Whale Talk Silenced in South,

Survives Mid-West Censorship

 

By Joshua B. Good

Monday, June 11, 2007

Novelist Chris Crutcher’s book Whale Talk was banned by South Carolina’s former superintendent of education and a school board in northern Alabama.

Challenges to the 2001 novel were based on Crutcher’s realistic use of curse words by the fictional story’s main characters – a group of misfit high school students who start a school swim team.

“We can't allow students to go down our halls and say those words, and we shouldn't let them read it. That book’s got a lot of bad, bad words in it,” said James Shannon, a Limestone County school board member in Alabama, according to a quote in a Huntsville Times newspaper article on March 9, 2005.

            An Iowa minister also attempted to have the book censored in public schools in a western Iowa community called Missouri Valley. But the school board there refused to have the novel pulled from the schools’ shelves.

            Crutcher appealed to community leaders in Alabama, Iowa and met with former South Carolina Superintendent of Education Inez Tenenbaum, asking them not to bar students from reading his book. Only officials in Iowa were convinced by Crutcher not to censor the book. 

           "It's an excellent story he tells," Tenenbaum said, according to a January 29, 2005, Associated Press story. "But if it was made into a movie, I'm pretty sure it would be rated R because of the language. I just felt that wasn't something we ought to be endorsing."

            The hero of the Whale Talk is a 17-year-old boy with the unusual name The Tao Jones, which pronounced correctly sounds like “The Dow Jones.” But his life is more mean streets than Wall Street. He calls himself T.J. Jones.

            T.J. could hide his name, but not his color, especially in north-eastern Washington, one of the whitest places in America.

            On page one, readers learn the boy is black, white and Japanese. His mother used crack cocaine and methamphetamine. Deprivation leads to adoption by parents savvy enough to get him professional counseling.

            T.J. is athletic, but refuses to go out for his high school football team, bringing condemnation from the all-powerful high school football coach and booster club leader. Instead, T.J. organizes a swim team, though his school has no pool. The motley swim crew includes a brain-damaged boy, an obese boy, a nerd, a nobody, a body-building choir boy and a one-legged kid with an anger-management issue.

            Whale Talk tackles mature subjects, such as child molestation, domestic violence, racism, suicidal thoughts, murder and alienation. The language at times is raw, but it’s true to how some middle and high school boys talk in locker rooms and playgrounds.

            And Crutcher would know. In the 1970s he was a teacher and director of a small alternative school in Oakland, California. He later worked as a therapist in Spokane, Washington, and though he writes full time now, he chairs the Spokane Child Protection Team.

            He gave that same run-down of his career in an open letter to the residents of Missouri Valley, Iowa, when his book was threatened with censorship there in February of 2007.

            “I say that only to let you know where many of my stories come from.  Real life.  Hard times,” Crutcher wrote in his letter. 

           Whale Talk was attacked by Minister Nathan Slaughter of the Missouri Valley Church of Christ. In a letter published in the Missouri Valley Times, Slaughter called the book “filth.”

            Crutcher said he believes religious beliefs play a central role in censorship of his books.

            "They [school boards] get pressured most times by the Christian Right, who are organized and loud when they want something censored, and sometimes the boards themselves are infiltrated by the Christian Right," Crutcher said in an email response to bannedmagazine.com. "In most cases they just don't want what they consider negative publicity.  I'm afraid there are very few school boards who stand up for educators."

            Crutcher’s book gives a voice to adolescents who aren’t in the popular groups. It also gives voice to those who have suffered from prejudice, be it because of race, handicap or ignorance.

            “All of you know kids who grow up in hate,” Crutcher wrote in his letter to Missouri Valley. “They sit in the classrooms of our schools, distrustful, betrayed; feeling like second-class citizens whose lives don’t matter.  When folks like Mr. Slaughter call for censoring their stories, they don’t realize they are censoring the kids themselves.  “Your life isn’t worth being talked about.  We don’t care what you feel like; we just want you to behave.  Don’t rub off on our kids.””

            The school board in Missouri Valley voted 3-2 to keep the book. The school board also changed its policy and now requires literature teachers to provide parents with a syllabus so parents can ask their child be assigned an alternative book if they find a text that is objectionable. 

           But in 2005 in Limestone County, Alabama, the board of education voted 4-3 to ban the book from reading lists and the high school library, citing the book’s language.

 The pro-censorship board members were Shannon, Earl Glaze, Bryant Moss, and Darin Russell. None of the four responded to email questions from bannedmagazine.com about the issue.

Crutcher appealed to school board members to reconsider their decision. In an essay published by the Huntsville Times, Crutcher wrote:

“From what I have been told, the major issue is the language used by the characters in the book. Probably the most offensive scene, taken out of context, would be on page 68 and 69 where a 4-and-a-half-year-old mixed-race girl is working in a play therapy session, mirroring what her life is like living with a racist stepfather and a mother who won't protect her.

“In the course of her therapy she is taking the role of the offender, yelling out all the names that she herself endures on a daily basis. Because she is screaming the words, they are in large font, which, I assume, makes them even more offensive to those paging through the book.

“The scene read in the context of the story, I believe, is heartbreaking. It is also true. It is something I have seen played out by a real 4-and-a-half-year-old mixed race girl in that very situation. Of course some things have been changed to fit this story, and to mask it from the real event, but it is real, and it is actually milder that what I witnessed in that case, and in hundreds of others.

“Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don't allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn't give them stories in which it is used. But that's an easy thing to deal with, and I've seen it done 100 times.

“Teachers bring up the offensiveness of the language and talk about why it's used to make a story real. We don't have to use the language to talk about the story in the classroom, but we can certainly talk about the raw power of any good story told in its native tongue.”

In South Carolina, Whale Talk had been on a list of books recommended by the state for schools to use in sophomore English classes as part of a state-wide experiment to improve reading skills. Then Tenenbaum banned it because of the language. Students can still read the book, but it is no longer recommended by the state.

Crutcher’s books have won numerous American Library Association awards in young adults categories; Whale Talk was listed by the ALA as one of the library association’s Best Books for Young Adults in 2002.

 

Other Links:

 

Read Crutcher's open letter to Limestone County, Alabama.

 

Read a Question & Answer with Crutcher about censorship here.

 

Chris Crutcher’s web site is www.chriscrutcher.com. His next book, Deadline, is scheduled to be released on September 1, 2007.