Hey, Sam, I'll Take Some Moonshine

Sam, Bangs and Moonshine by Evaline Ness

I had to explain to my son this weekend that different families have different values. It wasn't a lesson I was prepared to teach and I'm afraid I may have mangled it slightly by being unprepared.

I simply wasn't expecting to have this conversation sparked by a library book with a Caldecott Award seal on its cover. I know, I know, Caldecott awards the pictures in a book, not its content or story. Technically, I shouldn't demand great stories from Caldecott books-even if they usually are.

Sam, Bangs, and Moonshine won the Caldecott award in 1968-the year after it came out. I wasn't particularly impressed with the artwork, though I suppose I should have been. To me, they seemed to be pretty straightforward line drawings, painted in using dark splashes of color, heavy on the blacks and the reds.

Perhaps what makes the drawings notable is how well they correspond to the plot and story. When the story gets dark and scary, the pictures become more heavy and dark. There is an emotional feel to each of the pictures, an emotionalism that is echoed in the story.

It is that story which rather disturbed me and I almost stopped reading it midway through and continued only after my husband had taken it from my hand's and flipped forward to assure me that it was OK to continue reading-especially since my son didn't want me quitting midway through the book. (Yes, I know, I should have read the book to myself before beginning to read it aloud. Lesson learned.)

The story is about a little girl, a fisherman's daughter, whose mother has died. Her name is Samantha, but everyone calls her Sam. She spends a fair amount of time by herself. Like most children her age, she entertains herself with fanciful stories and believes that her cat, Bangs, talks to her. Oh, except the author (Evaline Ness) called them "lies" and her father called them "moonshine."

Now, personally, I see no harm in a young child whose mother has died dreaming that she has a mermaid mother. Or, given that she is often left alone all day long, in dreaming up companions such as a fierce lion or a baby kangaroo. These are all considered dangerous by the author, though, and she turns the book into a heavy-handed morality play with the introduction of Thomas, a little boy who believes everything that Sam says.

One day, Thomas goes off looking for Sam's mermaid mother and baby kangaroo. Unfortunately, a storm blows in and the tide will soon cover the rock where Sam said the mermaid and kangaroo were hanging out. She warns her father who goes out in his boat looking for them. He is able to bring Thomas home, but there is no sign of Sam's constant friend, the cat Bangs. When Sam chokes out the story, Sam's dad simply sends her to bed and tells her to think about the difference between real and moonshine.

The cat does show up-had it not, we would have stopped reading the book to our son-and Sam learns not to tell stories. Granted, as what could be considered a sop to parents such as myself, the father does tell Sam that there is good moonshine and bad moonshine, but no attempt is ever made to show what might be good moonshine.

It was after Sam was first sent to bed that I first put the book down to explain to my son that different families had different values and that our values were different from that of the author. I told my son that his father and I think imagination is a good thing (which is partly why we've been playing imagination/drama games once a week in all the classes at his school). We think it is healthy to be a creative thinker and to indulge in fantasies. We help him get to sleep each night by "starting a story" that he finishes in his head. Those stories get pretty wild and involve creatures that exist nowhere on the planet.

I was frankly furious that this author would label such things as lies. It is such teaching and thought that squeezes creativity and imagination out of people by the time they reach adulthood. Evaline Ness would deny a child any comfort and put them onto a straight and boring path where one rigidly marches according to the "proper" blueprint.

I'm especially surprised that this is the moral preached by someone who is herself a member of the creative class. She has written several books and was the illustrator for many of Lloyd Alexander's stories. So here is a woman who makes her living through moonshine, telling children that they shouldn't do it.

We won't be re-reading this book to our son and it will go back to the library just as quickly as we can get it there. It gives the exact opposite lesson of the values that we've been trying to instill in our son.