“Who’s Got Game: Poppy or the Snake:” Toni and Slade Morrison’s Retelling of Aesop

Heinrich Steinhowel’s illustration of The Man and the Snake first published in 1479.

The terse Aesopian fable “The Man and the Snake” (Perry 176) warns that it’s a risky business to assume the best of someone unlikely to return a favor.  Sir Roger L’Estrange’s retelling from the 1690s is written as if the end were a foregone conclusion:

A countryman happen’d in a hard winter to spy a snake under a hedge, that was half frozen to death. The man was good natur’d and took it up, and kept it in his bosom till the warmth brought it to life again; and so soon as e’er it was in condition to do mischief, it bit the very man that sav’d the life on’t. Ah thou ungrateful wretch! says he, is that venomous ill nature of  thine to be satisfi’d with nothing less that the ruine of thy preserver. 

More violent and dramatic is Samuel Croxall’s version from 1722, in which the man brings the snake home to warm up by the fire. As soon as it had thawed out,

It began to erect itself, and fly at his wife and children, filling the whole cottage with dreadful hissings. The Countryman hearing an outcry, and perceiving what the matter was, catched up a mattock, and soon dispatched the ingrate, upbraiding him at the same time in these words: Is this, vile wretch, the reward you make to him that saved your life? Die, as you deserve; but a single death is too good for you.

 The 2004 retelling by Toni Morrison and her son Slade is significantly different from those of their two most famous predecessors in English.  With Black characters living in a Louisiana bayou, the 32-page picture book give them more opportunities to spin out the story in more words and more of Pascal Lemaitre’s pictures.  One major change is that the fable is presented within a frame story about a grandfather and his grandson Nate, which opens with a serious conversation between them after dinner one evening. The boy confesses that he isn’t paying attention in school because there are so many other things he’d rather be doing.  Couldn’t he stay on with Poppy after school starts?  Poppy does some thinking, then takes out a pair of boots, and puts them on. He explains to Nate that these are his remembering boots and “right now they’re helping me remember that paying attention is just a way of taking yourself seriously.”  Nate is confused, so Poppy explains his meaning by telling  a story.–the fable of the man and the snake, in which the relationship between the two characters is developed more fully than is usually the case. Poppy accidentally runs over a snake when he parks his truck to go fishing, but doesn’t discover the creature until he comes back to the truck. Still sassy although badly hurt, it demands that Poppy free it, because he was responsible for nearly killing it.  Seeing that it’s a poisonous snake, Poppy’s guard is up, but convinces himself that the reptile wouldn’t swear to “never even think of biting” if  it weren’t decent deep down.  Once released, the snake insists that Poppy take him home for something to eat.  Within a day, the snake has a safe place to stay until it can be nursed back to health, another condition to which the good-hearted Poppy agrees. Things work out for a while, but the snake gets impatient with Poppy’s quiet ways.  One evening while they’re playing cards, the snake suggests rather nastily that the place needs a radio. When Poppy tells it he likes his own company, the tone of the snake’s response makes Poppy so uneasy that he makes a quick trip into town for something. Before turning in, he notices that the snake is sleeping closer to his bed than usual.   Near dawn, he is awakened by a sharp pain in his arm: the snake has bitten him but doesn’t feel at all guilty for having broken his promise. “Hey, man, I’m a snake. You knew that.”

But Poppy lives to tell the story because he took the precaution of getting snake serum that evening.   By having paying attention to the snake’s actual words when it was trapped under the truck’s tire–that it wouldn’t “think” of biting him, he saved himself from the consequences of a well intentioned but foolish act of kindness. Poppy doesn’t describe how the snake was dispatched, instead showing Nate the remembering boots made from its skin. After Poppy finishes the story, the two go off and celebrate by making music with a man who just might be Robert Johnson. The Morrisons end it there, trusting to Nate and their readers to understand the implied morals. It’s interesting to compare the Morrisons’ retelling to one by a Black man from the Black community in Kansas City, Missouri posted on the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The teller, unlike the Morrisons, outlined several powerful cautions illustrated in the fable: “You should not offer your help, your aid, to someone or something that you know to be dangerous….not to trust the promises of a desperate man, and to be wary of those who might stab you in the back.” The informant recalled that his mother told it frequently to him when he was growing up and one wonders if sometimes the snake was white...

Documenting the LGBTQIA+ Community’s Concerns in Children’s Books

Historian Susan Stryker has defined transgender people as those who “move away from the gender they were assigned at birth,”  a phenomenon that can be documented in many societies and cultures long before medical technology allowed these individuals to bring their bodies into alignment with their identities. Writing transgender history from the perspective of the marginalized is a challenge when the chief sources until recently tended to be produced by medical professionals, psychologists, law enforcement officers, etc. belonging to institutions with an interest in controlling them as outsiders. Autobiographers had to brave enough to risk inviting readers, whose intentions and sympathies could not be known, into their confidence.

With many prospective buyers of children’s books wanting ones that promote diversity by showing child characters that look and live in accordance with their identities, there has been an explosion of books for families with transgender members, many of them by people with lived experiences or by sympathetic activists. Reviews and recommendations are relatively easy to access because so many lists of resources are available on the webpages of medical schools and psychiatric associations, specialized independent bookstores and blogs.  to mention just a few.

Cotsen is assembling a cross-section of illustrated books about transgender childhoods and history for young readers which researchers can consult now, but even more importantly, in the future.  With increased pressure on public and school libraries to discard or severely restrict access to controversial books for children, the responsibility to preserve these materials as historical sources falls on collections whose primary constituents are not young people and their families, the teachers, and librarians who engage with them.

I Am Not a Girl by Maddox Lyons and Jessica Verdi with illustrations by Dana Simpson is a project published in 2020 by Roaring Brook Press, one of the most prestigious imprints in the Macmillan Children’s Book Department. “Based on a true transgender identity journey” of co-author Maddox Lyons, who wrote this after he came out to his parents because they could not find books “for and about kids like him.” Simpson the illustrator considers this assignment “an honor and a privilege” for a transgender woman like herself who hopes the book will foster mutual understanding between parents and their transgender kids who “should get to be who they are.”   The best incidents in the main character Hannah’s story are surely based on Maddox’s experiences—the pirate queen denying she’s a girl on Halloween, rehearsing his coming out speech to his parents in front of an audience of stuffed animals, admiring the boy’s haircut he’s always wanted for wear for class picture day.   A list of transgender individuals, male, female, and non-binary, from  Renee Richards “eye surgeon, veteran, athlete, and tennis coach who won a landmark case for transgender rights” to Jonathan Van Ness “nonbinary hair stylist, podcaster, and television personality” are included for inspiration.

If LGBTQIA+ parents want to be able to introduce their pre-school-age children to inspirational role models in transgender history, Little Bee Books , an independent publisher of progressive and inclusive children’s books in New York City, has started an uplifting series board books called “People of Pride”  featuring biographies of  television star Ellen De Generes, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in California, and drag queen, activist, and media personality, Ru Paul Charles.  Victor Chen is credited for the illustrations, but no one lays claim to the pedestrian text about a “trailblazer” (defined in the glossary as “a person who makes it easier for others to succeed”) surely called for a lot more sparkle.  Even if the text had more juice, it probably could not have helped a toddler grasp anything about the contributions AIDS activists and drag queens have made to society.Sarah Savage, author of She’s My Dad: A Story for Children Who Have a Transgender Parent or Relative (2020) illustrated by Joules Garcia is good example of the positive children’s books about difference that British publisher Jessica Kingsley  is known for.  The picture book shows without judgment a child’s joyful acceptance of her father’s transition to a changed body, new identity, and happier life. Reviewer Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir, writer and co-director of My Genderation, praised She’s My Dad as “a sweet, gentle book that doesn’t make being transgender a big deal at all. It’s presented as a part of everyday life and will allow kids to connect to the characters and at the same time learn about different types of families.”

This book seems to present an ideal scenario of unconditional love fulfilled, which the community hopes will someday be the norm. While the account covers the issue of pronouns cogently, it glides over other equally important difficulties inherent in the characters’ situations.  The father is presumed to be a single parent, supported by his parents and brother, his Black wife, and mixed-race daughter.  Mini’s mother is never mentioned and her daughter expresses no sadness at her absence from the family group, the perfect daddy’s girl. The process of transitioning from “he” to “she” covers the surgery and recuperation at home, which disrupts any family’s routine in tiring and unexpected ways, in a page about to a hospital visit, where Mini gives her dad a card and favorite stufftie for comfort.  The chief markers of transitioning are  changes in clothes and hair styles: Mini in her overalls and rainbow tee and her dad in a long layered bob and summery white dress bond over doing their nails together. How honest is six-year-old Mini’s perfect acceptance of her father’s decision, over which she has no power, yet impacts her enormously?  Does Mini as an exemplar set up impossibly high standards for other children, who may be intimidated by Mini, when they compare their divergent thoughts and confused emotions to hers?

If one takes the long view of these books, they are as old as time, no matter how controversial the contents. Their purpose is to train children how they should go, so imagination and art are powerful tools to make the presentation of the values the community wants internalized compelling.