Growing Up in the New South as Reflected in Children’s Literature
by Mark I. West  

Shortly after I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984, I began hearing the term New South. Charlotte, I was told, is a quintessential New South city. The city’s progressive African American mayor at the time was often called a politician of the New South. When a local history museum opened its doors a few years later, it was named the Museum of the New South.
          I soon discovered, however, that there is no general consensus as to exactly what is meant by this term other than it contrasts with the Old South. Some people use the term New South when referring to the South after the Civil War. Some people say that the New South started with the rise of southern textile industry in the early 20th century. Others point to the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and ‘60s as the beginning of the New South. Some argue that social changes associated with the civil rights movement actually started during Second World War, and therefore the term New South should refer to the South since the mid-1940s.
          Despite the fuzziness surrounding the term New South, the widespread use of the term reflects the fact that there is an on-going tension in the South between the “new” and the “old.” This tension certainly involves the changes in race relations, but it involves other changes, too. The New South has urban and suburban connotations, while the Old South has small town and rural associations. The New South embraces change, whereas the Old South values tradition. The New South has ties to technology and commerce, but the Old South has agrarian roots.
          This tension between the new and the old reverberates through the lives of young people who grow up in the New South, and numerous children’s authors have written about this experience. In an attempt to identify some excellent children’s books that capture the experience of growing up in the New South, I contacted a number of professors who teach courses in children’s literature at southern universities or colleges and asked each one to send me a paragraph or two about a favorite children’s book set in the New South. What follows are some of their recommendations.
          Lois Rauch Gibson, who teaches at Coker College in South Carolina, recommended a picture book in which the changes associated with the New South are reflected in the relationship between a girl and her grandmother:

In a warm portrayal of family life, Dinah Johnson’s lyrical text and James Ransome’s rich paintings in Quinnie Blue (Holt, 2000) move back and forth between the child narrator’s contemporary life and the imagined childhood of her grandmother. The book opens with the child’s exuberant exclamation, “Hattie Lottie Annie Quinnie Blue—that’s the rhythm that the rain made dancing on top of your tin roof during Carolina summer showers.” Quinnie Blue is an evocative rendering of ordinary activities in the lives of a closely knit African-American community. This is no traditional tale with a climactic plot. Instead, the special relationship between the narrator and the grandmother for whom she is named captures the reader and unifies the book.
          The granddaughter addresses Quinnie Blue in a series of rhetorical questions (“Quinnie Blue, did you wear your hair in braids like mine?”) and statements (“I can hear you reciting your poem for Easter Sunday. And you’d be proud of me, reciting Mr. Dunbar’s ‘Christmas is a-comin.’”). These show not only how much the child identifies with her grandmother, but also her sense of change and, more important, her sense of continuity and connection through generations. Ransome’s illustrations reinforce these images of change and continuity, and emphasize the bonds between Quinnie Blue and her namesake. Long-ago and present-day scenes are distinguished by clothing, hairstyles, automobile designs and background. Rural scenes with a gray-blue wood grain border or background indicate the past. Contemporary scenes are depicted on a beige wood-grain pattern and seem more suburban: gone are the chickens in the front yard and the rolling pasture. But the house and porch remain, and the family ties are clear as relatives gather to sing on the porch (past), or as the smaller circle of grandma, mother, dad, and child open Christmas gifts (present). Grandmother and granddaughter appear as girls in some separate, alternating scenes. For example, the young Grandma Quinnie climbs a fence to nuzzle her horse; on the next page, the older Quinnie watches as her granddaughter plays handclap games on the porch with friends. Once, they appear on opposing pages (both in blue and white dresses as little girls). In several scenes the grandmother smiles approvingly at her namesake; and finally, they appear seated side by side, both dressed in blue. In fact, Ransome includes bright blue in every scene—in clothing, shutters, walls, flowers, sky—reminding us of Quinnie Blue’s name. In the author’s afterword, she talks about her own grandmothers, sharing memories and answering the child reader’s inevitable question, “Did this really happen?”

          The relationship between a girl and her grandmother also figures in the novel recommended by Amanda Cockrell, the Director of the Graduate Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. In this case, however, the relationship is fraught with tension:

I recommend Dancing on the Edge (Harcourt, 1997) by Han Nolan, which (very deservedly) won the National Book Award. The central character, Miracle McCloy, is a girl who has grown up with a half-crazy grandmother who sees auras and believes in spirits, and has made a life a burden to her writer son, a prodigy who produced one brilliant book and nothing else, to the point that he simply disappeared. Miracle’s mother died at her birth, so she has been told, and everyone has an explanation for everything, except the truth. No one knows quite what to do with Miracle. There are too many things she mustn’t be told. Her grandmother tells her that her father just “melted” away, like the candles in his basement room. Miracle tries to melt herself and ends in the hospital where things become gradually clear, and she finds a place and a person to be.
          Told in first person, Miracle’s is a marvelous voice, taking note of the world around her and the skewed world of her family in a lyrical, observant voice, even as she gradually unravels. Shifting from her grandmother’s house in Tennessee to her aunt’s in Alabama, Miracle leaves pieces of herself strewn across the landscape until she is hardly there at all. But there is a real girl inside, and slowly she emerges as she finds out the true story of her mother and father.

          Several of the recommended books are set in small southern towns where change occurs more slowly than in big cities. Lucy Rollin, who recently retired from teaching at Clemson University in South Carolina, recommended a picture book that focuses on life in a Kentucky mining town in which the old ways do not easily give way:

Because I grew up in southeastern Kentucky in the years immediately following World War II, the book about the New South that most appeals to me is Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds (Harcourt Brace, 1991) written by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Barry Moser. This picture book offers a touching personal vision from both author and illustrator, both of whom grew up in Appalachia and recall their roots with deep affection. This book is about Appalachia today—an area little changed since the post-war period.
           Through Rylant’s text, we admire and sympathize with the coal miners, we sit on the porch and snap beans with the women, we hunt rabbits with the men, we go down to the creek with the children and their dogs, we eat a big Sunday dinner with the church-goers. All of the seasons in Appalachia are rich with nature’s bounty and appreciated by Appalachians, but Rylant gently explains that though Appalachian people are thinkers, “they could never find the words to tell you these thoughts they have. They talk to you of their corn or their cows instead and they keep the thoughts to themselves.” Theirs are the voices James Agee described as like the “voices of sleeping birds,” in a passage from Knoxville: Summer 1915, which Rylant and Moser selected as the book’s epigraph.
          Moser’s rich watercolor illustrations are, like Rylant’s text, at once straightforward and deeply poetic. He captures the dust, the sunshine, the proud smile of a woman showing off her cherry cobbler, the weary glance of a gaunt miner. The images are colorful but quiet, each one a bit of life captured, like a snapshot, in stillness. My personal favorite is of a boy in a big apron, pencil behind his ear, standing outside a grocery store. The boy is actually Moser’s brother outside his grandfather’s store in Tennessee, but he could be my neighbor from Harlan, Kentucky, outside Mr. Fitzgerald’s store where my mother bought me ice cream.

          Donna White from Arkansas Tech University recommended Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier (Dial, 1973), a novel set in a small town in Arkansas. In this case, however, outside forces bring major changes to the town’s residents:

Although Summer of My German Soldier is ostensibly about twelve-year-old Patty Bergen growing up in a small town in Arkansas during World War II, much of its emotional impact comes from its autobiographical elements: Bette Greene, too, was a young Jewish girl who grew up in small-town Arkansas in the 1940s. Arkansas does not have a strong Jewish presence, so both Bette the author and Patty the fictional character have first-hand experience with injustice and prejudice, the themes of this young adult novel. In Patty’s case, however, the main target of prejudice is not Patty’s Jewish family but the German POWs who have been brought to Arkansas to work in the cotton fields. Patty befriends one young man, Anton, and hides him when he escapes from the POW camp.
          Greene captures the essence of a long, hot Arkansas summer as well as both the security and claustrophobia inherent in living in a small Southern town. She avoids stereotyping her characters by making them individuals. Even the classic figure of the small-town Southern sheriff-a fat, intolerant good old boy-resists stereotyping; the sheriff is one of the few townspeople to show compassion to Patty when she is unmasked as a traitor. If there are any real villains in the novel, they are Patty’s unloving and abusive parents. Patty’s violent father uses her as a punching bag, and her mother’s constant personal criticism prompts Patty to think, “Just being in the same room with you, Mother, is like being feast for a thousand starving insects.” It’s no wonder this love-deprived child responds so strongly to the affection of the family’s African-American housekeeper and the kindness of an escaped prisoner. Despite its somber themes, Summer of My German Soldier shows Patty’s emergence as one of life’s survivors.

          Martha Hixon from Middle Tennessee State University recommended My Louisiana Sky (Holt, 1998) by Kimberly Willis Holt. Set a decade or so after Summer of My German Soldier, Holt’s My Louisiana Sky takes place in a small Louisiana town:

Most books for children (and adults as well) that are set in Louisiana take place in or around New Orleans or along the Cajun bayous, and are usually historical fiction rather than contemporary realism, possibly because of the richness of those particular settings and time periods. Kimberly Willis Holt’s My Louisiana Sky is a pleasant divergence from this trend, however: her book is set in the 1950s in Saitter, Louisiana, a fictitious representation of the small town of Forest Hill, located in the center of the state, surrounded by pine forests and farmlands instead of bayous and Gulf breezes. In My Louisiana Sky, twelve-year-old Tiger Ann Parker, the normal child of “slow” parents, tells the story of the summer she learns to accept both the death of her grandmother and the challenges—and joys—of living with mentally disabled but loving parents. Tiger Ann’s voice is strong and believable, Holt’s characters are individualized and admirable, and the novel is filled with a keen sense of both family and place.

          Ruth White’s Belle Prater’s Boy (Dell Yearling, 1996), the book recommended by Tina L. Hanlon from Ferrum College in Virginia, is also set in a small town during the 1950s:

At the beginning of Belle Prater’s Boy, Woodrow Prater’s situation is a little like Huckleberry Finn’s at the beginning of Mark Twain’s classic novel. His mother is gone and his father is an alcoholic who lives on a mountain, so Woodrow is left with more prosperous relatives in town, as Huck is taken in by the Widow Douglas. Woodrow is shrewd and he can tell some wild stories like Huck, but he is a mid-twentieth-century sixth grader in a heart-warming, realistic Appalachian novel, not a wanderer seeking freedom. Unlike Huck, Woodrow enjoys the material comforts his grandparents provide and he gets along well in school. His next-door cousin, Gypsy, narrates this story about the year after her Aunt Belle causes a sensation in their southwestern Virginia coal town by suddenly “vanishing into thin air.”
          Gypsy is not so comfortable with her stepfather, a newspaper editor who tries to win her affection, or her mother’s preoccupation with turning her into a lady and grooming the long hair that makes Gypsy feel trapped like Rapunzel. This novel avoids stereotypes about class and region by showing that the girl who has everything, living in one of the town’s nicest houses, is more disturbed by her father’s death than the awkward coal miner’s son from the mountain who is at the center of town gossip after his mother’s strange disappearance. The father who can't raise his son and the mother who abandoned them are not portrayed as entirely neglectful, for they left Woodrow with a love of learning and a spirit that responds sensitively to people, poetry, and the mysteries of life. Details from American popular culture of the 1950s—radio, television, comics, movies—are woven into the story as Gypsy and Woodrow learn that to enjoy life, they must forgive their parents whose “pain was bigger than their love."

          Diane Johnson, who in addition to writing children's books is a professor at the University of South Carolina, recommended a book set in a small town during the beginning of the civil rights movement:

Sandy Richardson’s The Girl Who Ate Chicken Feet (Dial, 1998) is a quietly powerful book that explores the life of ten-year-old Amy Claire, who lives in Midville, South Carolina. The year is 1960, the beginning of an era that will bring changing times, according to the news reports that Amy Claire is hearing. “It has something to do with the colored people down in Mississippi and Alabama." But Sissy, as her family and friends call her, has other things to concentrate on, mainly the business of growing up. Each story in Richardson’s eloquent collection blends seamlessly with the others to introduce readers to the most revealing moments and charismatic characters that give shape to Sissy’s world. They affect the way she thinks about herself, about girlhood and womanhood, about how she interacts with family and neighbors, and about the south.
          Everything about The Girl Who Ate Chicken Feet is alive—the lilting, metaphoric language, the flora, the tastes and smells and textures, and the southern characters of various ages, races, genders, and economic classes who live their lives with boldness, conviction, passion and humor. Richardson knows that in some measure, the woman-child Sissy can be honest in a way available to children alone. Richardson has created a character who helps readers to understand how in a certain place and time, in life, “...the glad and the sad [get] all mixed-up together.”

          Angela Johnson’s The Other Side: Shorter Poems (Orchard, 1998), recommended by Sylvia Iskander from the University of Louisana at Lafayette, is another book that deals with growing up in a southern town during the 1960s:

The red dirt, sweet magnolias, fields of kudzu, and hot, sticky weather characterize Shorter, Alabama, a small town about to be razed, which provides the setting for the reminiscences of the poet’s childhood and adolescence spent among a loving extended family. With vivid imagery and first-person narration, the writer describes her hometown where everyone knows everyone else, her playmates, and the town characters. She reveals her life with its happy side—plum picking, skinny-dipping, riding an old carousel horse, and its sadder side—her father’s death and racism. Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, this poetry collection realistically depicts growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, times of great change for the poet and for the South.

          One of the major changes associated with the New South is the population shift from small towns to suburbia. This change figures in the book recommended by J. D. Stahl from Virginia Tech:

In Simon and the Game of Chance (Viking,1970) Robert Burch tells the story of the Bradley family, six children and their parents, living in the small town of Redwood, which had “once been a farming center, but now, thanks to modern highways and automobiles . . . was gradually becoming a suburb of Atlanta.” Mr. Bradley is a stiff and preachy father, and when the seventh child in the family is born and dies soon after, Mrs. Bradley becomes too withdrawn and depressed to function. The family has to learn to cope without their mother, though nineteen-year-old Clarissa takes over a lot of the mothering. With a keen eye for character and feeling, Burch lets us see the world from thirteen-year-old Simon’s perspective. Simon wants his moralistic father’s approval, and dreads Clarissa’s marrying and moving away, but eventually learns that he has little control over people or events.

          Ellen Donovan, who teaches at Middle Tennessee State University, recommended Edward Bloor’s Tangerine (Harcourt, 1997), a young adult novel that is set in a contemporary suburban community in Florida:

As a transplanted Northerner, my experience of the New South is grounded in the pervasive suburban development that has occurred over the last decade and a half. For that reason, I would recommend Edward Bloor’s Tangerine. The novel opens with twelve-year-old Paul Fisher and his family moving from Houston to Tangerine, Florida. They move into a large suburban home in Lake Windsor Downs, one of several housing developments with names that suggest their total disconnection from the landscape and history of the area. Because of a vision problem, Paul is prevented from playing on his middle school’s soccer team. When a mammoth sinkhole swallows up many of the classroom portables at the middle school, Paul convinces his mother to allow him to attend Tangerine Middle School without the restricting IEP that prevented him from playing soccer at Lake Windsor. Paul’s experience at Tangerine Middle draws him into a circle of soccer players whose families own and operate the tangerine groves in the area. Paul’s primary conflicts are a response to family dynamics and his movement into a world that his parents don’t know or appreciate. Though Bloor resolves Paul’s family conflict rather clumsily, the novel is a scathing criticism of several aspects of the New South. Bloor makes very clear that the pervasiveness and importance of football at both the high school and colleges is unmerited. Paul’s father and his older brother Eric are determined to make the Eric Fisher Football Dream come true: an athletic scholarship to a university with a major football reputation. Meanwhile they overlook Paul’s skill as a soccer player. Bloor also criticizes rampant suburban development and its attendant environmental degradation. The haze of “muck fires” caused by development, the osprey that eat the expensive koi out of the artificial lake in the housing development, the lightening that repeatedly strikes the same house, and the raw sterility of the new suburban landscape contrast to the sweet scent of the tangerine groves. Bloor’s concern regarding social inequality between Anglos and Hispanics is illustrated in the schools that Paul attends and in his Anglo friends’ and parents’ response to his association with the children of the growers. Tangerine offers an engaging perspective of the South that reflects many of the current issues teenagers in the South will recognize.

          Carl Haaisen’s Hoot (Knopf, 2002), the book recommended by Virginia Tech’s Kathryn Graham, has much in common with Tangerine. Both are set in contemporary Florida, both focus on a boy in middle school, and both deal with the environmental problems caused by suburban development:

Hoot is Carl Haaisen’s first novel for a young audience. Long known for his witty columns in the Miami Herald and novels for adults, Haaisen wanted to write about Florida from a child’s perspective. He says, “Florida is a whole different world today than when I was a kid. It’s a highly urbanized state with heavy urban problems, not the sleepy tourist trap it was forty years ago. Yet at the same time, there’s still the Everglades, Florida Bay and miles of beaches that so far haven’t been turned into condo canyons. So a kid can still experience some astounding wilderness, and decide for himself what’s worth fighting for. “
          What Roy Eberhardt, the protagonist, decides is worth fighting for is a network of burrowing owls, an endangered species nesting underground in a vacant lot about to be bulldozed for yet another Mother Paula’s All American House of Pancakes. Roy joins the mysterious, barefooted runaway called “Mullet Fingers” and Beatrice Leep, the toughest girl in the school (who wins Roy’s admiration and gratitude when she bites a chunk out of his bicycle tire to give him an excuse for being late), in a sometimes comic, sometimes poignant battle against the adult world of overprotective parents, teachers, the police, and greedy corporate America. Hoot is a lively contemporary novel with convincingly realistic voices and a leavening of adolescent humor that keeps the ecological didacticism from feeling too heavy-handed.

          All of the recommended books deal in some way with the tension between the New South and the Old South. In most cases, this tension is played out in the context of a particular place, but in the case of Katherine Paterson’s Come Sing, Jimmy Jo (E.P. Dutton, 1985), this tension is played out in a musical context. Recommended by Virginia Tech’s Frieda Bostian, Come Sing, Jimmy Jo focuses on the changing role of country music in southern culture:

“Sing me a comfort song,” says James Johnson’s grandma. In Blue County, West Virginia, James, age 11, shoulders his guitar and begins, “There’s a mansion over there...,” which causes his grandma to weep because “[a] song like that’s pure delight. And Lord, boy, you sing it like a angel.” Indeed, James has “the gift,” and as Paterson’s novel progresses, Grandma isn’t his only audience. The Family, who’ve been playing locally for years, acquire a manager and the chance to go to Tidewater, Virginia, to perform on the Countrytime radio show—but only if stage-shy James, rechristened Jimmy Jo for the occasion, agrees to participate. He loves his daddy so much that he reluctantly agrees to do so, setting off a series of musical and personal challenges that bump over a rocky path toward resolution in this perfect-pitch novel.
          A lot happens, but here I’ll highlight how Paterson’s presentation of the music in Come Sing, Jimmy Jo is emblematic of the New South. At first the Family is a unit, playing and singing the Appalachian songs of their farming community. Then when they sing on Countrytime, a song James’s father has written for him, “Broken Bird,” has the fans swarming for the boy’s autograph; the musicians are still within their genre, but in the oral tradition, adding their own touches. Next two members of the Family, wanting more, get a club date, but “[t]he club didn’t want Grandpa. An old grayhead picking a bass fiddle, with a reedy mountain voice, was too old-fashioned for the kinds of customers the club attracted”; instead the manager hires an electric bass and a steel guitar. This same family duo secretly goes to Nashville to cut a demo, breaking James’s heart when he hears them on the radio singing in generic Nashville style “Broken Bird,” his own “real mountain song.” Wounded and angered, James refuses to perform with them until, mediated by James’s beloved father, the Family finally reconvenes to sing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” Just as the traditional rural music of the Old South has often been subsumed by the commercial, electrified sounds of Nashville, many other cultural phenomena of the region have been diluted into a more homogenized, generic form. At worst, the New South has sold its birthright. At best, broader audiences and markets mean a richer medium and more prestige for its artists. Even if it’s uneasy and ends in a question mark, the musical reconciliation of the Johnson Family is hopeful; so too is the New South.

          These recommended books all suggest that growing up in the New South involves coping with change. The young characters in these books, like real children living in the South, must figure out their own ways to deal with the broad regional changes going on around them everyday or else risk becoming living fossils. However, even though many of the changes associated with the New South are positive, it would be a shame, in my opinion, if young southerners turned their backs on all the traditions and culture associated with the Old South. As these books demonstrate, growing up in the New South is something of a complicated balancing act. It might be a hard act to perform, but it often makes for a good story.

Mark I. West is a professor of English at UNC Charlotte, where he teaches courses on children’s literature and serves as the Associate Dean for General Education. In addition to editing The Five Owls, he is the Book Review Editor for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. His most recent book is A Children’s Literature Tour of Great Britain (Scarecrow, 2003).