I have a vast collection of children’s picture books that I used to teach my college classes. A good picture book can deliver information as well as, if not better than, the most sophisticated scholarly discourse, and it takes as much research to distill profound meaning into a few choice words and arresting images as it does to write a convincing thesis. In my Black Music History course, I would begin each semester by showing my classes the excellent book A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins and Sophie Blackall. A Fine Dessert tells the history of both advancing technology and changing social values in the modern Anglosphere through the persistence of one pudding recipe over three hundred years. The publisher described it as:
a fascinating picture book in which four families, in four different cities, over four centuries, make the same delicious dessert: blackberry fool. This richly detailed book ingeniously shows how food, technology, and even families have changed throughout American history.
In 1710, a girl and her mother in Lyme, England, prepare a blackberry fool, picking wild blackberries and beating cream from their cow with a bundle of twigs. The same dessert is prepared by an enslaved girl and her mother in 1810 in Charleston, South Carolina; by a mother and daughter in 1910 in Boston; and finally by a boy and his father in present-day San Diego.
The New York Times named A Fine Dessert one of the Best Picture Books of 2015. Soon, however, a controversy erupted over images of one of the four families: in the 1810 section, a little girl in slavery is given the job by her mother of whipping cream for the blackberry fool. After beating it with a wire whisk for ten minutes, she holds out a bowl of perfect whipped cream with a proud smile.
Later, after serving at table, mother and daughter hide in a closet and eat the rest of the “fine dessert”:
A reader commented:
The blog Reading While White, administered by white librarians seeking diversity in children’s books, posted the following mea culpa:
It's never easy discovering a serious fault with a book I originally appreciated greatly. . .
and yet...what do I have to lose, really? What am I giving up when I can admit something may not be as wonderful as I originally thought?
And so it is with A Fine Desert: Four Centuries, Four Families, and One Delicious Desert. I liked so much about it from the outset when I read and discussed it with colleagues last spring. I still like so much about it: The small details, the big arc, the way it looks at continuity and change from such a child-friendly perspective.
As for the much-debated way it handles the blackberry fool made in 1810 by an enslaved woman and child? I confess I glossed over much of it. The only image that gave me pause initially was the one in which the mother and child are closeted away eating the treat together. I remember asking, "How is a child reader going to make sense of that scene without any explanation?" This idea of an unmediated experience with that part of the book was particularly worrisome to me. But while I did think briefly of children of color, of Black children, and wondered if it would generate a sense of shame or confusion, I read the author's and illustrator's notes, and let my vague sense of discomfort go. . .
And I've changed my mind.
I cannot ignore the voices of those who have helped me understand something I didn't consider before: No matter how thoughtful the intent was in depicting this mother and child, the end result is that it can be seen as perpetuating painful imagery of "happy" slaves.
Am I ashamed I didn't see this myself? Yes. Because it's the kind of thing I'd like to think I wouldn't miss.
This is a classic example of “doing the work”: a public admission of personal guilt at the failure — generally of a white woman — to properly evaluate the cleverly-hidden malice in a statement or symbol thought to be innocuous.
The eruption of criticism of the creators of A Fine Dessert for apparently embedding a racist dog whistle in the book prompted the author, Emily Jenkins, to issue an apology, and a pledge to donate her author’s fee to the advocacy group We Need Diverse Books. But even Jenkins’s apology was not enough to satisfy the librarians at Reading While White:
It’s interesting to note that the illustrator, Sophie Blackall, defended her choice to depict slaves smiling in an explanatory post on her own blog:
1) At the risk of sounding exactly as the writer of one comment predicted, ("But we included something hard! But I researched slavery!”), evidence shows that many mothers were able to keep their children nearby, usually because it suited the plantation owners to increase their workforce. Historian Michael Tadman estimated that one third of enslaved children in the Southern States experienced family separation, which suggests that two thirds did not. Jennifer Hallam writes, in Slavery and the Making of America, “The bond between an enslaved mother and daughter was the least likely to be disturbed through sale.” This does not imply that those relationships were not constantly under threat. But it seemed reasonable that we might show a mother and daughter working together. I believe the author, Emily Jenkins came to the same conclusion. There is no father to be seen.
By showing an enslaved mother and daughter together, it is certainly a more positive portrayal of slavery than showing them wrenched apart. But it is not inaccurate. And the book is about different families making blackberry fool over four centuries.
2) I thought long and hard about these smiles.
In the first scene, the mother and girl are picking blackberries. I imagined this as a rare moment where they were engaged in a task together, out of doors, away from the house and supervision, where the mother is talking to her child. It is a tender moment, but the mother is not smiling. The girl has a gentle smile. She is, in this moment, not unhappy. I believe oppressed people throughout history have found solace and even joy in small moments.
This, to me, is the crux.
If you believe that it’s morally suspect to suggest that an enslaved child might have experienced a moment of happiness, you are not only denying that child’s humanity for a second time; you’re also denying the whole foundation of Black music in America.
The world-historical repertoires of Black American music come from the extremities of human suffering, and deal with the persistence of human hope and creativity in the most inhuman of circumstances. In fact, the little girl’s smile is a potent symbol of her humanity, and when we see it, we know that the whole shaky structure of slavery is bound to fall.
In the twenty-first century, we’re past the point of needing to convince our fellow Americans that slavery was an outrageous injustice against humanity. If teachers really believe that children need to be taught that owning other people was wrong, then their view of children’s innate intelligence is dark indeed. Nevertheless, to depict an enslaved child smiling in pride at something she’s created does nothing to defend the indefensible. The little girl’s smile is, instead, a salvo in the war against dehumanization, a war that persists in other forms in our own time.
Happiness can be a form of resistance. Listen to how Our Native Daughters — Rhiannon Giddens, Amethyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell — put it in the song “Moon Meets the Sun”:
As historian David R. Blumenthal has written:
Happiness [is] a struggle to make life compatible with the Ineffable . . . To be happy is to struggle with oneself, with society, and even with God to make life more holy. To be happy is to challenge God, the world, and one’s inner being to live up to the covenant of justice and love for all beings. To put it another way: Happiness is resistance.
Happiness is not synonymous with comfort, or even with justice. Happiness comes from the recognition of our humanity and the humanity of others, even in the most terrible circumstances.
Obviously, for most middle-class Americans in the 21st century, circumstances are not literally terrible in the way they were for 19th-century slaves, and it would be ridiculous to draw an analogy. But the soul-crushing mundanity of post-industrial life, which so many try to ameliorate through synthetic experiences digitally mediated by laptop or phone, has had the effect of flattening our humanity. Perhaps, for our own time, happiness comes in not trying to escape this mundanity, but in recognizing it as beautiful in itself.
There’s a deeply moving scene in the underrated 2020 Disney Pixar film Soul, in which the protagonist, Joe, a jazz player who dreams of greatness but is stuck teaching middle-school band, realizes just this. Upon returning home at the end of his hero’s journey, Joe extracts from his pockets the detritus of everyday life and sits down at the piano. He sweeps the sheet music from the music desk and places the contents of his pockets there instead — and he plays them:
Joe realizes, and shows viewers, that the music of everyday life is transcendent, and that recognizing the indwelling transcendence of the mundane is, itself, a form of resistance to the monoculture that’s captured both American music and American life. This is an odd, off-brand message for a Disney movie, and perhaps it explains why Soul failed at the box office. The fact that Joe is a jazz musician, a practitioner of that least-loved and least-understood of American repertoires, is a powerful symbol in and of itself.
Joe resists the fickle economy of what the world calls happiness, and chooses to embrace the beauty of the everyday. This is a small example of happiness as resistance; we would all do well to notice and do likewise.
"If you believe that it’s morally suspect to suggest that an enslaved child might have experienced a moment of happiness, you are not only denying that child’s humanity for a second time; you’re also denying the whole foundation of Black music in America."
Bingo!
Also, why is it white people always being the watchdogs and gatekeepers for this kind of thing? I though the whole "white savior" thing had gone out of vogue.
The scene from "Soul" was beautiful. I will try and watch that movie; I'd never heard of it!