Popular children's author relates '3 S's' of book censorship

By Jin Moon

10.02.00

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NEW YORK — Popularity can often lead to censorship and controversy, particularly in children's literature.

Author Judy Blume, whose stories about awkward adolescence are cherished by thousands of children and adults around the country, knows this fact better than most.

The author of the best-sellers Forever and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is also the author of five of "the 100 most frequently challenged books of the decade" of the 1990s. That makes her the author who appears most often on the list, which was released earlier this year by the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

And she has a strong sense of why that is, she said during a panel discussion last week, "Censors and the Schools: The Battle over Children's Literature" at the First Amendment Center. The pattern of targeting books adds up to three "S" words: sexuality, swearing and Satan, she noted.

"Long, long, long, long before Harry Potter, I would go out and speak about the three S's," she said "And that's been true for a very long time. People would choose to ban books — Satan's been there."

Charges of Satanism have surfaced with the enormous popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series about a young wizard. But sexual content is the biggest complaint about Blume's books, according to the author.

"It was anything to do with sexuality, which for my characters was puberty. Any language that people found offensive. Sometimes lack of moral tone, whatever that is," Blume said.

Blume's five books on the list of the 100 most-challenged books of the 1990s are: Forever (7), Blubber (30), Deenie (42), Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (60)and Tiger Eyes (89).

"It was a shock to me," she said about reactions to her books in the 1980s. "The person who wrote the books is always surprised."

Back then, Blume said, "I had nowhere to turn. I didn't have (the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression) making Muggles for Margaret. I felt completely alone. I didn't have the publishers behind me. No one was doing anything. It was all: 'We don't talk about this.' It was shocking and sad."

The panel discussion, taped during Banned Books Week for The Freedom Forum's "Speaking Freely" television program, heard another vivid instance of censorship from Detroit bookseller Cammie Mannino.

Mannino recounted how she had devoted a significant amount of her time defending the right of students in her local school district to read Suzanne Fisher Staples' novel Shabanu, Daughter of the Wind, which deals with an 11-year-old girl who runs away rather than marrying a man her family has chosen.

A teacher in Mannino's local district had wanted to teach Shabanu to her class, she said, but foes of the book called it pornography because of one page that alluded to sexuality. Because of the controversy, the book was not allowed into the curriculum.

"The decision was made on one line of the book that bothered one rather uptight parent instead of the other 89 kids who enjoyed the book and got a lot out of it," Mannino said.

"At that point, I began a two-year campaign to wear down the school administration until they finally got so sick of me that they finally ended up putting the book back into the curriculum. It was quite a process.

"I e-mailed (Staples) to tell her it was back in the curriculum," Mannino added. "She wrote me this wonderful e-mail in which she said, 'I'm weeping into my computer because this is the first time I have ever had any of my books reinstated in a curriculum after being censored.'"

A similar instance of censorship catapulted author and professor Carolivia Herron into a much-heated controversy.

After a teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., read Herron's book Nappy Hair to her class, one upset parent called the local TV networks and with 50 other people ran the teacher out of the school, right into the cameras.

Herron had recorded her uncle telling the story of her nappy hair and had played it for students in an oral poetry class at Harvard. The African-American students loved the story so much that Herron decided to turn it into a children's book.

"I shared it with an African-American audience," she told the panel. "They loved it so much. I decided to go for a children's book because of popular demand. So you can imagine how surprising it was to have somebody disagreeing with it, and telling me, I was told, that I sold my race down the river, and that sort of thing."

Herron couldn't understand why her book stirred such controversy, and, she said, neither could Ruth Sherman, the Brooklyn teacher who was run out of her school for reading Nappy Hair to her class.

"(Sherman) said everyone told her not to call me," Herron said. "But she was determined to call me because she wanted to know 'What did I do wrong?'"

Herron said the three major problems that probably led to the Brooklyn incident were: the photocopies teachers made for the students were too dark; Sherman was white; and the word "nappy" was considered to be a black-on-black insult in many African-American communities.

Since the Brooklyn incident, Herron has traveled "anywhere, anytime" to defend a teacher's right to use the book, and also to defend her right as an author to publish the story. The incident also propelled sales of her book. Before the controversy, she had sold 13,000 copies. Afterwards, her sales shot up to 100,000.

But that was not the reaction that mattered, she said. It was the principle that was paramount.

"I ended up having to leave my position because I felt that it was too important," said Herron, who was by then an English professor at California State University. "The gift to be a writer is too great. You can't say, 'Well, I have this requirement to do this other small thing.' It was very hard, but I had to leave what I was doing."

Panel moderator Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center, pointed out that the controversy surrounding Herron's book underscored a fourth "S" word.

"The other issue beyond the three S's, I think, is an issue of sensitivity," Paulson said. "(Herron's book) raises concerns among African-American parents who thought it was stereotypical. We also see a book like Huckleberry Finn being banned because of a racial epithet."

Herron agreed. "The 'N' word can hurt so bad that there needs to be some education before you can get into (Huckleberry Finn)," she said. "And again my wonderful father, when I first read that book, he sort of sat me down and told me what the book was doing and that sort of thing. I admired the book so much that . . . when I was in high school and college, I would dramatize the part of (black slave character) Jim to try to get people to see what I thought was actually going on."

Education, the panel agreed, is the only way children will be able to process what they're reading without misunderstandings and misconceptions.

"Harry Potter has been in so many ways a golden chance for us to talk to children about the First Amendment because they love the book in a deep, passionate kind of way that makes them understand how important it is to have that feeding," Mannino said.

And book challengers must also stop judging a book by its author, she added.

"(The challengers) don't judge the product," she said. "They're looking at the author. Is the author black? In the case of Huckleberry Finn, since the author is not black, then it's not permissible (to use the 'N' word)."

Blume added a different perspective. "When you talk about books about race, the books that are most often challenged ... are African-American authors writing authentically about the experience of growing up African-American with true language," she said, a fact that rang true to Herron and her book Nappy Hair.

At that point, Paulson played devil's advocate.

"We tend to demonize people who want to censor," he said. "There is a sense that these are people who walk into walls and they're not well-read and they're just determined to shut out the world. But are there times when a parent could go to a school administrator and say, 'Look, my son or daughter is reading this in the fourth grade and it's really not appropriate.' Would that always be wrong?"

Blume said, "A thoughtful parent coming into school to talk about something is always welcome. It's the zealot that we all jump away from."

Mannino pointed out that most books with meaningful content have the potential to be offensive.

"It's only the most bland kind of literature, the kind of formulaic literature with no voice and no character and no whatever, that's going to meet the test of everyone yawning but no one will be offended," she said.

For Blume, creating meaningful content has always been a priority. But sometimes she's faced with dilemmas about what to include in her books and what not to include. This self-censorship can be dangerous, she said.

"I've certainly had the experience of being asked on several occasions to take something out of a book by a beloved editor," she said.

She recalled a recent conversation with her editor who told her that if she omitted the "F" word, which appeared only once in a book she did not name, she wouldn't lose all the sales from book clubs.

She was so conflicted on what to do until she talked to her grown son.

"He said, 'You are Judy Blume. You stand for honesty and truth. How can you even consider changing it?'" she recalled.

"And so I didn't."

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