African-American Children and the Case for Community: Eleanora Tate's South Carolina Trilogy

Abstract

African-American writers have long recognized that their literary expressions are intimately welded to their history, verbal traditions, and sense of community. Indeed, in postmodern culture, as critic Nancy Peterson has demonstrated, engaging historical and community issues through literature has become one way for marginalized groups to counter their invisibility. Concerned with societal pressure on children of color to assimilate into the dominant culture, African-American author Eleanora Tate actually began her career as a writer of children's literature with the purpose of presenting perspectives of the past which destabilize hegemonic history. In The Secret of Gumbo Grove and Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!, the first two novels of a trilogy about coastal South Carolina, Tate looks behind the curtain of double consciousness to reveal the complex sensibilities of black children exploring their heritage, the history of their community, and the bewildering stereotypes of inferiority and shame which continue to proliferate so irresponsibly in our society. In A Blessing in Disguise, the focus shifts to a young African-American girl's conflicts while struggling to come to grips with the seamier side of her parents' past; setting the child's experiences against the backdrop of a neighborhood in strife, this last book of Tate's trilogy takes a tough, no-nonsense look at what happens when drugs, crime, and violence invade a rural community. A major source of discontent regarding children's books surfaced for Eleanora Tate when she moved to coastal South Carolina in 1978 and found practically no information on library shelves in her new environs which would help African-American children relate to their history and the history of their community. She was discouraged and disenchanted to find that so much material available to black children focused on slavery but was slanted from the white slave owners' perspective and was marked by a stereotyping and condescension offensive to African-American sensibilities. She thus decided to write a book with a positive viewpoint which would be carefully researched for historical accuracy involving South Carolina black children - modern children - reflecting back on their history. Her intent was to deal with the issue of slavery in terms of neighborhood history and in such a way as to diminish the attitude of shame she claims so many African-American youngsters have. This all-too-prevalent sense of shame is voiced early on by Raisin Stackhouse, the eleven-year-old heroine of The Secret of Gumbo Grove: ... when we read about people doing in history class, it was always about White people when it came to Calvary County. Which was OK, but nobody ever mentioned anybody Black. And when asked Miz Gore, my teacher, how come we never studied about anybody Black who did around here, she said nobody Black around here had ever done anything good worth talking about. (5) Seeking to promote the realism of neighborhood history, Tate starts from the premise that, by participating in the community life around them, children can see where they have come from, can learn the history of their particular locale. Her message to young readers, as Dianne Johnson points out in Telling Tales, is, 'This is your story, your history' (56). In the process of reclaiming their community's past, Tate suggests, children acquire a broader historical perspective and may even find contemporary heroes just as accessible as those projected on the TV screen or those put forth as icons by popular culture. Raisin longs for more African-American heroic models like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and she has no trouble bridging past and present through such figures: I liked heroes. And liked to feel good about what people did back in the old days, because it helped me go ahead and feel good about now (5). Even against the backdrop of such positive emotion, however, there lingers a sense of shame which slices in two directions as Raisin relays next how she is mocked by her friends for being interested in old-timey stuff and then admits her own embarrassment at her classmates' ignorance of such famous personages. …