Before Margaret

With the release this week of the movie version of Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, there’s been a flurry of press and reckoning with Judy Blume, so I pulled down my collection. This is still the best cover of Margaret IMHO.

But looking through the pile, my (ex-library) copy of Iggie’s House struck me anew. The subject of racism, racist housing codes, and redlining and integration are right out there on the cover of this edition.

Published in 1970, Iggie’s House was Blume’s first book and after a re-read, I think it still feels daring and fresh over 50 years later. 

Blume had worked on the MS of Iggie’s House in an NYU Continuing Education writing class with teacher (and editor) Lee Wyndham, and the book is dedicated to her. Blume read an ad in The Writer’s Digest for Bradbury Press, and according to Dick Jackson, legendary children’s book editor and co-owner of Bradbury Press, she liked that Bradbury was based in New Jersey and she wouldn’t have to drive on the turnpike to Manhattan if she worked with them. So Blume submitted Iggie’s House to Bradbury and Jackson, an editor for authors such as Arnold Lobel, Paula Fox and Gary Paulsen, pulled Iggie’s House from a slush pile and published it. He called the money they spent on that Writer’s Digest ad “The best $5000 I ever spent”, as he went on to edit some of Blume’s best known works. Judy Blume said in a remembrance, “I once asked what he’d seen in Iggie’s House and he said, “I saw the next book and the book after that.”

When Iggie’s House came out, Kirkus Review wrote (among other things): 

Iggie's cosmopolitan family is off to Tokyo and Winnie knew they'd sell to someone interesting—but her welcome to the Negro Garbers ('Detroit! Did you riot?') doesn't warm them and her championship of their cause isn't backed up by her parents: she's the bumbling, besieged liberal at age eleven. But not a girl to give up easily…Occasionally forced (Mrs. Landon's crude tactics, Clarice's very name), loose though not slack—in fact evanescent except for the rueful truth.

Bumbling, besieged liberal sounds like a very 2023 descriptor. A scene where the Gardener children call Winnie on her “white savior-ism” feels just as relevant today too:

“Good old Winnie! Herbie slapped her on the back and made her cough. “Miss Do-Gooder Herself!”

Who did he think he was? Here she was trying to help… trying to do her best for them and this is where it got her. “Do you have to be so nasty all the time?” she asked Herbie. “What’d I ever do to you?”

Herbie dropped to his knees, pretending to pray. “Lord… oh Lord! Thank you Lord for sending the Garber family this Do-Gooder, Winifred. Now that she’s discovered us, she’s going to save us, Lord. All by herself! And after we’re gone, Lord… then she’ll be able to tell everyone how she’s had black friends. Now isn’t that wonderful! I ask you Lord… isn’t that just too…” [p.90]

In Designing Critical Literacy Education Through Critical Discourse Analysis : Pedagogical and Research Tools for Teacher-Researchers, researchers Rebecca Rogers and Melissa Mosley Wetzel wrote up a study they conducted involving Iggie’s House. The study involved a class book group for pre-service teachers, explaining:

In this chapter, we illustrate the complex ways in which we sought to make meaning around issues of race, racism, and anti-racism and in doing so we demonstrate how we drew on the tools of critical discourse analysis both during and after our teaching/learning. As we alluded to earlier, we found that our students tended to focus their cultural analysis on people of color and did not interrogate whiteness as a racialized identity. In Chapter 3, we described how we provided contexts for pre-service teachers to narrate their experiences to further explore the relationship of literacy to gender, family, privilege, interests, emotions, culture, and struggles. In a deliberate pedagogical move, we designed a book club with children’s literature that included White people grappling with racism, White privilege, and anti-racism.

One of the titles they assigned was Iggie’s House and Tonya, a Black pre-service teacher starts out with a very valid critique of the book:

Tonya presented her primary critique of the book, what she saw as a privileging effect,    which operates when White people reframe racism (and measures to redress racism) in a manner that privileges the feelings of White people at the expense of the material realities of people of color. Tonya’s point was that the African-American voices were deliberately silenced in the book so Winnie’s racial identity development could be explored. 

Tonya’s primary critique of Iggie’s House focused on the lack of action in the book, the shallow representation of the Garbers (the African-American family in the book), and the predominance of the privileging effect (where White people’s emotions are foregrounded over the material realities of people of color). In the book, The Garbers, a Black family, buy a home in the suburbs of New Jersey, where they meet Mrs. Landon, a White woman, who circulates a petition against the Garbers and puts a “go away” sign in the Garbers’ yard. Tonya wrote the following in her journal: It seems to me that nothing was solved in this book. It was just a story about a 12-year-old White girl and her one to two-week encounter with the new Negro neighbors, or colored people as they were referred to by the other White characters in the story, and how their “coloredness” affected the lovely neighborhood on Grove Street… Tonya’s point was that the African-American voices were deliberately silenced in the book so Winnie’s racial identity development could be explored.

Leslie, a (White) pre-service teachers offers this reflection:
“I feel like I am . . . this little girl.” She then offered an explanation for her identification with Winnie. “Well, because I feel like, um, when she when she talks about like, like um, ok, when she talks about things, like people aren’t supporting her when she has these ideas and they’re not the same as her parents, I feel like that situation is really similar to me sometimes if I try to talk to my parents or like friends, ike that aren’t in the education program about different like social justice type things they don’t really understand it. Especially, like I remember reading, when Dr. Rogers read it [a section of Iggie’s House aloud],  I felt like  “oh, I feel like we’re alike”...

Perhaps what Leslie was identifying with was Winnie’s frustration talking about matters like race to her family:

Winnie had heard enough. She ran upstairs and into her room, slamming the door behind her. She flopped down on the bed, then rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. Her parents never discussed important things with her. Anyway, there were no Negro families in their end of town. And only a very few in the other end. So her folks had nothing to say on the subject. Besides, they liked to pretend everyone was just like they were. But Winnie read the papers and she had seen plenty on T.V. And just last spring her teacher had assigned the whole class to do a paper on “What I Can Do to Improve Racial Relationships.” That was pretty funny, she had said to Iggie’s family. What could she possibly do when she hardly knew anybody of another race? [p.15]

Later when Winnie is upset about a petition that her nosy neighbor Mrs. Landon has started, urging the Garbers to move, she asks her Mother why she hasn’t done anything:

“I don’t see how you and Daddy can just sit there day after day doing nothing. Are you against the Garbers?”

Mrs. Barringer did not reply.

“Well, are you?” Winnie asked again.

“No, Winnie,” her mother answered in a calm voice. “We are definitely not against the Garbers.”

“Then why don’t you do something?” Winnie repeated.

“Because it isn’t really any of our business Winnie. Your father and I don’t believe in getting mixed up in other people’s lives. These things will work themselves out. Daddy and I are not crusaders.”

“What do you mean crusaders?” Winnie asked, baffled.

“That’s who you are Winnie. You’re a crusader. Always finding a new cause and then jumping in to fight for it. You’re like Mrs. Landon in a way.” [p.69-70]

At the end of Roger and Wentzel’s course, pre-service teacher Tonya wrote this as a reflection:

I understand that change is not going to happen unless White people work, too, but is it necessary for books to exist where White people are positioned as the main character? Don’t these books silence the voices of the oppressed? At first read, I felt the author’s sentiments were the polar opposites of my own. Fondrie (2001) states, “I always place the burden of acting or speaking on the characters who represent other groups. They are the ones who must act and speak and think appropriately in my estimation.” Then, I realized something interesting  . . . I have been doing the same thing! I criticize society for placing the burden of racism on people of color, yet I also criticize books like Iggie’s House for attempting to shift some of the burden to White people and how they deal with racism . I realize that I have issues that I need to sort out about how I feel about discussions and literature centered on whiteness, White privilege and White allies before I make a conclusion about the validity of these topics. I have to come to understanding on the significance of each of these topics in discussions on racial issues and whether or not I feel that they are necessary and helpful or just another indirect tool of oppression.

Absolutely. So was I wrong to feel like Iggie’s House might still have something valuable to say, 53 years later? In a 2022 NYT Book Review interview, the great kids lit writer Jason Reynolds was asked what was the last great book he read:

You know, if I’m being honest, the last book that I really loved (which makes it great to me) was probably “Iggie’s House,” by Judy Blume. I’d read it long ago, but I recently reread it and suddenly it feels even more … alive. It’s not one of her most popular books, but when I think about the fact that it was published in 1970 and addresses white flight, I’m enamored by Blume’s courage and decision-making in the work.

So while Blume’s work on girls and puberty is in the spotlight right now, it’s worth recognizing all the other difficult subjects she also tried to tackle. 

Rogers, Rebecca, and Wetzel, Melissa Mosley. Designing Critical Literacy Education Through Critical Discourse Analysis : Pedagogical and Research Tools for Teacher-Researchers, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pccol/detail.action?docID=1244635. Created from pccol on 2023-04-26 20:28:17.