Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had short dark hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty ... He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. [sic, sic, sic!]

Ethel and Mr Salteena engage in plenty of witty repartee:

I shall put some red ruuge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.

You will look very silly said Mr Salteena with a dry laugh.

Well so will you said Ethel in a snappy tone and she ran out of the room with a very superier run throwing out her legs behind and her arms swinging in rithum.

While Austen and King-Hall had perfect control of their humor, Ashford probably didn't mean her book to be quite as funny as it is. "The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems," by Nathalia Crane, falls somewhere in the middle. The bard from Brooklyn was 10 or younger when she wrote the poems in this collection, first published in 1924, now hopelessly out of print. Some of them seem appropriately childish, with a sharply sexual edge like Ashford's:

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography...

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy
He's as busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he's making a raft
Out of an old settee.

He'll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.

Other poems seem weirdly sophisticated (though not exactly better):

Cloud-made mountains towered, Beckoning to me; Visionary triremes Talked about the sea...

Prodigy though she clearly was, Crane didn't grow up to be a famous poet. Perhaps the authors of "Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets" will take their voices further than Crane did. Selected by Lydia Omolola Okutoro, a recent college graduate and a poet herself, the pieces in this collection seem for the most part sincere rather than brilliant, but they map out some of the concerns of young people struggling with race and identity. My favorite, "My First Love," by 18-year-old Jennifer McLune, is a paean to hair:

Hair burstin‚ hematite and obsidian aglow ...
Hair that drifts and grows shamelessly in touch with the deep-grown roots of the fertile land called scalp
Hair she be my first love.

With its vivid metaphors and poetic cadences, "My First Love" stands out in a pond of vague generalizations and bits of prose arbitrarily chopped into lines. Still, young readers will find plenty to identify with here.

"I can be a doctor, a lawyer, an athlete, an astronaut, a writer, a musician, a businesswoman, a scientist, an army general, or a leader of my people," writes 16-year-old Akilah N. Evering. It's a nice, long list of choices for the cheek-pinchers.

Books:

"In the Forest of the Night"
By Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
Delacorte Press
147 pages

"The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë"
Edited by Frances Beer
Penguin Classics
389 pages

"The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st"
By Jane Austen; introduction by A.S. Byatt
Algonquin Books
34 pages

"The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765"
By Cleone Knox (Magdalen King-Hall)
Chatto & Windus (out of print)
245 pages

"The Young Visiters"
By Daisy Ashford; illustrated by Posy Simmonds
Chatto & Windus
79 pages

"The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems"
Nathalia Crane
Thomas Seltzer (out of print)
82 pages

"Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets"
Selected by Lydia Omoloa Okutoro
Hyperion Books for Children
102 pages
salon.com | May 18, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon