As John Rowe Townsend pointed out in A Sounding of Storytellers, children's literature in the 1950s and early 1960s tended to promote a gentle, reassuring view of children, their families, and their role in society. He wrote, "Childhood was part of a continuing pattern—the orderly succession of the generations—and [in the accepted view] children were growing up to take their place in a known and understood world." By the late 1960s, however, people were becoming aware that this notion of childhood as a safe, protected time was just that—a notion—and it did not reflect the reality of children's lives. Children, like adults, suffer, experience trauma, and live through conflicting emotions about events they cannot control or justify.

As Townsend noted, Fox was one of the first writers to wake up to this reality. He wrote that she "was one of the small number of writers who brought quick sharp perceptions to the new and in many ways uneasy scene, and also an instinctive sympathy for the young who ... had to deal with it." In her early works, children and adults fail to understand each other: there is no cozy bond between the generations. In The Slave Dancer, Fox takes a larger step and looks at a terrifying time in human history through the eyes of a boy who, like the slaves, is taken captive and experiences the horrendous reality of The Moonlight. Even worse, he must help others mistreat the slaves, using his gift for music as an instrument of torment. As Townsend wrote, the presence of a child in this setting is an alarming and awakening touch of truth. In The Slave Dancer,

The 'young eye at the centre' is no mere convention of the adventure story for children; it is the one perspective from which the witnessing of dreadful events can be fully and freshly experienced, and at the same time the moral burden be made clear.

Some reviewers have questioned whether this exposure to horrendous events is appropriate for children and whether books like The Slave Dancer can be considered children's literature, despite the presence of the "young eye at the center." In her essay, "Nightmares of History," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Hamida Bosmajian wrote that such books not only can but should be included in the canon of writing for young people. Bosmajian wrote that for children who are personally experiencing trauma such books can have "therapeutic value" and can "raise the consciousness of youngsters whose environment is stable."

As Bosmajian points out, historical "nightmares" created by adults, such as the Nazi Holocaust, nuclear war, or the enslavement of Africans, always include children since they affect whole societies. It is impossible to pretend, given the reality of these circumstances, that all children live the protected lives that earlier books portrayed. Bosmajian wrote that perhaps some adults object to stories about these events because "we fear that to depict the children within the nightmare of history

This loss of a certain amount of joy, this tempering of the soul and of hope, is only natural in someone who has seen what Jessie has seen. To write a book in which someone saw the suffering of slaves and who then went home and 'recovered' from the experience would be shallow and false."

Paula Fox obviously supports the view that writers should not shy away from portraying real pain and notes that some contemporary books may pretend to look at the dark side of life but in the end try to make readers believe that everything will be all right. Fox told Sylvia Steinberg in Publishers Weekly, "The American idea is that everything can be solved. Our lives are not problems to be solved! They're to be lived! ... Children are given liar's clothes early on. It's a way of not looking." And, more heatedly she said, "At the core of everything I write is the feeling that the denial of the truth imprisons us even further in ourselves." In her essay "Some Thoughts on Imagination in Children's Literature" in Celebrating Children's Books: Essay on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, she described such books as "tract literature" and as:

stories that strain to teach children how to manage life by merely naming such "problems" as disease, physical anomalies, and even death and by assuring them there is nothing to be afraid of, nothing to suffer about, nothing complex.

Clearly, The Slave Dancer is not that kind of book. The book contains disease, physical (and moral) anomalies, death, and a host of other frightening things: Jessie's father is dead, his family is extremely poor, he is kidnapped, he is beaten and sees others beaten, he sees slaves thrown over the rail of the ship—both dead and alive—after being starved, exposed to disease, and tormented—and he doesn't know if he will ever make it home alive. Worse, he not only has to witness the torment of the slaves but he is forced to become one of their oppressors as he plays his flute; he is aware that, even though he is like them in the sense that he is a prisoner on the ship, when they reach land, he will be free to go home to his mother and sister, a choice that will forever be denied to the slaves. In addition, he is aware that because he is white, the crew automatically regards him as "human," whereas they don't see the slaves as human at all. For Jessie, who has noted his kinship with the slave boy Ras, this false dichotomy is troubling: he knows that, at bottom, there is no difference between them, but the sailors beat him whenever he shows compassion for the slaves' humanity and their suffering.

Jessie cannot find an easy solution to these moral questions and to the questions of why people are cruel and why people suffer. Even after Jessie makes it home, he is changed permanently. Although he grows up and manages to make a modestly successful life, with a decent career, a wife, and a child, the scars of the voyage are always with him. His decisions to become an apothecary, move to the North, and fight for the Union side during the Civil War are all direct results of his harrowing childhood experience. For his whole life, he avoids or fights against anything that helps the cause of slavery. For his whole life, he struggles against the memory of his own brief captivity on the ship and the marks it has left on his psyche. Even though he appears normal and well adjusted to his neighbors and even when he rarely thinks consciously about the ship, he is unable to hear any music—no matter how simple—without pain. His musical gift, which was once so lighthearted and free, has become a continuing symbol of the slaves' torment, and of his own.

This loss of a certain amount of joy, this tempering of the soul and of hope, is only natural in someone who has seen what Jessie has seen. To write a book in which someone saw the suffering of slaves and who then went home and "recovered" from the experience would be shallow and false. In "Some Thoughts on Imagination in Children's Literature," Fox wrote of books that bring up social problems and then provide easy answers: "The implicit instructions of contemporary 'realistic' books may vary ... but they have the same sequel: they smother speculation, they stifle uncertainty, they strangle imagination." In these books, she wrote, "We present children with cozy books about desertion and death and sex, promising them that, in the end, everything can be made all right. Thus we drown eternal human questions with contemporary bromides."

Although Fox's work is painfully realistic, it is not pessimistic. Jessie does manage to create a good life; he is not scarred to the point of being unable to contribute positively to the world. As John Rowe Townsend wrote in A Sounding of Storytellers, "Ultimately the book is not depressing; the human spirit is not defeated."

Fox's insistence on telling the truth is allied to her sense that writing for adults is no different from writing for children. She once stopped to write a children's book in the middle of writing a novel for adults and says that she does not write differently for her two audiences. John Rowe Townsend, in A Sense of Story, quoted Fox as having said, "I never think I'm writing for children when I work. A story does not start for anyone, nor an idea, nor a feeling of an idea; but starts more for oneself." Unlike other writers, who "write down" for children or try to teach some moral lesson, Fox follows her instincts and tells the truth about events, believing that the truth is inherently interesting and that only by exploring it can readers, and writers, grow as human beings.

In her acceptance speech for the Newbery Award, reprinted in Newbery and Caldecott Winners, 1966-1975, Fox wrote that writing helps us "to connect ourselves with the reality of our own lives. It is painful; but if we are to become human, we cannot abandon it."

Source: Kelly Winters, Critical Essay on The Slave Dancer, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Winters is a freelance writer and editor who has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers.

I have left until last the book which, so far, is Paula Fox's finest achievement. I do not think it could have been predicted from her earlier work that she would write such a book as The Slave Dancer. It is the story of Jessie Bollier, a boy who is pressed into the crew of the slave ship Moonlight in 1840 for a voyage to Africa, picking up a cargo of blacks to be sold in Cuba. This is a case where the discipline of writing for the children's list has been wholly to the benefit of the book as a work of art. The 'young eye at the centre' is no mere convention of the adventure story for children; it is the one perspective from which the witnessing of dreadful events can be fully and freshly experienced, and at the same time the moral burden be made clear. Jessie is horrified by the treatment of the slaves, but he is powerless to prevent it; moreover he is young, white, and one of the crew, and the oppressors are his fellow-countrymen.

Jessie plays the fife, and his job is to make music to which, for brief periods daily, the slaves can exercise. This is called dancing the slaves. The aim is to keep them (relatively) healthy and therefore marketable, in spite of the crowded and filthy conditions in which they live. A slave has no human value but has a financial one: a dead slave is a lost profit. As the voyage goes on, the slaves, crammed together in the reeking hold, become sick, half-starved and hopeless, most of them suffering from 'the bloody flux', an affliction that makes the latrine buckets inadequate. And Jesse finds that 'a dreadful thing' is happening in his mind:

I hated the slaves! I hated their shuffling, their howling, their very suffering! I hated the way they spat out their food upon the deck, the overflowing buckets, the emptying of which tried all my strength. I hated the foul stench that came from the holds no matter which way the wind blew, as though the ship itself were soaked with human excrement. I would have snatched the rope from Spark's [the mate's] hand and beaten them myself! Oh, God! I wished them all dead! Not to hear them! Not to smell them! Not to know of their existence!

The Slave Dancer is not a story solely of horror. It is also a novel of action, violence and suspense, culminating in shipwreck (which was indeed the fate of a slaver called Moonlight in the Gulf of Mexico in 1840; the actual names of her crew are used). Jessie and a black boy named Ras with whom he has made a precarious friendship are the only survivors; they reach land and there is a limited happy ending. Ras is set on the road to freedom; Jessie gets home to his mother and sister, is apprenticed, lives an ordinary, modestly-successful life, and fights in the Civil War on the Union side.

After the war my life went on much like my neighbors' lives. I no longer spoke of my journey on a slave ship back in 1840. I did not often think of it myself. Time softened my memory as though it was kneading wax. But there was one thing that did not yield to time.

I was unable to listen to music. I could not bear to hear a woman sing, and at the sound of any instrument, a fiddle, a flute, a drum, a comb with paper wrapped around it played by my own child, I would leave instantly and shut myself away. For at the first note of a tune or of a song, I would see once again, as though they'd never ceased their dancing in my mind, black men and women and children lifting their tormented limbs in time to a reedy martial air, the dust rising from their joyless thumping, the sound of the fife finally drowned beneath the clanging of their chains.

Those are the closing sentences of The Slave Dancer. Ultimately the book is not depressing; the human spirit is not defeated. But it is permeated through and through by the horror it describes. The casual brutality of the ordinary seamen towards the slaves is as fearful in its way as the more positive and corrupt cruelty of the captain and mate and the revolting, hypocritical crew member Ben Stout. For the seamen are 'not especially cruel save in their shared and unshakable conviction that the least of them was better than any black alive'. They are merely ignorant. Villainy is exceptional by definition, but dreadful things done by decent men, to people whom they manage to look on as not really human, are a reminder of our own self-deceit and lack of imagination, of the capacity we all have for evil. There, but for the grace of God, go all of us.

Is such knowledge fit for children? Yes, it is; they ought not to grow up without it. This book looks at a terrifying side of human nature, and one which—in the specific manifestation of the slave trade—has left deeply-planted obstacles in the way of human brotherhood. The implication was made plain by Paula Fox in her Newbery acceptance speech in 1974. We must face this history of evil, and our capacity for evil, if the barriers are ever to come down.

Source: John Rowe Townsend, "Paula Fox," in A Sounding of Storytellers: New and Revised Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children, J. B. Lippincott, 1979, pp. 55-65.