communicate with nature—​precisely the skill that Kester has—​ fuels Selwyn Stone’s hatred. The plague that Stone deliberately introduced into the animal population in order to leave the corporation with a monopoly on food allowed him to fulfill two goals simultaneously: killing animals and plants and profiting from this destruction. The texts that feature talking animals indirectly argue that greed rather than language characterizes the human-animal distinction. Nature-​deficit Disorder

Torday’s trilogy suggests that an alienation from nature makes it easier to destroy it. The contemporary children’s fiction examined here presents through symbolism and vocabulary what Richard Louv has “called nature-​deficit disorder.” In Last Child in the Woods, Louv sets out the problem, its consequences, and remedies. The problem is children growing up without feeling embedded in the natural world. The consequences are waning physical and mental health for individuals but also a lack of environmental understanding. The solutions include an immersion in the natural world in whatever form that might take, such as the backyard and the neighborhood lot. The Last Wild symbolizes nature deficit disorder in Kester’s imprisonment at the beginning of the book. The institution allows no contact with the outside world. Kester knows that sea and sky and rocks exist, but he cannot see them, let alone touch them. The light bounces off the glass of the building and into his eyes so that he sees only his own reflection. His experience suggests that of a generation of children raised to look at screens and consider their own self-​representation rather than being absorbed in the natural world. In Nicola Penfold’s Where the World Turns Wild, a book not centered on communication with animals though it does include a helpful lynx, the main character, thirteen-​year-​ old Juniper, is growing up in a dystopian future where city dwellers try to protect themselves from a plague. The book presents an interesting comparison with The Last Wild: both books feature dystopian futures brought about in part by deliberately introduced diseases. In The Last Wild, the corporation Factorium develops and spreads the “red eye” as a plot to achieve economic domination; the disease kills animals but not humans. In Where the World Turns Wild, ecoterrorists known as the ReWilders develop a tick-​born disease that affects only humans so that humans will garrison themselves in cities and allow nature to flourish without them. In

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  131 both of these future worlds, then, humans live apart from nature. Where the World Turns Wild begins in a city where it is almost impossible to catch a glimpse of nature. As Juniper describes it: Only you can’t see out, not properly. You can’t see the Wild. The view is obstructed by these angled-​down sheets of metal. You can gaze down at the grey of the city, marvel at it—​the housing blocks, the schools and hospitals and the Institute—​but you can only see to where the Buffer Zone begins. (72) Nevertheless, the city government allows licensed “Plant Keepers” to grow succulents because “People need to see green things. It’s a medical fact” (10). Not surprisingly, Penfold mentions Louv’s book along with Emma Mitchell’s The Wild Remedy and Lucy Jones’ Losing Eden as inspiring her novel. The separation from nature caused by the built environment contributes to fear and ignorance and manifests itself in language. In The Last Wild Kester has been taught that contact with animals will hurt him, even kill him. Later, as Kester approaches the city with an entourage of animals, he understands why urban dwellers are afraid of them. Not only have they been fed lies about how dangerous animals are, but most have never been in contact with an actual living animal (Last Wild 274). Kester’s own alienation from the natural world at the beginning of the series is reflected in the paucity of his language for animals and plants. He refers to a deer as “a baby horse” and describes but misnames badgers (Last Wild 59). Even the adult villain Captain Skuldiss refers to the wolf cub as “the little dog-​fox thing” (Last Wild 158). This loss of language reflects a loss of knowledge. Louv and others see this ignorance as a sign of nature-​deficit disorder, crystallized in the fact that children are more likely to know the names of fictional video game creatures than actual animals (Louv 33). In The Silver Arrow, Kate ponders the names of animals. She is unsure of whether certain creatures are rabbits or hares, “or were they the same thing?” (41). An animal comes aboard that is “long and slinky and furry that she supposed was probably a weasel or something” (76). Kate reflects when she tries to figure out whether a cat is a lynx or a bobcat—​it turns out to be neither—​that she “hadn’t studied for this” (79). The baby pangolin is a complete mystery. Instead of accurate names, some texts reflect the tendency to describe creatures as “vermin,” a word like “weed” that reflects not much more than human dislike. Willodeen remembers herself as a child who loved all creatures, “especially … the unlovable ones. The ones folks called pests. Vermin. Monsters, even” (5). In The Last Wild, Kester begins by referring to the creatures who were not killed by the

132  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals plague as “the useless ones. The ones we couldn’t eat, the ones that didn’t pollinate crops or eat pests. Just the pests themselves—​the varmints” (16). Something deep inside Kester craves friendship and contact with nonhuman animals so much that he befriends a cockroach, regardless of his cultural conditioning. The Last Wild is thus also the lost wild. It suggests lost experiences and a lost language with which to describe these experiences. Thus, it has much in common with articles and books, such as Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris’ majestic picture book The Lost Words: A Spell Book, that decry the estrangement of children from nature and their loss of a vocabulary to describe it. As MacFarlane puts it: Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed—​ fading away like water on stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker—​gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren … all of them gone! (MacFarlane and Morris, The Lost Words) MacFarlane and other writers criticize the removal of these “natural” nouns in favor of more “contemporary” words by the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in both the 2007 and the 2012 editions, a process crystalized in the replacement of blackberry—​the plant—​with Blackberry—​the phone (MacFarlance, Landmarks 3). MacFarlane’s point, which he elaborates on and tries to counter at length in Landmarks, is that “language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we deplete our ability to denote and figure particular aspects of our places, so our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-​human nature is correspondingly depleted” (“Word-​Hoard”). Both Nicola Penfold’s Where the World Turns Wild and Between Sea and Sky are clearly indebted to contemporary discussions of the loss of a shared nature vocabulary. In Where the World Turns Wild, the two main characters, Juniper and Bear, have names taken from the natural word and Juniper tells us that her brother “knows most nature things. Acorn, buttercup, conker, daisy. That’s Bear’s alphabet. The only one he’s ever bothered learning” (29). He asks Juniper to read to him about kingfishers from his favorite book. “Acorn,” “buttercup,” “conker,” and “kingfisher” are all words removed from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (“Word-​Hoard”). In Between Sea and Sky, the children on a future earth wrecked by climate change have found a caterpillar, supposedly extinct, and try to find out about butterflies. Even though their government has wiped all the pictures of butterflies from the library computer, the captions containing the names remain: “There were

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  133 lots of different types … Peacock, Common Blue, Meadow Brown, Holly Blue Brimstone, Painted Lady, Speckled Wood, Gatekeeper, Swallowtail, Skipper” (37). One of the protagonists responds with goose bumps at hearing the names (37). When the librarian recites what he knows about Lepidoptera, “The words float out of … [his] mouth, like he’s enjoying saying them” (38). An incantatory quality resides in repeating precise words and details about the natural world. Along with emphasizing the specific names of flora and fauna, the texts here counter nature-​deficit disorder through several implicit strategies, including naming, rewilding, acknowledging difference, kinship, and becoming animal/​plant. Rewilding refers to bringing back species to areas where they once lived. But it may also solve children’s nature-​deficit disorder. Kester, who has never been outside the city or Spectrum Hall, is transported, literally flown by pigeons, to a tree-​surrounded lake. His initial response is twofold—​an immediate appreciation of the beauty of the place and fear that something in the water could contaminate him. His communication with animals helps him understand what is around him. The Last Wild Trilogy uses the word “wild” in each of its volumes. It also redefines the word beyond our usual sense of “wild” as untamed by defining a “wild” as a “group of animals brought together by habitat, food source or shared need” and a Wildness, the position that Kester will occupy, as “the leader of a wild” (Wild Before n.p.). Kester has to touch animals and the natural world, has to be rewilded, before he can help fix the problems caused by humans. Torday’s books add to the number of contemporary books for children with the word “wild” in the title. Presumably the hope is child readers themselves will be inspired to experience the wild. Torday’s The Wild Before, for example, ends with an empty frame in which readers are encouraged to “make a map of your nearest wild space” (n.p.). Kester’s example illustrates that rewilding includes more than conservation and preservation. Mark Bekoff argues that we need to engage in a “rewilding of our hearts” which “is about becoming re-​enchanted with nature. It is about nurturing our sense of wonder … It means thinking of others and allowing their needs and perspectives to influence our own” (147). In observing what he calls “deep ethology,” Bekoff attempts to enter the experience of animals “to discover what it might be like to be a given individual—​how they sense their surroundings, how they move about, and how they behave in myriad situations” (148). Characters in environmental fiction also overcome their separation from nature by acknowledging that animals and plants exist in different sensory worlds—​Umwelten—​ and immersing themselves, as much as possible, in them.6 In North to Benjamin, Edgar imagines the world from the perspective of an insect: “if you were an ant, or some other small insect, what would the giant world

134  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals look like all around you?” (72). Perhaps, he continues, flies, with their multiple eyes, “saw many worlds” (72). When Edgar begins talking to the dog Benjamin, he notices that although his sight is unchanged, his hearing improves and his sense of smell increases. In The Last Bear, the polar bear teaches April how to “really listen,” so that she hears the snow falling and her faraway father’s sighs, and even the island itself (164). More generally, these novels emphasize the connectedness between living things in an attempt to correct human alienation from the natural world. In doing so, they fit with Gaard’s desire for “narratives of connection, community, and interdependence among humans, animals, and the natural world” (“Children’s” 327). When Kate in The Silver Arrow states, “a little defensively” that “Humans are animals,” the fishing cat responds, “Of course you are … But you’ve spent so much time pretending you’re not, you’ve lost the knack” (117). The wolf Isengrim tells Silas that there is only one world: “This is the Forest …Your species lives here too. You just don’t notice, most of the time” (Wolfstongue 14). The Fisher in The Barren Grounds says, “All things are connected … Your world and this one, the sky and the land. All that is” (88). In Maybe a Fox and Willodeen, humans and animals bond to a place or ecosystem. In the former, Sam thinks that the animals in the woods and the humans who live nearby are “all woodland creatures. Every last one” (170). The fox cub Senna identifies Jules as “a creature of the woodlands, like her own fox family” (125). In the latter, Willodeen, who has uncovered the link between killing screechers and the disappearing hummingbears, tells her village “that we were all connected. People and plants and fish and birds and yes, even screechers” (237). Her words are a plea for a fictional uncharismatic species. This connectedness comes close to what Donna Haraway refers to as “making kin” (Staying 103) or even Bekoff’s “deep ethology” (148). Occasionally, the human character approaches the state that David Abram, and earlier, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, refer to as “becoming animal.” These concepts, all of which speak to a desire for connection with the animal—​and sometimes plant—​world, apply to the fiction discussed in this chapter. A couple of examples follow. Haraway defines “kin” as “those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-​optional, you-​can’t-​ just-​cast-​that-​away-​when-​it-​gets-​inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences. I have a cousin, the cousin has me; I have a dog, a dog has me” (“Making”). The plot of Pax derives from a disruption of this model; Peter is forced to abandon his pet fox. A deep sense of responsibility and of being kin is what starts Peter on his journey to find the animal he loves. This kinship may also be reflected in granting personhood to a nonhuman animal. In The Lost Whale, Rio feels “As if there were an invisible current linking him to the whale and, by keeping himself motionless, he could somehow reach out and connect with it” (142). Therefore,

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  135 he feels duty bound to find and help White Beak. Though acknowledging that “whales weren’t human,” he says to White Beak: “You’re not just an animal, are you? … You’re like us” (160). While Rio refers to White Beak as “like us,” Kate of The Silver Arrow sees herself as like the wild creatures on the train. Literalizing the human-animal divide and then erasing it, Kate reflects that “These were wild animals, and there was nothing between her and them—​no fence, no glass, nothing. She could’ve reached out and touched them if she dared. It was almost like she was one of them” (73). In Maybe a Fox, the formulation that humans and animals near or in the Vermont woods are “all woodland creatures” (170) suggests an affinity beyond devotion to one’s own species. Bekoff describes his approach to the natural world as an attempt to enter the Umwelten of animals, plants, and even stones: “When I watch coyotes, I become coyote. When I watch penguins, I become penguin. I will also try to become tree and even rock” (148). In Pax, Peter sometimes feels that “he and Pax had merged. The first time it happened … [t]‌he kit had seen a bird and had strained against the leash, trembling as though electrified. And Peter had seen the bird through Pax’s eyes” (14). Later, in Pax: Journey Home, Peter refers to this connection as a “ ‘two but not two’ bond” (132). Deleuze and Guattari’s state of “becoming animal” occurs primarily in conjunction with “demonic animals” (40). They explain that “becoming animal is an affair of sorcery,” because, among other matters, “it implies an initial relation of alliance with a demon”—​not a fixed category—​which exists “at the borderline of an animal pack” (45). Maybe a Fox delves into the deep human desire for connection with a particular animal or species by referring to the spiritual function of animals as totems and familiars, and then inventing its own category of daemon. The “Kennen,” as they are called, “are linked to the spirits … Some believe that the Kennen are meant to finish something … [or] to help in some way, big or small” (66). In particular, Senna the fox contains the spirit of Jules’ sister, Sylvie, whose name implies her bond to the woods. Calarco notes that one type of “becoming-​ animal” occurs when a human meets “terrible animal suffering” (Animal 27). In Maybe a Fox, Jules experiences this state when Senna the fox leaps into the path of a bullet to save her. As the fox dies, Sylvie’s spirit is released (250). It is, in effect, a moment of animal sacrifice. David Abram’s “becoming animal” resembles Bekoff’s methods. To Abram, the child instinctively bonds with nature, but this bond is “soon severed” (42). His manifesto on the subject calls humans to become a “two-​legged animal, entirely a part of the animate world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us” (3). Becoming animal, or rather, becoming plant, happens in The Silver Arrow, when Kate communicates telepathically with the trees, and then she, her brother, and the accompanying animals become

136  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals trees and cycle through the seasons: “She closed her eyes. She didn’t need them! There were so many other ways to sense and feel. Her toe-​roots went down, down, down” (148). In this version of the arboreal humanities, the human, and even animal, self is left behind. In these texts, the child protagonist often becomes an environmentalist through a variety of means that are covertly—​sometimes openly—​ suggested also for the child reader. These methods spring from the idea of paying attention and include collecting data on nature, influencing adults, collective action, and individual action. In The Last Wild Trilogy, Kester’s friend Polly carries a notebook full of sketches and information about plants. She knows which plants are helpful and which are hurtful to humans. Her parents’ collection of genetic information—​the DNA code of extinct species—​is key to reintroducing life on earth. Other child characters also behave like naturalists. Willodeen counts the screechers and through careful observation deduces why the number of hummingbears has decreased. In The Lost Whale, Marina and her father, Birch, teach Rio how to enter information about the whales they see in the Happywhale database, a real site for collecting information about whales that, as the author states in the “Resources” section at the end of the novel, assists people to become “citizen scientists” (311). Birch provides the lesson: “The more data we collect … the more we help raise awareness of what’s happening in the ocean. And awareness is the heart of change” (175). Most adults, unlike Birch, need to be taught by the child protagonist to see the urgency of the situation and to take on more responsibility. In The Last Bear, April tells the ship captain who transports Bear back to his Arctic home: “it’s all our responsibility! … Don’t you see? It’s not you, or me, who’s melted the ice caps. It’s all of us” (260). When the captain asks if she wants him to “save every polar bear,” she replies, “No … Just this one” (260). Though April’s father is posted to Bear Island to monitor the rising temperatures, April notes that her father, like most adults, appears only “mildly concerned … The fact that the world was in crisis just didn’t seem to bother of them like it did April” (187). At the end of the novel, April’s father, changed by his daughter’s activism, takes a new job working on composting plastic. Sometimes, the child recommends or takes collective action. April says that when she is an adult, she will work at the Polar Institute. Though Rio’s grandmother might not believe that one person can change things, Rio himself reflects that “You can make a difference when you all work together” (The Lost Whale 109). In Pax: Journey Home, Peter joins an organization called the Junior Water Warriors, who are working to clean the rivers and streams polluted by war. Ultimately, these texts come back to individual action, to playing whatever small part one can play, to trying. Novels have difficulty resting on the collective. When April says to Bear that the problems are so large

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  137 that it seems almost useless to try and fix things, Bear growls at her and she recalculates: “Just because I’m little is no reason not to do anything” (181). When the captain notes that preserving the Arctic “needs more than a little girl rescuing one polar bear,” April responds: “But imagine if every single person on the planet did just one thing” (261). Rio of The Lost Whale reflects that There were many grown-​ups all round the world who seemed to be waiting for the right moment to do something. Many people who were leaving it too late. Along with all the other whale watchers, at least Birch was trying to make a difference. And sometimes trying was all you could do. (296) Both books reach out to the child reader, implicitly including them in “every single person” as well as in the “you” of “trying was all you could do.” The rhetoric of environmental children’s literature typically assigns the role of savior to children both inside and outside of the text, working from the binary assumptions (mentioned above) that place children closer to nature. The Last Wild Trilogy ultimately locates the world’s problems in one super villain and their solution in the actions of children, and in particular, those of one special child. The stag says to Kester: *You cannot save us all, Kester. You cannot save everyone and everything … If you can only save some, then that is what you must do … Can you lead us? We need to enter the world of man to find the help we need—​and we cannot do that without you.* (Last Wild 180) The stag uses rhetorical devices found in many environmental texts, fiction and nonfiction, directed at children. The words indicate both that the actions of the child are necessary, that the child must help, but also, to diminish the heaviness of that burden, that the child cannot fix everything. Kester must be encouraged to do what he can, but not stagger under the weight of the problem. The stag’s words are a response to Kester’s self-​assessment: “*I’m just a kid who can’t talk. I can’t do any of this. I can’t save you—​I can’t even save a single cat*” (Last Wild 179). The wild animals nudge Kester into seeing himself as a leader. Later, in a moment of despair, Kester says to the stag: “*The whole world—​it’s just so broken. I can’t fix it. Just because I can talk to animals, why does that mean I have to fix it?” (Dark Wild 289). At that point, the stag responds that “all I can do, all any creature can do, Wildness—​is put one foot in front of another. We can keep walking” (Dark Wild 291). These texts walk a

138  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals fine line between empowerment and burden, between indicating that the child protagonists can impact the world and that they should not be held responsible for doing so. Polly remonstrates with the adults when they want to protect Kester and his friends: “You should be ashamed of yourselves. For even thinking this is only about bridges or power stations. But most of all, for telling us we couldn’t do it because we’re children. That’s the worst reason ever” (Wild Beyond 32). The rhetoric directed at the child protagonist is similar to that directed at the child reader who is often asked to “listen” to nature, to be aware of its predicament, and to join the environmental movement. Torday’s series ends with the author’s acknowledgements, in which he states, with regard to animals, that “We can’t save them all, but we can save some … We could begin by respecting all other species as the biological miracles they are … and we should always listen out for them, because you never know …” (Wild Beyond 401; final ellipses in original). He follows this with the website for Wildlife Trusts. More directly than that, the end page of The Wild Beyond depicts the first two books of the trilogy accompanied by an invitation and a query: “Join Kester on his other adventures with the last wild [.]‌The animals have something to say … are you listening?” This query is really an injunction to the reader to “listen” to what animals are metaphorically “saying,” which Torday has literalized in his books. Children are asked to be like Kester and to overcome their disempowerment, which is represented in Kester’s inability to speak. The author of Willodeen acknowledges the “young environmental activists everywhere: We thank you. We need you. Never stop fighting. And never stop hoping” (263). Considering The Lorax

The character roles in The Last Wild Trilogy have not evolved much beyond those of the book we might place at the beginning of children’s environmental literature: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, published in 1971. In The Lorax, the villain, the problem, is the “Once-​ler,” the capitalist who destroys the environment as it once was. The Once-​ler’s capitalist venture, his “biggering,” decimates the ideal world that he first came upon in his horse-​drawn wagon. To the sight, smell, and touch of the Truffula Trees, the Once-​ler says: “I felt a great leaping/​of joy in my heart” (Seuss), not unlike the opening line and title of Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up.” The speaker in Wordsworth’s poem, however, is overjoyed because he sees nature’s beauty in the rainbow and instinctively responds to it; the Once-​ ler sees nature’s beauty and immediately senses profit, unloads his ax, and chops down a Truffula Tree. The Truffula Trees are manufactured into Thneeds (a portmanteau of “thing” and “need”), sold for “three ninety-​ eight,” and the business grows and becomes more “efficient”; that is, more

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  139 deadly to the environment. The consumers, the buyers of the “Thneeds,” are relatively invisible, represented only by the first buyer, an everyman whose face is hidden by the Thneed. The Lorax articulates the ecological problems. As a character, he could represent an environmentalist, an Indigenous person, a combination of adult and child (mustachioed but small), or the spirit of the trees, whose wisdom or lore, opposes the ax and the mechanized “Super-​Axe-​Hacker” that clear cuts the Truffula trees. The Lorax speaks on behalf of the natural world, destroyed by the capitalist villain, and represented by the Truffula Trees, Bar-​ba-​loots, Swomee-​ Swans, and Humming-​Fish. The child, not present when the ecosystem based on Truffula Trees is destroyed, represents the burden placed on future generations and the child reader to fix what has been destroyed. The use of the second person makes this clear: “UNLESS someone like you/​ cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better” (Seuss). The Once-​ ler, tossing the last Truffula Seed to the child, instructs the child to plant and protect Truffula Trees and then “the Lorax /​and all of his friends /​ may come back” (Seuss). The last words are realistic rather than cheerful. Perhaps we can recover from environmental degradation if the child inside and outside the text can lead us to someplace better.7 Crucial differences do exist between The Lorax and the contemporary literature examined here. In The Lorax, the child inside and outside of the text is the listener but not the central character, and the child has no direct contact with the Lorax or with the flora and fauna of the world that used to exist. Extinction has already occurred. We do not hear the animals in The Lorax. They do not speak though their plight is channeled through the Lorax. In today’s environmental fiction, the child is an intermediary and occupies the position of the Lorax by speaking to adults on behalf of the natural world. Environmental Fiction and Intersectionality Race

A white boy receives the Truffula seed in The Lorax. Most of the environmental texts with child–​animal speech and communication more broadly feature boys, though by a slim margin. Perhaps this is a holdover from past children’s literature in which boys were associated with outdoor adventures and girls with the domestic sphere. More significantly, the majority of these protagonists are white, unlike the population that will be most harmed by environmental destruction and climate change—​people of color in the Global South. Frankly, in The Last Wild Trilogy, race seems like an afterthought. All the humans of the first volume are white; or more precisely, their race is unmarked. The second volume introduces Aida True.

140  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals Like Polly in the first volume, whom we first see pointing a gun at Kester, Aida first appears in a threatening pose. The descriptions are strikingly similar. Polly is described as “a girl with dark hair curled up on her head and fierce eyes staring at me over a small, angry mouth. A girl wearing blue wellies. And carrying a gun, pointed at me” (115). While Kester has invaded Polly’s house, Aida breaks into Kester’s. Kester describes her as follows: “Hair is piled in curls above a lollipop sticking out of her mouth” (45). Aida’s race is indicated only indirectly in The Dark Wild. Her speech suggests a Caribbean influence, in particular her omission of the verb “to be”: “Don’t play games with me, boy, I not in the mood. Where she?” (46). This null or zero copula is often found in English that has emerged from linguistic contact with another language (Parsard). While Polly’s parents are alive but missing in the first volume, Aida’s mother—​there is no mention of a father—​was a journalist and teacher who was killed by Facto because she found out about its secret project. Orphaned, Aida landed in the “Waste Mountain Gang” with other “Thieves, hackers, bikers” (Dark Wild 74). This gang resembles Fagin’s den of thieves in Oliver Twist, with Aida a version of the Artful Dodger. Her thieving talent comes in handy when she joins forces with Polly and Kester. Aida also does not care about niceties, telling the grown-​ups to “shut up” and referring to Kester’s scientist father as “Professor Beardie” after interrupting him with a “zip mime across her mouth” (Dark Wild 238, 240). Aida is an appealing character because of her willingness to challenge authority. But she also seems like a stereotype of a Black British child: raised by a single mother, speaking nonstandard English, joining a gang, talented in thievery, without social polish. The Wild Beyond takes note of her “hair sticking up in eighteen different directions” and her “dark skin” (Wild Beyond 80, 236). The Wild Beyond does end with Kester and Aida remaining on earth—​“together forever” (393)—​a new Adam and Eve. While The Last Wild series approaches race obliquely, The Barren Grounds foregrounds the subject. The Indigeneity of the two main characters is central to the story, and the novel includes subjects that have a long and ignoble history in Canada, including the removal of Indigenous children from their homes and their placement in white families. Morgan and Eli, foster children living with a white couple, have complicated relationships with this couple and with their pasts. Morgan, who has been living in foster care since she was three, initially resents her new foster parents’ attempts to celebrate her culture. Her foster parents, in presenting Morgan with moccasins to mark her two months with them, explain that they “don’t want … [her] to feel disconnected from … [her] culture, that’s all” (52). The problem is that Morgan does feel alienated from it: “I grew up white, in all these white homes. I’m not Indigenous anymore” (75). Morgan’s foster parents and her foster sibling, Eli, challenge her view. Eli,

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  141 who is strongly connected to his Cree identity, tells her, “Who you are is still inside you” (52), a statement that the text bears out. Up to this point much of what Morgan knows she has learned in school on Orange Shirt Day. This is the unofficial name for Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, meant to increase awareness of Canada’s cultural genocide in forcing Indigenous children into residential schools. Morgan knows about pemmican, bannock, and smudging ceremonies from Orange Shirt Day. That her knowledge comes solely from this event suggests that the schools she has attended in Winnipeg, the Canadian city with the highest percentage of Indigenous people, reckon (superficially) with Indigenous culture on only one day of the year. Language and speech are central to Morgan’s connectedness to her culture and to her re-​evaluation of her mother, whom she blames at first for “getting rid” of her (Barren Grounds 54). When Morgan is in Misewa (all that is), she repeatedly dreams of her mother rocking her as a small child. The woman whispers “Kiskisitotaso” to her. The first time this happens, Morgan tells Eli that she has dreamt of her mother speaking to her. He asks her to say the word. At first, the “sounds were hard and clumsy” (91). Eli tells her to “Say it again, like you remember it … Like you can speak it. Like you’ve always spoken it” (91). He reassures her that deep down she knows it, and she speaks it. Eli explains that in English the word means “Don’t forget about who you are” (92). Morgan’s response to this first dream memory is anger. In her second dream, Morgan’s mother, crying, repeats the word “Kiskisitotaso” but also tries to keep her hold on the child as others take Morgan from her arms: “Mwach! Don’t take my girl!” (155). During this dream, Morgan herself cries out “Mwach,” which means “no.” Shortly after this, Morgan says aloud that she misses her mother. Her own utterance surprises her—​her speech is ahead of her thoughts. In her third dream, Morgan remembers being taken away from her mother, who is screaming to keep her. She awakens to find Eli being dragged away by a wolf, and she springs into action to save him. Near the conclusion of her time in Misewa, Morgan remembers her childhood home; in particular, its calmness and her connection there to the nighttime sky and stars. Finally, back in the “real world,” Morgan has a dream vision of approaching the house where her mother is now sitting alone and comforting her: “I haven’t forgotten myself … I did maybe … but I’ve found myself again” (240). She tells her mother she loves her and her mother sees her daughter’s future self. Morgan develops in the novel through communication with her mother and through her ability to understand and speak some words in Cree. Morgan’s language and speech also change as she forges a stronger relationship with her foster sibling. At the beginning of The Barren Grounds Morgan tries to avoid walking Eli to school. At school, she refers to him as

142  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals “the kid living with me,” and says “No, he’s not my brother … He’s a foster kid” (33). As they spend time together in Misewa, her perspective shifts. She tells Ochek that “Eli is kind of my brother, in a way. I’m responsible for him” (103.) The modifier “kind of” suggests the mutual kindness and kinship that the two develop. Again, Morgan’s speech is ahead of her thoughts when she tells Eli, “I’m your big sister and I have to think about keeping you safe. That’s my job” (192). When Eli questions her language she replies, “Yeah, you’re my brother” (192). When they return to life with their foster parents and school, Morgan acknowledges her new relationship to Eli by referring to him as “My brother” (245). This chosen family is another way of what Donna Haraway calls “making kin” (Staying 102–​103). Disability

For a series that is so insistent on environmental activism, The Last Wild Trilogy disappoints on the subject of disability. The books use disability as a metaphor and a symbol. Kester’s mutism, as discussed in Chapter 2, is a metaphor for his powerlessness and more generally for the powerlessness of children. At the end of the series his speech returns, and his ability to talk to animals wanes. The Last Wild is typical of the books I analyze here in that the connection to nature proves curative or at least helpful. This pattern is perhaps most famously illustrated in the classic children’s novel The Secret Garden (1911), discussed in Chapter 1. Dickon not only makes kin with the animals who follow him, but helps bring alive the garden as well as Mary and Colin. Gardening brings happiness to Mary and Colin; it also cures them of their disagreeableness and prepares them for normative class and gender roles. At the end of The Last Wild Trilogy, Kester, cured of his mutism, is ready to rehabilitate the world with Aida at his side. Other texts analyzed here also present characters who are, if not cured, made normative. Though Silas in Wolfstongue still has difficulty speaking when he tries to communicate with humans, he does realize his “need to speak to other humans” (195). In North to Benjamin Edgar regains his human speech and uses it to form a new family for himself. When Rio of The Lost Whale is on the boat to find White Beak, he does not stutter. Willodeen moves from rejecting most social interactions to joining the village committee studying the environment, and though she “still hated noise and crowds” she returns to school (250). Nature, the contact with it and desire to defend it, works to enable communication. In The Last Wild disability symbolizes the child protagonist’s underdog status. The series also reinforces old myths about disability; namely, that disability causes or reflects villainy. Thus, evil characters are disabled or marked as other in some way: they are fat, or stutter, or use crutches. At

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  143 Spectrum Hall Academy for Challenging Children, the Warden guarding Kester’s corridor is “the fattest” of the lot (Lost Wild 3). One student, called “Big Brenda” because of her size, “ate her mum and dad out of house and home … and got so big they couldn’t look after her any more” (Last Wild 9). Another child at Spectrum Hall has “attention deficiency. The kind of attention deficiency that makes you chase your mum around the kitchen with a knife” (Last Wild 10). Doctor Fredericks, who runs the institution, stutters: “You have been sent here because your parents want to, ahm, f-​f-​forget about you” (Last Wild 7). Like Long John Silver, but without his moral complexity, Captain Skuldiss moves rapidly on his crutches and uses them as weapons. Littleman, the head of the gang that rules Waste Town, is an adult the size of a boy—​a little person. In an analeptic passage, we discover that the chief villain, Selwyn Stone, was traumatized by the accidental role he played in his brother’s death. The text suggests, therefore, that Stone’s obsession with controlling nature, his monstrosity and greed, stems from a psychic wound. If only he had seen nature as the cure rather than the enemy. The Last Wild is ultimately a trilogy of second chances—​except for its arch villain who dies in one of his corporation’s chimney stacks. It ends with most earthlings departing for another planet. Kester and Aida, along with those denied entry to the spaceship, survive the apocalypse by living underground. They emerge to a scorched world that has burned away almost all human structures and nature, but has also burned away the plague. Aida’s stolen piece of the fast-​growing omnium plant takes root everywhere. Kester and Aida have rechristened the plant “the Tree of Life” (393), and Kester is sure that they “will build a new paradise in our own Island, over the debris” (394). It is impossible not to see this new world as a postapocalyptic Eden. Kester’s ability to talk to animals is no longer necessary, and they return to their wilderness. In Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, the town of Lucille must come to terms with imperfection, indeed with evil. Pet, the creature, is untamable, and does not expect anyone to speak for it. Though Jam and Redemption, with Pet’s help, uncover the evil, they are not charged with fixing it. Pet punishes the wrongdoer and the adults of Lucille take responsibility for what has happened in their community. The text places the burden of keeping watch where it belongs—​on adults. Pet operates as a supernatural force and a natural predator—​even a type of rewilding. When Pet takes leave of Jam at the book’s conclusion, it encourages Jam to recite the most important lesson it has taught her: “Do not be afraid” (203). The most common injunction in the Christian Bible, this phrase commands Jam to avoid the mistakes of the adults by refusing to look away from problems. Social justice novels walk a fine line between encouraging children to see and solve problems, between encouraging activism and overwhelming them

144  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals with fear for their world and for the future. Chapter 5 explores how child activists themselves do so. Notes 1 With the exception of Wolfstongue and Jen Reese’s A Game of Fox and Squirrels (2020), which also has a wicked talking fox, most contemporary fiction and nonfiction with foxes in central roles will elicit sympathy (even tears) rather than terror. In children’s fiction these include Appelt and McGhee’s Maybe a Fox and Sara Pennypacker’s Pax and Pax: Journey Home, discussed in this chapter, as well as Christian McKay Heidicker’s delightful Scary Stories for Young Foxes (2019). The same is true of picture books, including Coralie Bickford-​Smith’s The Fox and the Star (2015), Béatrice Rodriguez’s The Chicken Thief (2005), Edward Van de Vendel and Marije Tolman’s Little Fox (2018), Phoebe Wahl’s Sonya’s Chickens (2015), and Karina Wolf and Chuck Groenink’s I Am Not a Fox (2018). A talking and letter-​writing fox is the protagonist of George Saunders’ crossover fiction and environmental fable Fox 8 (2018). The memoir of biologist Catherine Raven, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship (2021), includes allusions to Antoine de Saint-​Exupéry’s The Little Prince, another text that helped rehabilitate the fox’s image. On the cultural and natural significance of foxes, Adele Brand’s The Hidden World of the Fox (2019) makes an excellent companion to Lucy Jones’ Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain (2016). 2 Bron Taylor includes Paul Watson’s description of his eye contact with a dying whale that he could not rescue. This moment cemented his commitment to “the whales first and foremost”: The whale wavered and towered motionless above us. I looked up … into a massive eye the size of my fist—​an eye that reflected back intelligence, an eye that spoke wordlessly of compassion, an eye that communicated that this whale could discriminate and understand what we had tried to do. (Watson in Taylor 98) 3 The classic philosophical work on the impossibility of understanding the world as an animal is Thomas Nagel’s “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” (1974). A superb children’s series focalized through bats is Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing Series (1997–​2007). 4 Amy Ratelle succinctly discusses “How wolves became ‘evil’ ” (43) as a foundation for her analysis of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang. As she puts it, “The history of the wolf is also the history of its persecution” (43). 5 In North to Benjamin, set in the Yukon town of Dawson, the reader can also draw connections between the destruction of an Indigenous way of life and climate change. Edgar learns about Chief Isaac, hereditary chief of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, and the impact of gold rush prospectors on the land and people. One passage moves quickly from conversation about Chief Isaac to a discussion of the mild winters, suggesting that climate change comes from the same greedy

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  145 fever that inspired the gold rush. Later, Edgar reads the words of Chief Isaac, who laments that the “white man” has taken not only all the gold, but also the moose and caribou: “game is all gone. White man kill all” (188–​89). 6 See Ed Yong for a detailed attempt to understand the Umwelten of animals. 7 For analyses of The Lorax, book and/​or film, see Bob Henderson et al., Arielle C. McKee, Meghan Meeusen, and Greta Gaard (“Children’s”).

Works Cited Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Vintage, 2011. Albert, Céline, et al. “The Twenty Most Charismatic Species.” PLOS ONE, vol. 13, no. 7, 2018, https://​doi.org/​10.1371/​jour​nal.pone.0199​149. Appelt, Kathi and Alison McGhee. Maybe a Fox. Caitlyn Dlouhy-​Atheneum, 2017. Applegate, Katherine. Willowdeen. Illustrated by Charles Santoso, Feilwel, 2021. Armstrong, Philip. “The Gaze of Animals.” Theorizing Animals: Re-​Thinking Humanimal Relations, edited by Nik Taylor and Tania Signal, Brill, 2001, pp. 175–​99. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​jmu/​ det​ail.act​ion?docID=​717​458. Bekoff, Marc. “Rewilding Our Hearts: Making a Personal Commitment to Animals and Their Homes.” Protecting the Wild: Parks and Wilderness, the Foundation for Conservation, edited by George Wuerthner et al., Island Press, 2015. 144–​ 53. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​jmu/​det​ail. act​ion?docID=​4509​454. Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals.” About Looking, Pantheon, 1980, pp. 1–​26. Bickford-​Smith, Coralie. The Fox and the Star. Penguin, 2015. Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. William Morrow, 1975. Boggs, Colleen Glenney. “Animal.” Keywords for Children’s Literature, edited by Philip Nel, Lissa Paul, and Nina Christensen, 2nd. ed., New York UP, 2021, pp. 13–16. Brand, Adele. The Hidden World of the Fox. Mariner, 2019. Buck, Wilfred. “Atchakosuk: Ininewuk Stories of the Stars.” First Nations Perspectives, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 71–​83. Calarco, Matthew R. Animal Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2021. —​—​—​. Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford Briefs-​Stanford UP, 2015. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–​1914. Routledge, 2016. Cumyn, Alan. North to Benjamin. Caitlyn Dlouhy-​Atheneum, 2018. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Revised ed., Princeton University Press, 1981. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​j.ctt​19zb​z6c. Daston, Lorraine and Gregg Mitman, editors. “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals.” Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, Columbia UP, 2005, pp. 1–14. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “Becoming Animal.” The Animals Reader: The Essential Classical and Contemporary Writings, edited by Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, Berg, 2007, pp. 37–​50.

146  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals Dobrin, Sidney I. and Kenneth B. Kidd, editors. “Introduction: Into the Wild.” Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, Wayne State UP, 2004, pp. 1–​15. Elick, Catherine. Talking Animals in Children’s Fiction: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2015. Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet. Make Me a World, 2019. Fromkin, Victoria, et al. An Introduction to Language. 11th ed., Cengage, 2017. Gaard, Greta. “Children’s Environmental Literature: From Ecocriticism to Ecopedagogy.” Neohelicon, vol. 36, 2009, pp. 321–​34. —​—​—​. “New Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 17, no. 4, 2010, pp. 643–​65. Gold, Hannah. The Last Bear. Illustrated by Kate Slater, HarperCollins, 2021. —​—​—​. The Lost Whale. Illustrated by Levi Pinfold, HarperCollins, 2022. Grossman, Lev. The Silver Arrow. Illustrated by Tracy Nishimura Bishop, Little, Brown, 2020. Haraway, Donna J. “Making Kin: An Interview with Donna Haraway.” Interview by Steve Paulson. Los Angeles Review of Books, 6 Dec. 2019, https://​lare​view​ ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​mak​ing-​kin-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​donna-​hara​way/.​ —​—​—​. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Heidicker, Christian McKay. Scary Stories for Young Foxes. Henry Holt, 2019. Henderson, Bob, Merle Kennedy, and Chuck Chamberlin. “Playing Seriously with Dr. Seuss: A Pedagogical Response to The Lorax.” Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, Wayne State UP, 2004, pp. 128–​48. Jones, Lucy. Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain. Eliot and Thompson, 2016. Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. University of Chicago Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://​ebook​cent​ ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​jmu/​det​ail.act​ion?docID=​432​257. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham, Beacon, 1963. Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-​Deficit Disorder. Updated and expanded ed., Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2008. Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. Penguin, 2016. —​ —​ —​ . “The Word-​ Hoard: Robert Macfarlane on Rewilding Our Language of Landscape.” The Guardian, 27 Feb. 2015, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​ 2015/​feb/​27/​rob​ert-​mac​farl​ane-​word-​hoard-​rewild​ing-​landsc​ape?CMP=​share​_​ btn​_​fb. Macfarlane, Robert and Jackie Morris. The Lost Words: A Spell Book. House of Anansi, 2018. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “How Human Language Could Have Evolved from Birdsong: Researchers Propose New Theory on Deep Roots of Human Speech.” ScienceDaily, 21 Feb. 2013, www.scien​ceda​ily.com/​relea​ses/​ 2013/​02/​13022​1141​608.htm. McKee, Arielle C. “The Kind of Tale Everybody Thneeds?: Ecocriticism, Class, and the Filmic Lorax.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1, 2015, pp. 39–​57.

Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals  147 Meeusen, Meghan. “ ‘Unless Someone Like You’ Buys a Ticket to This Movie: Dual Audience and Aetonormativity in Picturebook to Film Adaptations.” Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 4, 2018, pp. 485–​98. EBSCOhost, https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​583-​017-​9334-​6. Meijer, Eva. “Of Course Animals Speak: Interview with Patrick Barkham.” The Guardian, 13 Nov. 2019, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​scie​nce/​2019/​nov/​13/​of-​cou​ rse-​anim​als-​speak-​eva-​mei​jer-​on-​how-​to-​comm​unic​ate-​with-​our-​fel​low-​bea​sts. —​—​—​. When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy. New York UP, 2019. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, 1974, pp. 435–​50. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​2183​914. Oppel, Kenneth. The Silverwing Collection: Silverwing; Sunwing; Firewing. Simon and Schuster, 2014. Parkinson, Siobhán. “An Interview with Author Sam Thompson.” Wolfstongue by Sam Thompson, illustrated by Anna Tromop, Little Island Books, 2021. Parsard, Kyle. “Null Copula.” Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America, 2016, https://​ygdp.yale.edu/​phenom​ena/​null-​cop​ula. Penfold, Nicola. Between Sea and Sky. Little Tiger, 2021. —​—​—​. Where the World Turns Wild. Little Tiger, 2020. Pennypacker, Sara. Interview by Kelly McEvers. “Left To Fend For Himself, ‘Pax’ The Fox Must Find His Human Friend.” NPR, 10 Feb. 2016, www.npr.org/​tran​ scri​pts/​466274​721. —​—​—​. Pax. Illustrated by Jon Klassen, Balzer and Bray-​HarperCollins, 2016. —​—​—​. Pax: Journey Home. Illustrated by Jon Klassen, Balzer and Bray-​ HarperCollins, 2021. Ratelle, Amy. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://​ebook​cent​ral.proqu​est.com/​lib/​ jmu/​det​ail.act​ion?docID=​1913​600. Raven, Catherine. Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship. Penguin, 2021. Reese, Jenn. A Game of Fox and Squirrels. Henry Holt, 2020. Rich, Nathaniel. “All Screechers Great and Small: An Eco Fairy Tale.” Review of Willodeen, by Katherine Applegate, illustrated by Charles Santoso. New York Times, 1 Oct. 2021, www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​10/​01/​books/​rev​iew/​kather​ine-​ appleg​ate-​willod​een.html. Robertson, David A. The Barren Grounds. Puffin-​Penguin, 2020. Rodriguez, Béatrice. The Chicken Thief. Enchanted Lion, 2010. Ross, Andrew. “Climate Change.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson et al., New York UP, 2016, pp. 36–​41. RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “What Is the Red List for UK Birds?” RSPB, www.rspb.org.uk/​birds-​and-​wildl​ife/​wildl​ife-​gui​des/​uk-​conse​ rvat​ion-​sta​tus-​explai​ned/.​ Saunders, George. Fox 8: A Story. Random House, 2013. Seuss, Dr. [Theodor Seuss Geisel]. The Lorax. Random House, 1971. Slobodchikoff, C.N., et al. Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society. Harvard University Press, 2009. JSTOR, https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​j.ctv​20hc​vct.

148  Ecology and Speech: Talking to the Animals Taylor, Bron. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. 1st ed., U of California P, 2010. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​10.1525/​ j.ctt1pp​t59. Thompson, Sam. Wolfstongue. Illustrated by Anna Tromop, Little Island Books, 2021. Torday, Piers. The Dark Wild. 2014. Viking, 2015. —​—​—​. The Last Wild. 2013. Puffin-​Penguin, 2015. —​—​—​. “Why Writing Stories about Climate Change Isn’t Fantasy or Sci-​fi.” The Guardian, 21 Apr. 2015, www.theg​uard​ian.com/​childr​ens-​books-​site/​2015/​apr/​ 21/​clim​ate-​cha​nge-​isnt-​fant​asy-​sci-​fi-​piers-​tor​day. —​—​—​. The Wild Before. Quercus, 2021. —​—​—​. The Wild Beyond. Quercus, 2015. Trimmer, Sarah. The Story of the Robins. 1786. Dodd & Mead, 1870. Ullrich, J.K. “Climate Fiction: Can Books Save the Planet?” The Atlantic, 14 Aug. 2015, www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​entert​ainm​ent/​arch​ive/​2015/​08/​clim​ate-​fict​ion-​ marga​ret-​atw​ood-​lit​erat​ure/​400​112/.​ Van de Vendel, Edward and Marije Tolman. Little Fox. Translated by David Colmer, Levine Querido, 2020. Wahl, Phoebe. Sonya’s Chickens. Tundra-​Penguin Random House, 2015. White, E.B. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. Illustrations by Garth Williams, HarperCollins, 2012. Williams College. “Bird Song Discoveries May Lead to Refinement of Darwinian Theory.” ScienceDaily, 31 Jan. 2009, www.scien​ceda​ily.com/​relea​ses/​2009/​01/​ 09013​0221​227.htm. Williams, Ted. “America’s War on Wolves and Why It Must Be Stopped.” Yale Environment 360, https://​e360.yale.edu/​featu​res/​ameri​cas-​new-​war-​on-​wol​ves-​ and-​why-​it-​must-​be-​stop​ped. Accessed 17 Feb. 2022. Wolf, Karina and Chuck Groenink. I Am Not a Fox. G.P. Putnam, 2018. Wordsworth, William. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, https://​rpo.libr​ary.utoro​nto. ca/​cont​ent/​ode-​inti​mati​ons-​immo​rtal​ity-​recoll​ecti​ons-​early-​childh​ood. Yong, Ed. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Random House, 2022.

5 Conclusion Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality

Many books analyzed in previous chapters encourage activism among their characters and child readers. Akwaeke Emezi situates Pet in a society based on progressive principles. In Brown Girl Dreaming, a young Jacqueline Woodson watches the television set as Angela Davis proclaims “Power to the people” (305). In Rita Williams-​Garcia’s One Crazy Summer, Delphine and her sisters perform at a “Free Huey” rally. Ann Clare LeZotte sets Show Me a Sign in Martha’s Vineyard of the early nineteenth century to demonstrate “that Deaf people have a proud culture and history” (Gartenberg). The book ends with the American and British sign alphabets as well as words from Penny Gamble-​Williams, an activist of the Chappaquiddick Tribe. In The Lost Whale, Rio reflects that “You can make a difference when you all work together” (109), and author Hannah Gold includes an “Author’s Note” on how to be a “planet superhero” (308). All these texts, so desirous of social change, were written by adults for children. “Aetonormativity,” Maria Nikolajeva’s term for “adult normativity,” operates at the heart of children’s literature (8). In other words, when adults write for children, they cannot help but reproduce the existing power structure, one in which, as Nikolajeva states, “adults are and will always be superior to children” (203). But what happens when we widen our view of the field to include the writings and speeches of actual young people? What if we consider youth activism? In this chapter, I define activism broadly, following Graham Meikle, who argues that activism “include[s]‌the widest range of attempts to effect social or cultural change,” usually outside of traditional politics (2). Sometimes children’s voices can reach and change the world for the better. Recent years have seen young activists such as Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Bana al-​Abed, and Marley Dias command global and national stages to speak on weighty subjects such as girls’ education, climate change, war, and diversity in children’s literature. Malala Yousafzai

DOI: 10.4324/9781003189312-5

150  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize; Greta Thunberg has addressed the United Nations; Bana al-​Abed published her memoir—​when she was nine!—​and Marley Dias, at the age of twelve, was the youngest of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in 2018 (Howard). In this chapter, I focus on young adult speech and writing in support of the environmental movement. I draw mostly from published speeches and memoirs since these are widely available, though I know these young protestors obtain much of their power from their social media presence. In particular, I examine Mya-​Rose Craig’s Birdgirl: A Young Environmentalist Looks to the Skies in Search of a Better Future (2022), Jamie Margolin’s Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It (2020), Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet (2017), and Greta Thunberg’s collected speeches in No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2019). I supplement my analyses of these texts with Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s Imaginary Borders (2020), the memoir of Greta Thunberg’s family, Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (2020), as well as speeches and additional writings by these authors. My purpose in drawing the reader’s attention to these works and their authors is to raise key questions about speech and silence that go to the heart of my concerns in this book—​most importantly, the central literary question, “Who speaks?” Notably, in contrast to much of the tradition of children’s literature, which assumes the presence of a stable autonomous white voice, each of these young authors employs an intersectional awareness, which is often why they recognize silences or are provoked to speak. Jamie Margolin identifies as lesbian, Greta Thunberg as autistic, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez as Indigenous, and Mya-​ Rose Craig as British-​Bangladeshi and visible minority ethnic (VME). This chapter argues that these intersectional identities play a critical role in the production of environmental speech. I begin with a brief introduction to the authors and their texts, all of which fall under a generous interpretation of life writing. G. Thomas Couser defines life writing as a “term to cover a wide range of not necessarily literary discursive practices devoted to representing the lives of real individuals” (Signifying 12). These texts combine memoir and “how to” guide—​usually how to be an activist—​though they may weigh these aspects differently. The two books that directly teach young people to be activists are Jamie Margolin’s Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet. In these cases, we have children, usually the subject of pedagogical regimes, becoming their authors. Jamie Margolin, born in 2001, is the founder of Zero Hour, a group that focuses on “the voices of diverse youth in the conversation

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  151 around climate and environmental justice” and that organized the first youth climate march in July 2018 (Zero Hour). Born in 2000, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez addressed the United Nations on climate change in 2015 and has been involved with the Earth Guardians since he was nine years old. This organization “trains and empowers youth to be effective leaders in the intersections of the environmental and climate justice movements” (Earth Guardians). Both Youth to Power and We Rise include strategies for budding activists. These strategies are at the center of Margolin’s Youth to Power which opens with a foreword by Greta Thunberg entitled “This Book is Your Toolbox,” and moves through the practicalities of political action from “Finding Your Why” to “Making Your Activism Go Viral” to “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and Moving Forward” (xi, 1, 138, 221). Martinez’s We Rise places instructions for changemaking at the conclusion of chapters; the first four end with a “call to action” presenting various steps for burgeoning activists (14, 25, 34, 49). Later chapters also end with measures young people can take to lead a greener life—​“Change Your Habits”—​as well as ways to exert political pressure on behalf of the environment—​“Growing the Revolution” (80, 230). Both texts include interviews with activists, roughly one per chapter. Those in Margolin’s Youth to Power tend to be young; the interviews are relatively short, focus on grassroots movements, and are meant to inspire. In Martinez’s We Rise, the interviewees are older and more well known, even celebrities, and the interviews are an opportunity for education on topics like agriculture and veganism. Though both texts combine how-​to guide and memoir, the autobiographical component is central to Martinez’s We Rise. This is obvious even in the books’ covers. Margolin’s Youth to Power features a red background with “Youth to Power” in large white capital letters. The bottom of the cover has an outline of protestors’ arms, heads, and signs. A small picture of Jamie Margolin, speaking through a bullhorn, is on the back cover. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise has a picture of the author on the front, occupying three quarters of the cover. His face reflects the sun, his hair blows in the wind, and his eyes look at the reader. He stands against the blue sky and could be on a mountaintop. The first section of the book, “Roots of Revolution,” embeds Martinez in his Mexica heritage and describes his indebtedness to the teachings and ceremonies passed down to him from his father and grandfather. Youth to Power focuses on activism with Margolin’s own experiences as examples. Thus, when she instructs her readers to “Make a list of what you are and are not willing to sacrifice for your activism,” she includes “Jamie’s List of Stuff in Her Life” (157–​58). She grants readers an additional glimpse into her world in “A Day in the Life of a Teen Activist” (164–​69). This chapter opens

152  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality with a “Disclaimer” that “This is just me honestly telling you what my life as a young activist in high school is, in the day-​to-​day grunt work. It is NOT a model … of what an activist’s ideal day should look like” (164) and follows it with her typical school-​day schedule. This description of Margolin’s routine may provide some satisfaction to readers hungry for details of Margolin’s life—​her mother brings her fruit to nibble on!—​but all in all, it remains fairly general. Margolin’s words in the previous quotation are indicative of her tone and sense of audience. She writes to young people whom she addresses as “you” in a breezy conversational style: Okay, you know why you’re in this changemaking world, and you’re reading to get started. You’re fired up and ready to go, but there’s only one problem … as you’re sitting there zoning out in math class you realize, I have no clue how to get started! (8, ellipses and emphasis in the original) Note also the use of the second person in her subtitle—​“Your Voice and How to Use It.” We Rise is more formal than Youth to Power and, as its title indicates, tends to settle on the first-​person plural even when beginning with the second person, a technique of inclusion: Whether you’re outspoken or shy, you have a role to play in this movement. We can’t afford to let the scale of these problems swallow us up. We have to be hopeful. … . Find something that you’re passionate about fighting for … It’s going to take effort from all of us. (24–​25) Although writing to young people, Martinez does on one occasion address their parents, asking them to “Help your kids connect with nature” (25). Generally, the stance toward adults is more critical in Youth to Power. In a curious similarity, both Margolin and Martinez write of their books as physical objects and encourage their readers to make them their own; the assumption, therefore, is that these books are being read in personal print copies, not as library books or ebooks or audiobooks. From Margolin: Dog-​ear it, write in it, read it out of order, highlight what you want, rip out the pages and tape them to your bedroom wall, flush it down the toilet if that’s what helps you process information better—​I won’t be offended (or maybe don’t; that would clog your toilet). (xviii)

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  153 From Martinez: So keep this book by your side as you navigate the road ahead. Keep it in your backpack, near your bed stand, or in your hybrid. Write in it, highlight it, even rip out the pages and give them to your friends. (xvi) This transgressive stance toward the materiality of the book joins author and reader as rebels against the status quo. Martinez refers to the reader as a “teammate and partner” (xvi); Margolin says, “We’re in this together” (xviii). Child activists often invert the idea that the small is unimportant. This extends even to book size. Martinez has written a much shorter book, Imaginary Borders, published in 2020. With sixty-​ four small pages, Imaginary Borders is part of the “Pocket Change Collective” series from Penguin that features writing by young activists. Though it deals with the same subjects as We Rise, Imaginary Borders does so much more briefly and informally, fusing personal essay and manifesto. The language is colloquial—​sprinkled with abbreviations, swear words, and pop culture references—​and addressed to the teen reader. The book is also more confrontational, taking adults to task for their “blatant generalizations about our generation” and their inability to “see that the older generations who’ve shaped our society have done a really shitty job of creating a world that we feel inspired to engage with” (5). The book ends with a challenge for the young reader: “Taking that first step, no matter how small, is up to you. Are you in?” (63). The power of smallness is apparent in the title of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s collection of speeches No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. On the front cover, Thunberg wears a yellow raincoat—​a symbol of childhood—​with her school strike sign in the background and a steely look on her face. This slim volume collects Thunberg’s speeches from 2018 and 2019, including at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and the UN General Assembly in the United States. Thunberg, born in 2003, began her “School Strike for Climate” in 2018, gained international attention for it, and drove a protest movement among young people called “Fridays for Future.” Whether addressing a Swedish climate march or the British Parliament, she speaks to those who are skeptical of her mission or who are not doing enough to fight climate change; that is, almost everyone. Alongside her call to action and her statistics, Thunberg weaves a story of her disability and of becoming a protestor. Ana Belén Martínez Garcia places Thunberg’s work in “the longstanding tradition of testimonial narratives, claiming

154  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality to speak on behalf of a collective whose rights and lives are endangered” (351). Her speeches are also jeremiads, warning us of dire consequences if we do not change our ways. The cover of Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis names Greta Thunberg and her family members as co-​authors. As the symbolic burning house and the subtitle indicate, the book is a crisis memoir. The burning house refers to the family’s difficulties in getting help for Greta Thunberg’s and her sister’s disabilities and also to the warming planet. “Our house is on fire” is a metaphor Thunberg uses in four of her speeches in 2018 and 2019. Her address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, begins with “Our house is on fire” and ends with “I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is” (No One 21, 22). The expression circulated in the family, since Greta Thunberg’s father also uses it in a discussion with a publisher (Our House 150). It is Greta Thunberg whose picture appears on the cover of the American paperback, and whose name, printed in white against the dark cover, stands out from those of her parents and sister. By contrast, the earliest version of the book, Scener ur hjärtat (Scenes from the Heart) gives only the names of Thunberg’s parents. The predominant narrative voice in Our House Is on Fire is Greta Thunberg’s mother, Malena Ernman, an opera singer and Eurovision participant, who, prior to Greta Thunberg’s rise to fame, was the family’s celebrity. Ernman states in the preface that this book “could have been my story. An autobiography of sorts, had I been so inclined” (1). Instead, the book describes “the road to Greta’s school strike. The road to 20 August 2018” (2). Set up like a dramatic production, the memoir is divided into four parts and within them, various “scenes.” Part I, for example, is called “Behind the Curtain,” and the book ends with the sentence “It’s time to take your place on the stage” (278). I examine Our House Is on Fire as a disability and activism memoir that provides the context for Greta Thunberg’s own speeches. Birdgirl: A Young Environmentalist Looks to the Skies in Search of a Better Future combines an in-​depth account of Mya-​Rose Craig’s life as a birdwatcher with the growing social action this inspires. The book is also an unflinching look at a family coping with mental illness, and thus, like Our House Is on Fire, a crisis memoir. Craig, who has been birdwatching almost since birth, embodies what both Margolin and Martinez urge of young readers. Margolin tells readers that “the first and most important step to being an activist is to find your why” (1); in other words, to find what motivates them. Martinez states, “Find something that you’re passionate about fighting for, and keep at it” (25). For Craig, “everything started with birds” (5). She declares that

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  155 Birdwatching has never felt like a hobby; it’s not a pastime I can pick up and put down, but a thread running through the pattern of my life, so tightly woven that there’s no way of pulling it free and leaving the rest of my life intact. (23) Birding shows Craig “the impact of habitat degradation on people and wildlife” (2), and leads, in what seems “like a natural progression,” to “[b]‌ecoming a political and environmental activist” (2). When she starts her blog “Birdgirl” in 2014 at age eleven, she quickly realizes she can use it to draw attention to environmental problems. Soon after, she “transition[s] from writing online to becoming more active in real life” by speaking to organizations (175). As a person who self-​describes as VME, Craig also notes the striking absence of people of color in the birding community, in green spaces, and in the environmental movement. In 2016 she establishes “Black2Nature, a charity whose sole objective is to increase the engagement of VME people in nature” (254). In 2020, Craig accompanies Greenpeace to the Arctic where she holds the most northerly climate strike—​on an ice floe (311). Birdgirl describes how birdwatching transforms Craig into an activist. The “how-​to” aspect of the book is in the details of this more-​ than- hobby. Craig explains the fundamentals of extreme birding as she herself learned them; for example, a “Big Year” is a year in which birdwatchers search for all the species they can in a particular place (30). The chapter structure reflects the emphasis on birds and adds a quest to each. Chapters begin on a two-​page spread, with a striking illustration of a bird on the verso, and one to three paragraphs on that same bird opening the chapter on the recto. The Craig family will encounter this featured bird during the chapter’s major expedition. As the book goes on, Craig adds information to the epigraphs about the threatened habitats of these birds to match her increasing environmental sense; thus, for the yellow-​headed picathartes, Craig notes that “[t]‌heir forest range in Africa is being destroyed at an unsustainable rate and population numbers are rapidly dwindling” (81). Only once, near the book’s end, does Craig mention herself in an epigraph. She describes the helmet vanga of Madagascar and its habitat, which may vanish by mid-​century and lead to the bird’s extinction, and reflects, “In 2050 I will be forty-​ eight years old” (279). The tone is elegiac. Bird quests provide structure to the chapters and also to the lives of the Craig family members. Within each chapter Mya-​Rose Craig charts her mother’s bipolar disorder and its effects on the family.

156  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality Generation Z and Intersectionality These writers’ views on speech and silence emerge from their generational and intersectional identities. All were born between 2001 and 2003 and thus are part of what the Pew Research Center calls “Generation Z” (Dimock). They mirror this cohorts’ sense of belonging and identity. Francesca Belotti and her cowriters, who embedded themselves in Rome’s “Fridays for Future” (FFF) movement, investigate “how a sense of generational belonging, shaped around the climate crisis, influences the grassroots political practices of young people” (720; emphasis in original). They conclude that these activists see climate change “as their own struggle” and social media as “their own thing,” with varieties of social media allocated to sub-​ groups (726). Thus, as of 2020–​2021 when Belotti et al. carried out their research, Fridays for Future activists prefer Instagram for reaching fellow young people and employ other types of social media to broaden their message (728). Jamie Margolin, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Greta Thunberg, and Mya-​Rose Craig all have Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, as well as YouTube channels. Their digital presence facilitates connections with other young people and coalitions with other activist groups. In his article on child activism, Niall Nance-​Carroll documents this digital connectedness, particularly the media-​savvy tactics of Parkland, Florida students after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (14–​15). By and large, the activists examined here connect children with changemaking. In her introduction, Jamie Margolin refers to the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Alabama and the Indigenous youth movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 (Youth xv). She reveals that though she desired to do something about climate change from the second grade on, “[t]‌he world kept sending me the message that I had to wait until I was older and graduated college to have an impact” (xix). Her interviews with mostly Gen Z organizers present models for current young people, models she herself did not have. The title of Youth to Power plays on the expression “speak truth to power” because to Margolin young people are the ones who “want change and to create a better world” (xv). “Our power,” she claims, “the power of young people, is the power to speak the pure, undiluted truth to those in high places” (223). Margolin believes that though young people do not control institutions, they can change the culture and they do so by employing discourse: “Youth have and always will steer our society’s culture toward progress. That is our power. That is our job. That is our gift.” (223). Xiuhtezcatl Martinez shares Margolin’s valorization of youth as progressive. He writes in We Rise that “One of the benefits of fighting for a cause at a young age is that your ideas have no boundaries. It allows you to use your creativity and imagination to solve problems” (24). His

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  157 last chapter, “A Rising Generation,” begins with an epigraph that he authored, which states, “our generation gets to rewrite history” (209). This chapter praises today’s young people for, among other things, their comfort with diversity, access to technology, and solutions-​oriented vision (We Rise 209–​22 passim). In Martinez’s speech to the United Nations on climate change, he says he is “representing my entire generation” as well as Indigenous people (Xiuhtezcatl). Greta Thunberg’s stance on young people has altered. She does credit the protests of Parkland, Florida, as the inspiration for her school strike (No One 24). Initially, however, she was skeptical that young people were any more progressive than adults. In Our House Is on Fire, her father suggests that children will see the purpose of Greta’s school strike for the climate, and she responds, “No. Kids act like their parents… . . I haven’t met a single kid who cares about the climate. Everyone says that it’s the kids who will save us, but I don’t believe that” (216–​17). Becoming an activist changes her perspective. In her foreword to Jamie Margolin’s book, Thunberg states, “I have been proven wrong over and over again. It turned out that countless young people felt just like I did. That our generation wanted to not only change the world but also save it” (xi). The solution to the climate crisis, she says, is “the people,” and “[A]‌bove all, the young people” (xii). In Birdgirl, Mya-​Rose Craig focuses more on her family than on her peers. In fact, she describes with honesty, as do Thunberg and her family, what every child knows, that schools are full of bullies and clueless teachers. In Our House Is on Fire, Greta’s parents describe her bullying as “like a movie montage featuring every imaginable clichéd bullying scenario” (33). These include “being pushed over in the playground, wrestled to the ground, or lured into strange places, the freeze out, the systematic shunning and the safe space in the girls’ toilets where she sometimes manages to hide and cry” (33). The school blames the bullying on Greta Thunberg’s social differences. In Birdgirl, teachers do not sufficiently address Islamophobia and racism. As with Thunberg, Craig’s activism allows her to see young people differently. When the United Kingdom was under strict isolation requirements to combat COVID-​19 in 2020, Craig “spoke to thirty young campaigners from Indigenous communities and communities of colour” on climate justice (We Have a Dream 3). These interviews form the basis of her 2021 book, We Have a Dream: Meet 30 Young Indigenous People and People of Color Protecting the Planet, which introduces readers to activists like Autumn Peltier. Environmentalism and Diversity: Intersectional Movements and Selves These young adults encourage diversity within the climate change movement and also see themselves as participants in it because of their

158  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality own intersectionality. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Jamie Margolin discuss diversity generally. Martinez posits that “one of the biggest differences between our generation and our parents’ is that we understand the power of building intersectional movements” (Imaginary 60). One might add that these figures display extraordinary skill in deploying the rhetoric of intersectionality. Martinez and Jamie Margolin both use “ecosystem” as a metaphor for political groups. Margolin states that “activism and different changemaking spaces [are] like an ecosystem” (Youth 45). Martinez extends the metaphor to say that just as biodiversity helps ecosystems, so does a diversity of people help organizations (We Rise 189), while Margolin provides a description of a forest ecosystem as an implicit example: “Each animal and plant species helps the others survive, and there is an intricate web of connections and relationships that go far beyond what meets the eye” (Youth 45). In other words, diversity is strength. Mya-​Rose Craig founded Black2Nature to address the lack of people of color in environmental organizations. These writers also see the importance of building coalitions with other social justice movements. Jamie Margolin expresses it this way: In changemaking, the women’s rights movement, environmental and climate justice movement, indigenous rights movement, Black Lives Matter movement, reproductive rights movement and feminist movement, LGBTQ+​movement, health-​ care and disability rights movement, and labor justice movement live in an ecosystem together. Within each movement is an ecosystem of its own. (45–​46) As she says succinctly, “Find your allies” (54). Xiuhtezcatl Martinez speaks specifically of racial justice, quoting the director of 350.org, an organization fighting fossil fuels, who says that “working for racial justice is a crucial part of fighting climate change” (Boeve in We Rise 197). Greta Thunberg’s early perspective is slightly different. To her, climate change is the subject that ties together other social justice movements—​feminism, anti-​racism, animal rights, etc. (Our House 131). She describes it as “the key that fits all the doors” (Our House 131). However, in another deft move of social justice fluency, she has been clear from the beginning that the blame for the climate crisis falls on the richest individuals and countries. “The bigger your carbon footprint,” she states, “the bigger your responsibility” (No One 22). Thunberg’s edited tome The Climate Book, more than 400 pages long with entries by over 100 writers, includes sections titled “We are not all in the same boat” and “Honesty, solidarity, integrity and climate justice” which emphasize the uneven effects of climate change

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  159 and the necessity for what Naomi Klein calls “a just transition” (Klein 390–​95 passim). Finally, these writers ask readers to consider the perils and privileges of particular identities. Margolin, for example, suggests that young activists “research and think about the visible identities you carry—​your race, skin color, ethnicity, symbols of faith (like a hijab), queerness, and other outwardly recognizable factors of your identity. Think about how the world sees you” (100). She reminds them that “the more marginalized identities you carry, the more you will be up against” (91). Margolin and Martinez both suggest that activists reflect on their privilege. Margolin states, “be aware of how your identity might privilege you during an act of civil disobedience. You can take advantage of it to be a more strategic ally /​ accomplice” (101). Martinez says “it’s important to be aware of privilege when it comes to the law” (We Rise 195). Again, these figures display an uncanny mastery of a certain register that commands attention in the environmental justice movement. They speak truth to power but also demonstrate power in their command of the language of activism. All these writers have a sense of themselves as a complex assortment of identities. Here I engage in some simplification to consider how certain claimed identities produce speech. Greta Thunberg’s speeches and writings have garnered the most critical attention. Emily D. Ryalls and Sharon R. Mazzarella capture the variety of responses to Thunberg herself in their article title: “  ‘Famous, Beloved, Reviled, Respected, Feared, Celebrated’: Media Construction of Greta Thunberg.” I reflect on Thunberg’s characterization of her disabilities and the connection she draws between them and her environmental advocacy. How do we address the paradox that one of the strongest voices of the environmental movement spent months fundamentally mute? Thunberg’s disabilities, as she and her family describe them, include selective mutism, an eating disorder, obsessive-​compulsive disorder, and Asperger’s syndrome (Our House 35; No One 6, 28). Though Asperger’s syndrome is no longer accepted as a diagnostic category, having been subsumed into autism spectrum disorder, this is the term that Greta Thunberg and her family use, so I continue to employ it here. According to Thunberg, Asperger’s syndrome led to her single-​minded focus on climate change and her inability to see it in any other way than, as she says, a “black and white” subject (No One 6). In the family memoir, Thunberg’s parents reflect on one of Greta Thunberg’s school lessons on ocean pollution. While other students proceeded as usual afterward, their daughter is painfully aware of the contradictions between a movie featuring the South Pacific garbage patch and the consumer culture glorified by her teachers and classmates: “She starts crying and wants go home, but

160  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality going home isn’t an option because here in the school cafeteria you have to eat dead animals and talk about fashion, celebrities, make-​up and mobile phones” (Our House 37). As her parents point out, “Greta has a diagnosis, but it doesn’t rule out the fact that she’s right and the rest of us have got it all wrong” (Our House 37). In fact, Thunberg describes her disability as a “gift,” helpful because in the face of catastrophe, unambiguous approaches are exactly what is needed (No One 28). She was compelled to do “something, anything,” and hence her school strike outside of the Swedish parliament (No One 29). As Thunberg states in one of her speeches, I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. (No One 6) Not only does Asperger’s contribute to Greta Thunberg’s relentless focus, it also fuels her methods. Greta alludes to the social communication impairments associated with autism when she describes what led her to her initially solitary school strike: “if I would have been ‘normal’ and social I would have organized myself in an organization, or started an organization by myself. But since I am not that good at socializing I did this instead” (No One 28). Though Thunberg claims her disability as a gift she also makes clear in her speeches that her disability has made her the recipient of insults, that she has been derided and called “retarded” (No One 28, 3). National Geographic for Kids, in a profile on Thunberg, simplifies Thunberg’s disability this way: “At the age of 11, Greta became so sad about climate change that she temporarily stopped speaking!” (“Greta Thunberg”). In fact, Greta Thunberg’s selective mutism occurs alongside other problems that emerge at the same age. According to her parents, “She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And. She stopped eating” (Our House 15). Not surprisingly, Greta’s parents focus primarily on the eating disorder that threatens her life. Greta continues to talk to her family, but she will speak to no one else (Our House 27). The doctors conclude that, along with the Asperger’s disorder, they “could formally diagnose her with selective mutism, too, but that often goes away on its own with time” (Our House 35).

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  161 Greta Thunberg’s parents explain that the medical diagnoses are crucial because they allow access to care and accommodations, but they are not a panacea. The diagnosis of their younger daughter, Beata, for example, gives her “a fresh start, an explanation, a redress, a remedy” (Our House 63). Having the medical terms to hand does not solve all situations, though. When Greta Thunberg is criticized in a grocery store for smelling but not eating the samples, her mother tells the store employee that her daughter “has Asperger’s. …And selective mutism. She only talks with her immediate family and she has an eating disorder, so she can’t eat them. But she loves smelling things” (Our House 121). The clerk insists that the adult, then, eat all the samples. Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis is a book that is just as much about trying to make a family well as it is about climate change, and it shows these two problems as connected. If Asperger’s encourages Thunberg to see the world in stark terms, climate change is the perfect subject to preoccupy her. It provides her with an area of expertise on which to speak, and, eventually, an audience for her speech. Thunberg’s return to speaking, apart from talking to her teacher and family, occurs in a classroom full of people studying climate change. She answers a question on “the efficiency rate of solar panels” (Our House 206). She later prepares herself to answer journalists’ questions about her school strike. On the first day of her strike, “Greta’s answers are crystal clear and cut right through the noise. As if his [Svante Thunberg’s] daughter had never done anything but being interviewed by journalists” (Our House 229). In Our House Is on Fire, Greta Thunberg’s change is depicted as a radical transformation, so that “The invisible girl who never says anything is suddenly the one who is heard and seen the most” (252). Thunberg says of her selective mutism in a TED Talk, “That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary–​now is one of those moments” (“The Disarming”). According to Ana Belén Martínez Garcia, Greta Thunberg constructs a “testimonial self” by moving from a “self in crisis” to an “empowered self” (353) who can speak for others. Martínez Garcia notes that Thunberg challenges “such misconceptions as that of the silent disabled person” (353). What is notable about Thunberg’s references to her disabilities is not, as Martínez Garcia would have it, that she speaks up despite her autism and that she is “overcoming mutism” (361), but that these conditions constitute her as a person who must pay attention to climate change and speak about it. In other words, as Jay Dolmage would have it, disability is not only constructed by rhetoric, but also produces rhetoric. This is all the more important for children, who have traditionally been disempowered.

162  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality As readers we should also be alert to the potential ethical dilemma posed by writings about children’s disabilities. G. Thomas Couser, in his sustained analysis of life writing and disability, argues that parental memoirs are “inherently problematic” (Vulnerable 56). Parents, he continues, “have privileged access to their children. Indeed, parents frequently have knowledge of their children’s lives that the children themselves lack” (Vulnerable 56–​57). The upshot might be that these children grow up to judge their parents’ writings “as violations of their autonomy, acts of appropriation or even of betrayal” (Vulnerable 57). Our House Is on Fire attempts to thwart these criticisms by including all the Ernman Thunberg family members as authors. The Preface states that “This story was written by Svante and me together with our daughters, and it’s about the crisis that struck our family” (Our House 1). The “I” of the text, however, as in the previous quotation, is clearly Malena Ernman, Greta Thunberg’s mother. Greta would have been fifteen when the book was first published in Swedish, and her younger sister Beata twelve. One might argue that the description of Greta Thunberg’s impairments in the memoir is necessary, since Greta Thunberg refers to her disability in her speeches, or that the memoir provides the evidence for Thunberg’s claims about herself. The Swedish version of the text, however, was published just before Greta started her school strike; that is, before she became a famous speech giver. And what of her younger sister, whose compulsions and rages are displayed in the memoir? The argument of Our House Is on Fire is that this disability story needs telling because this family is not unique—​“Tens of thousands of families in Sweden are experiencing this now” (57)—​and because the writing itself is therapeutic (74). Furthermore, the memoir draws a link between the family and the planet, stating they all “felt like shit” (Our House 74). A late capitalist society, the book argues, not only kills the earth but leads to “burned-​out people on a burned-​out planet” (Our House 75). Birdgirl is also a disability memoir, but here the daughter discusses her mother’s mental illness and its effects on their family. Readers may have fewer ethical qualms with Birdgirl because we assume that Helena Craig fully consents to her daughter’s portrayal. Birdgirl details Helena Craig’s struggle with bipolar illness, including depressive and manic episodes, medications, misdiagnoses, suicidal ideation, and hospital stays. Birding helps the family cope. In Birdgirl, disability is to be lived with and managed; there is, as Craig writes, “no single magic pill for Mum’s bipolar” (197). The emphasis, as in Our House Is on Fire, is on the family unit. Both texts also scrutinize overworked and underfunded medical systems. They destigmatize mental illness and thus can be read as speaking up on the subject of disability. In Birdgirl, Mya-​Rose Craig displays and challenges the views of her Bangladeshi relatives who see Helena Craig’s illness as having

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  163 supernatural origins, a “defect” caused by demonic possession that should be hidden from others (95). The book, then, by writing Helena Craig’s story, rebukes those “in our Bengali community, who reasoned that the less the family spoke of it, or even acknowledged it was a real condition, the less other people would look at us with fear or, worse, pity” (95). In Our House Is on Fire, Greta Thunberg’s mother states clearly that the impairment is one thing, the response to it another. These responses are disabling, “a handicap that is created by ignorance, incorrect treatment, discrimination or an inability to provide much-​needed societal adaptation” (56). This is the social model of disability in a nutshell. Just as disability produces speech, so do race and ethnicity. Mya-​Rose Craig grounds her activism in her identity as Black and British. She refers to herself as “Bangla” (Bangladeshi) and VME and describes how she grows up “between two cultures,” and is viewed as “Asian to my White friends, and White to the Asians” (179). This inbetweenness helps channel her activism. Craig’s identity as Bangladeshi-​British helps her raise awareness in Bangladesh of the plight of the spoon-​billed sandpiper. As Craig states, “Given I am also Bangla, I leveraged my platform and ethnicity to gain wider attention” (180). While there, she meets countless Bangladeshi birders and scientists, which forces her to realize the spectacular absence of people of color in similar British groups. In response she starts a nature-​ focused Bristol summer camp, and eventually Black2Nature (254). She becomes increasingly involved in writing and speaking on diversity and the environment, so that “the more involved I became, the more compelled I felt to push harder, to add to the conversation” (255). She talks to many organizations about making nature relevant to children of color and notes the “echo chamber of the internet,” the predominance of white male voices on the subject of climate change. “If our key influencers come from a homogeneous group repeating the same tropes, where,” she asks, “is the diversity of thought?” (255) From a self-​described “[n]‌aturally shy” (176) person, Mya-​Rose Craig becomes “[a] vocal member of a minority ethnic group… . [who] was nipping at the heels of the echo chamber” (257). “I finally felt,” she says, “like my voice was starting to be heard” (257). Like Mya-​ Rose Craig, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez critiques the whiteness of the climate change movement, at least the movement of the past (We Rise 189). Unlike Craig, who tries to locate the origins of her anti-​racist activism—​perhaps, she says, it came from a trip to Ghana where she visited Elmina Castle, the point of departure for enslaved Africans (Birdgirl 109)—​Xiuhtezcatl Martinez describes his advocacy for the environment as in his blood. “[P]‌art of being indigenous,” he states, “is understanding a connection to the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the earth we walk on. …it is in our nature to want to fight the for the health of the planet” (We Rise 10). He points to significant events when he was

164  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality young, including the assigning of his name and his choosing of a deerskin, that mark his connection to Indigeneity. He also describes moments of speaking out “that helped me find my voice and empowered me to make a difference” (We Rise 17). One of these occurs when, as a six year old, he addresses a climate change protest “in order to hold adults accountable for the current state of our environment” (We Rise 18). He begins with a prayer in Nahuatl, “giving thanks to all the elements—​water, fire, earth, and air” (18). This ordering suggests an environmental consciousness that grows out of Indigenous customs. Martinez’s sense that he bridges past and future accounts for the difference in tone between his work and those of the other youth activists here, particularly Jamie Margolin. In We Rise, he writes, “I’m painting my legacy in honor of everything my ancestors fought for and in hope for the world that I will pass onto the next generation” (12). Though his six-​year-​old self wants “to hold adults accountable,” Martinez sees himself as indebted to Indigenous elders and credits his parents and grandparents for shaping him (We Rise 215). There is, therefore, a greater sense of coalition building across generations in We Rise. Greta Thunberg is often held up by scholars and climate change activists as an example of the power of whiteness to command the stage. Ryalls and Mazzarella write compellingly on the media’s relentless focus on Thunberg’s disability and race, both of which “cement her exceptionalism” (442). Among other factors, they point to the emphasis on her blonde hair, referred to in The Atlantic as “Pippi Longstocking braids” (Meyer in Ryalls and Mazzarella 444), a characterization that compares her “to a quintessential white fictional girl” (444). Ryalls and Mazzarella argue that this focus on one white girl as the climate superhero ignores the need for widespread action that spans generations. The other climate activists studied in this chapter all refer to Thunberg directly or indirectly. An association with Greta Thunberg lends legitimacy, even if activists criticize the media for amplifying her voice at the expense of others. Thunberg writes the foreword for Jamie Margolin’s Youth to Power, and Margolin mentions her within the text as an example of someone who started a movement on her own, though Margolin notes that most activists benefit from a group (48). Margolin also refers to Thunberg’s privilege as a Swede and as white (102). In the Introduction to Birdgirl and near the book’s conclusion, Mya-​Rose Craig discusses speaking alongside Thunberg at the 2020 Bristol climate rally. Craig counts herself as someone who was influenced by Thunberg’s school strike. However, Craig implicitly disagrees with some of Thunberg’s talking points—​such as her criticisms of cheap clothing and airplane flights—​without actually naming Thunberg. At the Bristol rally, Craig speaks about the problem of demonizing fast fashion, produced in factories in the developing world, without considering the

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  165 people who depend on that work. Craig also states throughout Birdgirl that ecotourism—​which cannot occur without flying—​is necessary for environmental sustainability in the global south. Though Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise does not mention Thunberg by name, the book tries to counter the “wealthy and white voices” that have predominated in the climate change movement (57). Thunberg herself is aware of her status. Niall Nance-​Carroll in his analysis of contemporary activist writers notes that many of them, including Thunberg, speak of their relative privilege and speak from a sense of “comparative injustice” (14). Thunberg often refers to wealthy individuals as causing climate change without suffering the majority of its consequences. Wealthy countries, she argues, must drastically reduce carbon emissions so that poorer countries can tend to the necessities (No One 8). She includes herself and others in the developed world as part of the “we, who already have everything” (No One 8). This is another way of acknowledging white privilege. In this discussion of activist texts and intersectionality, I argue that in the works of Greta Thunberg, Mya-​Rose Craig, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, marginalized identities produce environmental activism. In Youth to Power, Jamie Margolin portrays her activism as a gay woman and her environmental activism as parallel activities. Margolin dedicates Youth to Power to “The Queer Kids. We are unstoppable.” The “we” of the second sentence includes her in the categories of “queer” and child. Within the text, she demonstrates her myriad identities by referring to herself as “a young, Jewish, Latina, gay woman” (179). The identity that is brought to the fore in Youth to Power is her participation in the LGBTQ+​community. She continues, “living as my authentic self without shame is an act of resistance in itself. Preserving myself and my health and sanity as a queer woman is vital because the world is built to strike people in my community down” (180). Margolin states that her participation in a LGBTQ+​ support group is itself changemaking (167). And the support group is a place for speech—​a place to reveal feelings and help others (166). Outside of Youth to Power, Margolin draws the connection between queer young people and climate justice, stating specifically in a YouTube video that more vulnerable populations, including queer youth, feel the brunt of climate change (“Youth Climate”). Jamie Margolin places herself in the collective of “the queer kids.” Greta Thunberg refers to “we autistic” (No One 6). Mya-​Rose Craig discusses how comfortable she is in Bangladesh, where she is greeted warmly by relatives who understand that she is “bilati”—​meaning British (Birdgirl 179). Xiuhtezcatl Martinez feels anchored to the earth and community through his Indigeneity. These individuals all see themselves as part of a collective. But they also stand apart from their groups as speakers and leaders. And their individual names have taken on added significance, to

166  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality the extent that there is a talismanic power in the naming of these youth activists. Greta Thunberg begins many of her speeches by uttering her first and last name, sometimes accompanied by her age or her country of origin. Her first and last names are on all her social media accounts. The world-​wide recognition of this name is why it appears as the first one in the list of family members on the cover of Our House Is on Fire. In fact, the name “Greta” is now a mononym. On some covers of No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, her first name is much larger than her last, as if only her first name matters. An internet search for “Greta” will lead with references to Thunberg. Her first name also stands alone in the titles of these two children’s books, Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet and Greta and the Giants: Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Stand to Save the World. Just as Greta Thunberg’s name connects her to her Swedish heritage and sets her apart from others, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez states that his Mexica heritage is “written in my name” (We Rise 3). In the prologue to We Rise, he identifies himself by his first name and provides instructions on how to pronounce it (ix). A couple of pages are devoted to the significance of his name, and how he received it as an infant in a ceremony. It was given to him in consultation with the Aztec calendar and means “turquoise mirror” (7). Like his long hair, his name is a sign of his Indigenous roots and he does not want to be called by an easier-to-pronounce nickname. His website, Instagram, and Twitter accounts use just his first name. Mya-​Rose Craig goes by the moniker “Birdgirl,” which is the title of her memoir. She describes her attraction as a child to the cartoon figure with the same name, claiming a sense of kinship with it. Thus, she took it for her blog, which she started when she was eleven. The name seems perfect: a combination of her passion as a birder and her youthfulness. She now uses the name in combination with her full name and the title from an honorary doctorate of science, bestowed on her at seventeen from Bristol University (thus making her, as the book jacket tells us, the youngest person in the Great Britain to have received one). Her website, still called “Birdgirl,” prominently features “I am Dr. Mya-​Rose Craig” on its main page and her Twitter handle is now “Dr. Mya-​Rose Craig@BirdgirlUK.” She juxtaposes two parts of her identity: the youthfulness of “Birdgirl” and the accomplishments of “Dr. Mya-​Rose Craig.” Though they might seem in conflict, Craig shows them as united. Her passion as Birdgirl is what led to her honorific. Speech and Silence How do these young authors discuss and characterize speech? They have all delivered orations. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, for example, begins We Rise

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  167 with a pivotal moment in his life, when at fifteen he addressed the UN General Assembly. He describes in detail the preparations for the speech—​ travel, a new suit, New York food—​and the atmosphere of the room he would address. He stresses a couple of points about this talk. Firstly, his name, a matter of deep cultural significance to him, is mispronounced. Secondly, his speech begins with prayer in Nahuatl, for which there is no translation service, thus calling attention to cultural erasure. Thirdly, he breaks the rules by speaking longer than his allotted time and “from my heart” rather than following his prepared speech (xiv). He alludes to the speech but does not replicate it in We Rise. That he opens the book with a description of the speech suggests how important it is to his consideration of himself as an activist. Not surprisingly, since Jamie Margolin and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez write books on how to be politically engaged, they both discuss speech making and, more broadly, how to speak convincingly. Both of them emphasize narrative itself as the best way to connect with others (Youth 115; We Rise 85–​86). Martinez, who is a musician, places particular importance on music and its connection to change (We Rise 28). He breaks down the essential narratives into “Story of Self,” “Story of Us,” and “Story of Now” (We Rise 226–​27) and summarizes the power of stories in this way: “Our stories are what connects us, shifts perspectives, and builds understanding” (We Rise 218). He believes that his ability to shape his own account enabled him to spread his views (We Rise 218). Though Margolin and Martinez address speech making directly, all the young people discussed here demonstrate through their actions that speech making is essential. How do they characterize the subject of speech—​their own and the speech they are responding to? There are several key similarities. Speaking is necessary because others—​adults—​have abdicated their duties and have not spoken. Speaking is necessary to oppose lies and empty rhetoric. To counter these factors, one must speak truthfully, bravely, and clearly. These activists share the view that they must speak because others with more power either have not spoken or have not acted. Both Greta Thunberg and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez realized at an early age from watching particular films that climate change was not receiving the attention it deserved. Seven-​ year-​ old Martinez responded to the documentary The Eleventh Hour (2007) by asking his parents how humans could allow climate change to occur. He decides that his own age does not matter and he must “speak out” on the subject (We Rise 19). At an even younger age, Martinez states that he wanted to help the earth and he holds “the adults” responsible for destroying it (We Rise 17). Greta Thunberg sees a school film on the South Pacific garbage patch and cannot understand how to continue life as usual (Our House 36–​37). Jamie Margolin says it

168  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality is “unacceptable” for politicians to “put the burden of the problems they created and have the power to fix on our shoulders” (Youth 88). Mya-​ Rose Craig speaks to nature groups on diversity because no one else is doing so. The speech of young people, then, fills a vacuum. Rachel Conrad examines Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Greta Thunberg’s rhetorical strategies with respect to time; for example, their characterization of the present and the future (“Youth Climate”). I want to focus briefly here on the various ways young activists position “child” and “adult,” which has some overlap with Conrad’s discussion. Firstly, youth activists draw upon the idea that children ideally should stand apart from the political sphere. Martinez quotes his younger brother at a hearing on pesticides. He describes his brother as so small that he must stand on a box so to reach the microphone. Itzcuauhtli Martinez’s words exemplify the view of the child whose innocence should be preserved: “I shouldn’t be here right now speaking to you. I should be outside playing in the park. But because you guys aren’t doing your job well, I have to come and tell you how to do it” (22). All of these details contribute to the image of the innocent child wronged: the boy’s smallness, his distance from the microphone, his sense that he should be playing. Greta Thunberg notes ironically in “We are the Change and Change is Coming,” “They say let children be children. We agree, let us be children” (No One 104). And as she says elsewhere, “I’m too young to do this” (31); she carries on because “almost no one is doing anything” (31). Her point is that children cannot be children if adults will not assume responsibility. This view that the child ideally is apolitical is connected to the romantic sense that child activists have a moral purity that allows them to see and address the failures of the powerful. Niall Nance-​Carroll refers to the children who use this tactic as “enforcers,” in that they are employing “adults’ politicization of children back on them” (10). As Margolin writes, It’s our job as young activists to point out when the emperor has no clothes, even when the rest of society goes along with the lie. Our power lies in our ability to call BS, speak truth to power, and expose the powerful for who they are. (75) Margolin instructs young activists to be aware of the power they have, including the “moral high ground” (89). But the word “child” is also used, most frequently by Greta Thunberg, to mean “immature” or “irresponsible.” In this sense, the adults who should assume responsibility are instead behaving like children. Thunberg has various formulations of this idea, including that adults, political leaders

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  169 in particular, are not “mature enough” to tell the truth (13, 78), and that they behave “like spoiled, irresponsible children” (38). Because adults have abdicated their position in order to behave like children, children must abdicate theirs to conduct school strikes and give speeches. Conrad refers to this kind of rhetoric by Thunberg as a “strategic deployment of youth status” (“Youth Climate” 235). The adult shirking of responsibility constitutes a burden on children. These young activists are most annoyed when adults seem to relinquish power by suggesting that young people will solve the problem of climate change, particularly when most children do not wield even basic political powers like the ability to vote. When Thunberg speaks before the European Parliament, she notes that she and many of her generation cannot vote in their elections (No One 50). Margolin states that “it is unacceptable for leaders to put the burden of the problems they created and have the power to fix on our shoulders” (Youth 88). Martinez, in anti-​fracking testimony to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, states, “The children of this state are being endangered because of your lack of responsibility to do your job” (We Rise 156). When Mya-​Rose Craig complains about racist social media posts at her school, the onus is put on Craig and other students of color to explain to teachers “why it is wrong to hate people of colour, and how it sucks to go to this school if you’re not White” (Birdgirl 286). Ultimately, the responsibility of speech falls then on children. As Thunberg puts it, this places children in the role of “the bad guys who have to tell people these uncomfortable things, because no one else wants to, or dares to” (No One 78). Both Margolin and Thunberg take on the “children will save the world” rhetoric. Greta Thunberg’s mother reports that Greta “snorts” when her mother says that her generation will “save the world” (Our House 138). Thunberg recognizes this as a familiar dodge: All the teachers say exactly the same thing … “Your generation is going to save the world. You’re the ones who are going to clean up after us and fix everything,” they all say, before flying off on vacation on every break … But rather than saying that, we children sure wouldn’t mind if you started helping out a bit instead. (Our House 138) Margolin remarks on the same kind of language and notes that young people do not have enough institutional power to enact the necessary changes, and there is not enough time to wait until they do (88). At the same time, Thunberg and Margolin see the incredible potential in young people and in collective action generally. Thus, Thunberg often says a variant of “no one is too small to make a difference” or

170  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality “every single person counts” (No One 2, 4). She sees children as setting an example: “But I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we all could do together if we wanted to” (No One 11). To Margolin, children are not “broken and burned out” (Youth xiv). And as she subtitles one of her chapters, “The Antidote to Hopelessness is not just Action but Community” (204). Martinez also is sustained by being part of a collective (We Rise 210). These activists characterize speech as necessary to counter the lying speech of adults. In particular, Greta Thunberg’s collected orations rely on a moral imperative to speak because others are lying. She eschews euphemisms in favor of the blunt word “lie.” People “lie” (19) and use the “convenient lie” (15). They say things that are untrue (15). Or they do not “tell it like it is” (13). Instead, they tell “fairy tales” or “bedtime stories” or “feel-​good stories” (86). They create facts (79). In Our House Is on Fire, Thunberg responds indignantly to the Swedish prime minister’s televised address on climate change with “He’s lying!” (90) because the politician refuses to assign blame. She finds the Swedish politicians more infuriating than Donald Trump because they pretend to be fighting climate change but are not, while with Donald Trump there is no pretense (Our House 96). Martinez quotes a similar comment from Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society who notes that while Justin Trudeau speaks against climate change and Donald Trump rejects it, neither are actually combatting it. Here we have a version of lying speech that we might call meaningless speech, or as Thunberg puts it in describing Canada and Sweden, “empty words” (No One 101). All these activists have encountered hate speech on social media. Thunberg reads this hate speech as emanating from the dismissiveness of politicians. She characterizes this hate speech—​often ableist and sexist—​ as a distraction from climate change. Instead of dealing with the issue at hand, “the haters,” as she calls them, are “going after me, my looks, my clothes, my behaviour and my differences” (Rowlatt). Mya-​Rose Craig writes of encountering “Islamophobic, sexist and belittling comments” (235) on her Twitter feed when she was fourteen in response to her posts about racism. She decides that speaking back is not worth it, and instead blocks users. Jamie Margolin discusses how to handle discourteous face-​ to-​face speech by asking whether that individual would speak the same way to an older person (91). She also notes that young people have to be cautious when dealing with powerful adults and may have to restrain themselves and “be the adult in the situation” so as not to be accused of being childish (92). To refute the lies of the powerful, young activists talk about speaking the truth, and speaking it forcefully and clearly. This is a dominant theme

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  171 in Greta Thunberg’s collected speeches. The truth must be spoken; in fact, there is a moral imperative to “speak out” (21). She refers often to “the truth,” and in other words, to “tell it like it is” (103). Margolin understands this truth-telling as the special provenance of the young when she writes of their ability to address the powerful (Youth 223). For others to comprehend this truth, it must be spoken clearly, a modifier that Thunberg repeats (12, 19, 21). If truth is to gain attention, it must be spoken forcefully. Mya-​Rose Craig states that she had to push hard to make change, including writing to people with power “in clear, firm and forceful terms,” even though this led to difficult conversations (254). By contrast, then, adult speech is positioned as unclear and unforceful, even weakened and devalued. Speaking truth to power may mean being impolite, and thus violating the social convention of children speaking respectfully to adults. Greta Thunberg is clearly on the side of directness, no matter how it comes across. Her point is that a time of crisis “is not the time for speaking politely” (19). Margolin, in instructing young activists, counsels politeness most of the time—​“Be polite, pleasant, and civil”—​as the best way of getting what they want (116). But not so much as to be a pushover (133), and not in all situations. She reflects that sometimes “you just gotta say, ‘Screw it,’ and do you. Freak out, get mad, yell when it’s called for and appropriate and the issue is super serious” (92). These writers and speakers claim that their speech is their own rather than being controlled by others. Their assertions are in response to those who believe that children cannot produce speeches or books on their own. This idea surfaces whenever young people produce creative work. Rachel Conrad in Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency takes up the subject of adult diminishment of the work of children; in particular, the “exaggerated concern about the extent of adult mediation in the production of youth-​authored texts” (21), which we can extend to speeches. She notes that these concerns rest on the assumption that child writers receive counsel in a way that adult writers do not (22), which of course is false. In becoming a speaker for the environment, Mya-​Rose Craig states, “I had no grand plan, I wasn’t being directed by my parents or anyone else; I was simply following my passion” (177). She later discusses the pros and cons of having her mother manage her speaking engagements (297). Jamie Margolin also discusses what parents should and should not do, criticizing “activist stage moms” and stating the extent of her own parents’ involvement, which boils down to her mother accompanying her on her travels and her father reviewing her contracts and schedule (216). Jamie Margolin makes clear that she holds her parents at arm’s length from her activist work (217). Greta Thunberg insists that she writes her speeches herself with help from experts on the science of climate change

172  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality (No One 28). To the criticism that she sounds more mature than she is, she responds with a rhetorical question: “Don’t you think that a sixteen–​ year-​old can speak for herself?” (29). This undermining of child speech is connected to the insult Thunberg and other children striking have received of being “puppets” (33). Greta Thunberg in particular draws upon the verbs “listen” and “hear” as the necessary accompaniment to speech. She mentions the way in which the speech of young people is often ignored, or not listened to, because they are children, and thus it is easy to dismiss them (No One 52, 55). She argues that this would be fine, as long as politicians would listen to the scientists on the climate crisis (52, 101), but of course, they do not. The microphone symbolizes this refusal to listen, and Thunberg employs it in variations of the phrase “Is my microphone on?” (57). Here she implies that the lack of action on climate change stems from an inability to literally hear what she is saying. For if legislators could hear, they would act. She promises her supporters that those who strike and march to draw attention to climate change will keep at it “until they listen” (102). How do these young activists, then, characterize silence? Silence in their texts functions as oppression, omission, or stratagem. We can supplement our understanding of these categories by considering silence, as Adam Jaworski notes, on a continuum, “from the most prototypical, (near) total silence of not uttering words to the least prototypical cases of silence perceived as someone’s failure to produce specific utterances” (Jaworski in Murray, 8; emphasis in original). In other words, silence can be literal, which Michael Billig and Cristina Marinho define as “an absence of speech or other rhetorical noise” (22). Even literal silences, as Billig and Marinho point out, “possess rhetorical meaning” (22). Silence can also be metaphorical—​not the absence of speech but the absence of a particular subject (Billig and Marinho 22). This silence can be connected to the “not listening” mentioned above. Silence can be a tool of the strong to oppress the weak. Such old proverbs as “children should be seen and not heard” reflect the longstanding cultural bias that favors adult speech at the expense of children’s. Jamie Margolin begins Youth to Power by reminding young people that from the start of school, children are instructed, “Be quiet, raise your hand if you want to speak, listen to authority always, put your head down and do your work and never question anything you are told” (xiii). Here silence is a strategy adults employ to control children’s speech and thoughts. The demand for literal silence (“Be quiet”) and unquestioning acceptance of authority leads to docile subjects who, as Margolin states, become unable to challenge the status quo (xiv). The bias in favor of adult speech and against child speech is rooted in aetonormativity. Children should listen to their wiser elders.

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  173 Silence is also a tool of other powerful groups, past and present. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez refers to silence metaphorically in his discussion of colonialism. He writes that the Spaniards eliminated much of Aztec culture “and tried to silence our voices,” including attempts to extinguish the Mexica language (We Rise 4). In Birdgirl, Mya-​Rose Craig explains that it was up to her, a teenager, to initiate discussions on diversity with white environmental groups. These organizations, while not actively excluding people of color, had done nothing to include them. Their inactivity, which we can describe as a metaphorical silence, becomes clear once Craig engages with them. The onus was put on her to help them plan outreach; without her, they would carry on as usual (188). Craig describes herself as “the lone voice fighting to be heard through the deafening silence of inertia” (254). Both Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and Jamie Margolin acknowledge that this type of silencing can also happen within youth activist groups. Margolin advises young people to correct these situations and allow speech from “the most marginalized and silenced voices in your group” (210). Xiuhtezcatl Martinez advocates a strategy common among progressive groups called “step up, step back” which is meant to allow individuals whose opinions have typically not been appreciated the chance to contribute. Craig’s experience of institutional metaphorical silence is that it functions both as oppression and as omission. This is the silence of excluded or ignored topics. Governments, institutions, people speak about many things, but they choose to ignore others. This silence propels Greta Thunberg’s activism and she returns to it in many of her speeches. In an early speech, from September 2018, she says to those who disregard climate change, “Your silence is almost worst of all” (4). In “Scene 67,” entitled “Greta’s Monologue,” of Our House Is on Fire, Greta Thunberg tells her mother that she recalls learning about climate change and feeling it must be false, because if it were accurate, “we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. And there was basically no one saying anything about it” (138). She uses this recollection in her speech, “Almost Everything is Black and White,” when she mentions the cognitive dissonance she felt as an eight-​year-​old learning about climate change and finding it strange that “No one talked about it. Ever” (No One 6). She then articulates what people are silent on, beginning with reducing emissions: no one ever mentions it. Nor does anyone every mention anything about the greenhouse gases … Nor does anyone ever mention anything about the greenhouse gases already locked in the system … Nor does hardly anyone every mention that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction … Furthermore, does no one ever speak about the aspect of equity or climate justice. (No One 7–​8)

174  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality Employing anaphora, Thunberg succinctly articulates the main challenges of climate change by saying what is usually unsaid. She will be the someone who counters what “no one” will say. Many of her speeches use this type of unveiling. The opposition to this kind of silence might be phrased as “breaking the silence” or as “speaking up.” Jamie Margolin uses the former expression as she tries to encourage young people to talk. “Years can go by,” she says, “when no one says anything or those who do don’t say enough—​so you just have to stand up and decide, enough already, and be the one to break the silence” (223). Greta Thunberg frequently uses the phrase “speaking up” as admonishment. For example, in a scenario she employs in Our House Is on Fire, and with slight changes in “Unpopular,” her speech at the UN Climate Change Conference, she imagines herself at age seventy-​ five faced with the questions of her children. In Our House Is on Fire, this section is entitled “A Letter to Everyone Who Has a Chance to be Heard” (83). Here Thunberg states “Perhaps they are going to wonder why you, who had the chance to be heard, didn’t speak up. … . we want you to start speaking up and telling it like it is” (83–​84). In her presentation, she states “Maybe they will ask about you. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything, while there was still time to act” (No One 13). The “speaking up” of Our House Is on Fire has become the action of “Unpopular.” But silence can also be wielded by the less powerful as a strategy of resistance. Notable examples include Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the American national anthem—​using silence and gesture—​or the young Black activists who stayed silent while being insulted at the Greensboro lunch counter in 1960. Francesca Belotti and her cowriters note that they observed young people in the “Fridays For Future” Rome movement treat adults who did not respect youth leadership with “cold, exceedingly polite silence” (727). Silence operates in that case as a corrective. In We Rise Xiuhtezcatl Martinez describes how his younger brother, Itzcuauhtli, “decided to use silence as a megaphone” to draw attention to those hurt by climate change and the lack of media coverage (We Rise 62). To do so, he taped his mouth, emphasizing his mouth and using it as a symbol for the less powerful, and did not talk for more than a month (62). Additionally, as part of his protest, eleven-​year-​old Itzcuauhtli Martinez also employed the strategy of a set time for silence by asking others to join him for an hour of silence in December 2014. The timed silence engaged in by Itzcuauhtli Martinez is similar to a “commemorative silence.” This type of silence is, as Billig and Marinho note, a “respectful, literal silence” with “rhetorical meaning” (22). In We Rise, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez reflects on the two minutes of silence during the People’s Climate March of 2014 in New York City. He notes the impressive nature of silence in a place known for its noise (193). Usually,

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  175 a speaker introduces a commemorative silence. When there is no introduction, commemoration becomes resistance. An example is X Gonzalez’s unexplained (at first) silence during their speech at the March for Our Lives rally in 2018. Gonzalez starts to speak, then remains silent, so that their combined time of six minutes and twenty seconds, with more than four minutes of silence, equals the time the shooter spent on his rampage. The crowd is supportive but confused until Gonzalez ends the silence and explains it. The commemorative silence is supposed to allow for reflection. Quieting speech also means that what might be deemed background noise comes to the foreground. In Birdgirl, silence is a contemplative skill that allows Mya-​Rose Craig to engage with nature. Crucial for the activity is learning to blend in with the natural world; only then will she see and hear the birds (125). Eventually birding becomes a meditative experience that quiets “the insistent voice” inside her (204). The rainforests and other environments that Craig visits are usually very noisy. Occasionally, however, she describes places where nature exhibits a strange lack of noisiness; this reality, which Craig experienced in Rwanda, signals destruction and disrupted ecosystems (207). Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the text that started the environmental movement, also captures an eerie quiet as it elegizes the widespread death of birds from insecticides. As we reflect on speech and silence in these nonfiction texts, we can connect them to the fiction discussed in earlier chapters. All these works are concerned with the strategic deployment of silence and speech and the importance of naming. In many texts, eleven is the significant age. It is when Elijah Freeman (Elijah of Buxton), Delphine Gaither (One Crazy Summer), Cally Fisher (A Dog Called Homeless), and Kester Jaynes (The Last Wild)—​as well as many other protagonists discussed here—​begin their stories. It is also when Greta Thunberg becomes selectively mute and Mya-​ Rose Craig starts her blog, suggesting that their works are also coming-​ of-​age narratives. We can consider what these texts ask us or even compel us to attend to: climate change, racism, and the rights of the Indigenous, but also the power of narrative. We might even rethink our position as humans as we enter fictional portals to places where animals communicate with us. Mya-​Rose Craig asks us to forget ourselves by watching birds. Greta Thunberg reminds us that we are nature. She combats speciesism by prompting us to recall our animalness, referring to humans as “an animal species among others” (No One 5) and more particularly as “We are Homo sapiens sapiens. Of the family Hominidae. Of the order of Primates. Of the class Mammalia. Of the kingdom Animalia. We are a part of nature. We are social animals. We are naturally drawn to our leaders” (No One 69). The activists discussed in this chapter demonstrate that children can speak for themselves and on behalf of their world, that

176  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality they can indeed lead. Piers Torday’s The Last Wild Trilogy ends with an appeal to the child reader: “The animals have something to say … are you listening?” Perhaps the more pertinent question would be: “The children have something to say … are we listening?” Works Cited Belotti, Francesca, et al. “Youth Activism for Climate On and Beyond Social Media: Insights from Fridays for Future-​Rome.” The International Journal of Press/​Politics, vol. 27, no. 3, 2022, pp. 718–​37. Billig, Michael and Cristina Marinho. “Literal and Metaphorical Silences in Rhetoric: Examples from the Celebration of the 1974 Revolution in the Portuguese Parliament.” Qualitative Studies of Silence: The Unsaid as Social Action, edited by Amy Jo Murray Murray and Kevin Durrheim, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 21–37. Camerini, Valentina. Greta’s Story: The Schoolgirl Who Went on Strike to Save the Planet. Illustrated by Veronica Carratello, translated by Moreno Giovannoni, Simon and Schuster Children’s UK, 2019. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment. Edited by Sandra Steingraber, The Library of America, 2018. —​—​—​. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. U of Massachusetts P, 2020. —​ —​ —​ . “Youth Climate Activists Trading on Time: Temporal Strategies in Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s We Rise and Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 45, no. 2, April 2021, pp. 226–​43. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing. U of Michigan P, 2009. —​—​—​. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Cornell UP, 2004. Craig, Mya-​Rose. Birdgirl. Penguin Random House UK, 2022. —​—​—​. We Have a Dream: Meet 30 Young Indigenous People and People of Color Protecting the Planet. Illustrated by Sabrena Khadija, Magic Cat-​ Abrams, 2021. Curtis, Christopher Paul. Elijah of Buxton. Scholastic Canada, 2007. Dimock, Michael. “Defining generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins.” Pew Research Center, 17 Jan. 2019, www.pewr​esea​rch.org/​fact-​ tank/​2019/​01/​17/​where-​mill​enni​als-​end-​and-​gen​erat​ion-​z-​beg​ins/.​ Dolmage, Jay. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse UP, 2014. Earth Guardians. “Earth Guardians—​Our History.” Earthguardians.org, www. ear​thgu​ardi​ans.org/​our-​story-​1. Accessed 3 Feb. 2023. Emezi, Akwaeke. Pet. Make Me a World, 2019. Gartenberg, Benjamin. “After Words.” Show Me a Sign, written by Ann Clare LeZotte, Scholastic, 2020. Gold, Hannah. The Lost Whale. HarperCollins, 2022. Gonzalez, X [Emma]. “Emma Gonzalez’s Powerful March for Our Lives Speech (Video).” YouTube, 24 Mar. 2018, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​u46H​zTGV​ Qhg&ab_​chan​nel=​Guard​ianN​ews.

Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality  177 “Greta Thunberg Facts!” National Geographic Kids, www.nat​geok​ids.com/​uk/​ kids-​club/​cool-​kids/​gene​ral-​kids-​club/​greta-​thunb​erg-​facts/​, accessed 3 Feb. 2023. Howard, Caroline and Teddy McDarrah. “Thirty under Thirty 2018: The Teenagers.” Forbes, 14 Nov. 2017, www.for​bes.com/​sites/​car​olin​ehow​ard/​ 2017/​11/​14/​30-​under-​30-​2018-​young​est-​teenag​ers/​?ss=​30unde​r30&sh=​1b6e4​ 7e67​362. Klein, Naomi. “A Just Transition.” The Climate Book, edited by Greta Thunberg, Allen Lane-​Penguin, 2022, pp. 390–​95. Lean, Sarah. A Dog Called Homeless. Harper, 2012. LeZotte, Ann Clare. Show Me a Sign. Scholastic, 2020. Margolin, Jamie. “Foreword.” How to Make a Better World: For Every Kid Who Wants to Make a Difference, written by Keilly Swift, illustrated by Rhys Jefferys, DK-​Penguin Random House, 2020, p. 6. —​—​—​. “Youth Climate Activist Jamie Margolin on the Intersection of the Climate Justice and LGBTQ Movements (Video).” YouTube, 8 Oct. 2020, www.yout​ ube.com/​watch?v=​RWav​fxi4​M3o&ab_​chan​nel=​GLAAD. —​—​—​. Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It. Hachette, 2020. Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl. Imaginary Borders. Penguin Workshop-​Penguin Random House, 2020. —​—​—​. “Indigenous Climate Activist at the High-​Level Event on Climate Change (Video).” YouTube, 29 June 2015, www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​27gt​Z1oV​ 4kw&ab_​chan​nel=​United​Nati​ons. —​—​—​. We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet. Rodale, 2017. Martínez Garcia. Ana Belén. “Constructing an Activist Self: Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism as Life Writing.” Prose Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 349–​66. Meikle, Graham. “Introduction: Making Meanings and Making Trouble.” The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, edited by Graham Meikle, Taylor and Francis, pp. 1–​16. Murray, Amy Jo and Kevin Durrheim. “Introduction: A Turn to Silence.” Qualitative Studies of Silence: The Unsaid as Social Action, edited by Murray and Durrheim, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 1–10. Nance-​ Carroll, Niall. “Children and Young People as Activist Authors.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 14, no. 1, 2021, pp. 6–​21. Nikolajeva, Maria. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. Routledge, 2010. Rowlatt, Justin. “Climate Change: Greta Thunberg Calls out the ‘Haters’.” BBC News, 28 Sept. 2019, www.bbc.com/​news/​scie​nce-​envi​ronm​ent-​49855​980. Ryalls, Emily D. and Sharon R. Mazzarella. “‘Famous, Beloved, Reviled, Respected, Feared, Celebrated:’ Media Construction of Greta Thunberg.” Communication, Culture and Critique, vol. 14, no. 3, 2021, pp. 438–​53. Thunberg, Greta, editor. The Climate Book. Allen Lane-​Penguin, 2022. —​—​—​. “The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, 12 Dec. 2018, www.ted.com/​talks/​greta_​thunberg_​the_​disarming_​case_​to_​act_​righ​t_​no​w_​on​_​cli​mate​_​cha​nge/​tra​nscr​ipt?langu​age=​en. —​—​—​. “Foreword.” Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It, written by Jamie Margolin, Hachette, 2020, pp. xi–​xii.

178  Conclusion: Youth Activism, Rhetoric, and Intersectionality —​—​—​. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. Penguin, 2019. Thunberg, Greta, et al. Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis. Translated by Paul Norlen and Saskia Vogel, Penguin, 2020. Torday, Piers. The Last Wild. 2013. Puffin-Penguin, 2015. Tucker, Zoë. Greta and the Giants: Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Stand to Save the World. Illustrated by Zoe Persico, Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2019. Williams-​Garcia, Rita. One Crazy Summer. HarperCollins-​Amistad, 2010. Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. 2014. Puffin, 2016. Zero Hour. “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting for.” This Is Zero Hour, www. thi​sisz​eroh​our.org/​, accessed 3 Feb. 2023.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 144n1 refers to note 1 on page 144. Abram, David, 134–​135 accountability, adult, 2, 168–​170 activists, young. See youth activists and activism adults: activism countering lying speech of, 167–​168, 170; adult normativity (aetonormativity), 149, 172; adult-​child power imbalances in LSM, 20–​22, 27, 32–​33, 55–​56, 106; as characters/​ helpers, 25–​26; paradox of adult authors’ construction of children’s lit, 2; understanding adult language in coming-​of-​age novels and, 66–​71, 79, 81, 83–​88 Aesop’s fables, 107, 112, 114, 127 aetonormativity, 149, 172 African American children’s literature, 1–​2, 53–​54, 149–​150; addressing white people/​use of ma’am in, 80–​81; African American gothic and, 82–​83; The Brownies’ Book, 8; knowledge of America’s racial history in, 61, 63–​66, 72; coming of age as signifying/​manipulating speech in, 10, 61–​64, 66–​69; coming of age as signifying/​storytelling in, 71–​73, 89–​95; coming of age as signifying/​understanding adult language in, 66–​71, 79, 81, 83–​88, 97; community and family in, 66, 71–​73, 77, 94–​95, 101–​102; double consciousness in, 74–​75, 77–​78,

83, 85; fantasy fiction and, 11; folktales/​tall tales in, 66–​67, 72, 78, 90–​94; learning use of language in response to racism and, 88–​89; N-​word and, 79–​81; names and naming in, 66, 95–​99; need for improved representation of children of color, 8; religious righteousness in, 73–​74; silencing in through preponderance of slavery/​Civil Rights/​Reconstruction plotlines, 8–​10, 64–​66; texts used in analysis of, 10–​11, 62–​63; travel to heterotopias (“other places”/​ counter-​sites) in, 66, 74–​79, 81, 83, 96; trickery and trickster characters in, 62, 65, 67–​68, 73–​74, 91–​93; white authors stereotypes of African Americans and, 8. See also Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson); Elijah of Buxton (Curtis); Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​Garcia); Pet (Emezi); race in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs; Sugar (Rhodes) After Zero (Collins), 17–​18, 22–​25, 27–​28, 30–​35 age: age 11 as significant for youth activists, 175; of characters in children’s lit, 9, 18 agency, 66, 81; empowered speech as, 2; portraying silence/​silencing as lack of, 1–​2; return to speech

180  Index and, 32, 56; of youth activists and activism, 175–​176 al-​Abed, Bana, 149–​150 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 6–​7, 29, 111 alternative forms of communication, 25, 32, 35–​36, 38–​39, 175; animal language as, 108–​110; animal language vs. human, 109–​110; animal sounds as, 119–​120; of animal-​children (without speech), 106, 112–​113, 116–​122, 124, 131, 134–​138, 142, 149; eye-​contact in animal-​human communication as, 120–​121; human ability to understand animals and, 115–​116, 118–​119, 121–​123; in Pet (Emezi), 54–​56, 61; prosthetic speech device as, 27, 39, 44, 47; sign language as, 48–​52, 54; telepathic communication, 25, 33, 55, 61, 111, 135. See also animals/​animal communication in children’s literature Andersen, Hans Christian, 29. See also Little Mermaid, The (Andersen) Anderson, Laurie Halse, 18 animals/​animal communication in children’s literature, 4–​7, 11, 26, 33, 105, 118–​119; ‘outsider’ child protagonists and, 116–​117; in 18th century children’s lit, 108–​109; alternative forms of communication (animals-​children without speech), 106, 112–​113, 116–​121, 124, 131, 134, 136–​138, 142, 149; animal language, 108–​109, 111–​114; animal language vs. human, 109–​110; animal sounds in, 119–​120; animal speech as burden in, 114; animals as disabled characters and, 27; animals as raising human environmental awareness/​literacy and, 109, 123–​129, 133–​134, 136–​137; animals as saviors of humans and, 123; birds and birdwatching/​ birdsong symbolism and, 44–​46, 72, 91, 108–​109, 113; children as closer to natural world view in, 110–​111, 121, 137; climate change and, 11,

105–​106, 123–​126; communication difficulties with fellow humans in, 117–​118; Cree myth and language and, 114–​116, 128, 141–​142; cross-​species alliances in, 115; deer symbolism, 46–​47; desire for increased intimacy/​ connection and, 120, 133–​135; disability representation and, 142–​143; dreams of animals in, 115; eye-​contact in human-​animal communication, 120–​121; in folklore/​fables, 67, 92–​94, 107, 112, 114, 127; goldfish as symbol, 46; human ability to understand animals and, 115–​116, 118–​119; humans/​ children as saviors of animals/​ environment in, 122–​123, 137–​138; lack of listening to animal speech by humans, 121–​123, 138, 175–​176; limitations of language/​speech in, 119; nature deficit disorder and, 11, 124, 130–​134; non-​verbal communication and, 106; origins of animal speech in, 113; as symbols in LSM, 26–​28, 31; texts used in analysis of, 106, 124; works of Trimmer in 18th century and, 107–​109, 111, 122 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), 29–​30 anorexia, verbal, 30–​31 Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? (Connor), 10, 27, 35–​40, 44–​49, 51–​53 aphasia, 30–​31 Appelt, Kathi, 106, 113. See also Maybe a Fox (Appelt and McGhee) Applegate, Katherine, 106. See also Willodeen (Applegate) Armstrong, Philip, 120 Asperger’s syndrome/​autism, 27, 35, 44, 47; of Greta Thunberg, 150, 159–​161, 165 Barbauld, Anna, 4–​6, 107–​108. See also Hymns in Prose for Children (1781, Barbauld); Lessons for Children (1778-​79, Barbauld) Barren Grounds, The (Robertson), 106, 117, 128–​129, 134; animal

Index  181 language in, 112; climate change in plot of, 124; Cree culture and language in, 114–​116, 128, 141–​142 Bauby, Jean-​Dominique, 25 bears, 119, 125–​126. See also Last Bear, The (Gold) “becoming animal,” 133–​135 Bekoff, Mark, 133–​134 Bell, Alexander Graham, 52 Berger, John, 120 Between Sea and Sky (Penfold), 106, 132 Bible, 4, 29, 56, 143 Bildungsroman, 64, 66, 74, 95 Birdgirl (Craig), 150, 154–​155, 157, 163–​166, 169, 173, 175; as disability memoir, 162 birds and birdsong: in African American folktales, 91–​92; animal language in 18th century children’s lit and, 108–​109; crows, 72, 91, 113; as symbolism, 26–​28, 31–​32, 91–​92. See also animals/​animal communication in children’s lit; Birdgirl (Craig) Bishop, Rudine Sims, 8, 11, 62, 101. See also Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature (Bishop) Black Panthers, 65–​66, 73–​74, 78–​79, 84, 88, 101 Black2Nature (environmental organization), 155, 158, 163. See also Craig, Mya-​Rose Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 28–​29 Br’er Rabbit and Hyena (folktale), 92–​94 Brothers Grimm, 28–​29. See also fairy-​ tale motifs Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson), 10, 62–​64, 66, 69, 89, 92, 95, 97–​98, 101–​102, 149; addressing white people/​use of ma’am in, 80–​81; haikus in, 63, 78 Brownies’ Book, The, 8, 12n5 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 6, 8. See also Little Princess, A (Burnett); Secret Garden, The (Burnett) Calarco, Matthew R., 11, 109–​110, 135

“call and response,” 62, 84, 99–​100 Carroll, Lewis, 6, 29. See also Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) cerebral palsy, 31, 36, 47. See also Out of My Mind (Draper) “charismatic species,” 125–​126 Charlotte’s Web (White), 111, 115, 121 children’s literature: adult normativity (aetonormativity) of, 149, 172; class in, 3, 6–​8; defined, 9, 18; ecocriticism in, 2, 11, 106; “Golden Age of Children’s Literature” (1865-​1911), 6; imagination as main feature of, 6; journeys/​travel in, 66, 74–​79, 81, 83, 96; lack of diversity in, 54; paradox of adult authors construction of, 2. See also African American children’s literature; animals/​animal communication in children’s literature; disability in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs; environmental children’s literature/​ memoirs; gender in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs; literary selective mutism (LSM); race in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs; youth activists and activism “children should be seen and not heard,” 4, 12, 172 class in children’s books, 3, 6–​8 “cli-​fi” (climate fiction), 124. See also Barren Grounds, The (Robertson); environmental children’s literature/​ memoirs; Last Bear, The (Gold); Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday); Lost Whale, The (Gold); North to Benjamin (Cumyn); Silver Arrow, The (Grossman); Willodeen (Applegate) climate change, 11, 105–​106; agency and leadership of youth activists and activism and, 175–​176; critique of whiteness in climate change activism, 163–​165; extinction and endangerment and, 126–​128; in talking animal/​animal communication stories, 123–​126; youth activists on diversity and coalition-​building in, 157–​159. See also environmental children’s

182  Index literature/​memoirs; youth activists and activism Collins, Christina, 17, 28, 33. See also After Zero (Collins) commemorative silence, 174–​175 communication. See alternative forms of communication Connor, Leslie, 10, 27, 35, 40. See also Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? (Connor) Conrad, Rachel, 11, 168–​169, 171 Cosslett, Tess, 108–​109, 111 Couldry, Nick, 3 Couser, G. Thomas, 10, 20, 31, 150, 162 Craig, Mya-​Rose, 11, 168–​169, 171, 173, 175; Black2Nature (environmental organization) of, 155, 158, 163; environmental activism of (birds), 154–​155, 175; hate speech and, 169–​170; intersectional awareness/​identity of, 150, 155, 163; social media presence of, 156, 166. See also Birdgirl (Craig); youth activists and activism Cree myth and language, in talking animal stories, 114–​116, 128–​129, 141–​142 crisis. See trauma and children’s literature crows, 72, 91, 113. See also birds and birdsong Cumyn, Alan, 106, 112. See also North to Benjamin (Cumyn) Curtis, Christopher Paul, 10, 62, 64, 79, 95. See also Elijah of Buxton (Curtis) Dark Wild, The (Torday), 107, 124, 137, 140. See also Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday) Darwin, Charles, 109–​110 Davis, Lennard J., 2, 10, 19–​20, 49, 52 Day, Sara K., 27, 40, 44–​45 deafness/​Deaf culture, 48–​53, 149; ethnicity and, 52–​53. See also Show Me a Sign (LeZotte) death, 22–​23, 32–​34, 43 deer, as symbol, 46–​47 “deep ethology,” 133–​134

Delueze, Gilles, 134–​135 Derrida, Jacques, 120 Dias, Marley, 1–​2, 149–​150. See also Marley Dias Gets it Done and So Can You! (Dias) disability in children’s/​YA literature/​ memoirs, 2–​3, 10; “disability community,” 48, 50; “disability drift,” 36–​37, 40, 51; “disability hierarchy,” 47; “kill or cure” model of, 9, 20; animal symbolism and, 44–​46; animals as disabled characters, 27; bird symbolism in, 26–​27, 44–​46; deafness/​Deaf culture and, 48–​53; disability as metaphorical silence, 9; disability as narrative crutch in LSM, 19–​20, 56; disability memoirs of youth environmental activists, 150, 153–​154, 157–​163, 166–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174; disability studies on problematic plot lines of, 9, 19–​20; eugenics and, 51; human-​ animal communication and, 118–​119; invisibility of disabled characters and, 40, 52; medical vs. social model of disability and, 20, 25, 28, 35, 47, 49, 51–​52, 162–​163; narrative resolutions curing disability, 10, 20; nonspeaking characters (non-​LSM texts) and, 35–​48; parental memoirs of disability as problematic, 162; problems with metaphorical representation of, 9, 18, 20, 31, 53, 142–​143; Schneider Family Book Award and, 1, 9; texts used in analysis of, 10, 17. See also literary selective mutism (LSM) disability studies, texts featuring selective mutism and, 17, 19, 23, 56; medical vs. social model of disability and, 20, 25, 28 Dog Called Homeless, A (Lean), 1, 10, 17, 21–​26, 30–​32, 175 dogs: language of, 112; prairie dog communication, 110. See also animals/​animal communication in children’s literature; North to Benjamin (Cumyn) Dolmage, Jay, 9–​10, 36, 47, 161

Index  183 double consciousness, 74–​75, 77–​78, 83, 85; defined, 75 Douglass, Frederick, 65, 70–​71, 87, 96. See also Elijah of Buxton (Curtis) Draper, Sharon M., 10. See also Out of My Mind (Draper) DuBois, W. E. B., 75 “dumb,” as term, 4–​5, 36, 49–​50, 117 Durrheim, Kevin, 11 dystopian environmental fiction, 105–​106, 130 Eckert, Penelope, 3–​4, 30 ecocriticism, 2, 11, 106; feminist ecocriticism, 106 elective mutism, vs. selective, 19–​20, 22, 26, 34 Elick, Catherine, 109, 111, 115 Elijah of Buxton (Curtis), 10, 62–​69, 87, 91, 95–​96, 175; double consciousness in, 74–​75, 77–​78, 83, 85; plot summary of, 64–​66; signifying/​understanding adult language in, 66–​71, 79, 81, 83–​84, 86–​87; travel to Carnival of Oddities in, 74–​77, 81, 83, 96; trickery and religious righteousness in, 73–​74 Emezi, Akwaeke, 9, 149. See also Pet (Emezi) empowered speech, 2, 161, 164 English: sign language and, 50–​51; talking animal stories and, 109, 111, 114, 118; use of non-​standard, 63, 140 environmental children’s literature/​ memoirs, 11, 105; agency and leadership of youth activists and activism and, 175–​176; animal extinction and endangerment themes in, 126–​128; animals as raising human environmental awareness/​ literacy, 109, 123–​129, 133–​134, 136–​137; The Barren Grounds (Robertson) as, 124, 128–​129; children as closer to natural world view in, 110–​111, 121, 137; climate change in talking animal/​ animal communication stories, 11, 105–​106, 123–​128; Cree myth and language in, 114–​116, 128–​129,

141–​142; disability memoirs of youth environmental activists, 150, 153–​154, 157–​163, 166–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174; disability representation in, 142–​143; dystopian environmental fiction, 105–​106, 130; ecocriticism in, 2, 11, 106; environmental activism of child protagonists in, 136–​138, 143, 149; gender in, 139; human greed and, 128–​130; humans/​children as saviors of animals/​environment in, 122–​123, 137–​138; The Last Bear/​ Lost Whale (Gold) as, 124, 126; The Last Wild trilogy (Torday) as, 105–​107, 123–​127; The Lorax (Seuss) as, 11, 138–​139; loss of language for nature and, 131–​133; nature deficit disorder in, 11, 124, 130–​134, 143; race and ethnicity representation in, 139–​142; The Silver Arrow (Grossman) as, 124, 126–​128; talking animals in, 105–​107, 109, 123; texts used in analysis of, 106, 124; Willodeen (Applegate) as, 106, 124, 131, 134, 136, 138, 142; Wolfstongue (Thompson) as, 106, 124, 127; young adult speech and writing and, 149–​150. See also climate change; youth activists and activism epiphanies, 47, 78, 81, 83, 85, 120 ethnicity, deafness and, 52–​53 eugenics, 51 extinction and endangerment, 11, 105–​106, 126–​128 eye-​contact, in human-​animal communication, 120–​121 fairy-​tale motifs, 18, 28; “silent women” in, 28–​29 fantasy fiction, 54; lack of African American representation in, 11 feminist literary criticism, 30; feminist ecocriticism, 106 first-​person narration, immediate-​ engaging, 63–​64 Fisher Constellation (Ochek/​Big Dipper), 112, 114, 128. See also Indigenous peoples

184  Index Fletcher, Ralph, 17, 25–​26, 31. See also Flying Solo (Fletcher) flying Black people, in African American folklore, 72, 78, 90–​92 Flying Solo (Fletcher), 17, 23–​26, 35 folktales: birds in African American, 91–​92; Br’er Rabbit and Hyena, 92–​94; flying Black people in African American, 72, 78, 90–​92; preacher tales and, 66–​68, 73–​74, 76; signifying and storytelling and, 63, 67, 90–​95; tall tales as, 67–​69, 71–​73 Foucault, Michel, 75, 83 foxes, 127; language of in Pax and Pax: Journey Home, 112–​113, 120; language of in Wolfstongue, 112–​114, 116; literature about 144n1; as saviors of humans, 123 French feminism, 30 “Fridays for Future” (FFF) movement, 153, 156, 174 Fromkin, Victoria, 110 Gaard, Greta, 11, 106, 122, 124, 134 Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​ Garcia), 10, 62, 84, 175; addressing white people/​use of ma’am in, 80–​81; Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015), 62, 65, 72, 80, 86, 88–​89, 91, 100–​102; names and naming in, 95–​98; One Crazy Summer (2010), 62, 64–​65, 69–​70, 72–​75, 77–​80, 84–​89, 91, 93, 95–​98, 100–​101, 149, 175; P.S. Be Eleven (2013), 62, 70, 86, 88–​89, 97, 99–​101; plot summary of, 65–​66 Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie, 10, 39 Gates, Henry Louis, 11, 62–​63, 67–​68, 72 gaze. See staring/​gaze Gen Z, 156 gender in children’s/​YA literature/​ memoirs, 2, 7, 18; “silent women” in fairy-​tale motifs/​literature and, 28–​30; in environmental fiction, 139; female speech as necessary social skill, 29–​30; in LSM texts, 28–​31; normativity and speech and, 100, 142; psychoanalytic studies and, 18–​19; youth activists

on environmental movements and, 157–​159 Gold, Hannah, 106, 116, 126, 149. See also Last Bear, The (Gold); Lost Whale, The (Gold) goldfish, as symbol, 46 Gone Crazy in Alabama (Williams-​ Garcia), 62, 65, 72, 80, 86, 88–​89, 91, 100–​102. See also Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​Garcia) Gonzalez, X., 2, 175 gossip, 30 gothic, African American, 82–​83 Gray, Paige, 27, 40, 44–​45 Grossman, Lev, 106, 112, 126. See also Silver Arrow, The (Grossman) Guattari, Félix, 134–​135 haikus, 63, 78 Hamilton, Virginia, 90 Hanigan, Katherine, 17. See also True (... Sort Of) (Hanigan) Haraway, Donna, 134, 142 hate speech, 169–​170 heterotopias (“other places”/​counter-​ sites), 74–​79, 81, 96; Foucault on, 75, 83 historical fiction, 8, 10, 48, 61, 88. See also Elijah of Buxton (Curtis); Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​ Garcia); Show Me a Sign (LeZotte) Hymns in Prose for Children (1781, Barbauld), 4–​6 Imaginary Borders (Martinez), 150, 153 Indigenous peoples, 52–​53, 68, 72–​73; Cree myth and language and, 114–​116, 128–​129, 141–​142; youth activists and activism and, 11, 150–​152, 154, 157–​159, 163–​166. See also Barren Grounds, The (Robertson); Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl “inspiration porn,” 24 interior dialogues, 21 intersectionality, 11; intersectional awareness of youth activists, 11, 150, 156–​159, 163–​164, 166–​167 intertextuality, 21

Index  185 Johnson, Dianne, 11 journeys/​travel in children’s literature, 66, 74–​79, 81–​83, 96 Keith, Lois, 9, 20, 24 Konigsburg, E. L., 17, 23, 25, 56. See also Silent to the Bone (Konigsburg) Last Bear, The (Gold), 106, 116–​121, 134, 136–​137; climate change in plot of, 124, 126 Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (Louv), 11, 130 Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday), 11, 17, 22–​23, 25–​26, 31, 33; as “talking animal story,” 105–​107; animal-​animal speech in, 111–​112, 115; climate change in plot of, 124–​125; The Dark Wild, 107, 124, 137, 140; human ability to understand animals in, 115–​116; humans as saviors of animals in, 122–​123; plot overview of, 106–​107; race in, 139–​140; representations of disability in, 142–​143; The Wild Beyond, 107, 111–​112, 122–​127, 129–​130, 138, 140 Lean, Sarah, 1, 10. See also Dog Called Homeless, A (Lean) Lessons for Children (1778-​79, Barbauld), 3–​6 LeZotte, Ann Clare, 10, 35, 48, 50, 52, 149. See also Show Me a Sign (LeZotte) LGBTQ+​ community, 150, 158, 165 Lightland (McCutchen), 17, 24, 32 literary selective mutism (LSM): “more disabled” characters in, 24–​25, 34; “silent women” and, 28–​30; “sponsored silence” in, 12, 21–​23; adult “helper” characters in, 25; adult-​child power imbalances in, 20–​22, 27, 32–​33, 55–​56, 106; bird symbolism in, 26–​28, 31; characters motivations for silence in, 23–​24; creative communication in, 32; cure of mutism in, 25; decentering of protagonist’s selective

mutism, 53–​54; defined, 10, 17–​18; devaluing of women’s speech and, 30; disability as narrative crutch in, 19–​20, 56; disability studies and, 17, 19, 23, 56; fairy-​tale motifs in, 28–​29; family trauma and death in, 22–​23, 25, 31, 33–​34, 43; female speech as necessary social skill in, 30; gender in, 28–​31; interior dialogue of mute character in, 21; metaphorical use of disability in, 18, 26, 30–​31, 142; metaphorical use of silence in, 22–​24; need to end paradigm of, 10; vs. nonspeaking characters in non-​LSM texts, 35, 38, 41, 43, 55–​56; novels used in study of, 17–​18; Pet (Emezi) as alternative to, 10, 53–​56; power and speech/​silence and, 10, 18, 105–​106, 142; problems with metaphorical representation of disability in, 9–​10, 18–​20, 23, 31, 142–​143; race and ethnicity in, 53; return of speech and crisis/​trauma in, 31, 43; return to speech and agency in, 32, 56; vs. selective mutism, 18–​19, 117; strategic silences in, 17, 21, 38; voice in, 17–​18; written word of mute characters and, 34–​35. See also After Zero (Collins); Dog Called Homeless, A (Lean); disability in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs; Flying Solo (Fletcher); Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday); Lightland (McCutchen); Other Side of Silence, The (Mahy); Pet (Emezi); Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, The (Yang); Silent to the Bone (Konigsburg); True (... Sort Of) (Hannigan) Little Mermaid, The (Andersen), 29, 33–​34 Little Princess, A (Burnett), 7 Little Women (Alcott), 29–​30 Lorax, The (Seuss), 11, 138–​139 Lost Whale, The (Gold), 106, 116–​117, 120–​121, 134–​137, 142, 149; climate change in plot of, 124, 126 Lost Words, The: A Spell Book (Morris and MacFarlane), 132

186  Index Louv, Richard, 11, 130–​131 lying, 7, 20; strategic, 89; youth activists on adult, 167–​168, 170 ma’am, use of, 80–​81 MacFarlane, Robert, 132 Mahy, Margaret, 17–​18, 21, 23, 25, 30. See also Other Side of Silence, The (Mahy) “making kin,” 134–​135, 142 Malala (youth activist), 149–​150 Margolin, Jamie, 11, 151–​154, 158–​159, 167–​174; hate speech and, 170; intersectional awareness of/​ lesbian identity of, 150, 159, 165; social media presence of, 156; Zero Hour (environmental organization) and, 150–​151, 164. See also youth activists and activism; Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It (Margolin) Marley Dias Gets it Done and So Can You! (Dias), 1 Martha’s Vineyard, 48, 50–​52, 149. See also Show Me a Sign (LeZotte) Martin, Michelle, 11, 62 Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl, 11, 156, 158; Imaginary Borders, 150, 153; intersectional awareness of/​ Indigenous heritage of, 11, 150–​152, 154, 158–​159, 163–​166; social media presence of, 156; speech and silence of, 166–​170, 173–​174. See also We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet (Martinez) Maybe a Fox (Appelt and McGhee), 106, 113–​114, 117, 121, 123, 134–​135 McConnell-​Ginet, Sally, 3–​4, 30 McCutchen, H. L., 17, 24, 32–​33. See also Lightland (McCutchen) McGhee, Alison, 106, 113. See also Maybe a Fox (Appelt and McGhee) meaning, interplay of speech and silence and, 2–​3 medical model of disability, critique of, 20, 25, 28, 35, 37, 47, 49, 51–​52, 162–​163 Meijer, Eva, 122–​123

Meikle, Graham, 11, 149 Mitchell-​Kernan, Claudia, 62, 100 Mitchell, David, 9, 20 Morris, Jackie, 132 Murray, Amy Jo, 11 muteness and mutism, 1, 17. See also literary selective mutism (LSM); selective mutism Myers, Walter Dean, 8, 62 N-​word, 79–​81 names and naming, 66, 95–​99, 131; power of names of youth environmental activists, 165–​167 Nance-​Carroll, Niall, 11, 156, 165, 168 “narrative prosthesis,” 9, 20 natural world, children as closer to, 110–​111, 121, 137 nature deficit disorder, 11, 124, 130–​138; loss of language for nature and, 131–​133; rewilding and immersion into natural worlds for overcoming, 133–​134, 143 Nikolajeva, Maria, 149 No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (Thunberg), 11, 150, 153, 166, 169–​170 nonspeaking children in literature, 17; nonspeaking characters (non-​LSM texts) and, 35–​48; ubiquity of, 1. See also literary selective mutism (LSM) North to Benjamin (Cumyn), 106, 112, 116–​118, 133–​134, 142; climate change in plot of, 124 Ochek (Fisher Constellation/​Big Dipper), 112, 114, 128–​129, 142. See also Barren Grounds, The (Robertson) One Crazy Summer (Williams-​ Garcia), 62, 72–​75, 78, 80, 91, 93, 100–​101, 149, 175; double consciousness in, 74, 77–​78, 83, 85; names and naming in, 95–​98; plot summary of, 64–​66; signifying/​ understanding adult language/​speech in, 66–​71, 79, 81, 84–​89; travel to Chinatown/​Fisherman’s Wharf in, 74–​75, 77–​79; trickery and religious

Index  187 righteousness in, 73–​74. See also Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​Garcia) oral tradition, 71; “illusion of oral narration,” 63; “value of orality,” 90–​91; naming and, 96 Other Side of Silence, The (Mahy), 17–​18, 21–​26, 28, 31–​32, 35 Our House is on Fire (Thunberg et al.), 150, 153–​154, 157–​163, 166–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174 Out of My Mind (Draper), 10, 35–​40, 42–​49, 51–​53 P.S. Be Eleven (Williams-​Garcia), 62, 65, 70, 86, 88–​89, 97, 99–​101. See also Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​Garcia) pangolins, 127–​128, 131 parental memoirs of disability, problematic, 162 Pax (Pennypacker), 106, 112–​113, 116–​121, 123, 134–​135 Pax: Journey Home (Pennypacker), 106, 112–​113, 116, 118–​120, 123, 135–​136 “The People Could Fly” (folktale), 90–​91 Penfold, Nicole, 106, 130–​132. See also Between Sea and Sky (Penfold); Where the World Turns Wild (Penfold) Pennypacker, Sara, 106. 112, 113. See also Pax (Pennypacker); Pax: Journey Home (Pennypacker) Pet (Emezi), 9–​10, 53–​56, 61, 105, 143, 149; as alternative to LSM, 10, 53–​54 “playing the dozens,” 62, 72, 99–​100 power and speech/​silence, 42–​43; adult normativity (aetonormativity) and, 149, 172; adult-​child power imbalances in LSM, 20–​22, 27, 32–​33, 55–​56, 106; literary selective mutism and, 10, 17–​18, 23–​24, 105–​106 proverbs, 68–​69, 94; “children should be seen and not heard,” 4, 12, 172 psychoanalytic studies, 18–​19 Quayson, Ato, 9

race in children’s/​YA literature/​ memoirs, 2–​3, 6–​8, 80, 87; African American gothic and slavery and, 82–​83; childhood (19th century conception) and, 8; critique of whiteness in climate change activism, 163–​165; diversity and coalition-​building in environmental movements and, 157–​159; in environmental fiction, 139–​142; in environmental groups, 155, 158, 163; ethnicity and deafness and, 52–​53; lack of diversity in children’s lit and, 54; learning use of language in response to racism and, 88–​89; N-​word and, 79–​81; need for improved representation of children of color and, 8, 54; signifying as rhetorical strategy for survival, 62–​63; silencing through slavery/​ Civil Rights/​Reconstruction plotlines, 8–​10, 64–​66; texts used in analysis of, 10; visible ethnic minority (VME) identity and, 150, 155, 163; whiteness and whitewashing and, 53, 74–​76, 94, 163–​164. See also African American children’s literature/​memoirs; Indigenous peoples; slavery and enslaved people resistance, silence as, 2, 18, 21, 23, 174–​175 rewilding, 133, 143 Rhodes, Jewell Parker, 10, 62, 66, 90, 92. See also Sugar (Rhodes) Robertson, David, 106, 112, 114. See also Barren Grounds, The (Robertson) saviors, humans as in talking animal stories, 122–​123 Schneider Family Book Award, 1, 9 “second-​fiddle” books, 24 Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 6–​7, 9, 142 Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, The (Yang), 17, 23–​26, 32–​33, 53 selective mutism, 1, 17; decentering of, 53–​54; defined, 19; disability studies and, 17, 19, 23, 56; vs. elective mutism, 19–​20, 22, 26,

188  Index 34; examples of in YA literature, 18, 61, 106–​107, 117, 142; gender and prevalence of, 28; of Greta Thunberg, 159–​161, 175; vs. literary selective mutism (LSM), 18–​19, 117; representation of/​misrepresentation of, 18–​20, 25, 106. See also literary selective mutism (LSM); Pet (Emezi) Seuss, Dr. (Theodor Seuss Geisel), 11, 138–​139. See also Lorax, The Show Me a Sign (LeZotte), 10, 35, 48–​53, 149 “sight semantics,” 45 signifying, 10, 68, 81, 83–​84, 95, 99–​100, 102; defined, 62–​63; folktales/​tall tales and hyperbole, 67–​69, 71–​73; learning use of language in response to racism and, 88–​89; lying and, 89; speakerly texts in study of, 63; storytelling in African American children’s lit and, 71–​73, 89–​95; understanding adult language in coming-​of-​age novels and, 66–​71, 79, 81, 83–​88 signing and sign language, 48–​52, 54; in Pet (Emezi), 54–​56. See also Show Me a Sign (LeZotte) silence/​silencing: “children should be seen and not heard,” 4, 12, 172; “commemorative silence,” 174–​175; “dumb,” as term, 4–​5, 36, 49–​50, 117; “silent women,” 28–​29; “sponsored silence,” 12, 21–​23; in African American children’s literature through preponderance of slavery/​Civil Rights plotlines, 8–​10, 64–​66; disability as metaphorical silence, 9; in LSM, 12, 17, 22–​24; strategic silences, 17, 21, 38, 175; youth activists and activism and, 172–​175. See also literary selective mutism (LSM): selective mutism Silent to the Bone (Konigsburg), 17, 21–​26, 31, 35, 56 Silver Arrow, The (Grossman), 106, 116–​117, 122–​127, 131, 134–​135; climate change in plot of, 124; snake language in, 112 Slater, Lauren, 20 Slavery and enslaved people, 71–​72; African American gothic and,

82–​83; in Elijah of Buxton (Curtis), 64–​67, 70, 76–​77, 79, 82, 86–​89; in folktales, 91–​92; naming and, 95–​96 Smith, Katherine Capshaw, 18 Smitherman, Geneva, 62–​63, 69, 100 snakes, animal language of, 112 Snyder, Sharon, 9, 20 social media, youth activists and activism, 156, 166; hate speech and, 169–​170 social skills: female speech and, 30; lack of in child protagonists, 117–​119; speech as, 40–​42, 51 Speak (Anderson), 18 speakerly texts, 63 speech/​speaking: author’s personal experience of, 12; children as defined by ability of, 4; deafness and signing and, 49–​51; defined, 2; empowered speech, 2, 161, 164; female, 29–​30; interplay of with silence, 3; nonverbal characters with disabilities and, 35–​48; in Pet (Emezi), 54–​56; physical mechanism of, 4; public speech, 55–​56; as social skill, 30, 40–​42, 51; voice and, 3. See also alternative forms of communication staring/​gaze, 10, 39–​40, 53, 78; eye-​contact in human-​animal communication and, 120–​121 Storey, Olivia Smith, 90–​91 Story of the Robins (Trimmer), 108, 110, 122 storytelling in African American children’s lit, 71–​73, 89–​95; lying and, 89 strategic silences, 21, 38, 175 Sugar (Rhodes), 10, 62–​63, 66, 81, 90–​95; community and family in, 102; naming and name “Sugar” in, 66, 98–​99 Summer of the Swans (Byars), 40, 44–​45 symbolism: birds, 26–​28, 44–​46; deer, 46–​47; goldfish, 46 talking animal stories, 108–​111; Barren Grounds, The (Robertson) as, 106, 112, 114–​117, 124, 128–​129, 134, 141–​142; North to

Index  189 Benjamin (Cumyn) as, 106, 112, 116–​118, 124, 133–​134, 142; Silver Arrow, The (Grossman) as, 106, 112, 116–​117, 122–​127, 131, 134–​135; texts used in study of, 106; Wolfstongue (Thompson) as, 106, 112–​117, 127, 134, 142. See also animals/​animal communication in children’s literature; Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday) tall tales, 67–​69, 71–​73 Tatar, Maria, 68 telepathic communication, 25, 33, 55, 61, 111, 135 Thomas, Ebony, 9, 54 Thompson, Sam, 106, 112–​113, 127. See also Wolfstongue (Thompson) Thunberg, Greta, 2, 149–​151; critique of whiteness of, 164–​165; hate speech and, 170; intersectional awareness/​disabilities of, 150, 159–​161, 165–​166; Our House is on Fire disability memoir of, 150, 153–​154, 157–​163, 166–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174; rhetorical strategies/​speeches of, 11, 150, 153–​154, 159–​162, 166, 168–​174; selective mutism of, 159–​161, 175; social media presence of, 156; talismanic power of her name, 165–​166. See also No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (Thunberg) tongue, 4–​5 Torday, Piers, 11, 17, 23, 33, 105–​107, 111, 122–​125, 130, 133, 138, 176. See also Last Wild Trilogy, The (Torday) trauma and children’s literature, 18–​19, 118; family and death in LSM and, 22–​23, 25, 31–​34, 43 trickery and trickster characters: in African American children’s lit, 62, 65, 67–​68, 73–​74, 91–​93; animals as, 67, 91–​93, 112, 114 Trimmer, Sarah, 107–​109, 111, 122 Trites, Roberta Seelinger, 18, 30–​32, 64, 80 True (... Sort Of) (Hannigan), 17, 21, 23, 31–​32, 41

Trumpet of the Swan, The (White), 27 Umwelten, 133, 135 verbal sparring, 62 virtues of silence, proverbial, 4, 12, 172 visible ethnic minority (VME), 150, 155, 163 Wampanoag people, 48, 52–​53 We Rise: The Earth Guardians Guide to Building a Movement that Restores the Planet (Martinez), 11, 150–​153, 156–​159, 163–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174 whales, 120, 125–​126, 135; speech of in talking animal tales, 111–​112. See also Lost Whale, The (Gold) Where the World Turns Wild (Penfold), 106, 130–​132 White, E.B., 27. See also Charlotte’s Web (White); Trumpet of the Swan, The (White) whiteness, 53, 76, 94; in climate change activism, 163–​165; whitewashing, 74–​76. See also race in children’s/​YA literature/​memoirs Wild Beyond, The (Torday), 107, 122–​127, 129–​130, 138, 140; animal language in, 111–​112 Wilkie-​Stibbs, Christine, 18, 21, 23, 30–​31 Williams-​Garcia, Rita, 10, 62, 65, 149. See also Gaither Sisters Trilogy (Williams-​Garcia) Willodeen (Applegate), 106, 116–​118, 120–​121, 131, 134, 136, 138, 142; climate change in plot of, 124 Wolfstongue (Thompson), 106, 112–​117, 127, 134, 142; animal language in, 112–​114 wolves, 116–​117, 127, 134; language of in Wolfstongue, 112 Woodson, Jacqueline, 10, 62, 64, 66, 78–​80, 89–​90, 92, 97–​98, 149. See also Brown Girl Dreaming (Woodson) Wordsworth, William, 110, 138 Wyile, Andrea Schwenke, 64

190  Index Yang, Dori Jones, 17, 33. See also Secret Voice of Gina Zhang, The (Yang) Yoruba, 68, 97 Yousafzai, Malala, 149–​150 youth activists and activism, 2, 11, 149–​150; “how to” guides and memoirs by, 150–​155, 167; activism defined, 149; agency and leadership of, 175–​176; child vs. adult positioning of, 168–​172; critique of whiteness in climate change activism by, 163–​165; disability memoirs of, 150, 153–​154, 157–​163, 166–​167, 169–​170, 173–​174; on diversity and coalition-​building in environmental movements, 157–​159; environmental activism of child protagonists, 136–​138, 143, 149; environmental organizations founded by, 150–​151, 153, 155, 158, 163–​164, 174; hate speech and, 169–​170; intersectional awareness of, 11, 150, 156–​161,

163–​167; on lies and empty rhetoric of adults, 167–​168, 170; people of color in environmental groups and, 155, 158, 163; praise of youth as changemakers by, 156–​157; reflection on privilege in, 159, 165; rhetorical strategies/​speeches of, 11, 149–​150, 153, 158–​169, 173–​174; on silence and institutional metaphorical silence, 172–​175; social media presence of, 156, 166; talismanic power of names of, 165–​167; texts used in study of, 11, 150; undermining of child speech and, 171–​172. See also Craig, Mya-​Rose; Margolin, Jamie; Martinez, Xiuhtezcatl; Thunberg, Greta Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It (Margolin), 150–​153, 156, 164–​165, 167–​168, 172 Zero Hour (environmental organization), 150–​151