Walter Dean Myers on “The Geography of the Heart”

This past Saturday I had the good fortunate to attend the Arbuthnot Lecture given at the Alex Haley farm in Clinton, Tennessee. The well known and highly regarded author for young adults and children, Walter Dean Myers spoke on “The Geography of the Heart.”

As a member of the 2009 Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children, I was eagerly anticipating the lecture. The five-member committees—I say committees in the plural because there are several committees at work at the same time in different stages of their responsibilities—spend two years in the process of naming a lecturer and selecting a site for the lecture. Our committee, chaired by Amy Kellman, first met in Washington at the American Library Association Conference on June 23, 2007. We all brought suggestions for possible lecturers, but after discussion we came to a consensus well before our midwinter deadline. The next major decision was on June 28, 2008, at the Annual Conference in Anaheim; we reviewed the applications from institutions wanting to host the lecture. Although there were several outstanding possible sites, the match of Myers with the tenth anniversary celebration of the Langston Hughes Library at the Children’s Defense Fund’s Alex Hailey farm proved providential.

I set off for Tennessee with an exhilarating exhibition of Gulf Coast weather. The rain coming sideways at the terminal windows in Hobby Airport made the light outside turn green. As a result my afternoon flight wasn’t able to leave the ground until 9:30 in the evening. It’s a good thing I brought along a good book to read. I flew into Nashville and drove to Oak Ridge, which according to Tennessee folklore is the home of glow-in-the-dark frogs. I arrived at about 4:30 the next morning, napped, and went on to the lecture in Clinton.

April is a perfect time to be in Tennessee; the redbuds and dogwoods were all in bloom; the first signs of greenery were reappearing on the trees in the Smoky Mountains; the Canada geese were gliding along in the creek, and the sun was shining. I offer my condolences to those of you who spent the day in the dark and heavy rain back in Harris County. Signing in at the farm, I ran into a half-dozen of my former colleagues from the Nashville Public Library, and had a chance to visit with them and eat lunch with them before the program began. Then we all went in to the huge white tent in the sun and waited. Thankfully there was a cool breeze that blew through one side and across the hundreds in the audience.

At noon there was a panel discussion, “Trends and issues in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature” by members of the Langston Hughes Library Board. Since the library is a research institution focusing on books written or illustrated by African Americans or books about the African American experience, the panel was made up of African American academics, authors, publishers and librarians. Before getting down to the trends and issues, one member Effie Lee Morris, the retired Coordination of Children’s Services for the San Francisco Public Library reminisced about studying under May Hill Arbuthnot, “She looked prim, but she wasn’t. Her classes in children’s literature were lively. Her focus was on the children first and then the books.”

The trend the participants noticed was the “Street Literature” now flooding the market. Much of it was originally self-published. Wade Hudson, the publisher of Just Us Books, said that librarians needed to measure the new street lit against the works of Walter Dean Myers, Jacqueline Woodson, Sharon Draper, or Sharon G. Flake, authors that realistically portray the African American experience and, at the same time, know that out of this experience they have a message to pass on that is not measured by the number of books that they sell.

After the discussion we were welcomed to the lecture by Marian Wright Edelman, the President of the Children’s Defense Fund, Sheadrick Tillman, the Haley Farm Managing Director, and Pat Scales, ALSC President. Arbuthnot Chair Amy Kellman introduced Walter Dean Myers as a real mensch.

Myers noted that he’d been around for such a long time that he knew both Alex Haley and Langston Hughes. He said, “I love to write. What I do is write books for the troubled boy that I once was. My life is no different from any avid reader. As someone who is now at peace with himself, I can reflect on what worked and what didn’t in my life, and reading did.”

He recalled how his mother read to him from true romance magazines, and then after sitting in her lap and following the words he realized that he too could read them, she had him read them aloud to her. Reading gave him “an imagined universe that was both transitory and real.” He did not understand why some of the other boys in his Harlem neighborhood, didn’t “want to read no book.” Eventually he came to realize that they had different “geographies of the heart.” His were the assumptions of the larger culture that reading would get you ahead of life. His friends assumptions were that reading would not change their lives or their situation.. It would not lift them out of poverty or give them the self-esteem and recognition that they craved. It was a mental geography without hope.

He concluded, “Hope is not wishful thinking. It is the re-creation of our society. What my ancestors did, but in a new and better way. And while we can’t force or project our geography on others, we should give them stories to give them hope.”

Now, I am eagerly anticipating the publication of the lecture in the upcoming issue of Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children.

Postscript: It's printed in the Winter 2009 issue on pages 8-16, 26.