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Margaret McMullan

How I Found the Strong

By Margaret McMullan
Houghton Mifflin Company
2004
ISBN 061835008X
$15

I agonized at length for days, and a few sleepless nighttime hours, over writing this review. My reason for worrying, as it turns out, was without foundation.

As the dust jacket flap announces, "How I Found the Strong" is a "novel for children." Through no particular design of my own, my life is almost devoid of contact with children, though I would recognize a child if I saw one. The gulf-side park in Pass Christian is often filled with gaggles of children running, sliding, swinging, and consumed with the energy of being young. I see them as I leave my home and drive by the park with my car windows rolled up. How can I judge this book that is intended for an audience that I barely understand?

What I learned from reading "How I Found the Strong" is that a book intended for adolescents does not have to be written in a simplistic, child-like style.

In intelligent adult fiction, there is often a multi-layered structure of meanings to the words and sentences as they interact to form a whole greater than the sum of the individual parts. My concern was that this interplay of words, metaphors, and subtle contextual underpinnings that can make a story so rich would be lost on the very young, and therefore an author writing for this audience would not attempt anything but a superficial, facile use of words. In other words, the sentences would be flat, the words mono-syllabic, and the storyline shallow. Where I was wrong was in confusing the limited breadth of an adolescent's vocabulary with his or her ability to register nuances, plumb into the well of metaphor, and grasp the deeper, broader intent beyond the sentence. Wisely, McMullan writes for an intelligent reader, whether he is twelve or seventy three years of age.

"How I Found the Strong" was inspired by a long lost manuscript, "The Life and Times of Frank Russell." Frank Russell was the great-uncle of McMullan's grandmother and had dictated his remembrances of life in Smith County, Mississippi during the 1850's and 1860's when he was a young boy. As McMullan recounts, "the part of Frank's story that interested me the most, however, was what he did not talk about." While the older male members of his family went off to fight The Civil War, Frank, too young to be a soldier, but old enough to want to be, was left at home with the women and the farm. "I could not stop thinking about what being left behind must have felt like for young Frank - during a war of such high stakes - and that is how I came to shape the character of Frank Russell in my story."

The story deals openly with the horrors and issues of The Civil War, though not in a sensationalist or graphic manner. Because the novel's central character is a boy of ten, we are brought into the story through his young eyes devoid of the baggage of the political rhetoric espoused loudly and vigorously by some of the white southern men of the time . Frank Russell, unencumbered by prejudice, and fueled by a healthy dose of innocent curiosity, sizes up events and people as they are. Early on in the story as the community gathers to send their fathers and sons off to war, Frank muses, "We are a foreign country now, and I am not sure how I like that." The young Frank is the first to pick up that these soldiers, and the South in general, have lost the security of membership in the United States, troubled and argumentative as it may have been. The South, through its own actions, has achieved outsider status. Frank, too, feels like a foreign country in his own home and community - his security, his father and brother, is marching away to an uncertain fate.

Buck, the family's one slave, does not run off during the war, even after Lincoln (as one character describes him, "Ugliest man I ever laid eyes on, with those big ears and dark, evil snake eyes") issues the Emancipation Proclamation. The Russell family has been decent to him, indeed, against the maxims of the time, have educated him and brought him in to a seat at the dinner table. "I figured I been around you all all my life," says Buck when asked if he was staying, and Buck "just leaves it at that." But Buck's reluctance to leave more than likely stems from what he sees as the futility of expending energy on any option other than where fate has placed him. Buck has seen what happens to other slaves that have attempted to leave or broken the unspoken protocol of white/black relations. In the saddest of ironies, when Frank's father returns from the war, discharged due to injuries and without the son, Frank's brother Henry, that he marched off to war with, Frank observes of his father, "His face is blank and tired. Pa has the same look now as Buck always used to." Defeat knows no skin color.

The Russell family are not virulent Confederates. The father and eldest son went off to war because that is what they were expected to do. The Russell family, and their moderate views on race and secession for the times, hold a position that was not far from the majority in Mississippi, but often overlooked in the heated and broad-brushed fiction and revisionist history that is often still commonplace. In 1851, the secessionist Jefferson Davis ran for governor of Mississippi and lost to his Unionist opponent Henry S. Foote. While the election was close, it does demonstrate that all Mississippians were not proponents of leaving the Union. And recall that women could not vote, if they could have, Davis' defeat would likely have been more pronounced. As the historian Carl Degler writes in his essay, "There Was Another South," "it is now clear that if a majority of southerners ever did support secession - and there is real doubt on this - it was never a big majority, and it was not achieved until the very eve of the Civil War." McMullan steps outside of conventional, and incorrect, wisdom about the motivations and emotions during The Civil War in the South, and presents the story of a lower middle class white family that was pulled into the war not through their own convictions about slavery, but rather through the forces set in motion by a relatively small group of wealthy planters, many of whom were able to buy themselves out of service in the war effort. By writing through the eyes of a ten year old, a child unprejudiced by the rhetoric of the time, a large portion of the Southern population that may have quietly doubted the war is given a voice.

Frank's young curiosity focuses briefly on religion, and at a young age he realizes the futility of it, "And what kind of experience does God have anyway? Seems like he starts a world, then changes his mind about everyone in it, or regrets the whole idea, the way he did with the flood and all those towns he set out to destroy. When was the last time he came down and said 'Here, let me give you a little hand with that'?" While young Frank was questioning God and his lack of involvement, many of his elders were sure of God's hand and guidance. Many Southerners believed that God was on their side, in fact inseparable from their noble and lost cause. Here again, Frank's clear-eyed youth causes him to raise sensitive questions that many of the adults around him, through their sealed and darkened masks of conformity and dogma, cannot begin to comprehend.

With the backdrop of war and the certain bleakness of the future, the book is not without gentle humor. Young Frank's attempts at "sparking" with neighbor Irene Beall are painfully amusing. Determined to pay a visit to Irene, Frank must first make himself a pair of shoes - the first he has attempted. He finds his father's tools and pattern, and sets about his task. A determined Frank overlooks an important point about the finished shoes: the pattern was sized for his father's feet. Frank goes a-sparking oblivious to his appearance, until finally, on the way home, Frank notices that his "feet are about half the size of the shoes, the tips hang limp and my shoes look like a joker's shoes I once seen on one of my Grandpa's playing cards, except I don't feel like a joker and I'm not laughing."

McMullan has a way with descriptive phrasing, and I doubt that this will be lost on the young. "The tall pines stretch monster arms all around us," "Soon there are enough tears shed to swim a steamboat," "It's as though the natural world has stopped altogether, waiting for the war to be over before starting up again," and other similarly colorful phrases add a richness to the story and a maturity beyond what many adult novels can muster.

McMullan's first two novels, "When Warhol Was Still Alive" and "In My Mother's House," were directed at adult readers. I asked McMullan how she changed her writing style and focus to reach the adolescent audience of "How I Found the Strong." "I wrote the best book that I could write," she responded , " When I told my agent that my protagonist was ten years old, and that the book was less than 200 pages, she said I had a young adult book. Then she told me what a young adult book was. I'm glad that I did not know too much about the "genre" before I wrote this." McMullan is in good company with other authors that also respected their young audience and subsequently produced works that adults also cherish - think of Mark Twain and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Charles Dickens and "A Christmas Carol," or Daniel Defoe and "The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." I doubt that Twain, Dickens, or Defoe lowered the intellectual level or oversimplified their writing one whiff either, all three, as McMullan did, "wrote the best book[s] [they] could write."

McMullan was wise to avoid experts on children's literature or to study the genre beforehand. E.B. White, arguably on the very short list of the best twentieth century American essayists, ran afoul of expert advice after penning "Stuart Little." After sending a draft of "Stuart Little" to Anne Carroll Moore, children's librarian emerita of the New York Public Library, she commented back that "the book was non-affirmative, inconclusive, unfit for children, and would harm its author if published." Moore stopped short of declaring that the book would cause rickets in young readers. White, in a letter to a friend, ruminated on the librarian's remarks, "I thought that matter over, however, and decided that as long as the book satisfied me, I wasn't going to let an expert talk me out of it. … I detected in Miss Moore's letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature - rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. … I had followed my instincts in writing about Stuart, and following one's instincts seemed to be the way a writer should operate." A competent and seasoned writer understands that all of his or her faculties should be called into use to produce the best story possible, regardless of the intended reading audience. Good writing naturally finds it's own readership.

Is "How I Found the Strong" a "novel for children?" - I do not know. It does not matter. "How I Found the Strong" is a writing accomplishment that young and old can enjoy together.

Scott Naugle
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