Old Book Review: Call Me Charley

Book Review: Call Me Charley

Author: Jesse Jackson

Date: 1945

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Doris Spiegel

Quote: “You’ve got to see my workshop and maybe you will get to see the hideout if we initiate you into the club.”

Once upon a time, when the United States was not so badly overcrowded, there were whole neighborhoods in which children had never seen a person whose ancestors came from a different part of the world, and so there was a need for storybooks about the first and only child from various minority groups in a school. As a rule these storybooks were nicer than some of the actual memories of people who were the only one of their ethnic group in their schools, and nastier than others. There was always an obnoxious child, or a few obnoxious children, who didn’t want to be friendly to someone they saw as different (in real life this was not always the case) and there was always a nice child who did want to be friendly, and by the end of the story they were all playing together.

In real life, there were and still neighborhoods where the new kid at school has to fight his way up to his position in the hierarchy of physical or social bullying. The first member of a minority group would have faced the same overt challenges that a new member of the majority group faced. The key was to be tough enough, if not to win all the fights, at least not to show fear. Children's book publishers at this period very seldom wanted to discuss that kind of schools or neighborhoods. Denial ruled. At schools worth reading about that kind of social life didn't happen.

So children’s books in this genre stuck to the relatively non-controversial issue of playing with other children at recess. Adults did not think children needed to bother their little heads about more controversial issues like job and housing discrimination, religious practice, interfaith or interethnic marriage, the fact that some members of minorities were not always conceded their civil rights, or the fact that sometimes it was the newcomer or minority person who didn’t want to be friendly. Children were supposed to be so innocent that all they needed was an occasional nudge about the benefits of always acting friendly.

Call Me Charley is that sort of book. Charley is the only African-American in his neighborhood. And his story was likely to be the only book in the middle school library—if the school was prosperous enough to have a library, which wasn’t necessarily the case, either, in 1945—about a little boy who really was “a Negro.” In the first scene in the book Charley has to remind his new school friends that his name is not Sambo, which was the name of the protagonist in a sillier story, for younger children, about a little boy in India.

Times have changed more than that. In Charley’s first conversation with his new pals Tom and George, the story they tell him is about how the little boy whom Charley will of course replace in the club got his leg cut off by slipping on the railroad tracks, trying to dodge an oncoming train, when all the boys were picking up coal around the tracks. None of these children is considered poor and desperate. They live in nice houses, with cooks who can afford to let them “steal” an occasional cookie between meals, and scraps of building materials to use in their hideout. Picking up bits of coal that fall off railroad cars was just something “smart, thrifty” adults encouraged kids to do in those days. Call it an early form of recycling.

By the time I was old enough to read books like Call Me Charley, or like Melindy’s Medal or Mary Jane, African-American adults were saying that the need for these books had passed. Libraries could afford to discard surviving copies and give us books by Langston Hughes or Lucille Clifton, unless these older storybooks were loved--and sometimes they were. Another very trendy genre of storybooks by Euro-American authors didn’t mention anybody’s ethnicity in an old-fashioned way, but were illustrated with pictures of ethnically integrated groups of children. Our generation weren’t supposed to be oldfashioned enough to think about where our friends’ parents came from. Some of us perversely and rebelliously persisted in thinking our ethnic roots were interesting.

Our local libraries preserved old books for their historical value for a good long time, so I was allowed to grow up with books about children who would, if real, have been as old as my parents; Charley would be about the age of my mother. On the whole I think those books were valuable, and should be kept available for the rising generation. Call Me Charley was not a favorite of mine, because it’s about boys. Nor was it a favorite of my brother’s, because it’s about city boys; none of the main characters is a horse, or a dog, or even a devoted dog owner. It’s a nice, cheerful story about boys who overlook their differences and play as a group. It’s still worth reading, once, especially by children who have grandparents who might appreciate an opportunity to tell the children about what they were doing in 1945.

Personally, I'd like to see libraries discard only a few really bad books that they shouldn't have acquired in the first place, and keep books that were terribly timely when printed and are historical curiosities now. A library should be a place where people who like historical curiosities can find them. How do we make history interesting for children? If the children like stories, as I did, what works is to let them read stories of other times and places, and let them be attracted to the facts of history by curiosity about how and why things were so different. Children need to know that although most houses had been connected to the electrical grid by 1945, the mad scramble to replace oldfashioned things that still worked hadn't started; many people used electric lights but still cooked with gas and heated their homes with coal. A book from the 1940s, like Call Me Charley or The Melendy Family or Meet the Malones, painlessly installs that fact in their minds and may encourage them to fill in more facts about the period.

Yes, some may fret, but what about the outdated language? Call Me Charley was written by a Black author (the Jesse Jackson who's famous today may have been named after him) and presents Charley's Blackness in the way Black Americans who were born in 1908 preferred to talk about it. I wouldn't worry unless the children in question are fighting a real race war. In a normal modern integrated school, one can hope the giggling about outdated word choices will be mutual, and one can squelch any attempts to revive it with "Are you trying to talk like someone in 1945? Why don't you look up some more about that time? What about 'ration tickets'? What kind of song would you expect to hear played by a 'big band'? Where were people still using animals for transportation, and where were the streets full of cars, and what kind of cars?" When my parents used to do things like that, they really made the historical study projects interesting. They found a 1940s radio comedy rerun broadcast on radio; today you might find recordings on the Internet. You can find recipes, schoolbooks, even newspapers and magazines from the 1940s if you look hard enough, and while children's clothes that old are hard to find, hand-sewn clothes were cool in the 1940s and you might find patterns.