Book Review: Bud Not Buddy

Title: Bud Not Buddy

Author: Christopher Paul Curtis

Publisher: Random House

Date: 1999

ISBN: 0-440-41328-1

Length: 243 pages

Quote: “Especially don’t you ever let anyone call you Buddy…Buddy is a dog’s name or a name that someone’s going to use on you if they’re being false-friendly. Your name is Bud, period.”

Sound advice, North or South: Unless “Buddy” or “Son” or “Honey” or “Baby” or “Sweetie” really is a private pet name you use, with conscious irony, in private moments alone with one very special person, and you’d want to think twice about it even then—when you hear those words plopping out of something that is looking at you, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your weapon. People of good will do not call people names like that.

People of ill will do, however, use the claim that they do as a test. If you fall for it, you’re stupid and deserve whatever else you get from them, which is guaranteed not to be good.

Curtis’ character, Bud, never knew his father, and didn’t know his streetwise-too-late mother for very long. It’s 1936; there’ve been deaths in every extended family and in most immediate families. Bud is one of a multitude of orphan children but he holds on to what’s left of his mother—her words, and five advertising flyers for a band called the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. (This was, Curtis explains in an afterword, the name of a real band, with which his own grandfather played.) Bud’s mother didn’t keep a lot of souvenirs of anything so Bud has a feeling that the leader of this band might be his father.

As most of the millennial generation probably know, given the huge success of this book, Bud will never find his father. But he will find a band of extraordinarily nice people who accept him as a member of the band and…oh, read the book. This is, after all, a Depression Story. Christopher Paul Curtis was not alive in the 1930s but his parents were, and he wrote the kind of Depression Story that people who remembered the 1930s told. The stock market’s crash did not directly affect most Americans but its economic ramifications dragged on long enough that they did. Infectious diseases like polio and tuberculosis became epidemics; rich people died too, but more poor people died. A lot of people remember long, hard times—as when my father came down with polio, didn’t die and forced his arms and legs to get back to work, but he basically stopped growing for much of the 1930s. But what kind of story was that? The stories people told about the Depression were about the good times, the heartwarming things that made the financial worries, bereavements, even actual hunger in some cases, seem like backgrounds that only made the good stories sound better. To hear them talk, in the 1930s everybody was poor (not true) but everybody except a few ridiculous jerks was very, very nice (probably not true either, but be fair—did your elders actually say that or was that just the way all Depression Stories ran together in your mind and sounded to you?).

The music they listened to was similar to the stories they told. Some songs from the 1930s express grief and sorrow. More of them express cheerfulness, even manic, pumped-up, forced cheerfulness. If the happy days were not yet “here again,” they soon would be. There would be metaphoric bluebirds of happiness over the White Cliffs of Dover, though any birds literally flying there were more likely to be any of dozens of other species than Sialia sialis. So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile! (This was when the United States became the world’s toothiest nation. Tooth-baring does not, in fact, prove that anyone is still alive, but people talked as if it did.) At this period the efforts being made to help people who became “depressed” or alcoholic were pretty horrible, so, if you wanted to survive, you tried to seem cheerful. One thing people did for extra money was compete in ballroom dancing endurance contests. Since a lot of people were competing for these prizes, some couples kept grimly shuffling around the ballroom, taking turns sleeping on each other’s shoulders, for several days. See! They were DANCING! FUN FUN FUN!!!

So the good stories that people wanted to tell, and hear, were the ones that were actually unusual, with the surprise happy endings. My grandmother was pronounced dead, obituaries were printed, burial arranged. (That was commonplace.) Then she came out of her coma long enough to wink at a young doctor, scaring him badly enough that he wanted to try insulin shock to make sure she was well and truly dead before she was buried. So he was granted permission to inject an insulin overdose and, instead of dying, Grandmother sat up, got well, and lived for another thirty-nine years. (That was interesting, a real Depression Story.)

The President had had polio, just like some young relative you weren't allowed to visit, but everyone saw him, in the newsreels, walking and talking as if he’d never been ill in his life. And bad men roamed around robbing banks and shooting people, but good men came out to kill them or put them in prison. And extremely bad men were doing horrible things to your relatives back in the Old Country, but there was a plan for taking care of them, too, if everyone cooperated and planted Victory Gardens and stayed within their rations. So, smile the while you kissed the soldiers in your family sad adieu, and direct your feet to the sunny side of the street—and strike up that band! “Big” bands, often actually small groups that made “big” noises with wind instruments that could never be completely on key, were the fashion. Saxophones blared out polkas and marches and thoroughly cheerful songs about “the blues.” Funerals called for really jubilant songs about “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Bud is still an orphan but he has grandparents. And friends. And a choice of future careers, which may include playing a saxophone in a band. That’s only a fictional imitation of a Depression Story, but it meets the criteria for a real one. Maybe in some family, somewhere, it was true.