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Jesse Jackson began work on his first novel, Call Me Charley (1945), when Harper and Row editor Ursula Nordstrom said to him, “What I’m looking for is the story of a black boy growing up. Can you do it?” (Lanier 336). Invited to enter a publishing world dominated by white editors and writers, Jacksonjoined the ranks of the first African American authors to write about black childhood for both black and white audiences,1 and is rightly mentioned in histories of African American children’s literature as a breakthrough writer. Barbara Lowe, for instance, concludes her entry in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature with, “Jackson’s novels and biographies paved the way for more explicit writing about race relations in children’s and young adult literature and gave African American writers an audience that had, in large measure, previously been denied them.” Rudine Sims Bishop specifically refers to Call Me Charley as a “pioneering book” in what she terms “social conscience” literature (Shadow 17), and notes that with this text, Jackson “introduced the African American children’s novel of racial conflict” (Free 60).
Despite his foundational status, however, few critics have investigated Jesse Jackson’s work at length. Those who have argue that his early novels, especially Call Me Charley, emphasize interracial friendship as the means to overcoming racism (Lowe; Schmidt 78).2 Certainly friendship is the apparent focus of the text: Tom, a white boy who lives in an affluent suburb, befriends Charley, a black boy whose parents keep house for and chauffer the suburb’s resident doctor. Their relationship places the text firmly within the tradition of “race-liberal writing” as it manifested in 1940s children’s texts depicting African American children (Capshaw 6).Jodi Melamed argues that racial liberalism “promoted the idea of a racially inclusive US national culture as the key to achieving America’s manifest destiny and proof of American exceptionalism and universality” after World War II (58). Casting “racism as a problem of white attitude or prejudice” (61), the “official, state-recognized anti-racism” (x) of the early Cold War found a conduit in literature that could “enabl[e] changes in white attitudes that were presumed to have a leveling effect on racial disparity” (54). Melamed exposes how the race novel’s focus on sympathy and...