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Sugar Production Stories for Children and the History of Slavery

Contemporary children's production stories

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  • Brick by Brick
    Brick by Brick tells the story of the people who built the White House (1792-1800), showing cooperation between enslaved and free persons, and between black and white artisans. Production stories about historically significant structures—such as estate houses, castles, bridges, engineering wonders, government buildings, and churches—have their roots in early travel literature for children. By the mid-eighteenth century, educational travel literature included sketches about the major historical landmarks that children might tour with their families, alongside other sites like factories, shipyards, and natural wonders. By the twentieth century, improvements in book illustration and affordable printing supported a resurgence of production stories about buildings, marked by David Macaulay’s Caldecott honor book, Cathedral (1973). The construction industry is not responsible for the expansion of chattel slavery in the same way as cotton or sugar. Yet production stories about buildings remain political because they are symbolically significant embodiments of the narratives people tell about their nation. Emotional investment in old buildings leads to debates over what stories they should reveal for visitors. For instance, plantation houses attract visitors who want to learn accurate information about the lives of enslaved persons, but also visitors who expect a nostalgic reenactment of Antebellum America. Federal monuments celebrate the achievements of early Americans, which include slave owners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Production stories about major buildings thus have to contend with questions of national identity. And like other production stories, they have always been deeply political, requiring the author to decide whether to reveal to children the possibly violent history of how a building was made and for what purpose. Even the earliest sketches about famous buildings in children’s books touched upon whether the pyramids were built by slaves, or celebrated a famous female general who once defended her castle, or explained religious wars that destroyed a family—historical events that resonated with present-day controversies. Brick by Brick centers more on the people who built the White House than on the building itself. In the first spread shown here, the text suggests names for the unnamed workers. Photorealistic illustrations provide strongly individualized facial expressions that frankly acknowledge the exhaustive work, the participation of enslaved children, and the violence used to coerce enslaved persons. In picture after picture, enslaved black workers meet the reader’s gaze. Some of them look angry, others disheartened, and some hopeful. The mixed expressions heighten reader identification and humanize the many people involved in the work, only some of whom were allowed to keep a portion of their wages, which they used to buy their freedom. When the White House is finished, the illustration focuses on the builders themselves, with the White House itself outside of the frame. For their part, the builders look in several directions, some looking at one another. Centering the people, not the building, is an important authorial choice because so many production stories minimize the faces and identities of people at work, focusing instead on a famous architect or engineering feat. The closest readers get to the White House is in the final spread. A contemporary African American family atop the White House roof tends a flag ambiguously posted at half mast, as if in mourning for those who died without their freedom. The view is difficult to identify, since we are level with the family. One intriguing way to interpret the image is that viewers are looking at this scene from across the National Mall, while standing inside the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which was under construction when Brick by Brick was published. From this perspective, the book mourns and celebrates the construction of two quite different buildings, placed opposite to one another.
  • A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families
    A Fine Dessert is a picturebook about four families who make blackberry fool, a fruit and whipped cream dessert. Each family cooks in a different time and place, showing four centuries of cultural change, from Lyme, England (1710), to Charleston, South Carolina (1810), to Boston, Massachusetts (1910), to San Diego, California (2010). A Fine Dessert received positive reviews at its publication, but readers pushed back online by questioning how black children may feel when reading about an enslaved black girl and her mother in Charleston, South Carolina (1810). The two occasionally smile while they work, and they make the desert for a white family, then lick the bowl while hiding in a linen closet (Thomas, Reese, and Horning, 2016, pp. 6-11). Despite the association of sweet treats with innocent children, the history of making and eating desserts is an especially fraught topic. Cheap sugar production drove the rapid spread of black chattel slavery, which served the eating pleasure of white families. As a result, many sugar production stories from the last two centuries have misrepresented sugar slavery to children, to avoid showing the human cost of their favorite treats. This context for sugar stories is important for how readers may feel about a contemporary picturebook on a similar topic. By considering A Fine Dessert as a production story, we can understand how its approach unwittingly relies upon a storytelling tradition originally designed to celebrate technology and hide oppression. First, production stories favor strict repetitive formulas across the full story or series. The production story series by John Wallis (ca. 1805-1840), William Newman (1861-1863), or Maud and Miska Petersham (1930s) treat various commodities, such as bread, coal, steel, diamonds, or sugar, using the same formulaic approach for each one. They often use the same visual layout and descriptive tone, creating an enchantment with mechanical repetition that supports the genre’s underlying narrative of technological progress. The stricter the formula, the more likely that the series creates an inappropriate equivalency between free and enslaved workers. Illustrator Sophie Blackall uses this repetitive approach to enable readers to compare family cuisine between the four time periods—with similar limitations. Second, production stories typically end with children joyously consuming the product in question. This invitation to “join the feast” can distance readers who have social justice concerns about how the product was made. The final spread of A Fine Desert shows a multi-racial, multi-ethnic gathering of friends, eating dessert in San Diego, California (2010)—the present-day parallel of the 1810 image. Although the families are diverse, their emotional responses are not. The final representation of happy children from the present-day US may alienate readers who do not see their feelings acknowledged in these happy faces. The problem of reader identification in the “final feast” also occurs in Clara Hollos’s The Story of Your Bread (1946) and Henry Newman’s The Story of Sugar (1861), both of which feature white children as the final consumers.
  • Dave the Potter: Poet, Artist, Slave
    Dave the Potter is one of many contemporary picturebook production stories for children that explain how something was made in the past. Another example is Marguerite Makes a Book by Bruce Robertson, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt, about a girl who makes an illuminated manuscript; A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins, illustrated by Sophie Backall, about making a blackberry and whipped cream treat; and Blacksmith’s Song by Elizabeth Van Steenwyk, illustrated by Anna Rich, about the son of an enslaved blacksmith, who assists his father in the forge and helps freedom seekers. Picturebooks about making things in the past are either told from the perspective of a child who learns how to make something, or they are exemplary biographies of famous artists, musicians, and artisans. Dave the Potter tells the biography of David Drake, an enslaved master potter responsible for managing the operations of a pottery manufactory in the Edgefield District of South Carolina. Based on the latest designs, his industrial sized kiln made massive pots used to store grain and salted meats to feed the growing regional population of enslaved persons. The picturebook thus engages with both ceramics and basic food supplies, both commodities often treated in production books. David Drake signed many of his pots “Dave,” adding short poems of rhymed couplets, even though it was against the law for an enslaved person to read or write. Today, his creations are collected in museums for public viewing (Chaney, 2018). The picturebook shows how Dave makes his pots and his poems but avoids erasing his personality and skills by balancing close-ups on Dave’s hands with meditative images of Dave’s face and creative productions. The quadriptych close-ups on Dave’s hands, for instance, which appears mid-book, showcases his craft expertise. Like Dave, readers pull out the book’s page to view the full spread, just as Dave “pulls” his pot from the pottery wheel. Another spread from two pages later shows Dave’s face, with eyes closed, hands thrown wide like Christ to embrace readers, while behind him the faces of Dave’s people stretch out from his mind like an ancestral tree. In both cases, Dave’s creativity is connected to a long history of African Diaspora cultures, that embraces his ancestors but also readers. By involving readers in Dave’s creative enterprise, the picturebook time slips between present-day readers, Dave’s work in the kiln, and Dave’s own past. This Afrofuturist approach brings recipients of David Drake’s art, including readers, to his South Carolina shores, where they can positively identify with his creative spirit but cannot forget the tragedy of his captivity. The picturebook’s multi-temporal setting is doubly fitting because of what Dave writes on this particular pot, which readers only learn on the final spread: “I wonder where / is all my relation / friendship to all— / and, every nation.” Having read Dave’s poetry, readers can turn back time themselves, by turning back the pages of the book, to find the same sentiments foreshadowed on the opening spread: a large pot transposed on a dark Atlantic Ocean, where a single ship recalls the middle passage. Instead of the sky above, viewers look down into the pot’s stored contents, the brown rim of the pot arching like a rainbow’s promise. Remembrance and hope, sealed away, opened later. Perhaps these are the images in Dave’s mind as he made this pot, wondering about “all my relation.”