Black Gold: What a Black Bookstore Can Be and Do

Last week I was in the UK on various projects, and on my last day before returning to Buffalo, I went to New Beacon bookstore in Finsbury Park. Originally when I had planned my visit, I thought it would be my last time, as the bookstore was set to close after its 50^th anniversary. However, thanks to a populist campaign, the bookstore has raised enough money to revamp itself (see Natasha Onwuemezi’s article in the Bookseller: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/swell-support-new-beacon-books-helps-raise-10k-513551); it plans a new storefront, a different layout, and most importantly, more room and plans for community space and activities. I’m looking forward to going back with some of my postgraduate students in July to see how it is all coming along.

Educational essays by writers such as Gus John are not usually available at your local bookstore–unless that bookstore is one like New Beacon.

But of course this reprieve did not stop me from a few (ahem) purchases, especially since, in order to make room for new stock, they were selling off some of their old stock at deep discounts. New Beacon is not primarily a children’s bookstore, but they have throughout my relationship with them furnished my shelves with many gems. This is partly because of founder John La Rose’s connection with the supplementary school movement. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black British children (especially boys) were being placed into ESN (educationally sub-normal) classrooms or excluded from school altogether at an alarming rate. John La Rose, like other activists, tried to counter the effects of this travesty. He did this partly through supporting and publishing educational experts in the Black community, including Bernard Coard and Gus John (and I found a couple of Gus John’s essays at the bookstore this time).

The Evans English Readers engaged writers from throughout the former empire to write basic primers with BAME characters. This one is from Sierra Leone; the illustrator is Tom Simpasa.

But La Rose was also one of a number of Black British and West Indian activists who began supplementary after- or Saturday school programs, where kids could learn basic skills as well as Black history that the mainstream schools ignored. I have purchased many basic reading texts here over the years that feature Black characters, some from traditional publishers such as Macmillan Caribbean or the Evans English Readers, who had branches in Africa or the Caribbean. These readers were imported specifically by many supplementary and mainstream schools who wanted to be sure that their children found mirrors that reflected them in the books they read.  The one I found this time (above) is from Sierra Leone; the illustrator is Tom Simpasa.

Independently published stories range in quality, from pamphlets stapled together to hardcover books; but all need independent outlets like New Beacon to provide a market.

Other reading texts came from independent and community publishers, such as Centreprise, the Peckham Publishing Project, or the one I found this time from a group called Brockwell Books. Often these books were “home-made” in quality, created by teachers or even by the students themselves. These are not the kinds of books that are found in mainstream bookstores, or even in places like the British Library—their fragile nature means that few exist anymore, making New Beacon a critical resource. I also found a book of poetry, written by a 14-year-old British Bangladeshi girl, Faryal Mirza, and published in 1987 to an unusually high standard for a self-published book. It still has its original dust jacket, with the photograph of Mirza looking seriously out of glasses she probably would prefer to forget now.

This book, published by New Beacon Press, “is intended for use in schools and colleges or for individual and collective study.”

At New Beacon I’ve also found Black history, both older works published by New Beacon, such as Roxy Harris’s Being Black (complete with study questions and vocabulary), and more recent works of the kind that too quickly go out of print. This is one of the key features of an independent bookstore like New Beacon—books that either never reach the mainstream chains or are only available for a few months are much easier to obtain at an independent bookstore. Clive Gifford’s The Empire Windrush (Colllins Big Cat: 2014), Errol Lloyd’s Celebrating Black History (Oxford Reading Tree 2007) and Dan Lyndon’s Resistance and Abolition (Franklin Watts 2014) are all still available, but have you ever seen them in a bookshop? I found all three on Saturday.

Black History texts such as these go out of print quickly–and often are not replaced by anything else.

New Beacon also had books that preserve and teach history in other ways. For example, I bought one of photographer Joan Solomon’s beautiful multicultural books from her The Way We Live series, first published in the 1980s. Sweet-Tooth Sunil is a story of a British family celebrating Diwali; other books in the series include Sikh, Jewish, Caribbean, Chinese, and Japanese families.

Solomon did a series of photo picture books in Britain’s multicultural communities.

And finally, I bought books that I’ve been meaning to pick up for some time, before they disappear completely (and other than used book sites, New Beacon is the only place I’ve ever seen them). The independent publisher Verna Wilkins produced a series at Tamarind around the turn of this century called “Black Profiles” that showcased Black Britons who had achieved success in their fields despite any setbacks they may have encountered. These books were meant to inspire young Black Britons to do the same, and the books covered a wide range of people. When Tamarind became a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, the Black Profiles series was revamped, changed from a hardcover series with watercolor illustrations designed for the library market to a trade paperback series for the general market, with cover photographs instead of illustrations. The PRH version was perhaps more appealing to the young reader, but one of the editorial decisions made about the revamped series was to change the name, from Black Profiles to Black Stars. This new name made a subtle allusion to Black History, but it also meant that successful figures like the surgeon Samantha Tross disappeared from the series. New Beacon had both for sale.

Verna Wilkins of Tamarind published the Black Profiles series before the company was bought out by Penguin Random House.

I’m delighted that New Beacon will remain open, even if the changes they make may mean I won’t find quite so many older treasures. It will nonetheless remain one of the few places in Britain where you can find children’s books for and about BAME people in every imaginable category and by every kind of writer. And that is something that everyone in Britain (and outside it) should celebrate.

Mixed Messages: The Role of the Multiracial Character in Children’s Literature

In 19^th and early 20^th century children’s literature, the multiracial character generally evoked one of two responses: fear, or pity. Tom Sawyer’s Injun Joe, for example, was much feared by Tom and his gang, Tom even having nightmares about the character coming to get him. In Caddie Woodlawn, the children of an Indian mother and white father are “half savage” and the recipient of Caddie’s attempts to “civilize” them by paying for new clothes. Other examples can be found in British Empire literature—the “ugly mulatto” being a stock character of fear in books by G.A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and others; and the pitiable female “half-breed” or “mulatto” who cannot ultimately be saved by the white hero also figures in the works of these authors.

After World War II, as civil rights in the US and changing immigration patterns in Britain meant increasing, often hostile, interaction between racial groups, the multiracial character in children’s literature nearly disappeared for a time. But a generation later, many things had changed. More and more children were born who had parents of different races, but it was unclear where they would fit in to a post-civil rights society. Both American and British authors produced books dealing with this issue, but for this blog, I’m just going to look at two from Britain: Anthony Masters’ Streetwise (London: Methuen, 1987), and Jacqueline Roy’s Soul Daddy (London: Collins, 1990).

Brixton Riots 1981

That these two books appeared at roughly the same moment is not an accident. During Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership, race relations between white Britons and a new generation of born-and-bred Britons with Afro- and Indo-Caribbean ancestry were at a low point. Particularly in terms of relations between the (mostly white) London Metropolitan Police, who Thatcher had empowered with the revival of the “sus” laws, and the Black British community, tensions were high. Governmental reports had called for a focus in the schools on “multiculturalism” but most people felt that the emphasis was token at best, and assimilationist at worst. The multiracial character in children’s books at this time was employed—by both Black and White authors—as the receptacle for British fears and hopes about the possibilities of racial harmony in the country.

This is a story about race? Illustration by David Legge.

Streetwise’s author, Anthony Masters, is a white English writer of action-driven fiction for boys. The central character of this book, Sam, is a white English boy who finds out that his policeman father, killed under mysterious circumstances, had another family—with a black woman. This has been kept secret for a long time, because although everyone (including Sam’s grandmother and mother) think that the other woman is a nice person, if it was found out on the force that a white police officer had a child with a black woman, it would “stir up trouble” (23). Sam is uncertain about his new-found multiracial half-brother. Additionally, he is disturbed by dreams of a person he calls “Albino Man,” a local man who owns an old and crumbling cinema. Albino Man’s primary fearful characteristic seems to be his lack of color where color should be. Sam must confront these fears that center on race. Albino Man holds the key to finding his father’s killer. Once the secret comes out, it is Sam and his mother who are in danger, and Sam’s half-brother Winston rescues Sam’s mother from a fire set by the killers. In the rescue process, Sam’s mother’s face became “black—black like Winston” (116). Of course black skin and charred skin are not the same at all, but the implausible plot and descriptions aside, this is a story about fear of not knowing how to categorize someone racially; either they are supposed to be black but look white (or vice versa), or they are a white boy’s brother but they look black. Sam learns that his very survival means accepting people despite how “different” they may look from him.

You’ve got to have soul to be a whole person.

Soul Daddy, written only a few years later, has a multiracial author in Roy and a multiracial main character, a twin named Hannah who (like Sam) finds out that her father had another family with another woman. Hannah has grown up with her white mother, but her black father has returned to the house with his daughter who is only slightly younger than Hannah. Hannah has difficulty reconciling the change in her household, in part because her black half-sister brings disturbing ideas to Hannah’s world. Nicola questions why they have to live in the all-white suburbs, reads books by black authors, and speaks up in class about the need to include black history in the curriculum. Hannah runs away, but ends up in Brixton, where her father’s parents live. She suddenly “felt I belonged” (222) and can return home where to successfully integrate her black and white halves. Like Streetwise, the message of Soul Daddy is that integration is the way forward, although Roy’s version sweeps wider and urges the school systems as well as individual families to change: “Once, they’d spit on you in the street, but now the hostility was taking a less visible, more secret form . . . It was present in an education system which suppressed black history and achievement and denied black ability to learn” (134). Most people, Roy argues, “pretended it [discrimination] didn’t exist and that Britain was a multicultural society” (134). Both her book and Anthony Masters’ book reflect a still-racially divided Britain, and the hope that integration of black and white together (particularly in the form of the multiracial character) could unite and ultimately save Britain and the British people.

The multiracial character in the 1980s and 1990s was invested with responsibility for society’s problems, but also for possible solutions to these problems. Institutions in these books, such as education and law enforcement, are unable to deal with the “other” and only the character with the ability to function in either racial “camp” can hope to bring about harmony. But the emphasis on individual responsibility for racial harmony would be tested as the 1990s continued, and institutions continued to fail the Black British population.  Individuals cannot bring about racial harmony if institutions don’t support them–as Stephen Lawrence and his family found out.

 Stephen Lawrence, murdered by white boys in 1993.