Street roots., June 22, 2012, Page 12, Image 12

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street roots
June 22, 2012
tósi!
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M A U R IC E S E N D A K
Sendak’s streets
Remembering Maurice Sendak ’s fiction on homelessness, including “We Are A ll in the Dum ps with Jack and Guy,” hi
picture book inspired by seeing homeless children in Los Angeles. 20 years on, the issues raised in the book persist today
BY NOELLE SWAN
S T R E E T N E W S S E R V IC E
aurice Sendak was being driven
through Los Angeles in the early
1990s. It was the kind of journey
into darkness found in his children’s
only more real and scarier.
The nation was struggling to emerge from
the recession that had followed a worldwide
stock market crash in 1987. Big banks
reported record profits while major
corporations announced massive layoffs.
As Sendak’s car pulled up to a stop sign,
he looked out the window and noticed a
cardboard box on the sidewalk. Soon, he
saw wiggling feet sticking out from under
the box. Looking closer, he noticed the face
of a child.
Arrested by the stark contrast of invisible
children living in boxes at the feet of
excessive wealth, Sendak suddenly found
meaning in the line of a nursery rhyme that
he had been grappling with for years. “And
the houses are built without walls.”
The rest of that verse, coupled with
another obscure rhyme from Mother Goose,
became the cryptic scaffolding for one of
the first picture books addressing child
homelessness. Thus was born perhaps his
darkest and most strangely hopeful book,
“We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and
Guy.”
Famous for his depiction of a journey
through the rage, fear and loneliness of a
child’s tantrum in “Where the Wild Things
Are,” Sendak was acutely aware that not all
children had such a cozy home in which to
tangle with the often overwhelming
emotions of childhood.
The dark and surreal plot of the book
follows two street-tough kids, Jack and Guy,
through a cardboard shantytown filled with
children in rags. The pair of ruffians loses a
M
Cech says that Sendak spoke of the
litter of kittens and a bald “little kid” to
period when he wrote “We Are All in the
giant, sinister rats in a card game. The rats
Dumps” as a difficult time. “Friends of his
haul the kittens and the little kid off to St.
were dying all over the place.”
Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage.
As a gay man active in the homosexual
The moon takes pity and carries Jack and
books,
community, Sendak had many friends
Guy to the fields of rye outside St. Paul’s
touched by the AIDS epidemic. One of the
where they find the little boy. Guy stops
newspaper headlines featured in the book
Jack from hitting the little kid and suggests
they feed him instead. The moon transforms reads, “Jim Goes Home,” referring to the
AIDS-related death of his good friend James
into a cat and leads Jack and Guy into St.
Marshall, author of the award-winning
Paul’s to rescue the kittens.
“George and
Jack and Guy
Martha” books.
return to their
Some, including
cardboard village
Cech, have
where they vow to
W lille some may be
speculated that the
raise the little boy,
wneomfortable Introducing
bald little boy in
“as other folk do.”
swell themes to yonng
“We Are All in the
The rich two-page
Dumps” is a child
children^ Sendafe never
illustrations are
suffering from
layered with social
shirked aw opportunity to
AIDS-related
commentary. Many of
show the g rittie r side of life .
complications.
the street children
While some may
are clad in
be uncomfortable
newspapers, others
introducing such
use them as blankets.
themes to young children, Sendak never
On one page of the book the papers
shirked an opportunity to show the grittier
advertise expensive real estate, and on the
side of life.
next, headlines read, “Chaos in Shelters,”
“Tell them anything you want, but tell
“Famine in the World,” and “Leaner Times,
them the truth,” Sendak once told an HBO
Meaner Times.”
film crew.
“While most of his books weren’t overtly
As a child, Sendak was confronted with
political, I think by the time he arrived at
many harsh truths. A gay, Jewish kid
‘We Are All in the Dumps’ he just let it go
growing up in Brooklyn during the Great
and said whatever he wanted to say,” says
Depression is bound to hit some bumps in
longtime friend John Cech, an English
the road.
professor at the University of Florida and
Cech recalls Sendak telling him of tragic
the director of the Center for the Study of
childhood memories that went beyond the
Children’s Literature and Culture.
typical struggles for pecking order and
Cech first met Sendak while studying
penny candy.
children’s literature at the University of
A young Sendak was playing ball with a
Connecticut when Sendak came to speak to
friend, when he bounced the ball out of the
one of his masters’ classes. The two became
friend’s reach. His friend chased after the
friends, keeping in touch over 40 years.
ball and into the street where he was struck
by a car and killed.
Many of Sendak’s family members were
killed in the Holocaust while he was a young
child. Tragedy was just as much a facet of
life for young Sendak as any adult. Cech says
that children see tragedy every day.
“Kids know that their classmates are
abused; they see the bruises. They know
who is on food stamps. Kids know what
happens to other kids. Kids see those
things, they endure those things, but they
don’t talk about them because they are
simply a part of life,” he said.
Books such as “We Are All in the Dumps”
give children the space and permission to
talk about such issues.
“We Are All in the Dumps is a call to look
around, to care, and to see,” says Daryl
Mark, coordinator of children’s services at
the Cambridge Public Library.
Despite the disturbing imagery depicting
hunger, poverty, and homelessness
throughout the book, Mark sees hope and
kindness in the story.
In the end of the tale, Jack and Guy take
in the little kid and care for him. The final
image of the three children sleeping on the
street, the little kid curled up in Jack’s arms,
is at once heartwarming and heartbreaking.
“To me, what’s hopeful is the sense of
kindness even though there’s not a
resolution to the poverty, the hunger, the
homelessness or the vulnerability,” Mark
says.
While “We Are All in the Dumps” is
nearly 20 years old, the issues raised in the
book persist today.
Perhaps we are all in the dumps with Jack
and Guy, after all.
www.street-papers.org / Spare Change News,
Boston, Mass.