teaching journal

Whale Talk

I'm getting angrier and angrier about the banning of Whale Talk in Limestone County. While I was researching banned book stuff yesterday, I read an article online in the Decatur Daily called Forbidden reading - Limestone County, like nation, seeing trend of book challenges. In March, 2005, Limestone County Board of Education banned the book from its libraries after a challenge was filed in November, 2004 by Christi Brooks, a parent at Ardmore High School.

I also printed out Chris Crutcher's letter To the Citizens of Limestone School District, and to the Board of Education, in which he talks about his books and others as a means to help kids sitting in the classroom. He says, "I worked full time as a therapist in the world of child abuse and neglect for fifteen years, and continue to do pro-bono work even today. I hear stories like these [like Heidi's story in Whale Talk] and stories far worse on a regular basis. I am struck by the fact that the kids I hear them from, populate our classroom. They do not tell their stories because many of them feel shame because they are treated that way, and they hold the secret; the only real power thay have over their situations." His books (and books by many other young adult writers like Judy Blume and Walter Dean Myers and Sharon Draper) are about reaching out to readers who often have little or not support in their own lives.

I'm not sure I'm making much sense, but I'm upset about the banning of Whale Talk, because I got it out of the library yesterday afternoon and read it. I already knew which passage supposedly caused the banning, so it was weird to read the novel up to pp. 68-69 and then read this one scene taken out of context. The scene in context is a powerful statement of how racism kills. I mean, there's this little girl - 4 1/2 yrs. old - whose mom is white and whose dad, a paralyzed football player who left Alicia and their daughter Felicia, is African American. The widowed mom then marries a racist character, and they have twin boys. The stepdad, Rich, changes Felicia's name to Heidi, because "it was the 'whitest' name Rich could think of."

Felicia/Heidi is in a therapy session with Georgia when the main character of Whale Talk, T.J. Jones, arrives at Georgia's home. T.J. is multiracial (Japanese-, African- and European- American) and adopted. He also went to Georgia for therapy when he was much younger. As T.J. enters Georgia's home, she asks him to into the therapy session and Felicia/Heidi decides that T.J. must play the bad dad role. Felicia/Heidi, the 4 1/2 year old, is the one who yells the racist obscenities that got the book banned -- but she's repeating the abuse her racist stepdad heaped on her.

Now, no question Whale Talk is about race. But the novel is complex: it's about outsiders, left-out kids, arrogance of pampered jocks, long-term atonement for accidental sins. Lots of meaty stuff going on in the novel. Whale Talk gets banned because of racism...but what does that mean? Racist language is used to depict how racist beliefs maim others. The novel is fiercely anti-racist. So why does it get banned? I wonder if most of the novels banned on the basis of race actually are anti-racist books and the folks who challenged them actually were against the anti-racist stance and hid behind the offensive language as a way to get the books off the shelves. I mean, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou all have books on the banned books list.

I've written enough. The Decatur Daily article said that when Limestone County banned Whale Talk, Crutcher donated five copies of his novel to the Athens-Limestone Public Library. So Limestone County schools might not have this excellent novel on its shelves, but readers can still find the book in the public library.

posted by Sandra @ 3:11 PM