Early in the twentieth century, a little Jewish boy surveyed his neighborhood in Brooklyn. Already, he had an interest in cultures not his own. Peeking into one church with stained glass windows, he reported seeing a lady with a shawl over her head holding a baby, tenderly and sadly. He heard sweet sadness in the music coming from a neighboring storefront church as “Go Down, Moses” and “We’re in the Same Boat, Brother” drifted out into the street. He gazed at the colorful tree lights and tasted the treats when his upstairs neighbor shared Christmas treats with his family. He thought the array of his neighborhood was something to enjoy.
“Celebrate Variety,” in Highlights for Children (February 2005), became the title of my first writing about the man this boy became as Ezra Jack Keats. I had originally written it as “Stamp Out Sameness” with an underlying theme of diversity in children’s literature. An astute editor suggested that I keep the theme but turn the negative into a positive. My positive rewrite fit much better with Ezra’s own attitude of celebrating the range of options we get when we acknowledge the richness that diversity brings into our lives.
Writer Anna Quindlen, in an introduction to Little Women, says, “. . . novelists took their own world as a starting point.” As I have delved deeper into Keats’s life and work to write Becoming Jack Keats, I have seen that little boy taking his world as a starting point with a view of his neighborhood in the paintings and stories in his picture books. He pays tribute to the diversity of the children, the city landscapes including the graffiti, and frequent views of the wash on the clotheslines between the city tenements. One of my favorite discoveries came from a Christmas present – his picture book of the classic The Little Drummer Boy. I turned a page and saw a lady with a shawl over her head holding a baby, tenderly and sadly.
