Dream Me Home Safely by Susan Richards Shreve

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 2 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Dream Me Home Safely Shreve, Susan Richards (2003). Boston: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin; 223 pages. ISBN 0618379029. In her foreword to this collection in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Children's Defense Fund, Marion Wright Edelman says accurately that, 'This gift of 34extraordinary American writers sharing their stories of growing up in America paints a complex, richly detailed, and achingly real portrait of American childhood' (p. ix). As one would expect of a collection for this purpose, many of the accounts explore threats that children face. Seven authors describe racism against AfricanAmericans or new Asian immigrants. Joyce Carol Oates presents a young Jewish girl’s inchoate terror in the face of anti-Semitism. Two authors unveil the quiet violence leveled against poor whites. Five describe how others stigmatize or sustain children with polio, tuberculosis, multiple sclerosis, or autism. Two women remember when girls carried the full weight of shame and blame for teen sexuality and pregnancy. Three men recall the weight of family responsibility on their young shoulders in the wake of absent fathers. But these authors are survivors. At some point each gained the victory of being able to articulate these threats, so eloquently that their accounts reach out to others and the authors are freed to creatively move forward with their lives. Julia Alvarez, Ntozake Shangeand Carolyn Ferrell relate how they found this amulet against danger in childhood itself, in the magic worlds of reading or poetry. As Julia Alvarez says in her poem 'Arts Politica,' her family's explanation for how she changed from a clingy, frightened daughter to a feisty, elbows-out child was that she began to read and make things up. In this way, she could make a safer world than the one around her of hurricanes, shanty shacks, poverty, death squads and uncles who disappeared. 376 To save the uncles and free the prisoners in a storybook might not be the destiny of art, but it's a start- my start, our start, if Wordsworth had it right, and the child is the father of the man. The inhumanity of our humanity will not be fixed by metaphor alone. The plot will fail, the tortured will divulge our names, and our human story will end, unless our art can right what happens in the world (pp. 1-2). By articulating terrors and insecurities, by holding them at arm’s length on paper and in books, art presents the eternal hope that we as a community of people may understand the sources of these fears, and by acknowledging and analyzing them, learn to overcome them. Notably, there are no accounts of the worst forms of violence against children, when those responsible for their care and protection turn against them with incest or beatings. Does this most intimate betrayal cut wounds too deep to heal with words? Too shattering to leave any foundation for righting what happens in the world? Every account of threats against children in this collection contains some soft ground where redemption can root- a sheltering family, a parent’s or grandparent's protective love, a parent who teaches tolerance and kindness, or an accepting community. Are these mercies the context that enables writers to remember childhood and give it a voice? Or were these stories selected because they contain this content? Unfortunately, the editor Susan Richards Shreve provides no introduction that might answer these questions. The book's primary theme, celebrated by more than half of the stories, is gratitude for the love of parents and family or a special individual, father, mother, grandmother, or grandfather. In some cases, these adults wove a protective cocoon of love, pride and tough survival around the child, ensuring a safe space where childhood innocence could metamorphose into adult resilience. In other cases, even if special adults were unable to protect their child from the pain of racism, poverty, disability or an absent father, they fiercely 377 demonstrated their child's worth. As Elizabeth Strout noted, it is not only what we look at in childhood that determines our memories, 'but who, in that childhood, looks at us.' 'Children love to...