Peter #3: Last Name Unknown

On childhood, representation, and snowy days.

When your mom’s a librarian, there’s no way reading won’t be everywhere in your life. But that was the case even before mine went back to school to get her masters degree in library science, often with me in tow. By the time she started working in the children’s department of our local library, my sister and I were already weekly regulars, tottering out with head-high armloads of books every time we visited. The first time I met my kindergarten teacher, I asked her if we’d learn how to read and write, then helpfully informed her that I already knew how. 

For that—meaning the reading part, not the smartass part—you can thank not just parental involvement, but the books that my parents actually chose. There were the canonical requirements like Goodnight Moon and less-hallowed favorites like Olive Wadsworth’s Over in the Meadow; there were non-problematic Dr. Seuss classics and books I always thought were non-problematic Dr. Seuss classics, but aren’t by Dr. Seuss at all. (In my defense, the Cat in the Hat is on the cover. Or at least was. My guess is someone’s rethinking that.)

All of those books had lasting emotional impacts, ones that far outlasted any memory I might have of the words or pictures they contained. Their legacies are sensory more than anything else; more than 40 years later, I can still hear my father reading Over in the Meadow, me tucked under his non-book-holding arm and against his flannel shirt, feeling his voice thrumming through his chest. But one of the books that ruled my early childhood connected for a very different reason. It didn’t have animals at the center of its story, or silliness, or really anything beyond a child experiencing the world. But that child was named Peter, the world he experienced felt like one I experienced too, and the friendship I wanted to share with him was exactly the point of the book.

The Snowy Day was the second book Ezra Jack Keats both wrote and illustrated. He’d gotten the hang of things, apparently; it won the Caldecott Medal in 1962, and would go on to become the most checked-out book in the history of the New York Public Library. (Suck it, Dale Carnegie!) The thing is, there wasn’t much to the book, events-wise. A kid named Peter wakes up to snowfall, goes outside in a now-iconic red snowsuit, plays in the snow by himself, comes back inside, tells his mom about his adventure, falls asleep, and wakes up the next morning to play outside with his friend. The end. There are no pigeons driving buses, no tricksters or saboteurs, no fantasy sequences or magical journeys, no obstacles to overcome save for a melted snowball.

That was the point. Keats, who grew up in Brooklyn, wanted children to see themselves in his books. And maybe more importantly, he wanted children to see themselves in children who didn’t necessarily look like them. His first book, My Dog Is Lost, was about a Puerto Rican kid named Juanito who loses his dog after his family moves to New York. It didn’t garner the acclaim that A Snowy Day did, and the art’s rougher around the edges, but you can see Keats’ mission on every page. Almost a decade before Sesame Street began teaching Spanish and togetherness to a nation of Gen-X toddlers, My Dog Is Lost did the same.

But it was also an adventure. Juanito was running around, meeting kids in Chinatown and Harlem and Little Italy and recruiting them to his search. A Snowy Day, on the other hand, is a book of interiority. Peter may have been crunching down his block, making snow angels and deciding that he was too little to join in the big kids’ snowball fights, but because he was mostly by himself, you weren’t just watching him—you were looking at the world through his eyes. When he tells his mom about his day, you feel his excitement; when he sits in the bathtub, remembering it all, you feel his calm pride. He’s just as independent as Juanito is, but he’s not resolving conflict. He just … is. Just like you were when you were three, or four, or five, and read the book.

The Snowy Day wasn’t the only children’s book from my own childhood that depicted nonwhite human characters. But it was the first I can think of that gave me a protagonist I fully identified with, of any race. Some of that was in the name, I suspect; kids are just narcissistic enough that they’ll love anything named after themselves. But I also saw something of myself in Peter. He reacted to seeing the snow just like I would; he came home full of stories just like I would; he worried about things, both real and imagined, just like I would. The criticism that Keats met at the time, most of it boiling down to how can a white writer authentically portray a Black child’s life?, wasn’t without merit in the abstract. The key phrase, though, is “in the abstract.” Peter might have become a symbol because he was first, but he became a phenomenon because he was universal. Back then, I didn’t know anything about anything; I only knew that Peter had my name, and I had friends who looked like Peter, and that was enough for me.

Peter would live on past A Snowy Day, appearing in six other books Keats wrote. More crucially, though, his outsized impact on kids everywhere helped set up a late ’70s childhood that reinforced exactly what Keats had hoped for. Sesame Street, of course. Free to Be… You and Me. Electric Company. And look, I know representation doesn’t solve everything. Simply seeing gender roles exploded and racial unity modeled doesn’t guarantee that a kid will grow up to move through the world with empathy—not when so many other factors act as a tailwind for the status quo—but I have to think that it did a hell of a lot more than the publishing world would have wanted to admit in 1962.

If you haven’t read A Snowy Day in a while, do yourself a favor and revisit it: This narrated version is just about perfect. And if you know where I can get pajamas like Peter’s, get at me.

One Thing I Can’t Get Enough of This Week

🎧 The Roots, “In Your Dreams Kid (I’m Every MC)”

At this point, I have no idea how to describe The Roots. They’ve been The Tonight Show’s house band, and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon’s before that, for more than a decade. They’ve released 14 studio albums and played more live dates than Chuck Woolery. But last week, the Illadelph hip-hop legends released a deluxe version of their major-label debut, 1993’s Do You Want More?!!!??!, and hidden among all the alternate takes and remixes is an unreleased track that’s unlike anything you’ve heard before. (Well, maybe Aries Spears.) I wrote a little bit about Roots frontman Black Thought in a previous newsletter; I’ve also written about him in this piece from last year on rappers turning 40. He was a phenom when The Roots first came out, and he’s somehow managed to get even better and more ferocious with age, as last year’s “Father Figure” with Tobe Nwigwe proves. To hear him on “In Your Dreams Kid,” though, where he cycles through convincing impersonations of a dozen early-’90s MCs while rapping in their signature styles, is to hear a student of the game coming into his own. Not every impression is spot-on, but after a certain point it almost doesn’t matter. To paraphrase Jason Sudeikis: No one does a Kool G Rap! (Spotify)