An Ode to the Author of Blue Willow
I was reading a magazine article recently in which authors wrote about pivotal books they’ve read. What book would I name, I wondered. Immediately, I saw myself at my fourth grade desk in the 1950’s at Franklin Elementary School in Union Township, New Jersey. I am unwrapping a book I ordered from the Scholastic Book Club. It has a sky blue cover with a drawing of a patterned china plate that takes up most of the cover. A portrait of a blond-haired girl covers the center of the plate. The title, Blue Willow, is also in blue, and blue is my favorite color. The shirt the girl wears under her overalls is blue, too, and the little bit of her overalls that show in her portrait are pink, my sister’s favorite color. Her blue eyes look worried and sad. I know that worried look, feel it as my own.
The book club ordering catalog had said that the little girl is 10-years-old and her name is Janey Larkin. Her father lost his ranch to creditors and the family had to move from farm to farm for him to get work. Now the family is very poor and having a difficult time. My own parents are city people, but I know about longing, as Janey does, for my family not to have troubles. I know about feeling sad because of how hard they have to work. My parents struggle because they are very young parents raising two children 18 months apart on little money, with little family support, one of my grandparents even urging them to divorce.
This book has travelled with me and has been on my shelves since I brought it home from school that day long ago. I go to today’s book shelves and read it again to find out more about what its impact on me was, why I kept it through decades of moving.
Janey treasures a blue china willow plate she has brought from the Texas ranch. It is the most beautiful thing in her life and reminds her of how much she misses having a house she can call home and having real friends like she used to have. But they are not going back to Texas. They are near Fresno, CA where her father is doing work he can get and not treated well at all for his effort.
It isn’t long after the Larkins move into an abandoned shack and try to make it home, that Lupe Romero, daughter of the Mexican family in the shack across from the one Janey Larkin’s family lives in, carries her baby sister over to where Janey sits on porch steps. She tells Janey that she has a brother in addition to the baby and that a brother and sister are better than anything so it’s too bad that Janey doesn’t have any siblings. Janey doesn’t realize, the book’s narrator lets her readers know, that Lupe was merely trying to make a teasing brother and a bothersome baby seem attractive. Instead, Janey feels Lupe is putting on airs, and having made a promise to herself to never let anyone make her feel inferior, Janey replies that she has a china willow plate and that is what is better than brothers or sisters or anything. Janey, who we know is small for her age, says these words, according to the narrator, as if from a great height.
Janey invites Lupe into the family’s itinerant worker shack, one not even as substantial as the shack Lupe’s family lives in. Janey’s mother tells Lupe that Janey is a “runty little thing.” Again the narrator intercedes saying that the girls somehow know that the mother’s words are not really meant for them but are a talking to herself about the sadness of not being able to provide well for her daughter.
Late in the story, Janey trades her cherished china plate for rent and learns in doing so that the plate was also precious to her stoic mother, too, something she hadn’t known. And now the narrator informs us, “Somehow, in spite of the aching misery of its loss, it was almost worth the sacrifice to have discovered how Mom felt about the willow plate.” Feelings come first, as reading ee cummings decades later would confirm for us, no matter what American science and military achievement seemed to obscure.
Reading Blue Willow, when I, too, was ten, I realize now, meant having a world of human interactions interpreted. I was experiencing an important clarity about myself as well as others with each of the narrator’s articulations.
Stories in books were about timeless emotions and interpersonal relationships as well as about specific times and places and families and social problems. And they were companions and counselors and teachers of how to handle life and become a fine person. Feelings alone could contribute to holding a family together during difficult times.
Blue Willow is sometimes called The Grapes of Wrathfor children. Touted as an important fictional account of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, it won a Newbery Honor and many other awards. But at a time when awards and literary praise were not what I thought about, this book’s narrative sunk very deeply into me. It shaped my taste for writing that tells me what is really going on among families, colleagues, and friends.
Isn’t that what our own writing is for? Isn’t it so we can interpret the world and our experiences in it? Don’t we write to affirm what we have learned? Here’s one such moment of Doris Gates’ from Blue Willow that made me smile: “… Janey had learned during her strange life that there are times when only men are important, when even grown-up women don’t matter at all. And certainly not little girls.” In the story, the men do, of course, use Janey’s information to hatch a plan that will ensure the plate comes back to Janey and much more–a new home to live in.
Doris Gates, you lived until my own daughter was 14 and I had been writing seriously for a decade. I wish I could have met you and thanked you in person for your writing and for helping young girls understand the world of the adults around them as well as understand that although being a child often keeps us from being able to fix things, feelings are important because we grow from them. And then again, sometimes, a young person’s actions can help change things in a positive direction, which is one of the best feelings in the world. Although you could never have known your writing impacted a particular young girl in a particular New Jersey town, you are certainly one of those who planted the seeds of authorship in me.