Julius Lester 1939-

(Full name Julius Bernard Lester; also known as Julius B. Lester.) American novelist, folklorist, children's writer, short story writer, autobiographer, essayist, and poet.

INTRODUCTION

Lester has distinguished himself as a civil rights activist, musician, radio and talk-show host, professor, poet, novelist, folklorist, and talented writer for children and young adults. He is perhaps best known for his award-winning books for young people, a body of work including fiction, biography, and the retelling of folktales that directly addresses the black American experience during and after slavery. He has been acclaimed for his blend of realistic detail, dialogue, and storytelling—all contributing to important historical knowledge about African Americans. Lester has also written the autobiographies All Is Well (1976) and Lovesong (1988); the latter presents the story of his conversion to the Jewish faith.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Lester was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1939, the younger son of a Methodist minister and his wife. He grew up amid the racial segregation of the South, moving as a child from Missouri, to Kansas, then to Tennessee, where his father led congregations. Years spent listening to sermons and stories related by his father and other ministers provided Lester with an acute awareness of the rhythms and speech patterns of the southern rural black dialect. As a youngster, he read avidly, yet remembers finding nothing in the children's storybooks of his day that depicted black characters or reflected the physical and psychological violence of the racist world in which he lived. After earning a bachelor's degree in English from Fisk University in 1960, Lester became politically active in the civil rights struggle. One of his contributions was to play the guitar and banjo at rallies in the South, a vocation that brought friendships with other politically committed singers such as Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, and Judy Collins. As the 1960s progressed—and the racial climate in America became more polarized—Lester joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group that gradually assumed an increasingly militant stance against racism. His first books were written as a response to his experiences in the civil rights struggle. Middle to late 1960s works such as The Angry Children of Malcolm X (1966), Look out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (1968), and Revolutionary Notes (1969) established him as an eloquent and impassioned defender of the new black militancy. During the late 1960s he taught black history at the New School for Social Research, and in 1968 was hired to produce and host the live radio show The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution for WBAI-FM, a public broadcasting station in New York City. Around this same time an editor at Dial Press who had helped prepare one of Lester's adult books for publication suggested that he try to write for children. In 1969 Lester released two books that came to mark his future success as a writer for young people. To Be a Slave, a collection of six stories based on historical accounts, evolved from an oral history of slaves Lester was compiling. The book, Lester's first for children, was the runner-up for the Newbery Medal. Later that year Lester published Black Folktales, recasting various human and animal characters from African legends and slave narratives. In 1971 Lester began to host the live public television program called Free Time. He also accepted a position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a professor in its new Afro-American Studies department. Four years later he left radio and television and settled in Amherst as a full-time writer and professor. He has earned awards for both vocations, including state and national honors for teaching; several Lewis Carroll Shelf Awards; a National Book Award nomination in 1973 for The Long Journey Home (1972); and the Coretta Scott King Award for the novel Day of Tears (2005). In the early 1980s Lester converted to the Jewish faith and in 1988 he was ousted from the renamed African American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts. Undaunted, he transferred to the university's Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department, where he is professor emeritus.

MAJOR WORKS

Lester's experience as an African American convert to Judaism has contributed a unique outlook to his writings. Much of his work chronicles black history and African American or Jewish folktales. To Be a Slave, for instance, includes the reminiscences of slaves—impressed and freed—about their lives, from leaving Africa, to living through the Civil War, to dealing with the rapid changes of the twentieth century. Black Folktales, Lester's first collection of folk stories, features larger-than-life heroes, shrewd animals, and cunning human beings. While some of the characters are taken from African legends and others from American slave tales, they all demonstrate the black individual's resistance to and struggle against oppression. Lester also deals with white oppression in his second collection of American black folktales, The Knee-High Man and Other Tales (1972), which assembles six black folk stories, including those of the well-known Brer Rabbit, treating them with subtle emphasis on the politics of defying racism. 1972's The Long Journey Home and Two Love Stories as well as This Strange New Feeling (1982) offer lessons in the black heritage through fiction based on actual African American experiences. The Long Journey Home, for example, explores the everyday lives of ordinary African Americans during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

Lester's memoir Lovesong, in which he writes about his conversion to Judaism, remains one of his best-known books for adults. Documenting the seminal event of Lester's midlife, Lovesong came about after a long period of spiritual searching. Lester details his youth growing up in a Christian household; his later adoption of and dissatisfaction with agnosticism; his subsequent study of a variety of religions; his attraction throughout his life to Jewish music, history, and literature; and his discovery that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew. And All Our Wounds Forgiven (1994), Lester's first adult novel, is a powerful, disturbing, and controversial glimpse backward to the Civil Rights Movement, with the main character, Dr. John Calvin Marshall, representing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Among Lester's many other writings are the psychological mystery novel When Dad Killed Mom (2001), about how a brother and sister survive the loss of their mother, who has been murdered by their psychologist father; the novel The Autobiography of God (2004), in which a female rabbi converses with dead Jewish people and is visited by God; Sam and the Tigers (1996), a retelling of the Little Black Sambo story; John Henry (1994), a retelling of the popular American legend with a focus on Henry's African American heritage; and Black Cowboy, Wild Horses (1998), a tale centered on Bob Lemmons, one of many unheralded slaves who became cowboys and helped build the American West. Lester has collaborated with illustrator Jerry Pinkney on a number of his writings, including a series of well-received Uncle Remus retellings, beginning with The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, published in 1987. This cycle of titles, which came to be known as The Tales of Uncle Remus, continued into a fourth volume in 1994, with The Last Tales of Uncle Remus.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Many critics have lauded Lester's ability to blend history, humor, and storytelling with social and moral lessons. Others have commended his clear and direct language, his true-to-life characterizations, his thorough research, his willingness to deal with controversial issues, and his commitment to conveying the stories of ordinary, little-known people who nevertheless made a powerful impact on society. He is praised as well for preserving the history and heritage of black Americans in a format accessible to young readers. His conversion to Judaism has prompted critical discussion over his perspective as both a black man and a Jew, which offers him the unique ability to comment on the often problematic relationship that exists between the two groups. Looking at Lovesong in particu- lar, critic Adam Meyer (see Further Reading) identified common elements found in the autobiographical accounts of Jewish Americans and African Americans, including the dualism expressed by the authors—the idea that an individual possesses two different selves—and the motif of the journey, whether spiritual or physical, cyclical or linear. According to Meyer, Lester's autobiography follows the Jewish American cyclical pattern of autobiography, in which the protagonist comes full circle back to his ancestral roots. Commentators have also explored Lester's gradual identification with the Jewish faith and his struggle to accept himself as both a black man and a Jew.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly: An Instructional Manual [with Pete Seeger] (nonfiction) 1965

The Angry Children of Malcolm X (prose) 1966

The Mud of Vietnam: Photographs and Poems (photographs and poetry) 1967

Look out Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (prose) 1968

Black Folktales (short stories) 1969

To Be a Slave (for young adults) 1969

Revolutionary Notes (prose) 1969

The Seventh Son: The Thoughts and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. 2 vols. [editor] (fiction and nonfiction) 1971

Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight. 2 vols. [editor; written by Stanley Crouch] (poetry) 1972

The Knee-High Man and Other Tales (short stories) 1972

The Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History (short stories for young adults) 1972

Two Love Stories (short stories) 1972

Who I Am (poetry) 1974

All Is Well: An Autobiography (autobiography) 1976

This Strange New Feeling (short stories for young adults) 1982

Do Lord Remember Me (novel) 1984

The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (short stories) 1987

Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (autobiography) 1988

More Tales of Uncle Remus: The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies, and Others [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (short stories) 1988

How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? and Other Tales [illustrated by David Shannon] (short stories) 1989

Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (essays) 1990

Further Tales of Uncle Remus: The Misadventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, the Doodang, and Other Creatures [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (short stories) 1990

And All Our Wounds Forgiven (novel) 1994

John Henry [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (children's fiction) 1994

The Last Tales of Uncle Remus [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (short stories) 1994

Othello: A Retelling (novel) 1995

Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (children's fiction) 1996

Shining [illustrated by Terea Shaffer] (children's fiction) 1997

Black Cowboy, Wild Horses: A True Story [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (children's fiction) 1998

*Uncle Remus: The Complete Tales [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (short stories) 1999

What a Truly Cool World [illustrated by Joe Cepeda] (short stories for children) 1999

When the Beginning Began: Stories about God, the Creatures, and Us [illustrated by Emily Lisker] (short stories for children) 1999

Albidaro and the Mischievous Dream [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (children's fiction) 2000

Pharaoh's Daughter: A Novel of Ancient Egypt (novel) 2000

Ackamarackus: Julius Lester's Sumptuously Silly Fantastically Funny Fables [illustrated by Emilie Chollat] (short stories for children) 2001

The Blues Singers: Ten Who Rocked the World [illustrated by Lisa Cohen] (nonfiction for children) 2001

When Dad Killed Mom (young adult novel) 2001

Why Heaven Is Far Away (children's fiction) 2002

The Autobiography of God: A Novel (novel) 2004

Let's Talk About Race [illustrated by Karen Barbour] (nonfiction for children) 2004

On Writing for Children and Other People (prose) 2004

Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue (novel) 2005

The Old African [illustrated by Jerry Pinkney] (children's fiction) 2005

Time's Memory (children's fiction) 2006

Cupid: A Tale of Love and Desire (children's fiction) 2007

*This title reprints, in one volume, a series of works originally published separately between 1987 and 1994.

CRITICISM

Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: Shatzky, Joel and Michael Taub. "Julius Lester." In Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: ABio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, pp. 174-77. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

[In this essay, Shatzky and Taub provide a brief summary of Lester's life and his body of work, and offer insight into the critical response to his writings.]

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

Paula T. Connolly (essay date 1999)

Source: Connolly, Paula T. "Crossing Borders from Africa to America." In Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults, edited by Sandra L. Beckett, pp. 149-64. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.

[In the following essay, Connolly analyzes Tom Feeling's The Middle Passage and Lester's To Be a Slave in terms of their dual audiences (young readers and adults), noting that both authors "elude the marginalization of categories—in terms of history, aesthetics, and audience."]

Tales about talking bears, rabbits, foxes, and turtles would seem to offer a wondrous world of anthropomorphized animals for child readers. And if one were to ask children to identify the story of a brazen rabbit who illicitly enters a garden, tries to evade a farmer, then enjoys eating his fill of someone else's vegetables before being found out, they would probably cite Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Few would question that book being defined as "children's literature"; indeed, it is a story that was originally written for a specific child, young Noel, the son of Annie Moore, Potter's former tutor. Moreover, Potter's concerns about its publication were clearly with her child audience—the size of the books, for example, she felt must match their small hands.¹

Yet the specific elements that determine how one comes to define a work as "children's" or "adult" literature are less certain than the often pronouncement-like designations of literature for specific-aged audiences. Is it author intentionality, reader response, marketing, cultural context, or other contributing factors that lend to such a designation?² Another story that shares much of the basic plot of The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a case in point. In this story, the main character, an irrepressible rabbit, longs for some of the vegetables in a man's garden. The rabbit decides that the man "[o]bviously didn't believe in sharing. Being worried about Mr. Man's soul, [the rabbit] decided he'd make Mr. Man share." This rabbit then talks Mr. Man's young daughter into letting him into the garden, where he eats his fill. When the rabbit is caught in a trap, the farmer vows: "I got you this time…. And when I get through with you, ain' gon' be nothing left. I'm gon' carry your foot in my pocket, put your meat in the pot, and wear your fur on my head." Unlike Mr. McGregor, who only yells "Stop thief!" as he tries unsuccessfully to catch young Peter, Mr. Man plots this rabbit's demise and dismemberment with a sense of passionate enjoyment. This rabbit, however, eludes such a fate by tricking a passing fox into exchanging places with him. Although we may guess what fate awaits the gullible fox, we are only told that "[t]he story don't say what happened to … Fox…. Rabbit took care of himself. Now it's up to … Fox to take care of himself. That's the name of that tune."³

This second story, "Brer Rabbit Goes Back to Mr. Man's Garden," is not as easily categorized as Potter's, yet the specific differences between the two tales themselves—in apparent plot and character—are not, on the surface, keenly dramatic ones. Whereas Brer Rabbit faces clear dangers if he is caught, Peter had been warned that when his father had entered the garden, he had "had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor." Neither world is a kind one for rabbits, and in both cases the garden is a place that promises plenty, yet threatens entrapment and death. The stories speak of the transgressions of characters who steal, yet whose rebelliousness is admired by the reader. Yet when each rabbit is found out by the respective gardeners, their responses differ. Peter Rabbit flees terrified, and cries in despair when his now-plump belly prevents him from sneaking under a door to safety. Brer Rabbit, too, "quiver[s]" in the trap, fearful of what the man will do to him, yet these animals interact quite differently in their worlds. Peter finally escapes when he frees himself from the clothes he wears, returns to his natural state as a rabbit, and slips underneath a gate, "safe at last in the wood outside the garden." Although Brer Rabbit, held in a small trap, is more keenly caught than Peter, he is a quintessential trickster figure; here, the rabbit can speak to humans and animals alike. When his pleas for release are ignored by Mr. Man, Brer Rabbit uses his wits to escape by exploiting another's vulnerability for his own freedom and gain. Brer Rabbit, too, has no mother that sends him off or waits to care for him in the evening, no sisters like Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail who offer a domestic world. He is alone in this world, dependent only on himself, and it is not only his satirical voice that shows him functioning more as an adult than a child figure. Whereas Peter ends up ill from his gluttony and rebelliousness, Brer Rabbit has no such later ills or qualms.

Yet these differences alone can barely be enough to designate only the former as a child's story. Indeed, this and other Brer Rabbit tales are children's stories, of a sort. Storyteller Augusta Baker recalls how as a child she would race home after school and beg her Grandmother for more stories about Brer Rabbit: "We would get comfortable [she writes] and start down Brer Rabbit's road. Small, helpless Brer Rabbit always defeated his adversaries—the large animals—with his wit, humor, and wisdom. In my smallness I related to the clever little hare who could always get out of the most difficult situations through his sharp wit."⁴

Yet these stories are not the exclusive property of such a young audience. Indeed, these stories of animals, adventurers, and tricksters have a complex history that eschews their designation as either exclusively adult or children's stories. First published and popularized by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern White journalist in the United States, these stories were collected from slaves and ex-slaves Harris met in the years before and after the Civil War. In 1880, his Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings came out to vast popular success, and was later followed by seven other volumes of collected tales. The "Uncle Remus" of that title is the most problematic figure in Harris's collection. Not originating in the stories of slaves, Uncle Remus is a creation of Harris himself, who used the character as a function of the narrative frame. Here, the character, an elderly exslave who tells his stories to the young White son of the plantation owner, supports an image reminiscent of pro-slavery plantation novels, which depicted pleasant relations between slaves and masters and denied the racial oppression inherent in slavery.⁵

It was, many critics argue, particularly this depiction of a kindly and nostalgic ex-slave that underpinned the success of Harris's collections. Although, as Julius Lester notes in the Introduction to his current retelling of the "Uncle Remus" stories, "Uncle Remus is the most remembered character from a literature that justified slavery by portraying blacks who found slavery a haven, and freedom a threat and imposition,"⁶ it was particularly that depiction that many White audiences appreciated. Uncle Remus was, as critic Robert Hemenway points out: "a figure who could contribute to the country's reunification. Uncle Remus reassured Southern whites about their darkest fears: free black people would love, not demand retribution. At the same time he assured Northern whites that abandoning black people was not a failure of moral responsibility. Uncle Remus, immensely popular, witnessed that black people would turn the other cheek, would continue to love, despite all the broken promises of American history."⁷ These stories of animal adventures were thus not merely read to entertain children, but also to appease the psyche of adult Whites, both in the northern and southern United States.

The tales of Uncle Remus seem, therefore, to be stories about racial cooperation, yet this narrative frame with its fictional white audience denies the import of the center tales. As Julius Lester points out: "[w]hile such a setting added to the appeal and accessibility of the tales for whites, it leaves the reader with no sense of the important roles the tales played in black life."⁸ The irony about Harris's narrative frame is that the stories were neither originally for a White audience, nor particularly for children. In that regard, Harris creates more than a fictional character in Uncle Remus—he creates a fiction about the narratives embedded within the frame. In fact, the tales themselves fight the frame of happy Uncle Remus and the concurrent idyllic presentation of slavery. The supreme irony about these stories being removed—as Lester argues—from African American experience is that they were the stories of those enslaved people.⁹

The American enslavement of Africans was a destruction of and attempt to reconstruct boundaries, in geographical, political, cultural, social, familial, individual, and ethical terms. Taken from their countries, forced to cross the Atlantic Ocean, then brought to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar customs and languages, it is estimated that between thirty and sixty million Afri- cans were brought to the Americas, subjected to both physical and psychological enslavement.¹⁰ Enslavers sought to destroy, then reconstruct the identities of these people, as white captors denied their humanity and slave traders shattered their familial connections. Yet many Africans and their children found ways to evade such enslavement, certainly ways to recreate boundaries of culture and community to maintain a sense of distinct identity. Through songs, folktales, and a recreation of the religion meant to inculcate their subservience, enslaved Africans and their descendants were able to create communities that allowed them psychological identities distinct from those provided by the white community. Indeed, in their resignification of terms, they were able to create a language and world that whites did not understand and from which they were excluded, even though it was practiced in their midst.

The embedded tales of Uncle Remus—the stories within the narrative frame that were collected from those who experienced and survived slavery in the United States—are more than playful tales of the adventures of various animals. These folktales contain often highly symbolic language, codes in which the signifieds were obfuscated, tales in which the plights and victories of anthropomorphized animals paralleled their own plights as enslaved people. As historian Lawrence Levine has pointed out, "The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him, was forced to make do with what he had. His small tail, his natural portion of intellect—these would have to suffice and to make them do, he resorted to any means at his disposal—means which may have made him morally tainted but which allowed him to survive and even to conquer."¹¹

Indeed, the world of these stories is a dangerous, cruel, and violent one, in which a mishap can mean death. These tales showed the talents needed for survival in such a predatory place. Furthermore, they offered psychological release to those enslaved and a means of reifying an identity distinct from that as "slave" imposed by White masters. These tales strengthened group solidarity and allowed a means of undermining apparent white hegemony, not only because they allowed a way to verbalize aggression, but also because while they spoke of the master's world, the tales excluded a white audience. They became part of the coded language slaves created—what Ann Kibbey terms "linguistic virtuosity."¹² Through an array of coded language, rich in metaphor, imagery, and double signification, slaves could sing songs of freedom and tell rebellious folktales in the very presence of their masters, yet escape punishment. Levine argues:

… [t]he white master could believe that the rabbit stories his slaves told were mere figments of a childish imagination, that they were primarily humorous anecdotes depicting the "roaring comedy of animal life." Blacks knew better. The trickster's exploits, which overturned the neat hierarchy of the world in which he was forced to live, became their exploits; the justice he achieved, their justice; the strategies he employed, their strategies. From his adventures they obtained relief; from his triumphs they learned hope.¹³

It was precisely because the tales seemed childish that slaves were able to recount them in public without fear of retribution. Indeed, that categorization of adult men and women as "childlike" creatures who needed the protection of whites served as a rationalization for slavery itself. What underwrote this Sambo stereotype was "the American attitude toward … Africans…. Most antebellum whites firmly believed that Africans were … innately … imitative … childish … submissive."¹⁴ Here, "childish" is defined as specifically inferior and facile and—in a political and social context—a justification for the enslavement of millions of Africans. Yet what many of those enslaved did was to rewrite that notion of "childishness," to recreate the "Sambo" as a rebellious figure and use stories that were perceived as foolishly "childlike" as a sophisticated means of subversion.

These tales were used not only for the entertainment and "psychic relief"¹⁵ of adults, but also as stories with didactic underpinnings, as they sought to teach survival skills to young enslaved children. In "Mr. Jack Sparrow Meets His End," for example, Jack Sparrow goes to tell Brer Fox something, Brer Fox complains about deafness and urges the bird to come closer, eventually onto his tooth. "Mr. Jack Sparrow hopped on Brer Fox's tooth, and Brer Fox opened his mouth real wide and—GULP! Tattletales never do come to a good end."¹⁶

It was not the confines of age, but race, that demarcated the audience of these tales. These were stories for both children and adults, but they were children and adults within the slave community; whites, especially adult whites, were the intended excluded audience. Creating tales that would be seen by adult whites as merely a minor form of "children's" stories thus became a sophisticated means of rebellion, survival, psychological empowerment, and didactic lessoning for the entire enslaved community, adult and child alike.

When Julius Lester rewrote the Uncle Remus tales a century later, he attempted to retain and replicate many elements of such storytelling. Although he kept the title "Uncle Remus," he did not use Harris's narrative frame but instead retold the center tales, revising Harris's use of dialect to a "modified contemporary south- ern black English."¹⁷ Lester's purpose is "to make the tales accessible again, to be told in the living rooms of condominiums as well as on front porches in the South."¹⁸ As much as regional and socioeconomic differences are not barriers to the stories, neither is the audience's age. Arguing the fact that "folktales are now considered primarily stories for children is an indication of our society's spiritual impoverishment,"¹⁹ Lester includes "contemporary references [that] … reflect that the tales were originally adult stories" and acknowledges that "there are lines and references in my telling of these tales that are for the enjoyment of adults, references that children may not understand."²⁰ At the center of these stories, as well, is their earlier context; Lester tells his readers: "The suffering of those slaves who created the tales will be redeemed (to a degree at least) if you receive their offering and make it part of your life."²¹

Just as Julius Lester critiques the single definition of folktales as children's literature and rewrites the tales to include an adult audience, so, too, does another of his works show the dissolution of neat boundaries of such categorization. Lester's To Be a Slave, which among its many awards was cited as a 1969 Newbery Honor Book, has been described as "One of the most powerful documents to appear in children's literature."²² Ironically, however, this book is a compilation of adult texts—songs, slave narratives, proslavery tracts, interviews of former slaves made as part of the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, and even a discussion of racial hierarchy by Thomas Jefferson.

Here, Lester seeks to tell the story of slavery—from the capture of Africans, through their forced journey across the ocean, to their enslavement and later emancipation in the United States as a series of stories—that is, as a weaving of varied viewpoints and experiences. The textual pattern is a sophisticated one; it has neither a neat linear nor circular pattern. Indeed, it disrupts expected narrative lines, as it seeks to disrupt complacent notions of slavery and history. Lester presents not only different voices, but also often contradictory ones; neither does he exclude disquieting voices, like that of the complicit slave who spies on and betrays his fellow slaves. Lester's premise—"To be a slave was to be a human being under conditions in which that humanity was denied. They were not slaves. They were people. Their condition was slavery"²³—is a premise that immediately positions those who were enslaved in the center of the discussion of slavery. Here, they are not only the subject, but the speakers, those whose experience becomes the means of authority.²⁴ It is the telling of lived experience that figures centrally in this text. Lester connects these excerpts with his own brief explanations or transitions, but always the primary material is foregrounded.

The experiences of slaves encompass those who are tortured, murdered, commit suicide; those who rebel against their plight either physically or psychologically; and those who were complicit with their white slaveholders. Lester clarifies language, but is never patronizing or facile in his descriptions. He explains terms some may not know; he cites statistics, then allows the individuals to speak, so that this is not a history of cold numbers but of passionate and feeling people. Excerpts tell us, as well, of whites who supported slavery, those—such as Thomas Jefferson—who questioned whether Africans were as intelligent as whites. He tells, too, of the experiences of both adults and children.

By privileging the testimony of former slaves, Lester immediately denies the hegemony of white narrative perspective. He further attacks the concept of white hegemony with the focus on the ways slaves created separate communities with value systems exclusive of the white slave-holders. Value systems redefined acceptable behavior, so that stealing within the slave community was condemned, but stealing from the slave-holder was not. But if this text confronts and denies notions of white cultural hegemony of the nineteenth century, it also confronts and denies hegemonic notions of the definition of "children's" and "adult" literature. In To Be a Slave, Lester does not edit out difficult recountings of sexual exploitation, violence, and murder that might be deemed inappropriate for a young audience. He does not attempt to make these texts palatable for adolescents by sanitizing history or the testimony of these people. Indeed, the passion with which he directs the reader through passages, and the passion of the entries themselves, denies the possibility of a dry retelling of facts. Lester's selections are unflinching—both in language and in the scenes they describe. An excerpt from former slave Sallie Crane recounts: "We hardly knowed our names. We was cussed for so many bitches and sons of bitches and bloody bitches and blood of bitches. We never heard our names scarcely at all. First young man I went with wanted to know my initials! What did I know 'bout initials?" (29-30).

The separation of "children's" literature suggests a cultural construction of children, a time of increased vulnerability and protection afforded the young. It is particularly appropriate that Lester's To Be a Slave denies the often neat separation of literatures by age and uses defined "adult" literatures to create his text, for he is describing a time that offered little protection to enslaved children. Excerpts in Lester's book include recountings of families separated and children sold from parents who love them but are unable to save them from the auction block. Although not exclusively focusing on children, Lester nonetheless shows how children enjoyed no protection through any segment of the journeys of slaves. Of the middle passage, the sea journey from Africa to the Americas, Lester includes an excerpt from a narrative that describes how the white slavetraders who "fastened the irons on these mothers took the children out of their hands and threw them over the side of the ship into the water. When this was done, two of the women leaped overboard after the children" (25). In a time when children could be murdered by slavetraders without compunction, there are recorded incidents of mothers who killed their own children rather than have them endure slavery: "My mother told me … [about] a women who was the mother of seven children and when her babies would get about a year or two of age, he'd sell them and it would break her heart…. When her fourth baby was born and was about two months old, … she said, ‘I just decided I'm not going to let ol' master sell this baby; he just ain't going to do it.’ She got up and give it something out of a bottle and pretty soon it was dead" (40).

In one particularly horrific example of the vulnerability of children and the inability of their parents to protect them, Lester quotes Ida Hutchinson who recalls how the slave women would take their children into the fields because the master did not want "them to lose time walking backward and forward nursing. They built a long trough like a great long old cradle and put all these babies in it every morning when the mother come out to the field…. [A]ll at once … the rain came down in great sheets. And when it got so they could go to the other end of the field, that trough was filled with water and every baby in it was floating round in the water, drowned" (38).

To Be a Slave offers no gentle or indifferent view of slavery; neither does it offer a promise of happiness or resolution. Indeed, the ending of To Be a Slave is a patently uncomfortable one that denies any ready resolution to racial conflict. This is particularly apparent in its final entry, an excerpt from an interview in the 1930s during which Thomas Hall responds:

Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food, and clothing…. You are going to get a story of slavery conditions and the persecutions of Negroes before the Civil War and the economic conditions concerning them since that war. You should have known before this late day all about that…. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. I didn't like her book and I hate her … the white folks have been and are now and always will be against the Negro.

          (156)

Hall's rejection of white hegemony is multitiered. He castigates white icons of emancipation—Stowe, Lincoln, and the Yankee soldiers; he redefines the heroes of abolition and the Civil War as emblems of white hypocrisy; he denies the narrative perspective which largely places the Civil War in the foreground and slavery as a background setting device for white heroes; and he ultimately denies accepted categorizations of history. Race becomes the means of definition and categorization—in experience and ideology—for him.

The thirteen illustrations in To Be a Slave reflect such conflicts, for the black and white drawings by Tom Feelings often use those tones in symbolic and racial terms. In the first image facing the title page, a black man, clothed in white pants, his wrists held with white chains, stands facing a world of whiteness, deep blackness covering only a thin space behind him. Connected to that world he is forced to leave behind, the means and pervasiveness of oppression are defined by the whiteness about him. White as a symbol of oppression is clear, too, in other illustrations, as in the vastness of space above a man "on the auction block" (41), the fields of cotton surrounding slaves who work in the fields (67), and the hoods and burning cross of the Klu Klux Klan (149). The illustrations reflect the excerpts of To Be a Slave, and in that way they, too, reflect the problems with clear boundaries between "children's" and "adult" literatures.

The problem with definition of genre by audience age is apparent, too, in Tom Feelings's later work, The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. This book tells the story of the forced journey of Africans to the Americas. It has been estimated that only as many as one-third of those people may have survived an ocean journey marked by beatings, rapes, starvation, diseases, overcrowded quarters, murder, and suicide.²⁵ This is a story, like Lester's, that tells of the horrors of slavery with passion and honesty, yet except for a brief introduction by historian John Henrik Clarke and foreword by artist Tom Feelings, this is a story told entirely in pictures. Tom Feelings explains why:

I started reading everything I could find on slavery and specifically the Middle Passage…. But some of the writers' overbearing opinions, even religious rationalizations and arguments … made me feel, the more words I read, that I should try to tell this story with as few words as possible, if any. Callous indifference or outright brutal characterizations of Africans are embedded in the language of the Western World. It is a language so infused with direct and indirect racism that it would be difficult, if not impossible, using this language in my book, to project anything black as positive. This gave me the final reason for attempting to tell the story through art alone. I believed strongly that with a picture book any African in this world could pick up and see and feel what happened to us on those ships.²⁶

What Feelings does in The Middle Passage is show us the horrors of this forced crossing. In shades of black and white, from the initial drawing—a full two-page spread of sweeping lines and softened tones in which the faces of two Africans imposed upon the picture show their relationship to the scene, and a bird is flying above as an image of freedom—the scene soon changes; the drawings fracture from such a full spread to panel drawings often surrounded by white margins. Here it is whiteness that marks unspeakable cruelties, not only as the blank white margins confine the images of these people, but in the scenes themselves, as ghostly White men beat and kill Black men and rape Black women. It is, too, a white ship that drives Africans who scream in pain, across the ocean. Describing his creative process in the foreword, Feelings writes: "muted images flashed across my mind. Pale white sailing ships like huge white birds of prey, plunging forward into mountainous rising white foaming waves of cold water, surrounding and engulfing everything." As in To Be a Slave, Feelings's use of white and black is representational of the racial oppression inherent in the African slave trade. The bird of freedom shown in the initial scene of Africa has become this ship bird-of-prey and nature turns predatory. In a later two-page paneled set of drawings, the white boat sits like a representational medallion in the top center, cutting a wake through white waters as it continues to the Americas, yet looking closely one sees black figures left behind in its wake, other bodies falling from the sides of the boat. The top panel that this drawing interrupts allows a view of what is happening on that boat—as white figures take the bodies of innumerable Africans lying haphazardly in grotesque piles, and toss them overboard. In the bottom panel, white sharks swim about the body of a black man, ready to devour him. Tormentors both aboard the ship and in the ocean, the white sharks mirror the white slave traders in the top panel, just as the two panels on either side of the ship mirror each other. To attempt to describe these drawings in words is to diminish their power. That is another reason for the picture book format; without the limitations of words, Feelings was able to create "images [with] … a definite point of view and the passion in them that reflected clearly the experience of the people who endured this agony."

The Middle Passage has been categorized, alternately, as an adult and children's book. The explicit scenes of violence and rape would seem to suggest an adult audience, but the use of what is categorized as a "children's genre"—the picture book—problematizes that. To Feelings, "picture books" are more than a form for the child. He follows the origins of the genre to African storytelling. To create this book, he believed, he would "use everything [he] had ever learned about the power of picture books." He continues:

Storytelling is an ancient African oral tradition through which the values and history of a people are passed on to the young. And essentially I am a storyteller. Illustrated books are a natural extension of this African oral tradition. Telling stories through art is both an ancient and modern functional art form that enables an artist to communicate on a large scale to people young and old. I could use the form of historical narrative pictures telling a complete story to adults.

The importance of storytelling in his work is clear in the way Feelings invited people into his studio to look at sketches while they were still in progress. These drawings became, in some way, a series of stories, as was Lester's To Be a Slave. Feelings not only tells the story of millions of enslaved Africans, but he also notes: "I listened [to those black people who came into my studio] as they voluntarily opened up and told me about the joyful and the sorrowful things in their lives. And I began to soak up all this information. All those stories, all those things that as one person I could never experience in a single lifetime. Then when I was alone I let it seep slowly into all of my art." As Feelings recalls, he would also hear the voice of his deceased maternal grandmother telling him to continue the work "because you are not doing this just for yourself." The people he invited into his studio were defined by commonly shared cultural pasts, not by age, for he invited "all kinds of people, young and old."

Indeed, at various literary conferences, Feelings also has noted the importance of this story for the young. Critics have responded similarly. The Middle Passage has received the Coretta Scott King Award, which acknowledges outstanding African American children's authors and illustrators, and reviewers have noted the book's potential dual audience, as did Betsy Hearne, who wrote that it "will provoke discussion among junior-high and high school students (not to mention adults)."²⁷

Like To Be a Slave and, a century earlier, the tales of Brer Rabbit, The Middle Passage in not a book con- fined by the limitations of audience age. That issue is a keenly intriguing one in these cases, for these texts allow examinations of traditional boundaries of form and audience. Julius Lester uses adult narratives to create a book for adolescents; Tom Feelings uses a children's form to create a book for adults. Each permeates limiting notions of "children's" or "adult" literatures by using narrative forms typically designated for the "other" audience. Lester and Feelings seek to tell stories of how slavery attempted to destroy cultural boundaries and reestablish other, oppressive ones, in which people were viewed and treated as chattel. Their crossing borders of genre and audience draws not only upon traditions of storytelling from American slaves and earlier African folktales, but it also serves as a keen statement on the politics of using classification as a means of marginalization and, hence, oppression. To Be a Slave is not only a book for adolescents any more than The Middle Passage is exclusively for adults. By permeating the boundaries of narrative form, Lester and Feelings define themselves as "storytellers," as those whose works are a series of stories, representing many others, both young and old, and giving voice to those whom history might silence.

Lester's description of the Uncle Remus tales fits as well his and Feelings's work in To Be a Slave and The Middle Passage: "… storytelling is a human event, an act of creating relationship. In a traditional setting, storytelling creates and re-creates community, making a bond between the living and the living, the young and the old, the living and the dead…. The storyteller resides at the vortex of the mystery, resolving it by means that do not rob us of mystery."²⁸ Drawing upon traditions within and before the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, Lester and Feelings bring "storytelling" to current generations of both children and adults in their separate texts and as they do so, they also elude the marginalization of categories—in terms of history, aesthetics, and audience.

Notes

1. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902. London: Frederick Warne, 1987). For background on the story and its publication, see Leslie Linder, A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (London: Frederick Warne, 1971), 4, 95.

2. See Peter Hunt, Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), especially chapters 1-3, for a discussion on the debate about defining "children's" literature.

3. Julius Lester, "Brer Rabbit Goes Back to Mr. Man's Garden," in The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, illus. by Jerry Pinkney (New York: Dial Books, 1987), 81-86.

4. Augusta Baker, introduction to The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, by Julius Lester, vii.

5. For various discussions of the Uncle Remus character, see R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., ed, Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). For an example of a proslavery plantation novel, see John Pendleton Kennedy, Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion, ed. Jay B. Hubbel (1832. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929). The problematic presentation of "Uncle Remus" is the primary reason the Disney film Song of the South (1946), a retelling of Brer Rabbit stories with an Uncle Remus character, has not been rereleased in recent years.

6. Julius Lester, foreword to The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, xv.

7. Robert Hemenway, "Introduction: Author, Teller, and Hero," in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1982), 20.

8. Lester, foreword to The Tales of Uncle Remus, xv.

9. In his foreword to The Tales of Uncle Remus, Lester points out that these tales "represent the largest single collection of Afro-American folktales ever collected and published" (xiii).

10. See John Henrik Clarke, introduction to The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo (New York: Dial Books, 1995) n. p., for a précis of the middle passage.

11. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 112.

12. Ann Kibbey, "Language in Slavery: Frederick Douglass's Narrative," in Prospectus: The Annual of American Cultural Studies 8 (1983): 163-182.

13. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 114. For further discussions of coded languages and slave folktales, see Levine, esp. 81-135. See John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) for a discussion of the ways folktales served as "important psychological devices" for surviving slavery (129). See John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) for a discussion of the connections between African and African American folktales.

14. Blassingame, The Slave Community, 227. Also see Blassingame for a discussion of other stereotypes used to rationalize slavery, esp. 223-248.

15. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 115.

16. Julius Lester, "Mr. Jack Sparrow Meets His End," in The Tales of Uncle Remus, 37. For further discussion about the didactic purposes of these tales, particularly for children, see Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 125, and Blassingame, The Slave Community, 127.

17. Lester, foreword to The Tales of Uncle Remus, xviii. Lester discusses the Uncle Remus character in that foreword, esp. xiv-xvi and in The Last Tales of Uncle Remus (New York: Dial Books, 1994), x-xii. Lester has also published two other collections of Uncle Remus tales: More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies and Others (New York: Dial Books, 1988) and Further Tales of Uncle Remus: The Misadventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, the Doodang, and Other Creatures (New York: Dial Books, 1990).

18. Lester, foreword to The Tales of Uncle Remus, xvi.

19. Ibid., xv.

20. Ibid., xx.

21. Ibid., xxi.

22. Margaret A. Dorsey, review of To Be a Slave, Library Journal 93 (15 December 1968): 4,733.

23. Julius Lester, To Be a Slave, illus. Tom Feelings (New York: Scholastic, 1968), 28.

24. See William L. Andrews, introduction to Six Women's Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxix-xli, for a discussion of the slave as object ("eye") and subject ("I") of his or her own story. Harriet Jacobs and other former slaves would demand authority through their "testimony"; as Jacobs writes "Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations [slavery]." See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. L. M. Child, 1861. Reprint, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 2.

25. Clarke, introduction to The Middle Passage, n. p.

26. Tom Feelings, foreword to The Middle Passage, n. p. All following references from Tom Feelings are from this foreword.

27. Betsy Hearne, review of The Middle Passage, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 49 (December 1995): 125.

28. Lester, introduction to The Last Tales of Uncle Remus, x.

References

Andrews, William L. Introduction to Six Women's Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., xxix-xli. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Bickley, Jr. and R. Bruce, ed. Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community; Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Clarke, John Henrik. Introduction to The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. New York: Dial Books, 1995.

Dorsey, Margaret A. Review of To Be a Slave. Library Journal 93 (15 December 1968): 4733.

Feelings, Tom. The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo. Introduction by John Henrik Clarke. New York: Dial Books, 1995.

Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, ed. Robert Hemenway. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1982 [1880].

Hearne, Betsy. Review of The Middle Passage. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 49 (December 1995): 125.

Hemenway, Robert. "Introduction: Author, Teller, and Hero." In Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1982.

Hunt, Peter. Criticism, Theory, and Children's Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. L. M. Child, 1861. Reprint, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn, or A Sojourn in the Old Dominion. Ed. Jay B. Hubbel. 1832. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929.

Kibbey, Ann. "Language in Slavery: Frederick Douglass's Narrative." Prospectus: The Annual of American Cultural Studies 8 (1983): 163-182.

Lester, Julius. To Be a Slave. Illus. Tom Feelings. New York: Scholastic, 1968.

———. The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. New York: Dial Books, 1987.

———. More Tales of Uncle Remus: Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit, His Friends, Enemies and Others. New York: Dial Books, 1988.

———. Further Tales of Uncle Remus: The Misadventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, the Doodang, and Other Creatures. Illus. Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Books, 1990.

———. The Last Tales of Uncle Remus. New York: Dial Books, 1994.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Linder, Leslie. A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter. London: Frederick Warne, 1971.

Potter, Beatrix. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. 1902. London: Frederick Warne, 1987.

Roberts, John W. From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Sally Lodge (essay date 12 February 2001)

SOURCE: Lodge, Sally. "Julius Lester: Working at His Creative Peak." Publishers Weekly (12 February 2001): 180-81.

[In the essay below, written after interviewing the author, Lodge traces Lester's writing and publishing career, focusing specifically on The Blues Singers, To Be a Slave, and When Dad Killed Mom; on Lester's decision to become a writer; on his dual roles as educator and writer; and on his working relationship with illustrator Jerry Pinkney.]

Not many miles off the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston, a winding road rises and falls just before it reaches the turnoff leading up a hill to Julius Lester's pale green, clapboard home. Encircled by leafless trees, the house sits on a knoll overlooking a snow-filled meadow, as pale on a late January day as the gray sky that seems to dip down to meet it halfway. In sharp contrast to this frosty setting, the author's welcome is warm and gracious, as he ushers a visitor indoors to a chair by a large window offering a splendid view of the winter countryside.

Comfortably clad in a woolen burgundy plaid shirt, beige sweater, corduroy pants and fleece slippers, Lester settles into a chair to reflect on his 32-year writing career, during which he has created a bountiful 30 books for both children and adults. This spring alone, Lester has a trio of titles for young readers due out from three different publishers. Next month, Scholastic Press will release Ackamarackus: Julius Lester's Sumptuously Silly Fantastically Funny Fables, with acrylic and collage art by Emilie Chollat. Coming in May from Hyperion's Jump at the Sun imprint is The Blues Singers: Ten Who Rocked the World, illustrated by Lisa Cohen. And due the same month from Harcourt/Silver Whistle is When Dad Killed Mom, a young adult novel written in the alternating voices of a brother and sister whose father is convicted of fatally shooting their mother.

"My work has always had a range to it, but I've never had three so different books come out during the same season," says Lester in his deep, resonant voice. Asked whether he agrees with Scholastic's assertion, in the flap copy for Ackamarackus, that never before has the author's "silly side been seen in print," Lester chuckles and nods. "Yes, this is a total breaking away from what I've been doing over the last several years. Instead of retelling traditional tales with imagination, I created original imaginative stories. This book started with a dream I had, in which I invented a whole new alphabet."

Hardly new to the author is the topic of The Blues Singers, which offers profiles of such greats as James Brown, Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson. Lester notes that his work on this title, which Andrea Pinkney, his editor at Jump at the Sun, proposed he write, "took me back to a part of my life I hadn't been in contact with for a while. I used to be a folksinger in the 1960s, and I collected music in the South during this time. As a board member of the Newport Folk Foundation, I had been involved in the Newport Folk Festival and knew a lot of the old-time blues singers, so it was certainly fun going back to listen to that music again."

At first Lester struggled with his narrative, since it was difficult for him to write what he labels "just a factual book, since I am a storyteller." The birth of his granddaughter, now 15 months old, gave him a voice for this book. "Suddenly it occurred to me that I wanted her to know about these singers, and the storytelling element I was looking for opened up," he recalls. Accordingly, Lester addresses the child personally in his introduction, which he concludes with a characteristically original observation: "Honey, if it wasn't for the blues, we probably wouldn't have anything to listen to except our toenails growing."

Yet it is his new, wrenching novel, When Dad Killed Mom, that evokes the most emotional response from the author. Though he explains that he is usually dispassionate when he writes and does not himself expe- rience the feelings that he creates on the page, this book was an exception. "Emotionally, this book was different for me," he reflects. "These characters, their voices and their story were so clear to me from the very beginning. They had me in tears very often. Once you've reached a certain age and you've experienced the deaths of family members and friends, each death reawakens that experience. Both of my parents and my brother are dead, so I'm the only one of my family left. As I took these young characters through the grieving process after their mother dies, I went through another round of grieving myself. I sat down to begin writing, and I wrote 18 pages in one sitting. I've never before done that. I'm a bleeder: I write three pages at a time and then rewrite for a week before writing the next three. But this was very different."

Though Lester asserts that he didn't decide to become a writer until the last week of his senior year at Fisk University in Nashville, from which he received a B.A. in English in 1960, he spent his childhood surrounded by stories. The son of a Methodist minister who moved his family from Missouri to Kansas to Tennessee, Lester remembers spending much time listening to the stories that his father and his Southern minister colleagues shared. "My father's voice and the language and the rhythms I heard in church were a major influence on my life," he remarks. Similarly, the writer evokes fond memories of the childhood summers he spent at his maternal grandmother's home in Arkansas. "Her place had no electricity, so we'd sit in the dark on her front porch those summer nights, and I'd listen closely to my grandmother and my mother talking about old people they knew, or people who had died. These were so important to me, these voices coming to me through the night."

Lester's college graduation coincided with the beginnings of the civil rights movement, in which he became very involved. "This was really important to me in terms of being a part of making—and changing—history, as well as establishing many relationships," he explains. In 1961, he moved to New York City where he taught guitar and banjo before signing on as host of a radio show for eight years, which led to his own live TV show that aired for two years. When he wasn't on the air, Lester was polishing his writing skills and began publishing pieces in magazines in the mid-'60s. He penned what he describes as "the first book about black power from somebody who was inside the movement," which Dial Press published in 1968 as Look out, Whitey, Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama.

"It was out of that book that I stumbled into writing for children," observes Lester, whose editor at the time, Joyce Johnson, commented that he wrote very simply and clearly, and suggested he talk to Phyllis Fogelman, editor-in-chief at Dial Books for Young Readers, about the possibility of doing a book for children. At their initial meeting, Lester told Fogelman that he had been scouring the Library of Congress's collection of interviews with former slaves in hopes of finding traces of his ancestors. "I had come across many interesting accounts there and had also been collecting out-of-print books containing 19th-century slave narratives," he recalls. "I told Phyllis that I had been thinking about writing a book about what it was like to be a slave—in the words of a slave. She asked me to write a proposal, which she liked, and I spent the next three months writing the book."

It was obviously time well spent. Published in 1968, To Be a Slave was named a Newbery Honor Book and has sold just under half a million copies in hardcover and paperback. Lester modestly comments that the award impressed him little at the time. "This was a book that I knew I had to write, and I felt very fortunate that it was recognized. But I didn't know enough about children's literature to know that the Newbery was a big deal. What was great was that I realized that I enjoyed writing for children and that I could write for children in ways I couldn't write for adults." In the next few years, the author wrote several other books for adults, as well as Long Journey Home: Stories from Black Histories, another children's book with Dial that was a National Book Award finalist in 1972.

Lester, meanwhile, had donned yet another cap, that of educator. Due to the recognition he gained as author of Look out, Whitey, he was offered a position at New York City's New School for Social Research, where for two years he taught a course on black history. "And then in 1971, I was asked to come up to interview with the black studies department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and I've been teaching there ever since," he says. "I never thought I'd be here as long as I have, but I just love teaching. And I love the students."

Reflecting his range of interests and expertise, Lester's current teaching agenda includes a course on biblical tales and legends for the Judaic studies department, a course on the 1960s for the history department and a course on religion and Western literature for the English department.

Juggling his roles as professor and writer poses no problem for Lester. "Teaching at the university level, I'm able to set my schedule in such a way that I'm able to give what I need to give to the teaching and also have time to write," he explains. "I don't see the two as a dichotomy. Teaching keeps me in touch with youth, since college students are basically late adolescents. I'm very aware of the cultural influences in their lives, the kinds of things they are thinking about and what is important to them. I even watch MTV."

The author, whose agent is Minnesota-based Neil Ross, is gratified that he is published by a variety of publishers. He notes that his relationships with editors have sprung up through diverse channels, including encounters at conferences and unsolicited suggestions for book projects. "I feel that working with a number of editors improves me as a writer," he says. "I've learned very different things from different editors." Similarly, Lester enjoys collaborating with a spectrum of artists, some of whose work keeps him company each day: one wall of his front hall is decorated with framed illustrations from the covers or the interiors of his picture books.

Represented among the art in Lester's home gallery is Jerry Pinkney, with whom the author has a particularly close working relationship. "Jerry and I have an unusual way of working," he notes. "Often publishers try to keep writers and artists separated, so that authors don't try to dictate how a book should be illustrated. But Jerry and I talk to each other about a book. I would never tell Jerry, or any artist, what they should draw. We have a lot of respect for each other and our collaborations have worked well."

Very well, in fact. One joint effort, John Henry, was a 1995 Caldecott Honor Book and an ALA Notable Book, and won the Society of Illustrators' Gold Medal; Sam and the Tigers, a 1996 collaboration also published by Dial, was also named an ALA Notable Book.

The names of Lester and Pinkney will appear together again on the cover of another picture book, tentatively scheduled to be released in the fall of 2002 by Phyllis Fogelman's imprint at Penguin Putnam. Entitled The Old African, it retells a story that Lester initially relayed in Long Journey Home, based on a legend about Africans who walked into the ocean in Georgia and made their way all the way back to Africa. "I am very excited about this book," notes Lester. "I have been haunted by this story for years. When I sat to retell it, what came out was magical. Absolutely magical."

Lester has recently completed or is finishing six other books, including his third novel for adults, The Autobiography of God, which, in Lester's words, "my agent is sending out to publishers as we speak." This is the book the author cites when asked if there is a book that he had dreamed of writing but had not yet written. "This is one book that I really felt that if I died without writing it, I would really hate myself," he muses. "I've been working on this novel, on and off, for about 15 years, and I finally finished it last summer. It's a book that I had to grow into, but I'm very pleased with it now."

This prolific author has no plans to hit the road when the snow melts to promote his spring titles. "This has been the most creative period of my life, but I'm tired and I just want to stay home," Lester says determinedly. "I live here on 12 acres of peace and quiet. Why should I want to go any-place else? When my wife and I saw this house in the mid-'90s, it was the one house we wanted, but, as is always the case, it was more money than we could afford. So I said to God, ‘If you let me have this house, I guarantee you I will write, write, write.’"

Luckily for his readers, Julius Lester is a man of his word.

Opal Moore (essay date September 2001)

SOURCE: Moore, Opal. "Othello, Othello, Where Art Thou?" Lion and the Unicorn 25, no. 3 (September 2001): 375-90.

[In the essay below, Moore enumerates the many flaws she identifies in Othello, especially Lester's lack of "attention to craft," which "seems to have taken a back seat to [his] interest in what he believes is a moral purpose in his fiction."]

Virtue! Was I some fair-haired white maiden locked in the castle tower, braiding my hair as the barbarians approached, their penises tied around their waists in bows? No, I was the maid lying on the castle stairs, her dress bunched at her waist, her bodice torn in ribbons and her thighs smeared with semen-thickened blood.

I had to go back home, for it was in the South that I learned something of virtue from the old ones who never knew a day of ease, who accepted the indignities and atrocities inflicted upon them, but were never resigned to them. That was crucial …

          Julius Lester, All Is Well (286-87)

At least two years ago I came across Othello: A Novel written by Julius Lester. I first knew and remembered Lester as the author of Black Folktales, which had caused some stir in the publishing world. While there were some troubling aspects of female portrayal there, I loved his version of "People Who Could Fly." Since that publication I was aware that he had continued to generate materials for younger audiences, including the nonfiction work, To Be a Slave, which introduced children to some of the original narratives of black people that told of their experiences with American slavery. Though I did not follow his career closely, I knew that he had gone on to produce books of retold folk tales such as The Knee-High Man and Other Tales. When I encountered his Tales of Uncle Remus and More Tales of Uncle Remus as I browsed a bookstore shelf one day, I was somewhat surprised that Lester, who I considered to be of a radical black consciousness, would want to preserve not only the African American lore of B'rer Rabbit and his memeses, but Joel Chandler Harris's "darkie" uncle as well. I remember dismissing a vague flutter of alarm with a rationalization. I knew that Lester had turned some kind of corner, but I did not "study on it," as my great-grandmother would have phrased it. With the 1996 publication of Sam and the Tigers, reviewed in The Village Voice (49), I returned to Othello to "study on" Julius Lester and his latest developments.

Julius Lester opens his autobiography, All Is Well, with a detailed description of his desire from early childhood, to be a girl: "… in my childhood fantasies [I] became a beautiful girl with long black hair, like my mother's…. I called myself Michele" (9). This sense of the inner girl weaves throughout All Is Well, figuring in his tormented sexual development ("I particularly hated that thing drooping from the end of my torso like a fat worm …"[35]), his conflicted reverence and disdain for women ("… I came to hate girls" [35]), his categorical rejection of black women ("I'd known since I was nine years old that I would marry a white woman" [102]) and quick hatred for traditional black bourgeois cultural values ("When I returned to Fisk … I was a man at war, stoning the high-heeled properly coiffed girls with profanity, wearing my jeans like Jeanne d'Arc carrying the Croix of Lorraine into Orleans, and being as different from my classmates as I could, afraid that … I would succumb to the virus of black ‘respectability’ and be entombed in some black suburbia and written about in Ebony" [41]). By the time he's worked his way to the latter pages of his narrative, Lester has declared the Civil Rights movement and "The Revolution" morally and intellectually bankrupt, and has come to view himself as the embodiment of Remnant Virtue, likening himself (in the quote that opens this essay) to a helpless white girl ravished by barbarians. He concludes this depiction with an implicit comparison between himself (virtuous, defiled, white girl) and what we are to gather were the contemporary, assaultive barbarians—young black radicals who "sit on the porch … blood-stained machetes in their hands" (287).

Lester's All Is Well describes his life as a black boy struggling for self-identity in ways that evoke the stories of "females" trapped inside of "male" bodies who cannot find inner peace until they've purchased a sex change operation. His narrative is shaped like a story of Beast—the prince whose pedigree cannot be perceived due to the "shroud of color,"¹ who falsely believes he can only be released from the curse of his blackness through the bodies of idealized women. On the way, he first engages in pure romance with a light-skinned black girl who rejects him and dies, later marries a white girl/woman who drops him off at the doorstep of the Civil Rights Movement ("[Arlene] could see the class struggle in a bowl of Rice Krispies" [108]), carries on a brief and insincere flirtation with the Black Power movement, only to realize that what he seeks still eludes him. His later autobiographical work, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, opens with the declaration: "I have become who I am. I am who I always was. I am no longer deceived by the black face which stares at me from the mirror. I am a Jew" (1). Having discovered that he is not "Black" but a Jew, Lester declares that he has finally located his "true self." However, a reading of his novel, Othello, does not suggest that he has located an inner peace.

Lester's interpretive record of his personal story, added to a review of his other publications, offers a most illuminating context for the novel. In his essays, interviews, articles, autobiography and commentaries, Lester has frequently returned to familiar territory—an ongoing and bitter discourse on black men, white women and accusations of his racial defection and betrayal. In his writings, he has imbued interracial sex and his own sexuality with a kind of liberationist significance. For example, in his adult fiction, And All Our Wounds Forgiven, the main character, Marshall (who is shaped to suggest Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), is also obsessed with a white woman, Lisa. One carefully neutral reviewer commented on Lester's "tendency to focus almost exclusively on Marshall's trysts with Lisa rather than to provide a full progression of his life…." (Samuels 176). In other words, the novel seems less concerned with exploring the complexities and struggles of a man and a movement than insisting upon the centrality of the interracial sexual liaisons between a white woman and a black cultural hero. Of course, few would question Lester's right to reimagine a public figure. One might question, how- ever, the limitations of the project or its substance—does it aspire to a fictional truth, or is it anticivil rights agitprop?

In a brief review of Othello, Carol J. Pingel writes: "While purists might argue that the beauty of the Shakespearean drama has been diminished, Lester has succeeded commendably in changing the form but not the essence…. [The novel] presents the story and theme without the difficulty of the original" (39). Pingel's conclusion raises two questions: what are the "theme" and the "essence" of the original play, and what "difficulties" have been eliminated? The brevity of this review did not permit a consideration of Lester's claims for the novel or offer a basis for the reviewer's conclusion—that Lester has succeeded commendably. Henry James once said, "We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donné: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it." Lester himself argues that a novel must have its own integrity (Lester, Othello xii). So, how is Othello to be measured as a work of art? Did he intend to preserve the "essence" of the Shakespearean work (as the reviewer claims)? Is it intended to assist young readers in their appreciation of the play (minus the difficult language)? What has he "made"?

In the introduction to his novel, Lester seems inclined to explain his Othello. He begins by lamenting the fact that Shakespeare's work is "increasingly inaccessible to many [especially high school and college students] because of its unfamiliar and difficult language" (ix). This opening commentary would suggest that Lester intended to do for Shakespeare what he has done for Joel Chandler Harris and the Uncle Remus tales.² However, Lester soon complicates the matter. He explains his purpose, saying, "Othello: A Novel is an attempt to blend Shakespeare's characters and story with more accessible English and a reworking of the characters." He follows with his own question: What does this mean? (x). His explanations focus on the technical aspects of his project and do not reveal very much about the "reworking" of the characters.

Lester begins by explaining what he considers to be the important differences between the two genres, the novel and the play. His efforts to emphasize the differences seem forced and his analysis is often incomplete or baffling. As Flannery O'Connor has said, "If you know anything about the history of the novel, you know that the novel as an art form has developed [like the play] in the direction of dramatic unity" (74). While there are obvious differences between novels and plays, the creative processes for each share similar goals. Yet Lester insists upon emphasizing a difference; for example, he says, "in the theater we are willing to suspend disbelief and use our imaginations to transform a spare stage setting into a castle or ship or tenement house. In a novel, however, we expect to be rooted in time and place by descriptions" (xi). Such an articulation of "difference" assumes that there is only one kind of play or one kind of novel. It also suggests that the reader of novels need not employ imagination. Further, he borrows a well-used phrase—suspension of disbelief—a coining of phrase credited to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to suggest some kind of special quality of the theatergoer. In fact, this concept speaks to technique, not circumstance.

In The Art of Fiction, a small text on the demands of the novelist's craft, novelist-teacher John Gardner insists that the story writer must "by the quality of his voice, and by means of various devices that distract the critical intelligence, [encourage] the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (22). In other words, this "suspension of disbelief … which constitutes poetic faith" is not a generous propensity characteristic of the playgoer. It is a frame of mind that the writerly artist seeks to encourage through effective use of the devices of storytelling. Gardner goes on to say that "fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader's mind" (31). This fictional dream is effected by the writer's assiduous attention to matters of craft. The good writer strives to avoid making mistakes that will distract the reader from the continuous dream (32). My point here is to argue with Lester's intimation that the playwright need not worry about establishing the dream world of the play stage, because the playgoer will automatically set aside her critical intelligence and enter into a "suspension of disbelief" just because it is a play—or conversely, that the reader of novels will have no need to employ imagination in order to transcend the fact that the fictional world rendered by the writer is captured between the covers of a book.

Lester's sketchy notions about plays and novels, and the neglect in his introduction of creative concerns, reveals much about the ills of his Othello. Attention to craft seems to have taken a back seat to the author's interest in what he believes is a moral purpose in his fiction.

Lester is not unfamiliar with the work of John Gardner. In a statement concerning his own work and artistic goals, Lester quotes from another work, Gardner's well-known text, On Moral Fiction:

John Gardner put it this way: "We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, openmindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies … and confirms…. [M]oral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action." Perhaps the key phrases are "thoroughly honest search" and "explores open-mindedly." We are not accustomed to conceiving of the moral either as searching or exploring "open-mindedly," or imaginatively. (Italics added.)

          (Qtd. in Lester, "Re-Imagining the Possibilities" 284.)

The very design of the Othello project sets Lester at odds with his chosen mentor. When a writer sets out to save the soul of the reader, or to convince the reader to accept the ideas of the writer, we can be sure he is no longer writing fiction. Though Gardner writes about moral fiction (which is not the same as morality), everything he says is balanced by his requirement that the writer employ a trustworthy artistic judgment that is partly the writer's willingness to subject the creative work to the harshest artistic standards (The Art of Fiction 9). Gardner is not mushy or mystical about his morals.

Though Lester invokes Gardner, he seems determined to employ the words of this writer to justify the pursuit of a didactic art; he does not seem concerned in Othello with matters of craft that make art achievable. (Conversely, Gardner believes that strong writerly craft will produce a moral fiction, not that moral dictates can be put into a fiction.)

What is missing from Othello is not intention, but evidence that the writer understands the complexity of the art of building character, especially the intimate relationship of character to place and time (setting). What Shakespeare understood about his characters has given scholars a rich territory to question, explore and study. In Othello this relationship is lopped off—Othello, Desdemona and Iago are snipped out of their original contexts and pasted up on a flat backdrop of a medieval English castle—a most unlikely place for this drama to occur. If it were not, wouldn't Shakespeare have used his own England for the setting of his play? Perhaps it occurred to Shakespeare that if Africans were still being put on display in cages in his contemporary England (Lester claims that Shakespeare would not have had any contact with Africans otherwise [x]), it was not likely that an African would have obtained the position of General in the Queen's service.

Less likely, then, that such a phenomenon would have occurred in late fifteenth- to early sixteenth-century England—the era that Lester has selected for the setting of his novel because, as he explains: "… there is nothing in the play that says it must be set in Venice and Cyprus [therefore] I set the novel in late fifteenth-to-early sixteenth-century England because it made everything historically simpler for me as a writer" (xi).

One thing that can be said of historical fictions, whether they are presented as plays or novels, is that these fictions must be built upon solid facts. Everything that occurs in the fiction need not have happened, but it must have been possible for it to happen. While there may never have been a real-life African in Venice of Othello's accomplishments, Shakespeare knew that if it were possible, it would have been in a place like Venice, not in England. So, what could Lester mean when he says that shifting to England made "everything historically simpler"? There may be nothing in the play that is visible to the eye that demands the play occur in Venice and Cyprus, but as Paul Cantor points out, "Venice was an unusual form of community in Renaissance Europe: a commercial republic … a cosmopolitan community…. It is no accident, then, that Shakespeare's two great portraits of aliens are both set in Venice. In other European communities, Shylock as a Jew and Othello as a Moor could not have reached the level of acceptance they achieve at least initially in Venice" (298). It is this unique social fabric that made the marriage of Othello, a black man, and Desdemona, white daughter of a senator, not only possible but complexly significant.

Lester makes two mistakes that one would not expect of him. The first: he assumes that because Africans were not common in England, Shakespeare would know nothing of them or of the racial dynamics that were already being constructed throughout Europe. Because Shakespeare was a broad reader, Edward Berry has eschewed any assumption that the playwright built a fiction out of thin air. Rather, he has traced the "particularity of Shakespeare's portrait and its resistance both to negative stereotyping and abstract universalizing" to Leo Africanus's Geographical Historie of Africa … published in London in 1600 (315). If Shakespeare had no better information about blacks than Cinthio's play and the occasional African "put on display as an oddity" (Lester, Othello xi), he would have been hard-pressed to avoid stereotype. Berry studies the similarities of Africanus's broad descriptions and the details of Shakespeare's portrait of the Moor on the better speculation that Shakespeare did what most good writers do—his homework.

Drawing upon his first error, Lester makes a second error: he concludes that the only reason Shakespeare made Othello a "Moor" is because he was basing his play on an earlier work by Giraldi Cinthio. However, Lester should know that anything a writer borrows from another work must be justified within the new work. There should be no irrelevant detail in a good work of fiction; consequently, Othello's blackness (so often emphasized and commented upon throughout the play) would need to be important to character and, therefore, to the progress of the plot.

Why does Lester insist upon the unimportance of blackness as a critical detail in Shakespeare? His claim that the black Othello is "deracinated" may be designed to suggest that his emphasis on race is something that he is inventing anew for his novel. He further asserts that, "besides his skin color there is nothing African about [Shakespeare's Othello]" (xii). One wonders what other evidence of his Africanness would satisfy. A second possibility is that his reading in Shakespearean scholarship is either dated or highly selective to suit his own inclinations. As Edward Berry points out, "Critics have tended to ignore or underplay the issue of Othello's race. The topic of race has always been explosive, particularly when it involves miscegenation…." (315). Berry attributes much of this tendency in the scholarship to "evasiveness."³ While Lester tends to romanticize the subject of miscegenation rather than to evade it, he has taken the critical squeamishness once common in Shakespearean scholarship for fact and now declares that race was a mere sensational ploy and "not crucial to the unfolding of [Shakespeare's] tragedy." He asserts that Shakespeare made his character African merely "[as] a way to get people into the theater" (xii). The third possibility is that Lester was not interested in the breadth of study available on Othello, its complexities or subtleties, and did not bother with them. Given the carelessness of his preparations as suggested in his introductory commentary and in the novel itself, it seems more likely that he started out planning to do for Shakespeare's Othello what he had done for Remus. However, in the process of writing, he saw that he could use the Bard's dramatic plot as a prop to sing his own blackman's bluesy paean to white female perfection and the heartbreak of a black man being assaulted by his own kin, jealous of his perfect black/white love. Perhaps this is what Publishers Weekly perceived, saying, "Lester's novel succeeds in holding up a mirror to contemporary society" (62). Of course, Othello does not reflect our contemporary society—it harkens back to an earlier America, a period that bent Julius Lester into a permanent pose of racial agony. Nonetheless, in order for this blues song to be sung, Iago had to be made black—a brother. Considering the residual pain lodged in this book so thinly camouflaged as young adult fare, I think of Gwendolyn Brooks's description of her ghetto Lothario, Satin Legs Smith:

               … a man must bring

To music what his mother spanked him for

When he was two: bits of forgotten hate,

Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts:

The little dream his father humored: the thing

His sister did for money: what he ate

For breakfast—and for dinner twenty years

Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts.
 

"The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith" Selected Poems (16)

Julius Lester brings to Othello what society spanked him for: loving white women. However, it is not white America's spankings that he remembers, but black America's chiding "twenty years ago." What is Julius Lester's idea? What has he made of it?

If plays and novels were experienced only through their language, then the language project pursued in Othello might have something to recommend it. If Lester had taken a Shakespearean play and rendered it in a blend of his own prose and deftly selected lines from the original, keeping the important features of plot, character and setting intact, then young readers could experience a kind of "faux classic," appreciating some of original author's most beautiful and memorable lines while engaging in a real reading experience requiring them to grapple with the actual themes and problems of the original work. Such an option would make alternatives such as Cliff's Notes, with its abbreviations and unearned conclusions, unnecessary. Instead, we have a work that takes the title of a Shakespearean play but refuses to represent the essential qualities, questions and history presented in that work. What could be more misguided and even cynical than creating a work called Othello intended for primary and secondary school readers that could easily lead them to believe that having read it, they have gained the "essence" of Shakespeare's Othello?

What are teachers to do with this book? Will they have their students read it while cautioning them that "in this one, Iago is black"? Will the teachers tell their students that the blackness of Iago is a mere detail and not essential to the development of the plot? That the story would have the same meaning even if the evil character were white? Does this story have a demographic? Is it for white children who may not enjoy a story with a black hero and a white villain? Is it for black children who have too many black heroes as it is? Is it for young black girls? Should black girl readers ignore or accept the retrograde human and social implications in the comparison that Lester creates between a black Emilia, the maidservant, and white Desdemona, the love object? True, the original play elevates the beauty of Desdemona as white ideal, but it does not create for comparison a black maid who once yearned for Othello and lost out to a "better" woman.

This list of reader-response concerns becomes apparent with only a superficial reading of Lester's novel. A closer look reveals that there is really very little that is truly worthy of praise in this work, which does not enhance the reading of Othello, but infuses it with a heavy dose of American-variety racist beliefs and assumptions. The fact that it has been praised—listed as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and favorably reviewed in all the best places—suggests that the literary establishment's fear that Shakespeare is underread and underappreciated could open the schoolhouse door to all manner of bad art and backwardness. Lester's self-involved manipulations of race, intended for our most unsophisticated consumers of literature, must constitute a new black brand of old-fashioned literary malfeasance. What is Lester's idea, and what has he made of it? Says Lester:

If race was going to be more central in the novel, and it was, Iago could not be white, because his jealousy might stereotype him as a racist. I found it more interesting to explore racist feelings in a black person.

          (xiii)

Having asserted that Othello's blackness in Shakespeare's play is not about race, Lester determines that he will (voila!) insert race into the formerly raceless story. However, he perceives one danger—that with the "introduction" of race, white Iago, who hates the black Moor, may be mistaken as a racist white man. It is much more interesting (says Lester) and acceptable (evidently) if Iago is stereotyped as a black racist. And this is what Lester accomplishes.

Whereas Shakespeare managed, despite his limited information about Africans, to avoid writing a flat black character (Othello has his flaws, but Shakespeare manages to dance him lightly through the landmine stereotypes of saint and savage), he neglected to sufficiently motivate Iago. Iago is a shorthand for evil. As a secondary character, he lacks history. He may, in fact, be "related" (as some have speculated) to another flatly evil character in an earlier play (Aaron, another Moor, is the black lover of a white woman, Tamora, in Titus Andronicus). However, it is much more likely that Shakespeare is working within the limits of the genre. While Shakespeare may be interested in the complexities of evil, he must employ the tools available to him as best he can. Iago, an eloquently voiced and engrossing portrait of evil, is ultimately a tool to goad the playwright's main character into action.

And this is the greater difference between the play and the novel, one that Lester neglected to mention or appreciate. The playwright must, due to the strict limits of time, often employ a shorthand in rendering character. Because an audience can only sit for so long before losing patience, the playwright's toolkit holds many accepted "types" that are routinely employed for their efficiency. Writing and producing plays for a popular audience, Shakespeare would necessarily make use of recognizable character types and traits, forgoing much elaboration. By contrast, the average novel will range from 250 to 400 pages. Some novels are even longer. The good novelist need not and should not depend upon easily recognizable types but must try to avoid them. The novelist has the time and space to fully develop "round" characters; even secondary characters can be rendered with originality and specificity.

Lester's novel is diminutive, 150 pages of a small-page format. If Lester were actually attempting a novel, he would not need to change Iago's race to avoid stereotyping him. He would have the novelist's toolkit to render all of his characters, not just the villain, with more complexity, specificity and history. Nor would substituting a black stereotype for a white one be considered a better or more interesting option. Lester's excuse that keeping Iago white would force a stereotype is ridiculous. It is not need but desire that writes Iago black as Lester compulsively rewrites his life story and what he believes is the racial truth and salvation of America.

Othello is replete with its own set of stereotypes and unconvincing character motivations. While he provides Othello and Iago with African names and a memory of their common homeplace, even suggesting that Othello has considered returning to Africa, Lester does little to convince the reader of the reality of this situation or setting—he neglects, as he has said a novelist must, to root the reader "in time and place by descriptions." An acknowledged weakness of Shakespeare's Othello is the brevity of the passage of time between Othello's infatuation with Desdemona and his murder of her. Lester does not take advantage of the novel's unique qualities to explore the abbreviated spaces that are natural to the stage play, nor does he attempt to impose a new time frame. Othello careens along at breakneck speed in the same fashion as the play. However, a novelist would need to develop a much more thorough and convincing psychological portrait and set of circumstances surrounding the crumbling of Othello's confidence in Desdemona's faithfulness.

Lester's questions concerning Othello are perfunctory and are handled perfunctorily: How did Othello get to England? Did he miss his homeland? Did he think of himself as European or African, or both? etc. Yet we learn little of Othello's interior landscape. We are told that he despises the "Europeans" ("Europeans were … filthy and did not bathe more than two or three times a year" and had not learned of the use of knives and forks [15-17]). However, these observations seem gratuitous. We do not learn of Othello's personal habits, or of those of his people back home in Africa. We do not know how Desdemona is exempt from this scorn. Is she the only woman in England who washes frequently? Does Desdemona carry her own personal fork?

Iago's character fails to deliver on Lester's promise; he is less "interesting" as a character than as an obvious polemical pawn. Iago's character is inconsistent according to the moment-by-moment requirements of the author. He is said to have hated Othello from boyhood (29) yet the two men call each other by their intimate names (Enaharo and Modibo) to assert their love for one another. Furthermore, Iago is described as being profoundly angered by Othello's marriage because it meant to him that they would never return to Africa together (47). Iago is said to have a physical disgust for whites ("pasty skin like dough … lank thin strands of hair … they were an ugly sight to behold" [47-48]), yet Iago has slept with white servant girls (26). Later we are told that Iago didn't really hate Othello from boyhood (47) but that his marriage to Desdemona was what he hated him for and that this marriage makes Othello (Enaharo) one of them, or "white." In a two-line paragraph, Iago abandons what has been a lifelong love of Othello (as he has renounced or forgotten his earlier professed hatred of him from boyhood) and determines to destroy him.

These contradictions seem more like the writer's inattention to detail (or worse, an assumption about the comprehension levels of his target audience, which includes schoolteachers) than an attempt to portray Iago as jealous, schizophrenic or manic-depressive. What is not clear is why such good friends have never talked about their lives in England, or race, or women, or love. Why does Iago never confront Othello, his homeboy, openly about his concerns? Iago is as much an unknown to Othello as he is to the Europeans. Also, if we consider the time period, what are the feelings of Africans about color differences and marriage? Has Iago imbibed the race hatred of the whites, or does it originate elsewhere? No cultural notes enter into the record here, so we can't know why Iago is not proud that his friend is marrying a woman of such "high birth" as opposed to advocating sexual relations with white servant girls. And if there are no other black women available, whom does Iago suppose that Othello should marry? Or should he be "celibate as a priest" (47)? (Are African priests celibate?) We also know that Othello (Enaharo) has denied Iago (Modibo) a deserved promotion to lieutenant (has given it instead to young, white Michael Cassio) because (we are told) he is afraid that he will be accused of favoring his old friend. Yet, this Othello is elsewhere described as being afraid of nothing. And, in fact, at no time do we observe Othello fearing the opinions of white men. However, this "reason" is supposed to serve as motivation for the remaining action of the novel when in fact it isn't supported in any details of the story. It's not in the novel; however, rumors of black paranoia abound in contemporary America. So, without any cultural detail to make Iago's racial anger plausible, and with no dramatic preparation, Iago discovers that Othello has married Desdemona, and this pushes him beyond his limits. He views this marriage as more of a betrayal than anything Othello has ever done, including transfixing his wife, Emilia (Ashaki) and giving away his well-earned promotion.

Similar inconsistencies can be found in the characterization of Michael Cassio. The omniscient narrator assures the reader that Michael has never felt more than a brotherly affection for Desdemona (9); later we are told that he had played the charade of friend and had never revealed his deep love for her (34).

Desdemona is no more developed in this novel than in the play. She is perhaps more romanticized by Lester than by Shakespeare, her beauty described in overwrought language: "Her pale skin gleamed with the brightness of the crescent moon. Her dark hair spilled over her shoulders like silken desire" (18-19). This description of Desdemona comes just one page after Othello has described the Europeans unflatteringly as "people pale as fog" (17). Yet Desdemona is always described in terms of her perfect whiteness: "She is young and beautiful with skin as white as Christ's soul," Othello tells Michael Cassio (31). Desdemona is a familiar theory of perfection, which Lester seems to take to an extreme. As with other inconsistencies, he gives the pure Desdemona this odd interior thought at the opening of the novel:

There [Othello] was now, his thighs clasping the horse's flank. Death could have taken her soul if, at that moment, God had made her into the horse.

          (5)

By interjecting this reference to Desdemona's sexual appetite (in a startling image of the innocent Desdemona as foaming beast, an image one might expect to be constructed in the mind of Shakespeare's Iago), Lester once again breaks with his character portrait to indulge the standard fantasy of the little white girl who yearns for the big, brawny, larger-than-life black man. As Lester plays this note only briefly, then abandons it, we are left with merely a glimpse of pornography's favorite male fantasy—the white vixen virgin. Had Desdemona's character been developed, her budding sexuality as longing for adventure certainly could have provided something more interesting than a reiteration of a white woman's sexual purity as the "universal" feminine ideal.

I could say that Othello is a bad novel. That it is bad as a novel, on its own terms. That in its indulgences of the author's racial anxieties, resentments and old hatreds, it works contrary to the enlightenment aims of good literature. That it is a bad thing that it shares the name of Shakespeare's play. I could say that it does not meet the standards or the demands of the novel. Where Lester might have used the novel form to explore the unanswered questions of the play, he has instead removed the difficulties, not only of language, but the difficulties that constitute good, compelling conflict. For example, if Shakespeare's Othello is complicated by his cultural isolation, Lester removes that most complex aspect of his internal conflict. By surrounding Othello with African companions, Lester creates a situation in which Othello ought to feel emotionally supported and confirmed in his identity. The reader could expect that Othello, having access to a small, closely-knit black community, would be profoundly bonded to that group, or else the story would reveal why this was not so. Instead, we have a small group of black people who never speak to each other, do not confide, do not share. With such a good friend so close by, why is Othello still as isolated and forlorn in Lester's work as he is in Shakespeare's play? And why is the African Iago as unforthcoming and uncongenial as the white one? Why? Because Lester did not consider the dramatic costs of changing the racial makeup of the cast of characters. He made the assumption of the inexperienced writer—that the writer is some kind of self-appointed god who can do as he pleases. However, stories make demands, too, upon the writer. A good writer pays attention to the demands of story. A good writer is always humble to the craft, and humbled by it.

Julius Lester has stated that he "thinks of writing as a sacred trust" and that one must "take responsibility for that place of Sacred Truth." He suggests a connection between his purposes in writing and the Jewish concept of "tikkun haolam, repair of the universe" ("Re-Imagining" 286-87). Within this context one can perceive Lester's religious goals with works such as Sam and the Tigers, and also the pitfall of piety.

Flannery O'Connor, who was an avowed Catholic and who believed it possible to be both religiously committed and a good artist, said, "Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real" (96). O'Connor is useful in this discussion of Julius Lester's novel because she was a religious-minded artist who had an unflinching eye for detail, an appreciation for the real lives of people, and because she was aware of the propensity of religious fervor to overtake art. Her diagnosis of the shortcomings of many novels and stories is that the writers "are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth" (68).

Julius Lester is conscious of a problem—race. And he believes he knows the solution. He may be growing as a soul through his own religious conversion, but he has not grown as an artist. He is finally a preacher of his own narrow creed. Even granting this much to the man, the work is dishonest. The failure of Othello is the very project it proposes—to write a "novel" in a way that excludes a search for "the mystery of our position on earth."

Notes

1. In "The Shroud of Color" from Color (1925), Cullen writes of black life: "… My color shrouds me in, I am as dirt / Beneath my brother's heel; there is a hurt / In all the simple joys which to a child / Are sweet; they are contaminate, defiled…. I strangle in this yoke drawn tighter than / The worth of bearing it, just to be man…." (97).

2. Julius Lester has published retellings of Harris's Uncle Remus tales; his collections remove the difficulties of dialect, making the stories more accessible to modern readers.

3. Berry's analysis is very thorough in its review of the various approaches taken with Othello. What is clear is that the portrait of the Moor is complex and should be treated in its complexity, not stripped down to essentials or blurred by the language of universals.

Works Cited

Berry, Edward. "Othello's Alienation." Studies in English Literature 30:2 (1990): 315-34.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. "The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith," Selected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

Cantor, Paul A. "Othello: The Erring Barbarian Among the Supersubtle Venetians." Southwest Review 75:3 (1990): 296-320.

Cullen, Countee. My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen. Ed. Gerald Early. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage, 1985.

Lester, Julius. All Is Well: An Autobiography. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1976.

———. And All Our Wounds Forgiven. New York: Arcade Pub.; Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994.

———. Black Folktales. Illus. Tom Feelings. 1969. New York: Grove Press, 1978.

———. The Knee-High Man and Other Tales. Illus. Ralph Pinto. New York: Dial Press, 1972.

———. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988.

———. More Tales of Uncle Remus: The Further Adventures of Brer Rabbit. Illus. Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Press, 1988.

———. Othello: A Novel. New York: Scholastic, 1995.

Rev. of Othello: A Novel, by Julius Lester. Publishers Weekly 242 (20 Mar. 1995): 62.

———. "Re-Imagining the Possibilities." Horn Book Magazine 76:3 (May/June 2000): 283-89.

———. Sam and the Tigers: A New Telling of Little Black Sambo. Illus. Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1996.

———. The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit. Illus. Jerry Pinkney. New York: Dial Press, 1987.

———. To Be a Slave. New York: Dial Press, 1968.

O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1969.

Pingel, Carol Jean. Rev. of Othello: A Novel, by Julius Lester. Book Report 13:5 (1995): 38-39.

"Play It Again, Sambo." Rev. of Sam and the Tigers, by Julius Lester. The Village Voice 41:38 (17 Sep. 1996): 49.

Samuels, Wilfred D. Rev. of And All Our Wounds Forgiven, by Julius Lester. African American Review 31:1 (1997): 176-82.

Shakespeare, William. "Titus Andronicus." William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. New York: Random House, 1975. 919-46.

———. "Othello, The Moor of Venice." William Shakespeare, The Complete Works. New York: Random House, 1975. 1113-50.

Julius Lester (essay date January 2002)

SOURCE: Lester, Julius. "The Way We Were." School Library Journal 48, no. 1 (January 2002): 54-8.

[In the following essay, Lester reflects on his childhood and on how his early experiences shaped his writing for both adults and children.]

Our ideas about children, says writer Julius Lester, are strongly influenced by our own childhoods.

Writing for children is an odd vocation. We write for an audience that, for the most part, does not buy books. So we must write books that first appeal to the adults who decide what books children will be given the opportunity to read-the editors and publishers, the buyers at bookstores, the librarians and parents. We are all engaged in the creation and distribution of literature to people who are decades younger than we are. On what basis does a writer know that a particular book he or she is writing should be offered to children?

How do others involved with children's literature decide which books to make available for children? Many have taken courses in child development and children's literature, while others educate themselves by familiarizing themselves with children's literature, and staying current by reading as many books as they can and reading reviews of the works they can't. These activities are important and legitimate. However, there is something else that is also important, something that we may not even be aware of.

I wonder if our primary ideas about children are not based on who we were as children and, if we have children, who we are as parents. Since 1968, 1 have published 34 books, 24 of which have been for children. In all those years, I have never had a conversation with publishers, editors, librarians, or teachers about who they were as children. And yet, I've had conversations with people in each of those categories who have told me that such-and-such in a book of mine—and sometimes entire books—were not appropriate for the age group for whom the book was being marketed. So what I would like to do is share with you something of what my childhood was like and its relationship to my work. My hope is that in doing so you will be encouraged and perhaps even inspired to reflect on your childhood and its role in the important decisions you make about children's literature. I will end with some reflections on the events of September 11 and how, after such events, we might tend our souls and those of the children we seek to serve.

On January 27, I will be 63, and I am more childlike now than I ever was as a child. There are several reasons for this. My parents were in their 40s when I was born. They were born in 1897 and grew up in the South. My father's parents were both dead by the time he was 15 and he was left on the farm to raise his two younger brothers. My mother's father died when she was three, and she and her three siblings were raised by their mother at a time when single mothers were rare. Because my parents never had true childhoods, they had no idea I was supposed to have one.

But there was another factor against my having a childhood. That was race. I grew up during a time when racial segregation and discrimination in the North and South were as common as dandelion fluff in the spring. It was a time when my life was in danger if I raised my eyes and they accidentally met those of a white girl or woman. Black men and boys were lynched for this during my growing-up years. In such a world, childhood was a luxury my parents could not have afforded for me even if they had known how. Their task was two-fold: to insure that I survived to adulthood without being killed or put in jail; and to prepare me to succeed in a society that would actively do all it could to keep me from succeeding.

A survival technique employed by blacks during those years was humor. My father was a Methodist minister, and black ministers, at least the ones around whom I grew up, were born storytellers. My father loved to laugh and one of my joys as a child was finding a joke or a story to tell him and hearing him laugh. So I grew up listening to my father and other ministers tell stories, especially trickster tales of how blacks survived by using their wits to escape the wrath of racism. In the tales, and especially in the sermons I heard every Sunday, my ear became attuned to the cadences and rhythms of southern black speech, its idioms and patterns.

Years later it was as natural to me as breathing that one of my earliest books was a retelling of AfricanAmerican tales called Black Folktales (Richard Baron, 1969), which was followed by The Knee-High Man and Other Tales (Dial, 1972). What I could not have known was that those two books would lead to a conversation between the late Augusta Baker, the venerable and venerated coordinator of children's services of the New York Public Library, and Phyllis Fogelman, my editor at what was then Dial Books. Mrs. Baker asked Phyllis if I would consider retelling the tales of Uncle Remus. When Phyllis presented the idea to me, it was obvious that this was a project my childhood had prepared me to undertake.

Another book with its inception in my childhood was To Be a Slave (Dial 1968, 1998). In the introduction to the 30th-anniversary edition, I wrote the following: It was the late forties. I was not yet 10 years old. One day there came in the mail a letter addressed to my father in which a company promised—in big and bold letters—to research the Lester family tree and send us a copy of our family coat-of-arms. I was excited, but when I saw my father fold the letter as if to discard it, I asked anxiously, "Don't you want to know our family history?"

He laughed dryly. "I don't need to pay anybody to tell me about where we came from. Our family tree ends in a bill of sale. Lester is the name of the family that owned us….

One of the many mysteries of existence is why an offhand comment of a parent would imprint itself on the soul of a child, would haunt the child, nag at the child like some illness that lingers though it does not interfere with daily living. I was not angry that my family tree ended in a bill of sale. (Anger was not a safe emotion for blacks in the '40s.) Rather, I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss. There was an emptiness within me that could not be filled, and I grieved, though I did not know that then. I needed to be able to follow the trail of my existence back through time, to hear stories about those whose existence had made mine possible. But I did not even know my real name.

That moment from my childhood was one of the defining moments of my life. So much of my writing has been dedicated to putting faces to the bills of sale. To Be a Slave, Long Journey Home (Dial, 1972), This Strange New Feeling (Dial, 1982), From Slaveship to Freedom Road (Dial, 1998), and Black Cowboy, Wild Horses (Dial, 1998) are all devoted to making visible the lives of my black ancestors, to allowing them the voices they were denied in life. But in that experience of hearing my father say that our family tree could be traced to a bill of sale, I was also introduced to the ex- perience of wondering, an experience which would be reinforced in several ways. To wonder is to venture outside of oneself; it is to ask: What is it like to be someone else? Here is where I encountered the mystery of what it is to be human.

I want you to imagine the front porch of an unpainted house on a wide expanse of land outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It is a time when the poles and wire that brought electricity to white neighborhoods have not been extended to black ones. So the darkness of the night has never been diluted by the luminescence of light bulbs. This is a darkness which is not threatened by the feeble light given off by the coal oil lamps, which I can see in the windows of houses scattered over the countryside. This is a darkness so thick that though I am sitting in the swing next to my mother, I cannot see her. Nor can I see my grandmother on the other side of the porch, where she sits near her brother, Rudolph. Then, suddenly, into this darkness comes my grandmother's gruff voice: "Beatrice? Do you remember Ruth Rollings?"

There is silence and though I cannot see her, I can hear my mother thinking. Finally, she says, "Did she have a brother, a tall ugly boy, believe his name was Gerald?"

"That's her!" Grandmother says immediately, delighted that she and her daughter can meet in the realm of memory. "Well, let the tell you what happened to her." And my Grandmother would proceed to relate the woes that had befallen Ruth Rollings, and I would listen intently, trying to imagine what Ruth Rollings looked like and how did it feel to be her when fate unfolded and crushed her, as if she were nothing more than a mosquito slapped into a quick death for whining too close to someone's ear.

Perhaps imagining myself into the lives of others was a consequence of a childhood, and subsequently, a life lived in solitude. Though I played with other children, they were never that important to me. I found books vastly more invigorating than people or play, However, I did not read children's books. Though my mother took me to the library several times a week because I read so voraciously, my interests were books of biography, history, and geography. I found the usual children's books to be uninteresting. This had nothing to do with there being no books depicting blacks, and a lot to do with the fact that the children's books I looked at in the library did not reflect the world of violence in which I was growing up. I refer not only to the psychological violence of racism, which was profound, but also the physical violence and deaths in my community.

Throughout my childhood, death was probably more my companion than other children. I remember the funerals at Daddy's church of people I had known. I remember sneaking into church before funerals and staring at the body of someone, a child or adult, whom I had known. The person looked somewhat like themselves, but something was missing, and I didn't know what. I would close my eyes and concentrate hard and try and put back in the person whatever had been taken out. And I suppose that is what I've been trying to do as a writer-breathe life into the dead. The dead have no one to speak for them.

When I look at my work, the books for adults and children, I see it, in part, as an homage to the dead. My adult novel Do Lord Remember Me (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984) is based on my father's life and takes place on the last day of his life. In And All Our Wounds Forgiven (Arcade, 1994), the protagonist, John Calvin Marshall, reflects on his life even though he is dead. In my latest adult novel, The Autobiography of God which will be out next fall (if I get the revisions done in time), a community of Jews killed during the Holocaust come to live with a young female rabbi. John Henry (Dial, 1994) was the first children's book in which I addressed death directly. But in another sense, much of my work for children has been concerned with either giving life to the dead or giving life to stories that were certainly on their deathbeds, but didn't deserve to die—the Uncle Remus Tales (Dutton, 1987; Dial, 1999) and Sam and the Tigers (Dial, 1996) especially.

Times change and stories can, too. In recent books I have embellished, combined, and added elements to traditional stories, as in What a Truly Cool World (Scholastic, 1999) and When the Beginning Began (Silver Whistle, 1999). In Ackamarackus: Julius Lester's Sumptuously Silly Fabulously Funny Fables (Scholastic, 2001), I created original stories drawing on my childhood as the class clown whose ambition was to be a comedian. Yet, my obsession with death continues. When Dad Killed Mom (Silver Whistle, 2001), my first young adult novel with a contemporary setting, is explicitly about death-the murder of a woman by her husband and how their two children live with this loss. I am haunted by the dead. (I wonder if the living will haunt me when I'm dead.)

Since September 11, we all feel haunted by the dead. I hear through the grapevine that some children's book writers and illustrators are saying that they don't know how to write anymore, that they aren't sure they can write any longer. And I understand. After what we witnessed on that clear and beautiful and dreadful morning, it is difficult for any of us to make sense of our lives or of life itself. But make sense of it we must, just as it has fallen to us to make sense of slavery and the Holocaust, to name but two of the many horrors of civilization. I do not mean make sense in that we understand. I mean that we learn how to live with the pain in our hearts. In From Slaveship to Freedom Road, I ask readers to allow the suffering of slaves to become part of their lives. In doing so, it was and is my hope that the reader's understanding of what it means to be human is expanded. So it is with the events of September 11. To the extent that I am able to make the sufferings of others part of my daily living, to that extent do I learn not to cause others to suffer. So I make the pain of the people killed that day, the pain of their survivors, a part of the rhythm of my heart.

Perhaps that is why it is imperative that those of us who write and illustrate books for children must commit ourselves anew to our vocation. Children live in closer relationship to that place where all is eternally well. In saying that, I am not being sentimental or romanticizing children. Instead, I am remembering a child growing up in the '40s and '50s who could not understand why there were white people who might kill him if he did not say "yessir" and "yes ma'am" to them, who could not understand why he had to give his seat on a bus to a white person, who did not understand why he was hated. But that child did not grow up angry at whites. His parents and teachers taught him how to live so only his social identity was defined by the values of white people. His soul belonged to him and was his to define as he desired.

This is obviously a time when the souls of children need tending. And it is a time when the writers and illustrators of children's literature are needed. Of all people, the creators of literature for children cannot give into despair or hopelessness. We must tend our own souls as well and remember what Elie Wiesel was told by another Jew at Auschwitz: "Hang onto your soul at all costs." By hanging onto our souls we remain in possession of our humanity. That is what I learned in my childhood. It is the matrix around which my life continues its dance.

Hanging onto our souls means learning to hold within ourselves the inevitable tension that comes from living with paradoxes. Hanging onto our souls is a way of being in which the heart learns to weep and exult at the same moment, a way of being that holds as one the beauty and the horror of the morning of September 11. Hanging onto our souls means finding ways to remind ourselves that we are participants in the eternal even as we feel paralyzed by the painful rigors of the finite.

Note

Adapted from the 2001 Anne Carroll Moore Lecture, held at the New York Public Library's Donnell Library Center, November 13. 2001.

The annual Anne Carroll Moore Lecture honors the founder of the New York Public Library's children's services department.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Connolly, Paula T. "Still a Slave: Legal and Spiritual Freedom in Julius Lester's ‘Where the Sun Lives.’" Children's Literature 26 (1998): 123-39.

Focuses on Lester's portrayal of a female slave in the story "Where the Sun Lives," included in the collection This Strange New Feeling.

Jackson, Millie, and Gary Schmidt. Reviews of Jacqueline Woodson: "The Real Thing," by Lois Thomas Stover, and On Writing for Children and Other People, by Julius Lester. Lion and the Unicorn 29, no. 3 (September 2005): 450-53.

Discusses Woodson and Lester as writers who believe in the power of storytelling to break down boundaries along such lines as race, heritage, religious views, and social status.

Meyer, Adam. "Gee, You Don't Look Jewish: Julius Lester's Lovesong, an African-American Jewish American Autobiography." Studies in American Jewish Literature 18 (1999): 41-51.

Explains why Lovesong should be regarded as a Jewish American autobiography rather than an African American autobiography.

Nikola-Lisa, W. "John Henry: Then and Now." African American Review 32, no. 1 (spring 1998): 51-6.

Compares the various renditions of the legend of John Henry as told by Ezra Jack Keats (1965), Terry Small (1994), and Julius Lester (1994).

Samuels, Wilfred D. Review of And All Our Wounds Forgiven, by Julius Lester. African American Review 31, no. 1 (spring 1997): 176-82.

Mixed assessment of And All Our Wounds Forgiven, which the reviewer calls "Lester's acute dramatization and penetrating (and, in some cases, most disturbing) examination of the personal histories of his four emotionally disabled major characters."

Tsemo, Bridget Harris. "How God Made Butterflies." Footsteps 8, no. 3 (May-June 2006): pp. 24-5.

Describes the characterization of God in the tale "How God Made Butterflies," and recounts the tale's discussion of the original creation of the term "butterflies."

Additional coverage of Lester's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 12, 51; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 3, 9, 11, 12; Black Writers, Ed. 2; Children's Literature Review, Vols. 2, 41; Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 17-20R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 8, 23, 43, 129; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults Supplement, Ed. 1; Major 21st-Century Writers (eBook), Ed. 2005; Something about the Author, Vols. 12, 74, 112, 157; and St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers.