













































 

"LIFE FOR ME AIN'T No CRYSTAL STAIR";  
READIN', WRITIN', AND PARENTAL (IL)LITERACY 

IN AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILDREN' S BOOKS 

NEAL A. LESTER 

Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now. . . if you 
teach that nigger. . . how to read, there would be no keeping him. 
It would forever unfit him to be a slave. 

-Frederick Douglass (1845) 

Mass literacy is a relatively new social goal. A hundred years ago 
people didn't need to be good readers in order to earn a living. But 
in the Information Age, no one can get by without knowing how to 
read well and understand increasingly complex material. 

-Newsweek (22 November 1999) 

LITERACY AS DEMOCRATIC IDEAL 

While Frederick Douglass's important Narrative of the Life of 
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) 
demonstrates an individual's alleged personal liberation spiritually and 
psychologically through reading and writing, the narrative equally forwards a 
culturally chauvinistic agenda that privileges the printed word. Proposing to 
show his learned northern abolitionist, primarily white male audience that 
access to reading and writing transforms him from his perceived animal 
barbarism to civilized humanhood, Douglass impressively and eloquently 
details human bondage and his release from it through elaborate rhetorical 
strategies: symbolisms, ironies, allusions, parallelisms, ambiguities, 
repetitions.2 Indeed, Douglass's liberation from his enslavement comes less 
from his physical freedom than from his ability to read and write: 

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher [his 
master's wile, Mrs. Auld], I set OUT with high hope, and of a fixed 
purpose at whatever cost of trouble to learn how to read. (667) 

He learns indirectly from Mr. Auld how threatened masters were of 



 "LIFE FOR ME AIN'T NO CRYSTAL STAIR" LESTER 

slaves' becoming literate—among other things, they might write their own 
passes to freedom literally and figuratively—and this knowledge fuels his 
intense determination to become literate by any means necessary: 

What he [Mr. Auld] most dreaded, that I most desired. What he 
most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to 
be carefully shunned, was to be diligently sought; and served to 
inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to 
read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as 
to the kindly aid of my mistress. (668) 

Douglass's learning to read from Mrs. Auld's instruction and from 
manipulating little white boys so that he could write what they wrote is 
fundamental to Douglass's newly realized selfhood. Douglass's copying-
physically mimicking "white literacy" –speaks to a cultural binary that exists 
between literacy and illiteracy in the western world. Although Douglass 
clarifies that slaves' physical and psychological survival was also connected 
to slaves' "reading" masters' behaviors and motives, he feels completely 
human and humanized largely because he can read and write. 

In a broader sense, "formal" education generally and alphabetical 
literacy were believed to be keys to African American liberation from 
economic, social and political oppression. As Violet J. Harris explains in 
"African-American Conceptions of Literacy: A Historical Perspective," 

African Americans hold many of the same views [on the sacredness 
of education as white American citizens]; they, too, maintain an 
unstinting belief in the power of literacy to effect essential political, 
cultural, social, and economic change. In the past, and to some 
extent now, education was a privilege, albeit a privilege literally 
acquired through blood, sweat, tears, and enormous economic 
sacrifice. Unquestionably, acquiring access to literacy for African 
Americans has involved continuous struggle, in the face of 
unrelenting opposition from segments of the planter aristocracy, 
politicians, clergy, and ordinary citizens.3 

Hence, to connect individual worth and selfhood, as does Douglass, with the 
ability or inability to read and write—one dimension of lit- 

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eracy—is not uncommon, however problematic, in a western culture that is, 
as Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer describes, "hypnotized by 
literacy." According to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey, literacy is 
the ability "to use printed and written information to function in society, to 
achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential."4 Buried 
in this definition is the ideal of literacy as realized personal goals, social 
worth, and fullest self-potential, implying that illiteracy constitutes failure on 
any number of personal and social levels. Despite its obvious language bias 
by specifying "standard" English as the definitive marker, The National 
Literacy Act of 1991 broadens this definition of literacy by adding orality to 
the equation: literacy is "an individual's ability to read, write, and speak in 
English and compute and solve problems at levels of proficiency necessary to 
function on the job and in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop 
one's knowledge and potential."5 Personal goals and social values are again 
emphasized, literacy underscored as a prescribed personal and social ideal 
and standard. Neither definition, however, acknowledges literacy as a 
multitude of practices that legitimize realities and communicate diverse and 
varied experiences. If in fact literacy grants opportunities to achieve various 
ideals, those unable to read and write are perceived and treated as being 
socially handicapped and personally burdened. While Nancy N. Rue, in 
Coping with an Illiterate Parent, maintains that "literacy is not a single skill" 
(38) and has little to do with the moral and ethical decency of a non-reading 
individual (19), she nevertheless writes of this issue with extreme pessimism 
and oversimplification, maintaining that illiterate parents are most often 
"trapped in a nowhere job, imprisoned by a sense of inferiority, shamed by 
the inability to give [a child] everything [that child] needs intellectually and 
socially and emotionally because he/she can't read and write 
competently"(emphasis added 11). Rue implies that illiterate parents are in 
some ways less than complete and upstanding social individuals fully 
capable of maintaining satisfying familial and social relationships and 
leading productive lives. Even the book title itself—"Coping with an 
Illiterate Parent"—suggests that illiteracy is a kind of social disease or illness 
with which a child has to deal until a "cure" or "treatment" is found. 

LITERACY IDEALIZED AND MORALIZED 

Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, few children's texts address the issue of 
parental illiteracy. The treatment of illiteracy in a picture or 

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 "LIFE FOR ME AIN'T NO CRYSTAL STAIR" LESTER 

storybook for those learning to read seems on the surface oxymoronic, 
perhaps even absurd from the perspective of a publisher wanting to sell 
books. The idea of illiteracy I examine here is not about glorification of non-
reading and non-writing. Rather, my concern is that books that dare to deal 
with parental illiteracy at all present parental illiteracy as a shameful secret, 
always to be hidden from the world of the parents' children. Eve Bunting's 
The Wednesday Surprise (1989) presents an elderly, presumably white 
grandmother learning to read as a "gift" to her adult son on the occasion of 
his birthday. Dick King-Smith's The School Mouse (1995) deals with the 
issue of non-reading parents in the racially and cultural neutral world of 
mice: young literate Flora "saves" her illiterate parents from eating poison. 
Both Dolores Johnson's Papa's Stories (1994), now out-of-print, and 
Vashanti Rahaman's Read for Me, Mama (1997) deal specifically with 
African Americans and parental illiteracy. In all of these books, the parent/ 
adult-as-teacher role is reversed, and parents are led to literacy by the efforts 
of and responsibilities to a child. In these texts, literacy is idealized and those 
who can read idolized; literacy also—according to these accounts—allegedly 
signifies personal and social value and measures adult self-esteem and self-
worth. With minimal complexity and compassion for individual 
circumstances even for or especially for children's texts, all of these 
treatments of illiteracy create artificial, culturally biased binaries that further 
marginalize those unable to read and write. 

Children's texts that celebrate being able to read and write are not 
problematic in and of themselves. Problems arise however when such texts 
presume and forward the position that parental illiteracy is simple personal 
choice and not a series of complicated circumstances almost always beyond 
individuals' control. For example, my 79-year-old grandfather, with whom I 
spoke recently about his own illiteracy when I was mulling over ideas for this 
project, does not read and write, and to my knowledge this reality has never 
been an issue of family concern or discussion. It was an understood and rarely 
spoken fact, and clearly evident when, for instance, other family members 
read Father's Day and birthday cards to him. The whole tenor of my 
conversation with him was one of apology from him for this inability to read. 
He had a third grade education when his parents died and was forced to leave 
school to help work for the livelihood of his other five siblings. My 
grandfather and his older preacher brother were the only two who had 
minimal reading and writing skills. Others managed to continue studies along 
the way. With my Ph.D. in English, I felt awkward, embarrassed, and 
invasive talking about something the family had never 

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broached in such a manner. My conversation with my grandfather about his 
illiteracy was a lesson for me in his personal history and circumstances, a 
lesson of which I had no previous knowledge.6 In children's texts that deal 
with the subject of non-reading and writing parents but the non-reading and 
writing parents are not in fact the subjects, the circumstances of illiteracy—be 
they environmental or social, emotional, psychological, visual or even 
neurological as in dyslexia ("a disorder that makes learning to read extremely 
difficult")7 are unaddressed. Instead, literacy is celebrated at the expense of 
parental embarrassment, shame, and even morality. 

Literacy is championed with near religious fervor in Vashanti Rahaman's 
Read for Me, Mama, wherein a young seven or eight-year-old African 
American boy is the instrument of his mother's "salvation" from illiteracy. 
Rahaman's story perpetuates class and race stereotypes, equating illiteracy 
with dirtiness, personal shame, even sin, and literacy with moral cleanliness 
and spiritual enlightenment. The story polarizes Joseph's ideal school/library 
experiences and the drudgery and mundane nature of his seemingly less than 
desirable home environment. The school librarian—older, wiser and 
proportional in weight—is almost God-like because of her professional 
authority and Joseph's adulation of her; she inspires Joseph with her engaging 
story reading. In fact, Joseph wants to emulate Mrs. Ricardo as a story reader. 
While Joseph's mother's storytelling is as exciting as the librarian's story 
reading, Rahaman's text affords the librarian and literacy an idealized 
position of power and authority not realized in Joseph's home life. 

Race and class stereotyping occurs in other textual details. In fact, 
Rahaman makes illiteracy the source of these stereotypes. The overweight, 
late twenty-something African American woman, also a single parent—the 
text affords no clues to how this circumstance came to be—is trapped 
financially in two janitorial jobs. She has no independent means of 
transportation—she rides a bus or walks wherever she goes—and lives in an 
apartment next to empty lots of garbage and in a neighborhood with broken 
sidewalks. While these images alone are not distinct class markers, 
contextually, they render this less than ideal family unit as limited and 
existing in less than ideal American middle-class circumstances. Again, 
images of dirtiness and cleanliness are synonymous with illiteracy and 
literacy respectively. The illiterate Mama cleans hotel rooms, dirty dishes, the 
dirty apartment, and presumably white Mrs. Holder's apartment. These 
clean/dirty images appear in the illustrations as well. The literate librarian is 
either a light-skinned ethnic minority or a white person. The illiterate mother 

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is dark-complected.8 The university student who reads to Joseph at the 
laundromat is also non-African-American. Because of the mother's illiteracy, 
the text suggests, her participation in society is limited to working two jobs, 
doing laundry, shopping for groceries, and attending church activities. The 
implication is that the mother wants more or should want more or deserves 
more from life than these social rituals afford when in reality, some 
individuals, whether literate or not, may be quite satisfied in these 
circumstances.9 

While leaving Joseph's mother unnamed in the text affords some degree 
of character universality in treating this issue of illiteracy, it also suggests that 
an illiterate parent may not warrant the authority of an identity, a name, not 
even the ability or opportunity to name herself. Recall that Frederick 
Douglass's consummate mark of selfhood and manhood comes in his ability 
to name himself, to "subscribe [him] self Frederick Douglass," suggesting the 
power and authority of one who can name or possess a non-generic name. 
Surely, there is more to this individual's identity than her named motherhood 
identity, an identity that is neither personalized nor individualized. All of the 
other literate characters, even the son Joseph, are privileged with a named 
identity: Ms. Ricardo (librarian), Mr. Beharry (university student), and old 
Mrs. Holder. 

That Joseph's mother finds literacy through her church might easily be 
connected with the role black churches played historically in educating 
African Americans during and after slavery. As Leo McGee and Harvey G. 
Neufeldt note in Education of the Black Adult in the United States: An 
Annotated Bibliography, "[T]he black churches, most noteably [sic] the 
African Methodist Church, took the lead in providing educational 
opportunities for blacks of all ages" (92). Yet this historical note is not 
revealed in the story but rather the notion that literacy is a "gift" from God. 
Just as a mysterious and seemingly divine presence puts a "pot of geraniums. 
. . in the deep hole in the sidewalk" in Joseph's neighborhood, the preacher 
and the congregation at Mama's church pray fervently to God for her to 
become literate, and God answers their collective prayers with evening adult 
reading courses and tutorials for Mama. One of the last images in the book 
shows Joseph and his Mama reading together as though their mouths are 
reading in unison. This image of open mouths even suggests singing as at 
Mama's choir practice or church revival service. Indeed, the illustration and 
the final words—"Slowly and carefully, Mama's voice stepped from word to 
word, page after page. Mama was reading!"—resound with the religiosity of 
singing, shouting, and celebration. With Mama's newfound literacy, she is 
presumably no longer desperate and 

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blinded by personal shame, deception, and inadequacy. She rather cryptically 
explains her illiteracy before her "conversion": "I have to learn to read. . .. 
My boy needs a mama who can read. But I never practiced up my reading, 
never learnt it good in school, and it all got lost from my mind, all got lost" 
(emphasis added). Notice that the mother equates literacy with good 
parenting. Importantly, the book's title, "Read for Me, Mama" (emphasis 
added), rather than "Read to Me, Mama" (emphasis added), further suggests 
that this parent's becoming literate is a response to her son's desperate plea, a 
plea that goes beyond the son's leisure entertainment: if Mama does not re-
spect herself enough to be literate, then certainly she will become literate for 
her child. Notice also that Mama's spoken language is mangled and awkward, 
and presumably once she learns to read, she will be a better parent and will 
speak correct "standard" English. Indeed, literacy brings light and 
enlightenment to Mama. In this sense, the final open mouthing might well be 
the words read or sung of the popular folk hymn "Amazing Grace": 

Amazing grace how sweet the sound/ that saved a wretch like me. 
I once was lost but now I'm found. Was blind but now I see. 

Rahaman's text associates illiteracy with "wretchedness," being "lost," and 
being "blind"; literacy, in contrast, with sight and moral purity. While 
illiteracy may be perceived as a blindness, it is nevertheless one dimension 
ofa person's life experience, not a whole human condition. Hence, although 
Mama may already know the words to the hymn as she does the hymns she 
knows well in her church choir, she can now read other unfamiliar verses and 
other less familiar hymns.10 With literacy, the book contends, Mama is a 
soldier armed to conquer the world. Armed with literacy, the author contends, 
this mother and by extension this family will break from its personal and 
social shackles. Even the book jacket reiterates this religious romanticizing of 
literacy as "salvation": "Vashanti Rahaman's story of how a mother and son 
face the challenge of literacy is told with warmth and sensitivity, while [the 
illustrator's] bold and beautiful oil paintings light the pages with images of 
hope and love." 

The message of Read for Me, Mama oversimplifies even for a child 
audience the issue of illiteracy. We see Mama's life of drudgery before she 
becomes literate and are to believe that her daily busyness as a single parent 
will either change or cease and that she will have more time for her son. 
Indeed, while the mother may not spend time avoiding reading to her son, 
perhaps too much of the relationship between 

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a mother and her son is connected with her (il)literacy. The message presumes 
that Mama will not arrive home from work late if her work times are changed 
because she will be able to read announcements about revised schedules. The 
story avoids the reality that even literate persons misread or do not always 
read carefully. And how likely is it that Mama's work place would present 
revised schedules and have no verbal announcement or discussion so that 
Mama and others might at least hear about the schedule change? The final 
lesson of the book also suggests that Mama's literacy will change the quality 
of the relationship between this mother and her child. While reading to a child 
is an unquestionably important act that can be a bonding experience between 
a parent and a child, there is no reason to believe that the quality of this 
family's life overall or needs to change significantly. 

Although Joseph admits that his mother is a great story teller—"Mama 
was the best storyteller in the world. Her voice danced and played with the 
words. She could make the most ordinary things seem not so ordinary after 
all" –her storytelling is not really celebrated.11 Indeed, the book makes clear 
that Mama's stories are interesting to Joseph because Mama is an engaging 
storytelling performer: she uses interesting voices to make stories come alive. 
But while Mama is a great storyteller, even better than Mrs. Ricardo and the 
university student Mr. Beharry, Mama's storytelling—to which Joseph has 
undoubtedly been exposed long before he goes to school and hears a librarian 
read to him—ranks second in importance and value to Mrs. Ricardo's, the 
librarian's, story reading: "Mrs. Ricardo, the librarian, was the best story 
reader in the world. She could make her voice loud and soft and squeaky and 
growly. She could sound angry and happy and oh, so very sad. She knew all 
of the great big words in the books. Joseph wished he could read like that." 
The librarian, because of her literacy performance, is idolized. Joseph's 
mother's storytelling performance is as exciting and actually comparable to 
Mrs. Ricardo's animated performances, yet what distinguishes the librarian 
from the mother in this context is the librarian's ability to "know great big 
words." Surely, literacy is more than decoding big words. 

Mama's conversion to literacy furthers the primary bias that literacy 
exempts individuals from limitations and creates false hopes: "Literacy," one 
source claims, "arouses hopes, not only in society as a whole but also in the 
individual who is striving for fulfillment, happiness and personal benefit by 
learning how to read and write. Literacy. . . means far more than learning how 
to read and write. . . The aim is to transmit. . . knowledge and promote social 
participation."12 While literacy allegedly "saves" Mama from public and 
personal shame. Read 

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for Me, Mama does little to move what can be the painful realities of illiteracy 
to a deeper understanding. Rather, it maintains and even perpetuates faulty 
assumptions that illiteracy determines one's self worth and the quality of one's 
personal relationships. The text confirms Nancy N. Rue's assertions that 
"Illiteracy is considered by our society to be a shameful thing-certainly not 
something that is volunteered in the course of casual conversation. . . If 
[adults] tell people they can't read, they're likely to lose jobs, friendships, and 
even the respect of their kids" (9). That Mama wears a pair of heart-shaped 
earrings prominently positioned in the illustrations just before her "true 
confession" before the church congregation and during and after the 
"conversion" further presents literacy as a divine "gift" from God, suggesting 
once again that literacy directly impacts on the loving relationship between a 
parent and child. 

With the mother's literacy also comes a seemingly newfound church 
community rallying around the new "convert." Was there no community 
around Mama before this moment? Perhaps Rahaman works too hard to 
idealize literacy with assumptions that can surely undermine parental 
authority and individual self-respect. Perhaps she tries too hard to present a 
"happily ever after ending" to a story and circumstance that are more 
complicated than she realizes or dares to explore. Perhaps the story would 
achieve a greater impact if it explored some possible or probable causes of 
Mama's illiteracy beyond her cryptic explanation in the church. Perhaps 
Rahaman's reading audience might be better served by using Mama's 
illiteracy to discuss the cultural bias and social marginalization of those who 
do not share the same abilities, talents, opportunities, or even reading levels. 
The book might have been an occasion to educate both reading parents and 
children that there are degrees of functioning literate practice, that Joseph's 
mother's inability to read his library books, her church hymn books, or her 
work schedule announcements does not mean that she can not differentiate 
between cleaning supplies, shop for groceries, read numbers on her paycheck, 
or pay bills. Perhaps the book might have included some awareness on the 
author's part of the social, historical, and political history of illiteracy 
specifically among African Americans since according to Jonathan Kozol, in 
Illiterate America (1985), "[Illiteracy] figures for the younger generation of 
black adults are increasing. Forty-seven percent of all black seventeen-year-
olds are functionally illiterate. That figure is expected to climb to 50 percent 
by 1990" (2). Although the National Education Association reports that 
among the total population of adult non-literate in English—41 % are English 
speaking whites, 22% are English speaking African Ameri- 

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cans, 22% are Spanish speaking, and 15% are non-English speaking people-
"the actual numbers of white non-readers is twice that of the number of 
African American and Hispanic non-readers, dispelling the myth that 
illiteracy is not a problem among whites. "13 Still, Kozol further urges the 
rightful need to address illiteracy specifically within a particular cultural 
context of race politics: 

When nearly half of all adult black citizens in the United States are 
coming out of public schools without the competence to understand 
the antidote instructions on a chemical container, instructions on a 
medicine bottle, or the books and journalistic pieces which might 
render them both potent and judicious in a voting booth, who can 
pretend that literacy is not political? (92) 

While Kozol's comments are fundamentally sound, his call for urgency 
certainly warranted, perhaps he, too, overestimates the alleged "saving" 
powers of literacy. Joseph's mother seems not to have endangered her life or 
Joseph's or suffered any devastating trauma as a result of her inability to read. 
Nevertheless, the need to historicize illiteracy in any such discussion is clear: 

The politics of literacy are nothing new. Long before the politics of 
racial segregation in the schools came to the national attention, long 
before Woodrow Wilson argued for the merits of class stratification 
in the public schools, long before laws throughout the nation made it 
a crime to teach black people how to read and write, long before the 
U.S. Constitution measured the black citizen as three-fifths of a 
man, one hundred years before the present government existed, a 
powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated 
his views in clear, unflinching terms. "I thank God," he said, that 
"there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning 
has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, 
and printing hath divulged them..God save us from both!"(93)14 

While Rahaman's children's story need not be a history textbook, readers 
might well benefit from a cursory explanation of the richness of the African 
American oral tradition represented to some extent in the mother's 
storytelling, a tradition often less valued by a learned people. Carl F. Kastle 
farther adds in Literacy in the United States: Readers 

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and Reading since 1880: 

For some centuries after the introduction of alphabetic writing, 
literacy was restricted to a small elite and limited to a few functions. 
. . . These early developments took place in the contexts of 
pervasive oral culture. Oral culture did not atrophy in contact with 
written culture; rather, the written word modified and extended 
communication networks. Not only has the great majority of the 
earth's population been illiterate throughout history, but the great 
bulk of communication in literate societies is still oral. (6-7) 

The artificial white literate vs. oral and African American illiterate dynamic 
speaks largely to the race dynamics more fully understood within the context 
of social and political history. Kastle adds: 

On all measures of literacy, at all points during the last century, 
white Americans have been more literate than black Americans. In 
1880, the differences were vast, of course, with American black 
population emerging from slavery and subject to massive poverty 
and discrimination. . . . A large, durable portion of literacy 
differences between black and white Americans clearly cannot be 
explained by measurable economic and family characteristics. In 
the unexplained portion of the variation lie such elusive but real 
factors as the effects of prejudice, cultural alienation, 
discouragement, and differential aspirations, all related to race. 
(125-26)15 

Additionally, the various ways in which different races, ethnicities, and even 
genders experience the world impact on their learning to read and write. For 
instance, African Americans, historically and politically denied access to 
writing and reading, emerge from and celebrate an aural, oral, and visual 
culture often at odds with the culture of the written word, authors such as 
Zora Neale Hurston raising oral rituals of folk culture to high art. "The white 
man," according to Hurston, "thinks in a written language and the Negro 
thinks in hieroglyphics" (50). To offer some commentary that presents 
parental illiteracy often as the result of varied and complex circumstances is 
to enlighten readers, young and old alike, rather than perpetuate further 
ignorance and misunderstanding among the alleged literate. 

Dolores Johnson's book on parental illiteracy, Papa's Stories, comes 
with mixed and confused messages, again associating illiteracy 

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with parental love for a child and with individual self-love. Emphasizing 
folktales, fairy tales, and the rich textures of oral traditions, Johnson's detail 
of a father's illiteracy seems incidental, not fundamentally connected with the 
story's inadvertent final message: that good storytelling is good storytelling 
whether the story is read, recited, or improvised. 

Perhaps without really intending to, Johnson has written a book that 
celebrates folklore and performance. Not only does the narrative engage fairy 
tale rhetoric and a young kindergartner, Kari—her father's growing 
"Princess"—stumbling upon her thirty-something-year-old father and 
mother's secret of his illiteracy, but the story also romanticizes literacy as a 
middle-class ideal. While Kari's Dad does not "read" words in his daily 
"reading" rituals with Kari, he reads the pictures and creates wonderfully 
exciting stories from those pictures. In the illiterate father's hands, the 
culturally familiar stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping 
Beauty, and Jack and the Beanstalk take on new life for Kari.16 And since 
Kari herself is not quite a reader, there is no immediate confusion for her 
about what she sees on the printed page and what she hears her father 
"reading" to her. The father-daughter reading ritual seems complete until the 
fairy tale's wicked stepmother or witch figure—Kari's older neighborhood 
friend, Jennifer—disillusions Kari about her whole relationship with her Dad. 
Ironically, it seems that Jennifer's literacy threatens the ideal world Kari and 
her Papa have created: 

Papa settled into his favorite chair, his skin smelling as fresh as fir 
trees. Kari climbed into his lap and snuggled into the crook of his 
arm. Then Papa read her a story. . . . There were times Kari and 
Papa got so wrapped up in their reading that Mama let supper sit 
while she joined Kari and Papa on the porch in the moonlight. Or, 
during winter's chilliest evenings, the whole family would snuggle 
close together on the sofa and read by the light of the fire. 

Although Jennifer's alleged literal reading of the Little Red Riding Hood 
story affords Kari an opportunity to discuss her dad's illiteracy with him—the 
story does not clarify why Kari should believe her friend's version over her 
Dad's—the story does nothing to advance an understanding of the issue of 
illiteracy. That illiteracy seems secondary stems also from the fact that the 
illiterate father is not presented with any problems particular to his disability: 
he and his literate wife own a nice house in a pleasant middle-class rural 
environ- 

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ment, and he presumably has an adequate blue-collar job. 
Johnson is not quite sure what her book is about; its focus seems too 

fuzzy to know what Kari or Johnson's reading audience is to glean from the 
details other father's cryptic explanation of why he is unable to read: "When I 
was young, I didn't care enough about learnin'. And there was no one who 
seemed to care about me. When I got older, I didn't love myself enough to 
even try." Might Johnson have allowed the family to have an honest 
discussion of less vague reasons for the father's illiteracy? How young is 
"young" when this father did not care about learning? Did extenuating family 
circumstances impact on this father's early education? How is learning to 
read and write fundamentally connected to this father's lack of self-love, and 
how has this lack of self-love manifested itself in his life as an adult? Did this 
father drop out of school when he was young? Is it possible for an illiterate 
individual, a parent even, to have healthy self-esteem? Were the cir-
cumstances of this father's illiteracy forced upon or "chosen" by him? What 
specific lessons might Kari learn from her father's reading inability? 

Indeed, as Papa "reads" to Kari, Johnson does not initially make clear 
that the father is not choosing to improvise. That Kari prefers her dad's 
improvised, more creative versions of stories accentuates the performative 
nature of good storytelling that in this case is not handicapped by the father's 
illiteracy. When this father learns to read a little from his wife and is able to 
read the words on the pages of Kari's books, not just the pictures, Kari prefers 
what might easily be considered sillier revisionist versions where "little boys 
swallowed magic till they were full of beans, and giants. . . were angry 
because their mustaches didn't fit." At the book's end, Kari makes this request 
of her father: "Excuse me, Papa. When you finish this book, read it to me 
again like you always did. I love the extra-special way you read the stories. " 

It seems odd that Johnson foregrounds her text allegedly about illiteracy 
in fairy tale folklore since fairy tales are part of cultural literacy and even 
those who may not be able to read them have surely heard of them and know 
their narrative germs. As folklore, these fairy tales have surely circulated in 
the father's own childhood whether or not he is the product of a literate 
family. Just as Kari and anyone else starts the journey toward literacy by 
inventing stories from pictures, Kari's father has every right to be respected 
for and confident in his storytelling abilities despite his illiteracy. Are story 
readers necessarily the best storytellers? 

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BEYOND THE LITERACY BINARY 

Many readers and writers take for granted the privilege and authority 
given those who can do the same. For them, daily tasks such as reading traffic 
signs, a newspaper or magazine in a doctor's office waiting room, a restaurant 
menu, telephone books, a child's school progress report, checks, recipes, 
maps, and medicine bottles are believed fundamental to our social and 
personal survival. I was starkly reminded of my own middle-class 
assumptions when I recently assigned to my African American children's 
literature class an intergenerational oral history midterm project specifically 
about African American identity and childhood reading experiences. Students 
were asked to interview two individuals—one at least ten years older than 
they and another between the ages of five and ten—about their reading 
experiences as African American children. I had expected to get stories from 
individuals that allowed students to see how images of African Americans 
had or had not changed over generations and how early reading experiences 
impact on adult identity formations. When one student submitted his project, 
his younger interviewee was the only instance of twenty who could not read. 
While I had assumed that all parents are reading to their children before they 
are put to bed, the reality of non-reading children and non-reading parents 
became an issue I had inadvertently overlooked in all of my fairly extensive 
preparations for teaching the class. The young boy, now age ten and in a 
juvenile jail until age eighteen for various crimes, was never read to and 
never learned to read; he still acknowledges no value in learning to read as he 
is the product of a non-reading adult environment. Another student submitted 
a project that revealed an eleven-year-old boy's extreme written and verbal 
giftedness despite having grown up with totally illiterate grandparents. And 
just as it is necessary to understand the circumstances of young Johnny's 
inability to read, it was equally important to understand the circumstances of 
Johnny's parents' illiteracy since illiterate children become illiterate adults and 
illiterate parents. 

While this project has made no efforts to be exhaustive in its exploration 
of parental illiteracy in African American children's books, it recognizes the 
grave misinformation and incomplete information available to children with 
non-reading parents.17 Failure to address parental illiteracy in children's texts 
in many ways furthers the marginalization of those unable to read and write. 
Treatments here evidenced are rudimentary and grossly inadequate. To 
equate illiteracy with hopelessness, immorality, lack of self-love, limited 
quality 

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family relations, latchkey childhood, parental dishonesty, and limited social 
participation is to accept the cultural bias associated with literacy and to 
remain ignorant to complicated realties. As a Professor of Education clarifies, 
"The great divide in literacy is not between those who can read and write and 
those who have not yet learned to. It is between those who have discovered 
what kinds of literacy society values and how to demonstrate their 
competencies in ways that earn recognition."18 Sojourner Truth, an illiterate 
former slave and one of the first black feminist abolitionists, "protested 
against discriminatory laws that denied the ballot to women. . . blacks and 
illiterate citizens. After she was once turned away from a voting booth, she 
said, 'I can't read a book, but I can read the people."19 Indeed, her comment 
speaks to a dimension of (il)literacy that must be considered in order to 
eradicate myths and stereotypes used to determine individual self and social 
worth. My exploration reveals that literate authors can be totally unaware of 
the complexities of (il)literacy and the multitude of literate practices at the 
core of social, cultural, and individual identity formations. Among African 
Americans, the issue of (il)literacy must be further contextualized not as a 
way of condoning not learning to read and write but as a way of 
understanding more fully that non-reading and writing is seldom if ever a 
simple matter of personal choice. 

Arizona State University 
Tempe, Arizona 

NOTES 

I. Langston Hughes. "Mother to Son," Selected Poems of Langston Hughes 
(New York: Vintage, 1974), 187. This poem is selected and recited by Precious Jones, 
Sapphire's illiterate teenage African American female in Push (1996), as one of her 
pre-GED adult illiteracy course assignments. The poem is dedicated to her infant son, 
Abdul (112-113). 

2. Alphabetical literacy and orality need not exist in cultural opposition. Even 
though the "readerly" narrative is a model of rhetorical flourish at its best and meant 
to be read as a demonstration of "mastering the muster" through mastering the 
master's language, other rhetorical strategies by Douglass-emotional flourishes, 
metafictive moments, and rhythmic patterns-render the Narrative its distinctly 
sermonic/ "speakerly" textures, its clear connections with orality and African 
American folk storytelling. Robert G. O'Meally, in his essay "Frederick Douglass's 
1845 Narrative: The Text Was Meant to Be Preached," comments on the oral 
"preacherly" dimensions 

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of Douglass's text: 

The Narrative does more than touch upon questions often pondered by 
black preachers. Its very form and substance are directly influenced by the 
Afro-American preacher and his vehicle for ritual expression, the sermon. In 
this sense, Douglass' Narrative of 1845 is a sermon, and, specifically, it is a 
black sermon. This is a text meant to be read and pondered; it is also a 
Clarion call to spiritual affirmation and action: This is a text meant to be 
preached. . . . But Douglass, who grew up hearing sermons on the plantation 
and who heard and delivered them throughout his life, produced, in this 
greatest account of his life, a text shaped by the form and the processes of 
speaking characteristic of the black sermon. This is a mighty text meant of 
course, to be read. But it is also a text meant to be mightily preached. 
(Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature: The 
Reconstruction of Instruction. New York: MLA, 1978, 192-193; 210). 

3. Violet J. Harris, "African-American Conceptions of Literacy: A Historical 
Perspective" Theory Into Practice 31 (Autumn 1992): 276. Not only does Harris 
provide a rudimentary summary of historical realities facing African Americans in 
their quest for literacy, she also comments on the fact that literacy, depending on the 
nature of what one becomes literate in or about, can be both "emancipatory and 
oppressive": 

Literacy serves emancipatory functions when appropriated to reconstruct 
society and/ or provide individuals with the options needed to participate in 
all sociocultural institutions. Literacy functions in an oppressive manner. . . 
when curricular materials, educational philosophies, and pedagogical 
techniques combine to inculcate an ideology that denigrates a group, omits 
or misrepresents the history and status of a group, or limits access to 
knowledge that would enable the individual or group to participate in 
sociocultural institutions. (277). 

 4. "Literacy and Life." <http://www.edentek.net/litlife.htm> (26 Febru 
 ary 2000): 1. 
 5. Ibid. 
 6. In circulating drafts of this essay, a couple of African American friends, 
responding with familiarity to these details of my illiterate father, were compelled to 
share illiteracy details in their own families. Both email accounts show how adult 
family members' illiteracy impacted on their own educational values. One, an adult 
literacy volunteer teacher, writes: 

The men on my mom's side of the family are illiterate. They were not 
encouraged to do well in school like the women were. So they 

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didn't. None of my uncles could read or write past elementary school level. 
Survival came from what they learned on the streets and others doing their 
reading and writing for them. My dad, who was a math whiz, dropped out 
of school in the third grade to roam around and do nothing. In his fifties, he 
joined a literacy organization to learn how to read and write. We are proud 
of his accomplishments. It was never a secret in my family. When my 
brothers slack, they try to use the excuse that [since] dad made it without an 
education, why can't they? He sets them straight. 

One of my students (female) also quit in the third grade to help feed 
the family. She never really had the opportunity or drive to go back until 
recently. She is now eighty years old. (Personal email, 19 January 2000) 

Another writes of the circumstances other parents' illiteracy: 

My mother died at the age of forty; she did not get her GED until she was 
thirty-seven. She was a very smart woman and it was fun when she went to 
school because we sometimes go to help her with her homework to an 
extent. My stepfather never graduated from grade school as I can recall; 
however, he traveled the world in the army. It was not until I was a grown 
woman that I found out how extremely well his math was, something I 
suffer with. The point is that neither Mom nor Dad ever helped us with our 
homework. There was no doubt that we would go to school and were 
expected to graduate, but there was never any reading to help us or helping 
with math so that we could move to the next level. Other than school books 
and the Bible, we had no books around our house. There was no money for 
them and of course we never went to a library. I do however remember 
them telling stories when the weather caused the lights to go out. That was 
fun! As you can tell, I sometimes have very mixed feelings about education 
and its benefits. So many non-formally educated folk have become 
millionaires. (Personal email, 2 February 2000) 

7. Barbara Kantrowitz and Anne Underwood, "Dyslexia and the New Science of 
Reading" Newsweek (22 November 1999): 72. In their investigation of this disorder 
that affects about 20% of children, Kantrowitz and Underwood point out that this 
inability to decode sounds, essential to reading, results from mixed brain signals; in 
this case, "reading disorders are most likely the result of what is, in effect, faulty 
wiring in the brain-not laziness, stupidity, or a poor home environment" (74). They 
also cite instances of individuals who are successful despite these childhood reading 
and learning challenges: "Indeed, famous and successful dyslexics include Tom 
Cruise, artist Robert Rauschenberg and Olympian Dan O'Brien" (74). Although the 
article obviously does not champion non-reading, it emphasizes that non 

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readers can succeed, further evidenced in the example of John Corcoran: "By sixth 
grade John Corcoran, a severe dyslexic, still couldn't spell 'cat' and could tell MEN 
from WOMEN on restroom doors only because one was longer. Still illiterate as an 
adult, he taught social studies in high school—by using movies for lessons, inviting 
guest speakers and having students grade papers. At 48, he registered for a public 
library literacy program. . . . Now 60, he published The Teacher Who Couldn't Read 
in 1994" (78). Corcoran's book details his life of deception and riskiness as he 
successfully moved up the career ladder through elementary and high school, college, 
and ultimately to his own classroom as a teacher unable to read words on a page. 
Learning how to read was to him like "being set free from almost five decades of 
bondage." Notice the analogy made here between illiteracy as a form of enslavement 
and Frederick Douglass's alleged liberation from slavery through his ability to read 
and write. 

Although not a children's text, Sapphire's controversial novel Push (1996) is the 
disturbingly graphic account of an adolescent African American girl's tortured journey 
to realized selfhood through literacy. The novel demonstrates the complex 
circumstances-emotional, psychological, social, and physical-that interfere with 
Claireece Precious Jones's efforts to become literate. Because of many complicated 
circumstances and situations revealed in the novel, Precious is sixteen and unable to 
read and write. In fact, she confesses in her narrative that except for pages with 
pictures, "the pages look all the same" (48). Importantly, literacy is less Precious's 
"savior" from her traumatic life of paternal and maternal incest and two subsequent 
pregnancies, AIDS, and social neglect, than her teacher, Blue Rain, whose approach 
to helping Precious realize her own self-worth despite her past and present 
circumstances is through reading and writing. The narrative shows Precious's spiritual 
blooming after enrolling in a pre-GED adult literacy class for beginning writers. In 
addition to mastering alphabetic literacy, Precious gains a community of fellow 
students who respect and care for her as never before. The novel ends with Precious 
reading to her infant son and committing herself to making her son's life better than 
hers. Interestingly, some details of Precious's circumstances echo a situation shared in 
one of the emails from an adult literacy tutor friend that, after reading a draft of this 
essay, shared an experience with one other student: 

I had a student once who quit school in the ninth grade. She thought she 
was stupid because she never did well. It was not until just before we began 
our lessons that she found out that she was dyslexic. When I started 
working with her, her kids would make fun of her. When she started 
improving, they started helping her with her homework. When she was on 
her way, she got a job in her child's school as an office aide. Before, she 
was on welfare, just passing the time doing much of nothing. I would say 
she had very low self-esteem. In the two years we worked together, I saw 
her grow as a person. (Personal email, 19 January 2000) 

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8. Historically, the intraracism that exists within African American communities 
and households associates light skin with power, authority, and success. Dark-skinned 
African Americans were presumed to be, were treated as, and perceived themselves as 
less socially advantaged. Such dynamics emerge from the history of American slavery 
that rewarded on many levels African Americans closest to masters' white ideal in skin 
color or hair texture. Masters' children with slaves often were treated as privileged and 
socially gifted. See Kathy Russell, et.al., The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin 
Color among African Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1992). 

9. Nikki Giovanni's autobiographical poem, "Nikki Roasa," is an adult's 
perspective on childhood memories often misrepresented or misinterpreted when 
others impose their values onto another's realities or experiences. Despite her family's 
material lacking and problems with a father who drank too much and too often, 
Giovanni is not necessarily in psychological and emotional denial when she insists 
that her childhood "was quite a happy one": 

 childhood remembrances are always a drag 
 if you're Black 

. . . and if you become famous or something 
they never talk about how happy you were to have your mother all to 
yourself and 
how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those big tubs 
that folk in Chicago barbecue in 

. . . and though you're poor it isn't poverty that concerns 
you. . . 

. . . I really hope no white person ever has cause 
to write about me because they never understand that Black love is Black 
wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never 
understand that all the while I was 
quite happy. 

 ("Nikki-Roasa." in Demetrice A. Worley 
 and Jesse Perry, Jr., eds., 
African-American Literature: An Anthology, 295) 

10. This instance of illiteracy is explored briefly in Harper Lee's To Kill a 
Mockingbird when the narrator Scout attends her black maid Calpurnia's church and 
wonders why the congregation is not reading from the hymnals as they sing. Coupled 
with the economic issue of the black church not having sufficient funds to buy enough 
hymnals for its members is the fact that most of the congregation is illiterate. 
Calpurnia's literacy came from the whites whose house she keeps and she has passed 
that "gift" of literacy on to her son Zeebo who lines hymns—announces the words of 
hymns for the congregation in a call-and-imitation response format. Notice the 
conversation between Scout and Calpurnia about this performance: 

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 "LIFE FOR ME AIN'T NO CRYSTAL STAIR" LESTER 

"How're we gonna sing it [hymn] if there ain't any hymn-books?"  
Calpurnia smiled. "Hush baby," she whispered, "you'll see in a 
minute. " 
Zeebo cleared his throat and read in a voice like the rumble of distant 
artillery. . . . 
Miraculously on pitch, a hundred voices sang out Zeebo's words. . . . (121) 

It never occurs to Scout that folks who can not read as she and others around her can 
function quite efficiently. Scout's naivete highlights again the assumptions of 
privilege attached to literacy. The reality of illiteracy in her church congregation 
offers Calpurnia the opportunity to explain literacy as something that potentially 
separates rather than unites her with other blacks socially: 

Jem [Scout's older brother] said it looked like they [illiterate congregation] 
could save the collection money for a year and get some hymn books. 
 Calpurnia laughed. "Wouldn't do any good," she said. "They 
 can't read." 
 "Can't read?" I asked. "All those folks?" 
 "That's right," Calpurnia nodded. "Can't but about four folks 
in First Purchase [church] read. . . I'm one of 'em." . . . (124) 

Class and race are here connected with literacy. In this moment, Lee shows that 
illiteracy does not mean individuals are unable to function or suffer from low self-
esteem because they are unable to read and write. At the same time, the literacy and 
Calpurnia's attachment to her white family further separate her from the "regular" lot 
of blacks in Maycomb County. 

Not only are illiterate church members able to function in literate circumstances, 
but there are even illiterate preachers who manage effectively as well. My maternal 
grandfather's older brother is an illiterate preacher and has been all of my life. For 
those who do not know that he is illiterate, he "performs" literacy quite effectively. 
He has heard biblical scriptures so often that he has memorized them, giving 
audiences a sense of his spiritual commitment. He knows familiar songs and the 
Word of God so well that he does not have to read them word for word. Since there 
are so many translations and modifications of the Bible for various audiences, his 
recitations might easily be taken as a modernized revision of scriptural texts. He does 
open the Bible to some text as he recites. Those who know him well know how he 
skillfully manages to avoid situations calling for spontaneous reading on his part. 
Since a number of illiterate black preachers in my childhood were not formally 
trained in seminaries or other theology schools, they managed quite effectively to 
preach soul-stirring sermons and to negotiate their leadership, authority, and 
credibility masterfully. 

Literacy as privilege and a means of separating blacks from the illiterate masses 
is evidenced in Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in the Life of 

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a Slave Girl, Written, by Herself.  Notice the emphasis as in Frederick Douglass' title 
when both authors clarify that their narratives were "written by [themselves]." Literacy 
marks their liberation from slavery. Jacobs, who allegedly taught herself to read, is 
more self-confident, arrogant even, because she is literate, unlike the other slaves 
around her: "I was invited to attend [slaves' churches] because I could read" (emphasis 
added 45). There is no sense that Jacobs/ Brent has any other connection, spiritual or 
communal, with those who share her lot beyond her ability to read to them. She even 
comments on her ability to pass on news information because others depended on her 
reading abilities: "They knew that I could read; and I was often asked if I has seen 
anything in the newspapers about white folks over in the big north, who were trying to 
get their freedom for them" (45). While literacy puts Jacobs/ Brent on equal grounds 
with the white populace, it separates her from her fellow lots of slaves. This middle-
class preoccupation with literacy surfaces again when Jacobs/ Brent is reunited with 
her nine-year-old daughter Ellen after seven years of being separated and in bondage. 
Although Jacobs/ Brent is concerned about Ellen's unkempt appearance, she is most 
bothered by daughter's inability to read: "When she [Ellen, the daughter] was placed 
with Mrs. Hobbs, the agreement was that she should be sent to school. She had been 
there two years, and was now nine years old, and she scarcely knew her letters. There 
was no excuse for this, for there were good public schools in Brooklyn, to which she 
could have been sent without expense" (166). At the same time, Brent/ Jacobs's 
concern for her daughter's literacy might seem any literate parent's desire that her child 
receive an education that will aid in living a "better" life. 

11. Story reading and story telling need not be as dichotomized culturally as this 
narrative presents. In other words, reading stories is certainly not any more important 
than good story telling. For instance, Angela Johnson's Tell Me a Story, Mama (New 
York: Orchard Books, 1989) is an African American children's book that celebrates a 
storytelling tradition. When a young daughter requests that her mother tell her a story 
as she is being tucked into bed, the young preschool girl clarifies which story she 
wants her mother to tell by ultimately telling the story to the mother as the mother has 
told her. The narrative re-creates the mother's childhood story through the daughter's 
retelling. Whether or not the mother is literate does not influence this equally 
important parent-child ritual. Two other children's texts importantly present talking 
and storytelling as a source of communal celebration: Deborah M. Newton Chocolate's 
retelling of the Ashanti legend, Talk, Talk (Mahwah, NJ: Troll Associates, 1993) and 
Angela Shelf Medearis's Too Much Talk, a West African Folktale (Cambridge: 
Candlewick Press, 1995). 

12. "Quotations about Literacy."<http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/ 
Database/quote.html> (03 September 1999): 2. 

13. "The Typical Adult Non-Reader," <http://indian-river.fl.us/living/ 
services/als/tvpical.html> (26 January 2000): 1. According to a 1987 report, The 
Subtle Danger: Reflections on the Literacy Abilities of America’s Young Adults, 
published by the Educational Testing Service (Princeton, N.J.), "on 

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 "LIFE FOR ME AIN'T NO CRYSTAL STAIR" LESTER 

the average, African Americans perform 20% behind whites on literacy tests and 
Hispanic perform halfway between the two." 

14. Not only were slaves punished if caught learning to read and write, but 
whites that assisted in slave learning were also subject to legal consequences. 
Describing feminist abolitionist Lydia Maria Child's crusade against slave illiteracy in 
Child's An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans (1833), Cecelia McCall, in 
her essay, "A Historical Quest for Literacy," recounts the deliberate obstacles to slave 
learning: 

[Lydia Maria Child] reports that various laws were enacted to maintain 
illiteracy. For instance, South Carolina was the first state to order that any 
person caught instructing a slave be fined one hundred pounds. Virginia 
declared that schools established to teach either slave or free Black people 
should be disbanded and each pupil lashed twenty times. Anyone caught 
teaching slaves in Georgia was imprisoned for ten days and given thirty-
nine lashes. By 1837, all states in the slaveocracy had enacted similar laws. 
. . . In the free North, . . . Ohio, for instance, refused to educate "colored" 
children at the public expense or allow them to attend schools with white 
children." (4) 

After slavery ended, literacy continued to be a weapon of white supremacy used 
against black social and political participation: "Literacy or other tests as a condition 
for voting were suspended by the Voting Rights Act in 1965 initially only in those 
states in which Congress found there had been pervasive discrimination against blacks 
in registration and in which literacy tests had been specifically designed to 
disfranchise racial minorities. Later, the ban on literacy and other tests was made 
nationwide and permanent by amendments to the Act in 1970 and 1975. The Supreme 
Court held the nationwide ban constitutional after concluding that literacy tests had 
reduced voter participation in a discriminatory manner throughout the country and not 
merely in those states originally covered by the Act" (McDonald, Laughlin. "Minority 
Vote Dilution: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act" 
<http://www.aclu.org/aclu-e/course3_mcdonald3.html> 4 January 80, 3). 

15. Recall that Frederick Douglass, even after being free from slavery and 
"armed" with literacy, is unable to secure a job as a calker because whites will not 
work with him: "I went in pursuit of a job of calking; but such was the strength of 
prejudice against color, among the white calkers, that they refused to work with me, 
and of course I could get no employment" (Mack 714). The myth of Frederick 
Douglass's liberation from slavery and racism is perpetuated even in historical texts 
for elementary students. As if literacy exempts Frederick Douglass from racial 
discrimination, Karen H. Dusek's essay, "Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Writer" 
boldly asserts: "When Frederick Douglass was a boy, he wanted more than anything 
else to be free.  Believing that he would never be truly free without an education, he 
learned to read and write. His ability to read and write soon proved to be his most 
powerful weapon in his lifelong fight against slavery and prejudice" (Cobble 

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stone: The History Magazine for Young People, 21). Neither Douglass's narrative nor 
this essay on him speaks of literacy—the ability to read and write—as a way of 
personal liberation imaginatively. Rather, liberation is ideally connected to 
overcoming social circumstance. 

16. John Corcoran, chronicling his life as an illiterate parent and high school 
teacher, offers a similar experience with the fairy tales he pretends to read to his 
daughter, also called his "princess." Because of the pictures and his familiarity with 
the fairytales orally, Corcoran confidently embellishes the stories of The Three Little 
Bears and Cinderella but is at a total lost when his young daughter requests a story 
with which he is unfamiliar. He recounts the pain of that experience: 

The big Golden Books and their wonderful pictures would stimulate my 
imagination to weave some crazy yarns. When I told the Three Bears, 
Cinderella, or another well-known fairy story, they were embellished with 
all the drama of Orson Wells or Alfred Hitchcock. Sometimes I cold hear 
Kathy [Corcoran's wife] laughing in the kitchen at my tall tales. I had a lot 
of practice at storytelling. 

Colleen had a surprise for me that night. "Read this Daddy," she said, 
snuggling closer to me. She held out a new book, one with smaller pictures 
and more words. Her blue eyes were bright with anticipation. . . . I looked at 
the first page, hoping there would be a clue. . . 

I couldn't decipher one word in this preschool children's book. 
 How I wanted to be able to read, to help her [daughter] during 
those valuable growing-up years before school. Parents who can't read can't 
teach their children to read. My heart was wrenched, knowing that I could 
not give her what I didn't have. (4-5) 

17. Eve Bunting's The Wednesday Surprise intends to be a warm, fuzzy middle-
class, white family moment celebrated when an elderly grandmother and her seven-
year-old granddaughter, Anna, give the adult son a "gift": the grandmother learns to 
read from the granddaughter's instruction. Although the message encouraging 
everyone to value reading is undeniably important—"It's much smarter if you learn to 
read when you're young. . . . The chance may pass along with the years"—the story is 
full of unanswered questions that might explain rather than boldly proclaim without 
explanation or clear illustration the advantages of literacy. As in other children's 
books examined in this exercise, illiteracy is synonymous with an individual's lack of 
self-esteem, poor self-image, and is tainted with presumed immorality. As the 
narrative moves rather fumblingly, it leaves more narratively unsatisfying questions 
than answers and explanations: How does the grandmother choose the books from 
which the granddaughter will teach her? How has the family responded to the 
grandmother's illiteracy up to the point of this story? What is the grandmother's life 
like as a nonreader? How and why is grandmother's learning to read such a "gift" to 
her son? Why has the grandmother resisted 

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her son's insistence that "she must learn to read"? Why does the son insist that his 
mother become literate?: "You were always telling me to go to classes, classes, 
classes," Grandma says to Dad." To what extent does the relationship between this 
mother and son suffer because she is a non-reader? To what extent has the 
grandmother's illiteracy affected the son's literacy? What are the specific 
circumstances of the grandmother's illiteracy? To what extent does a seven-year-old 
read well enough to teach anyone how to read? How long has the granddaughter been 
teaching the grandmother? Why has no adult in the family bothered to teach grandma 
to read? Why and how is grandma's reading "the best gift ever" for her son? While 
Bunting supports the notion that everyone should learn to read when young, her book 
never explains through the grandmother's experiences why and how reading is 
important on many levels. Once grandmother "performs" her literacy—"this 
wonderful thing" –before the family at her son's birthday party, how does literacy 
change her life or the family's? Mom will continue to have her office job, Dad will 
continue to work as a truck driver, and Sam will continue his sports practice. Once 
grandmother learns to read, will she and Anna continue to read during their weekly 
Wednesday night sittings? 

Derek King-Smith's The School Mouse, a level four reader and chapter book, is 
the story of a mouse, Flora, desperately making herself literate: "By day, she educated 
herself, and in the evenings she taught her class" of other mice. While the story 
champions literacy in the very act of the mouse's saving her mouse parents from 
eating "poison" because she has learned to read—"Thank goodness I have learned to 
read. . . or else I might well have sampled these attractive-looking blue pellets" (28)—
the journey toward literacy is both dangerous and lonely for Flora. She meets with 
hostility and resentment from her mouse family who initially have no interest in 
learning to read. Flora's literacy quest begins as and leads to arrogance and alienation 
from her other mouse family. She says: "I am not an ordinary school mouse. I'm sure 
I'm not. I'm sure I can learn all sorts of things that no mouse has ever learned before, if 
only I study hard enough, and then I shall be an extraordinary school mouse" (16). 
Flora has accepted the assumption and cultural bias that literacy elevates individuals 
from the masses and that that such elevation is socially valued by all. Despite her 
mouse family's initial resistance to Flora's "too high an opinion of herself' (15), Flora 
recognizes her literacy acquisition as part other self-esteem in much the same way as 
does Calpurnia in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: "I am lucky. I don't suppose 
there's another mouse on the face of the earth that knows as much as I do already. But 
I can't talk much about my lessons to the others because they wouldn't understand. . . . 
They're all uneducated. And why? Because there's no one to teach them" (104). 
Literacy isolates the questing mouse and she is lonely until she meets another literate 
male mouse and they live happily ever after. As do the other children's texts, this one 
misleadingly idealizes literacy through Flora's action and proclamation that: ". . . the 
first and most important thing, for mice and humans, is to learn to read. Once you can 
do that, there is no limit to what you can get into your heads" (108). 

98 



 LESTER "LIFE FOR ME AIN'T NO CRYSTAL STAIR" 

 18. "Quotations about Literacy." <http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Da- 
tabase/quote.html> (03 September 1999): 1. 
 19. Peter Krass. Black Americans of Achievement: Sojourner Truth (New 
York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988),97. 

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	CFR_2002-2003_Part25
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	CFR_2002-2003_Part28
	CFR_2002-2003_Part29
	CFR_2002-2003_Part30
	CFR_2002-2003_Part31
	CFR_2002-2003_Part32



