Category Archives: Obituaries

Floyd Cooper (1956-2021): Picture Book Historian of Black Americans

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Three-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for the most distinguished portrayal of African American experience in literature for children or teens, Floyd Cooper passed away July 16 2021 from cancer. He was sixty-five.

So many of the 110 books he illustrated brought out the heroic, intimate, and joyful dimensions in American Black lives past and present, beginning in 1988 with Eloise Greenfield’s Grandpa’s Face. Over the years Cooper collaborated with notable Black writers for children and young adults Eloise Greenfield, Joyce Carol Thomas, Walter Dean Myers, Nikki Grimes, Patricia McKissack, Jacqueline Woodson, Howard Bryant, and Carole Boston Weatherford.  The last book he illustrated, Weatherford’s Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, drew on his grandfather’s memories as a survivor of the tragedy.  Nikki Grimes told Publisher’s Weekly, that the book was “a good note to go out on. He left us all wanting more.”

Cooper was a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and one of his earliest memories was scratching shapes into the side of the house  at age three.  Art kept him grounded during a childhood unsettled by divorce: in each of the eleven elementary schools he attended, he connected with the art teachers and showed them his work.  His talent was recognized by the award of an art scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, where he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts.  After college, he headed out to Kansas City to start work in the greeting card design department of Hallmark. The unpromising job of erasing and changing old cards was the genesis of the “subtractive process” that gives his illustrations their distinctive look. In 2018 he described in illuminating detail his unique approach to picture making, a process of erasing shapes from a background of oil paint.

Cooper’s art radiates a warmth that is partly grounded in capturing the individuality of the figures on the pages.  He typically used models, often  drawing his sons, their friends, and family members.  In an interview with Brown Bookshelf, he explained that “I tend to focus on the humanity of my subjects, the details of expression that add a certain reality to the work. Real faces = real art. That’s the goal anyway.”   The uniqueness of the brown faces in every book linger in the mind.In Sprouting Wings: The True Story of James Herman Banning, the First African American Pilot to Fly Across the United States by Louisa Jaggar and Shari Becker (New York: Crown, 2021), the reader also feels the young pilot’s excitement  when he pulls the plane up off the ground for the first time.

The climax of Ben and the Emancipation Proclamation by Pat Sherman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) shows the moment in the slave prison when young Benjamin Holmes no longer has to conceal his ability to read. One night word gets around the prison that Abraham Lincoln has freed the slaves and the illiterate inmates pool their money to buy a newspaper to see if the rumor is true. They ask Ben to read it to them and he does so with all the gravity the occasion demands.

Hands as a symbol of the dignity of work recurs in Cooper’s art.  Charles R. Smith Jr. tells the story of enslaved men’s unappreciated contribution to the construction of the White House in Brick by Brick (New York: Amistad, 2013).  Cooper draws hands skillfully wielding tools, lifting heavy burdens, and perhaps most poignantly, mixing clay, sand, and water to make bricks.  The weary boy looks at some point in the distance as he works.

A grandfather’s still nimble fingers can teach his grandson to tie his shoes, pick out a tune on the piano, throw a baseball, and knead bread dough.  Yet those skilled hands were stigmatized as dirty and forbidden by his employer Wonder Bread to touch the dough because white customers wouldn’t eat the product if they knew who made it. These Hands by Margaret H. Mason (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,2010) celebrates the Black workers successful labor action against discriminatory labor practices at the Detroit Wonder Bread bakery in the 1960s.

The young Frederick Douglass’s face is a study in just anger against an agent of cruel and arbitrary injustice, an anger strong enough to sustain resistance, even if it means risking death.  This remarkable illustration appears in Walter Dean Myers’ Frederick Douglass: The Lion Who Wrote History (New York: Harper, 2017).

Rosa Parks, her hair pulled primly back, in Aaron Reynolds” Back of the Bus (New York: Philomel, 2010) doesn’t strike the reader as the kind of a woman who sets out to make trouble.  Yet her quiet face looks as if she has decided not to be frightened  an image of an ordinary person who has discovered power deep within to protest disrespectful treatment against her people. The focus of this illustration of Black Wall Street in Carole Boston Weatherford’s Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (Minneapolis: Carolrhoda, 2021) is the confident, stylish lady who stands out in the crowd of other prosperous-looking shoppers.  Is she a symbol of the resentment White Tulsans harbored against the prosperous Black community that boiled over in 1921?Cooper’s joy in celebrating Black beauty takes its most irresistible form in his portraits of children.  This illustration of a little girl exploding with laughter is just as beguiling as the more famous one on the cover of Joyce Carol Thomas’s poems in Blacker the Berry (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2008).   In this fiercely partisan age we are living through, the compassion that shines through Floyd Cooper’s picture books will be missed.

The Staying Power of Beverly Cleary (1916-2021)

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Early in her career Beverly Cleary said she wanted to write about “universal human emotions,” but the idea that there are emotions all readers can relate to, regardless of race, gender, and class, seems hopelessly optimistic, perhaps even dangerously dated now.  Her Klickitat novels from the 1950s and mid-1960s reflect another America, but have shifting values invalidated her attempt to find common ground through the depiction of ordinary anxieties children experience daily at home and school? Things like, will something interesting happen to me?   Or how am  I going to hide something embarrassing from my peers?   These two concerns play out humorously in Cleary’s stories time after time without lapsing into cruelty or condescension.

The pest Ramona Geraldine Quimby may be Cleary’s most famous character and, judging by some of the recent posts, the one many women like best.   I still find Ellen Tebbits easier to relate to than Ramona, decades after making their acquaintances.   Ramona courts attention because the littlest and youngest person won’t be noticed unless willing to make great big noisy fusses.  Which, of course, she is.  Ellen also wants attention, but is much more self-conscious when trying to get it   Imagine Ellen, with a grimy face, balanced on top of a jungle gym howling and holding a lunch box which conceals the bone she stole from Ribsy as punishment for taking her ice cream cone…   Ramona is not malicious, but it is perfectly in character that she pulls her classmate Susan’s curls repeatedly without feeling anything like the remorse Ellen does when she yanks Austine’s sash and tears it right out of the dress’s side seam.  Compared to Ramona, the early 1950s four-year-old icon for girl power, eight-year-old Ellen hangs back, being more sensitive to other people’s feelings and more concerned about what they might think of her.  She will surely outgrow some of her timidity and tentativeness, but she will probably never be in Ramona’s league for brass.  Who can say what either of them will be like when they are grown up?

Anyone who had a Ramona-like sibling shouldn’t have any trouble believing her antics like taking one bite out of every apple in the bushel–or pushing down envy for having the imagination plus the nerve to have done it themselves. The upsets Ellen faces are more ordinary and easier to find parallels to similar experiences, regardless of personality type and social class, at least to some extent.  While it surely helps to have set foot in a ballet studio, Cleary helps the reader imagine Ellen’s torment trying to dance, while keeping the winter underwear from unrolling past her waist.  Leap and clutch.  Leap and clutch.  Leap and clutch.  Finding something for show and tell puts pressure on children to think of something so interesting that they will shine, please the teacher, and engage their classmates. Ellen arrives at school in a dress stained with mud and beet juice carrying a huge vegetable for show and tell, but her moment of triumph dissipates as soon as she begins to worry that she’ll be sent home to change and lose the opportunity to talk about the beet.  Unspoken is her fear of facing her  mother in the ruined dress.  There is probably not a reader who can’t hear his or her mother scolding them for not taking care of their things.

Klickitat Street was not home to a vibrant, diverse neighborhood that is the ideal now.  But in the 1950s and 1960s, it could be regarded within limits as different, depending upon what part of the country readers were growing up.   The arid Southwest was nothing like Oregon in the Pacific Northwest.  A place so wet and rainy that would require someone to wear long woolen underwear was kind of exotic if you had seen a such a garment in stores or dresser drawers.  Due to the rising demand for single-family homes in metropolitan Los Angeles, kids were more likely to scrounge for interesting stuff on construction sites than overgrown vacant lots.  To a boy who was driven in the family car down the San Diego freeway, the struggles of Henry Huggins bringing the stray dog Ribsy home on a bus with a rain storm threatening may have sounded pretty adventurous.  Kids weren’t  allowed to go places by themselves on a city bus–if there were any lines they could have taken.

The “adventures” of the white middle-class characters on Klickitat Street might not compare with those of the Pevensey children, but Cleary demonstrated that they had interesting lives even if they didn’t travel to parallel magical worlds.   Beloved by readers, her work has not generated a body of literary criticism as extensive as those of many fantasy writers, even though she was the recipient of the 1975 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (renamed the Children’s Literature Legacy Award), the 1984 Newbery Medal, and the 2002 National Medal of Art.  Perhaps if Cleary had written about a different cross-section of the American population or questioned contemporary gender roles, her standing within the canon of children’s literature might be higher.  Ultimately what she produced, not what she might have or should have done, ought to be judged within the context of the society she wrote about.  Perhaps we should think of Cleary as an heir of  Maria Edgeworth, who tried to show through the series of stories about her alter-ego Rosamund, how a child’s mind, feelings, and values were formed through interactions with family and friends.  Surely it is no small thing to try show with sympathy and humor  the breakthroughs and setbacks in the socialization process of a particular time and place.