Don't Split the Pole: Tales of Down-Home Folk Wisdom by Eleanora E. Tate
An Authors Guild Back-in-Print
Edition ©May 2014
Eleanora E. Tate
Eleanora E. Tate, author of eleven
children’s and young adult books, has been an author in schools, libraries, on
university campuses and at conferences around the country (and in Canada and
Bermuda) for over 40 years. She’s on the
faculty of Hamline University’s Masters
degree seeking low-residency program “Creative Writing for Children and Young
Adults” in St. Paul, MN. She previously taught children’s literature at North
Carolina Central University, Durham, NC and has been an instructor with the
Institute of Children’s Literature at West Redding, CT.
Her book Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance (Little, Brown Books for
Young Readers, 2007), is a recipient of the 2007 AAUW North Carolina Book Award for Juvenile
Literature, and an IRA Teacher’s Choice
winner. In addition to Don’t Split the Pole, her other books
are The Secret of Gumbo Grove; Thank You, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.!;
Front Porch Stories at the One-Room
School; Just an Overnight Guest (made into an award-winning television
film); African American Musicians;
To Be Free; A Blessing in Disguise; The Minstrel’s Melody; and
Retold African Myths. Two books are
audio books. Another was both a Notable
Children’s Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies and a Bankstreet Child
Study Book Committee “Children’s Book of the Year.”
She was a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellow; a National Association of Black Storytellers (NABS) Zora
Neale Hurston Award recipient, and a former NABS national president. Her
short stories have appeared in American
Girl Magazine, Scholastic Storyworks
Magazine, Gold Finch Magazine, African American Review, and in numerous
short story book collections. Her latest essay “Harking Back to Hargett Street”
is in the 2013 anthology Twenty-Seven
Views of Raleigh.
1. Your writing career spans decades. At what point did writing and promoting
writing in others go from being a hobby to a career? Were you ever worried about taking on writing
as a career?
My writing birth arrived in third grade
when I wrote my first story. By sixth
grade I envisioned myself as a published writer, striding along the streets of
Paris, France, Isadora Duncan style scarf
wrapped around my neck and also trailing behind me, flaunting a big Afro and in a swirling gown (
or mini skirt and boots!), notebook and
No. 2 pencil in hand. It was either that or being a revolutionary in a bandana
wrapped around my head, in boots, denim jacket and jeans, bandoleer strapped
across my bosoms, telescopic rifle in my hands, face frowned up with determination.
Maybe I am both in my writing.
In on-the-ground life I became news editor
of The Iowa Bystander Newspaper, a
Des Moines Black weekly. A few years later I joined The Des Moines Register and Tribune Newspapers, writing articles for
news side, poems for its Picture Page (that award-winning full back page of pictures and text), and fiction
for its Picture Magazine. I never considered
my writing to be a hobby. It was and continues to be my life quest. I did think
I’d make lots more money, though.
2.
Your stories in Don’t Split the Pole: Tales
of Down-Home Folk Wisdom are based on proverbs and sayings. Why?
I was born by the Mississippi River in northeastern Missouri where Missouri, Illinois and Iowa meet. Everybody I
knew as a child used proverbs, sayings, similes and hyperbolic anecdotes in
their every day conversations in the language common to our area. This regional
vernacular was so rich that I tried to
emulate it in my Missouri based books Just
an Overnight Guest (1980, 1997),
Front Porch Stories at the One-Room School (1992, 2007), and The Minstrel’s Melody (2001, 2009).
After I moved to South Carolina
in 1978 I was introduced to and fell in love with that state’s unique, vivid language,
history, and traditions. The result was
my South Carolina books The Secret of
Gumbo Grove (1987), Thank You, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.! (1990), and A
Blessing in Disguise (1995, 1999).
In
Don’t Split the Pole I wrap a
story around a saying I’d heard that had
an impact on me. Although the sayings are as old as dirt, I place them in the
contemporary time period to show readers that they have meaning in today’s
world.
Although my story “Slow and Steady Wins
the Race” differs from Aesop the Ethiope’s “Slow and Steady Wins the Race”
fable, my theme is the same, and still features turtles.
My other stories and sayings in the book are:
You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks; A Hard Head Makes a Soft Behind; Never
Leave Your Pocketbook on the Floor; Don’t Split the Pole; Big Things Come in
Small Packages; and What Goes Around Comes Around. All but one story are set in
North Carolina.
Sayings explain the reasons why things
are, or ought to be, and pass along wisdom not only to children but also to
adults. That’s probably partly why scholars call them “traditional literature” and lump them with
fables, folk tales, myths, and legends (and yes, fairytales, too, around which
there is still much discussion). In my original manuscript back in 1997 I included footnotes about the origins of the ones
I wrote about, but they were removed due to space limitations and politics.
Well, I plan to write a full
essay about those origins now!
3.
How were you introduced to folktales?
I loved to listen to my grandmother (who
raised me) tell stories about her own youthful, green salad days. She talked with such authenticity and her
language was so picturesque that her
adventures were as thrilling as many books I read, like The Wizard of Oz and Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. She also shared stories handed down from the
African and African American oral storytelling tradition, her versions of Grimms’
fairytales, neighborhood gossip, and unusual newspaper stories.
Once she told me about a Missouri woman
who was ten feet tall! I thought this was just another yarn until as an adult researcher I found out about a
very real woman named Ella Ewing, nicknamed “the Gentle Giantess.” She was born in 1872, grew to be eight feet, four
inches tall, and had hands ‘as big as frying pans’. Because of my grandmother’s
love for story I was compelled to have my fictional narrator Margie Carson tell
about Ella Ewing’s life in my book Front
Porch Stories at the One-Room School. Thank you, Momma!
I still collect stories. A fellow in
Tennessee in 1976 gave me his account of “Old John and the Bear” that I included in Just an Overnight Guest. Many years later I finally uncovered a
similar version.
My plat-eyed ghost tale in The Secret of Gumbo Grove was based on an
encounter a woman told me she’d had with one in South Carolina. I also read Ambrose
Gonzales’ book The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast (1922) and DuBose Heyward’s short story “The
Half-Pint Flask” to get a better feel
for Ole Plat-Eye. Years later the late Dr. James Haskins, a
master writer, researcher and good friend, included my plat-eye account in his
book The Headless Haunt and Other
African-American Ghost Stories (1994). His research revealed to my delight that a “plat-eye” legend existed
in the West Indies, probably having migrated earlier from west Africa centuries
ago!
My book Retold African Myths (1993) consists of age-old, often religious stories that existed primarily
in oral form for centuries on the African continent that I “retell” in my own
style and voice, based on the European published “variants” that my Perfection Learning Corporation editor and his
consultants (including famed writer Pat McKissack) selected. What I love in this
collection are the word lists and extended activities that lead students to
each of the eighteen selected kingdoms, cultures, and past and present histories.
I can’t stress enough that no single
culture or country can claim that the “first”
folk tale was exclusively its own. Wherever those ancient people gathered with
a common verbal or sign-making vocabulary, they told tales, and eventually
created popular shorter versions that grew into their lexicon.
Because of modern media technology, Walt
Disney, and writers eager to create something new and sellable from the old,
tracing folk tales, myths, legends, fables, fairytales, and, of course proverbs
and sayings back to their origins can be difficult. Still, I advise writers to
search for primary materials as best they can, and credit their sources.
4.
What are some of the most important lessons you learned that serve you in your
life?
You know what? While conducting a teacher
in-service years ago, I asked teachers that same question. We were discussing
proverbs and sayings, of course. But I’ll come back in a bit to what one teacher revealed.
For me the most important lesson still is A hard head makes a soft behind that my
grandmother often said to me. You should think about what you’re about to do
and be prepared to suffer the consequences if you make the wrong choice.
The “hard head” back story: When I was
four or five years old my grandmother and I walked to the local ice cream
parlor. I loved chocolate chip ice cream and lime sherbet, even in the winter. She
warned me not to climb upon the bar stool because in my snowsuit I’d lose my
balance and fall. Of course I tried anyway, and BAM! Landed on the floor HARD on my butt. In that special
grandmother who-still-loves-you-anyway
tone, she said, “See? A hard head makes a soft behind.” Of course she didn’t
say “behind.”
Worse, no ice cream for me! Since that
time I’ve learned to think and look first before placing my behind anywhere.
Anyway, back to those teachers in my
in-service. After some thought, one teacher responded, “Never make a major decision in the dark. I know. I have five kids
now.”
5. Although the children’s book landscape has
changed over the years, there is still a lack of diversity within their pages.
Beyond simply inserting more diverse characters for the sake of diversity, what
do you think is needed to create a more diverse landscape within children’s
literature?
Creating “a more diverse landscape” can’t
happen if the effort is directed only to children’s literature. It’s just
symptomatic of the “diversity” problems in the larger world. Children’s
literature has been around for less than a thousand years, but racism and
sexism and the other negative “isms” have been present in their many insidious
forms in the world since Day One, and evolve to fit racist and sexist et al. purposes.
For the moment, let’s assume that all is
right with the world otherwise, and that the only problem left is “lack of
diversity in children’s books.”
If
this was the case, the best way to
have more children’s books with more characters reflective of the human race
(i.e. diverse) is to have more writers and editors who reflect that humanity to
do the writing and editing.
But the problem is much deeper than that.
The problem goes to the core of human relationships. Some writers
question why they need to include
characters different from those that
they want to write about in their manuscripts. After all, they’re
writing about “their” world. I’d hate to have an editor insist that I add
accessory characters to those I already have “just because.” I’m writing about
“my” world, too, but my characters represent
different ethnicities and ages and have purpose
in my books. I’ve had wonderful editors
who understood this, and I’ve had editors who haven’t. They were good people,
but they just couldn’t comprehend.
White writers and editors write and
edit the majority of every other
culture’s books for children, but they can’t know everything about everybody
all the time! Yet, being in charge,
having privilege, and not used to so much ingrained compromise, too often they produce
books that may be racially and/or culturally problematic,
certainly insensitive. Though readers
may see the weaknesses, these writers and editors might not. What they will
recognize is that they are in charge.
Even words evolve. In the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s the word used to describe people of color was “minority.” It was personally sad to me to
hear about a school being “85 per cent minority.” Excuse me? Wouldn’t that make the school a
“majority” of whoever most of the student population was?
In the 1980s and 1990s the “trendy” words were “multicultural” and “multiculturalism”. Now
it’s “diverse” and “diversity”.
Writer,
educator and scholar Dr. Violet Harris produced a succinct definition of “multicultural” that I agree with: “Multicultural can include
race, ethnicity, gender, class, and other elements that denote difference.” And
“culture,” she writes, could refer to “beliefs, attitudes, values, world-views,
institutions, artifacts, processes, interaction, and ways of behaving.”
Dr.
James Banks, another scholar and educator who I met some years ago and also admire,
is a leading advocate for “multi-ethnic” education and curriculum, which would
(and as it should) include children’s
books that offer clear voices and
characters.
I obviously don’t care for the words
“diversity,” “diverse” and “minority,” because people are quick to say what
these words should do but have yet
to offer precise definitions of what
they mean.
Though
they may not realize or acknowledge it, all writers send their characters
through their own social, cultural, emotional, racial lenses. There are also those
writers who write about cultures other than their own, yet don’t have enough knowledge about that culture
to do it well. Yet they’ll have fits when their published terribly written work
is justifiably criticized.
Add to that lens a society’s stereotypes about culture and
ethnicity, and you end up with turmoil in the world and in books. It’s an insidious circle.
In the meantime … read my books.
6. How do
you hope your books will impact the next generation of readers? Is there
something you wish your readers would learn or understand through you?
I offer a glimpse into African American
life in the United States through my
lens. Those lives, whether biographical or fictional, encompass a variety of lifestyles.
I stand by what I write. I see it, I envision it, I live it, I hear it told to
me by people who’d lived it, I research
it through narratives of those who’d gone before me, all of which is part of my
personal history. This is real to
me. I study history because I want to know what happened with my people before I came on the scene.
When I speak about “my people” and “my
ancestors” I mean folks who were kin to me as well as those who weren’t. People of African descent -- enslaved, free,
from the African continent before enslavement, now -- experienced triumphs and tribulations that were and continue to be very real and
important to me.
Did you know that there are younger
generations of “Black” writers and
illustrators who laugh at children living in “the ghetto” and ridicule them? Yet
they want these children to read their books and look up to them.
I am different in my thought and
philosophy from such people, who are just as negative as the writers and
illustrators who don’t want to include people of color, disability, gender and
the rest of humanity in their works.
7. Does
writing and getting published still hold the same excitement as it used to? How
do you celebrate when a new manuscript is complete, published, or back in
print?
Several of my other books have been reprinted. Seeing Don’t
Split the Pole: Tales of Down-Home Folk Wisdom reach re-publication in May
2014 gave me a quiet sense of
satisfaction. Now all of my books, I think, are back in print.
8. How
can readers discover more about you and your work? (blog, twitter, web page,
etc.)
My web site is: http://www.eleanoraetate.com
My latest essay, “Harking Back to Hargett
Street,” appears with twenty-six other writers in the anthology 27 Views of Raleigh (2013, Eno
Publishers).
Here
are some online interviews:
Interview with author
Tamera Will Wissinger:
Interview with Author Jennifer
Bertman:
A few of my favorite magazine and book essays:
Bond, Dr. Ernie, editor; “Author
Spotlight;” Literature and the Young
Adult Reader; Pearson Education,
Boston, 2011.
“Novels with Long Roots,” essay, Book Links Magazine, American Library
Association, January 2000.
Harris, Dr. Violet, editor; “From the
Oral to the Written,” essay, The New
Advocate Journal, spring 2003.
“From Book to Movie,” essay, North Carolina Literary Review, online
edition, spring 2012.
