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| Image Retrieved from: The Snowy Day Board Book: Keats, Ezra Jack: 9780670867332: Amazon.com: Books |
Published in 1962, this is one of the first children's books featuring Black characters to gain mainstream success. (Though author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats was a Polish-Jewish immigrant, not Black. Andrea Davis Pinkney's book A Poem for Peter tells Keats' own story!) A Snowy Day is also a Caldecott medal winner and one of the first books to receive the Coretta Scott King award after the award was created in 1970. The story follows a little boy, Peter, during a snow day in New York. He goes outside alone to play and explore. He makes tracks in the snow of various shapes and sizes, observing them. He finds a stick and whacks a tree with it to make the snow fall out. He wants to have a snowball fight with the bigger boys but acknowledges that he's not big enough yet and plays alone, content. Then, he goes back inside and tells his mother all about his adventures while she helps him get clean and dry. Later in the evening, he is surprised to discover the snowball he put in his pocket for later has melted in his snowsuit! The next day, there is still plenty of snow on the ground and new snow is falling, so he yells to his friend across the alley, and they go outside to play together.
My Impressions and How I Would Use this Book:
This is a really sweet and simple book. While not a multicultural tale, it is an important piece of representation and would count as diversity literature. To be fair, the majority of Black children in the U.S. are too far removed from their ethnic heritage; most aren't even able to track what nation they originate from. So, a story like this is likely to be more relatable to the American Black (and brown and white) children in my classes anyway. I would use this book as a cute, fun story time. I would also use it as an access point for an introduction to the phases of matter in science; asking students why they think the snow melted in Peter's pocket after he went inside.
This was one of my favorite books when I was in preschool and kindergarten. Even though I am a white girl in the southern U.S. and Peter is a black boy in New York, I felt a strong connection to him when I was little because we were both happy playing by ourselves. My friends and teachers didn't understand why I always wanted to play by myself when other people wanted to be my friend (none of us knew I was autistic at the time), so I felt comforted that Peter (even though he did want to play with the bigger boys and plays with his friend at the end) plays happily by himself and no one gives him a hard time about it. Many classic stories, like this one, provide representation they didn't even intend to provide necessarily, which is what helps them stand the test of time! I'm so grateful for wonderful books like this I can love in my own childhood and can share with the next generation.
Professional Review:
One morning many years ago, a little boy in Brooklyn named Peter woke up to an amazing sight: fresh snow.
Peter is the hero of the classic children's book by Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day, which turns 50 this year. Peter has a red snowsuit, a stick just right for knocking snow off of trees, and a snowball in his pocket. And, though this is never mentioned in the text, Peter is African-American.
"It wasn't important. It wasn't the point," Deborah Pope tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. Pope is the executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.
"The point is that this is a beautiful book about a child's encounter with snow, and the wonder of it," Pope says. Peter was among the first non-caricatured African-Americans to be featured in a major children's book. But Pope says Keats — who was white — wasn't necessarily trying to make a statement about race when he created Peter.
"He said, well, all the books he had ever illustrated, there had never been a child of color, and they're out there — they should be in the books, too," Pope says. "But was he trying to make a cause book, was he trying to make a point? No."
That approach earned Keats a lot of criticism from civil rights leaders who felt he had not gone far enough. "They were worried," Pope says. "This was a time when the African-American community was fighting for a place at the table, was fighting to be heard ... and in the past, when white authors had written about black characters, it had not done well. It was not good. "But The Snowy Day became a huge hit. It won the Caldecott Medal, given to outstanding picture books. It was embraced by parents, teachers and children of all colors — and eventually the criticism subsided.
"It was no longer necessary that the book say, 'I am an African-American child going out into the snow today,' " Pope says. "They realized that you don't put a color on a child's experience of the snow."
Keats received thousands of fan letters from children, featuring their own versions of his deceptively simple collage illustrations. Even children in places like decidedly un-snowy Florida could relate to Peter's adventures. But one of the most touching reports came from a teacher whose students had read The Snowy Day.
"There was a teacher [who] wrote in to Ezra, saying, 'The kids in my class, for the first time, are using brown crayons to draw themselves.' " Pope says. "These are African-American children. Before this, they drew themselves with pink crayons. But now, they can see themselves.
"In 1940, Life magazine published a short photo essay focused on a little boy in Liberty County, Ga., who was about to undergo a blood test. Keats was struck by the sweet images of the child and cut the group of photographs out of the magazine. That little boy was the inspiration for Keats' character Peter, the African-American protagonist of The Snowy Day and six books that followed.
APA Citation: Keats, E. J. (1962). The Snowy Day. Puffin Books.
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