The Lonesome Boy theme as emblem for Arna Bontemps's children's literature

African American Review, Spring, 1998 by Joseph A. Alvarez

A careful look at Bontemps's work shows the lonesome boy theme appearing over several years and in different forms. For example, Bontemps wrote a version of the story, "Lonesome Boy, Silver Trumpet," in the 1930s, but it was not published until his collection of short fiction The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties appeared a few weeks after his death in 1973. And on May 5, 1966, he delivered a speech at the New York Public Library which was published in December of that year as "The Lonesome Boy Theme" in The Horn Book magazine. There, he states that he has often used the theme, particularly to reflect on himself, since he began writing fiction:

With me the lonesome-boy theme has persisted. Consciously or unconsciously, it too reflects influences. I used to avoid the first[-]person[-]singular in my writing; for some reason or other it embarrassed me. But despite my efforts - despite careful stratagems - I am afraid I did not always avoid autobiography. Born in Louisiana, carried by my parents to California at a very early age, I suspect that it is myself I see as I look back in each of the guises in which the lonesome boy has appeared since I introduced him in God Sends Sunday, my first book. (674)

Bontemps's use of the lonesome boy theme applies mainly to his children's literature, even though he clearly wrote God Sends Sunday for adult audiences.

While it would be facile to claim that all of his works - either for adults or children - reveal this autobiographical theme, his use of the theme suggests a reason behind the author's interest in writing for the young. A close examination of Bontemps's Lonesome Boy, therefore, can help explain his motivation to become one of the first authors of the twentieth century to write books for young African Americans. It can also explain some of his disillusionment with adult books and with the economics of the publishing world, which was still dominated by white publishers and white readers during the 1930s, even though the Harlem Renaissance would usher in permanent change.

Bontemps, at least temporarily, was shown to a bad seat during the 1930s. All three of his adult novels - God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936), and Drums at Dusk (1939) - appeared during the Great Depression; none sold well. And even though he proposed several other novels and wrote at least one full-length, unpublished novel between 1939 and 1973, when he died, he did not publish an adult novel after Drums at Dusk. Chariot in the Sky (1951), Bontemps's semi-fictional account of the famous Fisk University Jubilee Singers, straddles the line between adolescent and adult material, although it was published as a book for older adolescents. As we shall see, economics as well as politics and autobiographical impulses motivated Bontemps to write for juvenile readers.

For public consumption, Bontemps justified his turn to juvenile writing from poetry and adult fiction with the claim that his novels were falling on blind eyes. Consider, for example, his "Introduction to the 1968 edition of Black Thunder," made more timely because of the Civil Rights Movement and the riotous explosions of anger in many American cities, including Watts, where Bontemps had lived as a child. Referring to the 1930s, he writes, "I began to suspect it was fruitless for a Negro in the United States to address serious writing to my generation, and I began to consider the alternative of trying to reach young readers not yet hardened or grown insensitive to man's inhumanity to man, as it is called" (xxiv).

In a 1970 interview with Margaret Perry, Bontemps claimed that he started writing children's literature because, when he was coming of age, he couldn't find images of black people) in his junior and senior high school reading experiences. Bontemps repeated this theme when he answered a question about his turn to writing children's books in a 1972 interview with John O'Brien:

I was in no mood merely to write entertaining novels. The fact that Gone With the Wind was so popular at the time was a dramatic truth to me of what the country was willing to read. And I felt that black children had nothing with which they could identify. (13)

Carolyn Taylor provides another dimension to Bontemps's decision to write for children: "... he wanted young black people to be provided with carefully researched and documented facts about the richness of their historical past in Africa and America. He believed that only through knowledge of this complicated past could black youngsters direct and understand their identities and chart their own personal growth" (14). Kirkland Jones's biography of Bontemps, Renaissance Man from Louisiana, adds a slight variation before echoing Taylor: "He hoped to add a few stories that would help counteract the unpleasant traditions and associations of such stories as Little Black Sambo and Epaminandos. He was convinced that he had something better to offer America's children ..." (83).

Finally, Bontemps revealed, albeit indirectly, another variation on these themes of his motivation for writing literature for African American children in his 1969 essay "The Slave Narrative: An American Genre," printed as an introduction to his selected Great Slave Narratives. These comments reflect Bontemps's unusual scholastic history of being one of a very few African Americans educated in the predominantly white, religiously conservative, Seventh-Day Adventist San Fernando Academy. Paradoxically, the comments also reflect both a powerful and deeply felt sense of injustice and an equally heartfelt nostalgic longing coalescing around his plans in the 1960s to write his autobiography (titled A Man's Name), but left unfinished at his death: