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September 14, 2007
Harold and the Color of Empowerment
“Harold really *is* a good drawer, you know.”
-Lucas, upon reading Harold and the Purple Crayon and then watching the Weston Woods adaptation earlier this week
“But there isn’t much else to do on a desert, Harold realized as he looked around, except maybe play in the sand. Then he remembered how the government has fun on the desert. It shoots off rockets.”
-Harold’s Trip to the Sky by Crockett Johnson
One can hardly have Purple Week without mentioning Harold and the Purple Crayon. Published in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, Johnson’s picture books featuring young Harold are considered classics, today inspiring Weston Woods adaptations, an animated series on HBO, and a crop of ghost-written titles we’ll be exploring tomorrow on Sunday real soon (maybe Tuesday? Wednesday? Busy week.).
Harold’s stories are the definition of “deceptively simple.” On the surface, they follow Harold around as he draws himself a mostly straight-lined world to explore. Johnson’s pages are white, his drawings all solid lines in purple with a touch of black thrown in here and there. The art, it turns out, is in the concepts. In Harold and the Purple Crayon, Harold wants to go for a walk in the moonlight. There isn’t any moon, so he draws one. Then he draws a road and a tree and a fierce dragon. In other words, when Harold wants something, he just goes right ahead and makes it—no contemplating, no whining. He does take time to notice some of the fascinating mysteries of childhood, that the moon follows him wherever he goes in Harold and the Purple Crayon, for instance, and that he seems different sizes when he draws himself next to different things in Harold’s Fairy Tale. There’s a lot more going on in most pages than the readily apparent one-dimensional drawing and line of text. As much as these stories might be about creativity and the power of imagination, they are also about good old-fashioned empowerment. Johnson’s being subversive even when he’s not making overt jokes about the U.S.’s nuclear testing program. He’s telling kids to make their own worlds, and he’s doing it in a way that the book banners won’t see because he’s hidden his ideas behind a cute little boy with a crayon.
Brilliant!
It’s interesting that in Mr. Pine’s Purple House, purple is the color of rebellion, which, it seems to me, is just an extreme and aggressive state of empowerment. I wonder if there’s something about purple itself that attracts people who are a little different, or if purple is something the rebels cling to simply because it’s never truly been in vogue. I don’t know, but it’s interesting.
[Ed Notes: No Poetry Friday here this week (although check out the comment from alert reader Pat on this entry for a purple poem), but HipWriterMama’s rounding them up today over at her blog. Good stuff. Don’t miss it.]
Posted by adrienne at September 14, 2007 01:20 PM