Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek

A Tall, Thin Tale
(Introducing His Forgotten Frontier Friend)
by Deborah Hopkinson
picture by John Hendrix
Schwartz & Wade / Random House 2008


If in 2007 a book appeared by a 90 year old author claiming to have been a boyhood friend of JFK, relating an experience where the two as boys nearly drowned in the Charles River of Boston one summer day, where the author saved the young JFK's life and thus played an important role in our nation's history (who would have defeated Nixon in 1960 if JFK weren't even alive?), and there was no one alive who could refute it...

Did it really happen? And would we tell the story as a picture book?

Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek tells a similar story concerning Abraham Lincoln's Kentucky neighbor Austin Gollaher, about how the the two as young boys attempted to cross a creek, and how Austin rescued Lincoln which allowed him to live and, eventually, become our 16th president. The book attempts to tie up this story with the moral that "what we do matters, even if we don't end up in history books."

That's all well and good, but who's to say it happened? Hopkinson sites at the beginning of the book two titles that quote Gollagher from 1898 and 1921 and a third from 1922 that confirms the story, probably taken from the same sources. Given all the biographical scholarship on Lincoln done in the past 90 years it seems odd that more recent references couldn't be cited.

Unless the story couldn't be proven to modern standards.

Here, again, we see another recent example of the "storyography," the biographical recounting that place story before biography and, in this case, the anecdotal above the known. Hopkinson covers her bases by saying "The events described in this story, so far as this author can determine... did, in fact, take place..." Yes, well, short of Lincoln's personal account, or a third party's account, what we have is, as the subtitle indicates, a tall tale concerning a real individual from history. And since it is a tall tale is there really any reason to lend the story a level of legitimacy by pointing out sources? Does the fact that Lincoln is a character require this level of explanation?

And, as always, shouldn't this information be spelled out to the reader in the text and not placed in tiny type on the Library of Congress page intended for adults who won't be as nearly confused about the legitimacy of the story as the intended reader?

Actually, Hopkinson does attempt to alert the reader in the text that the story contains some questionable details. At the point when Lincoln falls into the creek a giant, incongruous caution warning splashes across the illustration announcing "I want to make sure we get this right. Because maybe it didn't happen like that." The narrative then proceeds with an alternative version of the event in question because, as Hopkinson later suggests, "For that's the thing about history – if you weren't there, you can't know for sure."

Ah, I see. Because we were not there, because the source of the story is perhaps an interested party who could profit from the attention of having been the late president's boyhood friend, because no one can say for sure it didn't happen we can proceed to tell this story as if it did.

A book is a powerful thing. It represents the labors of a lot of people – writers and illustrators, editors and publishers and printers – and when presented by adults like parents, librarians, and teachers takes on the weight of authority in a young reader's eyes. They would not have gone through all this trouble if the story weren't true, would they? When a child is handed Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek and reads the text only, do they have any reason to doubt the story happened as described, or at all? Do we teach young readers how and when to question historical events and to vet them for accuracy? No, of course not. They accept what they are given because they trust adults to be honest with them.

That said I do not suggest that Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek should not have been written, and that other books that attempt to tell historical anecdotes from the childhood of historical figures cannot be retold, only that it be clearly and directly related to the reader that such stories might not be factually accurate. There should no question in a reader's mind about the story they have just been told, nor should they confuse that story for history if there is any question.

I have an unusual perspective in this area, having been researching Lincoln's life from the period just after the events in this book. Earlier biographies contain second and third hand accounts of events that do not hold water in biographies written after the 1920s. In fact, I could write a few similar picture books concerning the pre-teen life of Lincoln that, while entertaining, would not be considered accurate by modern Lincoln scholars.

For the past decade we've seen a number of biographical picture books that seem to escape the rigor and expectations we would apply to books intended for older readers. This is a mistake, because (and I think I've said this many times before) that this young age is when we do the most damage in terms of misinformation. Children today STILL have heard the story of Washington chopping down a cherry tree when we now know that the story was a fabrication of Washington's childhood neighbors, told to their children as a morality story, recounted to biographer Parson Weems as gospel truth. It is not true and yet the power of this misinformation still courses through our national psyche.

Accuracy should not suffer at the hands of entertainment, not in the books we present to picture book readers. "What we do matters."

Exactly.

The Giant of Seville

A "Tall" Tale Based on a True Story
by Jan Andreasen
Abrams 2007

Playing off the size of the subject at hand, this book isn't so much a tall tale as much as it's a tale about a tall gentleman named Captain Martin Van Buren Bates.

Captain Bates has arrived in Seville, Ohio hoping he has found a suitable place to start up a home. The Captain's concerns center around his (and his wife's) eight-foot frame. Captain Bates has arrived by train with his legs stretched across the aisle over both sets of seats, his torso hanging out the window to accommodate him. He makes his way to a rooming house in town and inquires about a room for the night. When he sleeps in a normal bed his legs from the knee down hang out the window, warmed at night by the fire set and stoked by the boarding-house owner. In the morning he eats an army's worth of flapjacks. He joins everyone at a dance that night and while he's mindful of bumping his head on low ceilings he manages to break through the floor and climb out the basement embarrassed.

In the end Captain Bates decides it's time to move on, that he and his wife could never settle in Seville, but the townfolk have a surprise for him. They have begun the framework on a proportionally sized home for the Captain and his wife. And that was how Captain Bates became the giant of Seville.

When it comes to tall tales we make allowances for exaggeration because that's a large part of what American Tall Tale folklore is about. Pecos Bill lived with coyotes and used rattlesnakes for ropes and rode tornadoes the way other cowboys rode broncos. Paul Bunyan clear-cut the Dakotas and dug the Erie Canal with the handle of his axe (and with the help of a giant blue Ox named Babe). And where folk heroes were based on real people -- Mike Fink or Davey Crockett -- their real exploits were often exaggerated, retold, or taken out of context in ways that made them sound more interesting than they might have been if truth had been strictly adhered to.

I'm mentioning all this because there really was a Captain Martin Van Buren Bates who was nearly eight feet tall and was married to a woman just slightly taller than himself. Given that this story is based on a real individual would put its telling in semi-fictitious camp, asking us to forgive certain exaggerations in favor of telling a tale based on truth. But the only truth in this story is the fact of the man himself and his setting up home in Seville upon retiring from the circus; Everything else is pure fancy, and most of it a little baffling to me.

A railroad car might not be the most spacious of accommodations for an eight foot tall man, but he wouldn't be able to stretch his legs across the aisle and hang his upper body out the window. Nor would he dwarf the folks of Seville so much that they all appear half his height -- that is to say nearly four feet at the tallest. And assuming even a short bed at five feet long the Captain's legs might have been able to rest on the window sill (as they do in the first shown illustration) and not bend at the knee outside the same window (when you flip the page).

Yes, I am being picky about this because the exaggeration, and the inconsistency of the exaggeration, undercuts the telling of the story almost as much as the factual detail included at the end of the book undercuts what we have read up to that point. Davey Crockett fought at the Alamo and was a US Representative but he also allegedly killed him a bear when he was only three years old. Killing the bear wasn't the important part of the legend, it was doing it at a young age. Being tall doesn't make one a folk legend, it's what you do with it, and it requires more than sleeping with your seven foot long legs hanging out a window or falling through the floor. The Captain was a tall man and he fought in the Civil War and worked with the circus but none of that comes out in the story, and you can't just hang a tall tall on a tall person and expect that to be the whole story.

Ultimately this is a dull little story that attempts to make a real person legendary without really giving the reader anything to feel awestruck about. Honestly, the man may have weighed as much as two hefty men, but are we supposed to find heroic his eating enough pancakes to feed a town? Perhaps if that eating brought with it the strength and prowess of a John Henry...

Here's a new rule of thumb for future picture books: No more "based on a true story" books. Either tell the story of a real person or make up a story inspired by a true person or event -- without mentioning the source. No more of these hybrids or attempts to lend credibility and weight to flimsy storytelling.

Jack Plank Tells Tales

by Natalie Babbitt
MDC/Scholastic 2007

Set on the island of Jamaica in the 1720's, Natalie Babbitt's first new book in a quarter century is the story of a former pirate looking for a new vocation after getting kicked off his ship for not being pirate enough. Jack doesn't have the stomach to plunder or rattle swords and would rather cook soup and keeps his fellows company, and for a while the crew of the Avarice were fine with the arrangement. But times for pirating were lean and Jack was set ashore with his belongings and enough florins to get him set up on land.

Checking into a local boarding house his charm wins him an audience among the borders who are slightly excited to have a reformed pirate in their midst. Daily Jack sets about with the landlord's daughter to find suitable work but each day encounters a problem that prevents him from taking on the enterprise. At the end of each day when the members of the boarding house sit down to sup Jack recounts a story relevant to why this job or that isn't suited to him, thus justifying his inability to find employment.

These tales all center around the things he's seen during his days as a pirate, tall tales for the most part of the kind that make for good nautical folklore: The sailor that takes the shape of an octopus during the full moon; The man who bakes a cake to successfully woo a mermaid; The sailor whose prize possession of a mummified hand of king lures a ghost to the ship. There are also the less supernatural yarns, of alligator charmers and gold-fever, and a sailor so enamored of his beard he refuses to cut it off despite having a dead crab lodged within it. Each of the stories ends with a short discussion by the boarding house audience and an agreement that after hearing such a tale Jack's aversion to a particular vocation is justified.

(Non-spoiler alert: I'm not giving away the ending, though I think it can be easily guessed.)

In the end Jack realizes he can no longer afford to stay at the boarding house, but the answer has been staring them in the face the entire time. Arrangements are made and Jack manages to stay, utilizing his skills to the fullest.

In the same vain as a shaggy dog or campfire story, Babbitt's stories don't really justify Jack's inability to find work so much as link a fanciful hornpipe of nautical tales. It's clear from the start that Jack is a master of avoiding work and his amiable ways are what keeps him in good company, if not fed, housed and clothed. When the landlord suggests "Stories aren't much, of course, but on the other hand, they're not so little, either" it echoes an old expression I've often seen credited to Barry Lopez but heard comes from the old Yiddish saying that "people need stories as much as food." It's that hunger for the spirit that comes alive in the telling, the ability to be transported to another place, see through another's eyes, experience adventure.

There's the odd sense I had while reading these tales, a feeling of displacement. Not quite ghost stories, they have that feel of a collection of supernatural tales that would be better suited for Halloween. Not quite campfire stories, because of their nautical settings, they beg to be told by an old salt on the docks of a fishing village to the kids who congregate there, not the parlor setting of Jamaica in the 1720s. To be as genteel about this as possible: the pirate setting almost feels calculated to ride the recent wave of popularity in all things pirate.

As a collection, the stories vary only slightly in quality from one another, and the exercise as a whole feels about three stories too long (there are eight stories total) and we could argue which three could go. (If anyone who has read the book feels so inclined to list their three least favorites in the comments I'll check in with mine). Overall, a not unpleasant option for teachers and the lovers of tall tales, or as an alternative to usual tales told in October. Just not stellar.