Born June 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., and died August 8, 2002, in Jacksonville, Florida, Doris Buchanan Smith focused her life around her two greatest passions: love of writing and love of children. The ALA Notable author wrote 17 books for adolescents, including the 1973 award-winning A Taste of Blackberries. Other books included Return to Bitter Creek (Viking), which was a School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly best book of the year, and The Pennywhistle Tree (Putnam).
Smith was the first modern writer to tackle the difficult theme of the death of a playmate in a children's book. She received much critical acclaim for her work, winning the Georgia Children's Book Award, the Children's Best Book Prize in Holland, and was nominated for the Newbery Medal.
Having dreamed of being a writer from the age of eleven, she got serious about a career after her children were in school. She arrived at writing for children in a round about way, when a friend suggested that one of her short stories about a child should instead be a story for young readers. After many attempts at poetry and adult short stories had failed, the author reluctantly audited a course in children’s literature. When the instructor, Helen Diehl Olds, requested that she write a children’s story, like everyone else in class, her protests were ineffective. She wrote the story, and the experience determined her profession.
Though her books deal realistically with contemporary problems, Smith didn’t like being typecast as an “issues author.” When a friend commented that all of her books had dealt with “death, divorce, drugs, delinquency, and dyslexia,” she dropped the idea of giving the hero of her next book diabetes. Smith explained that her books began with a character, and the character has problems. She did not invent the character to write about the problem.
Her first book, which was never published, was an adventure story; her second, A Taste of Blackberries (1973), brought her success and established her reputation as a sensitive and skilled delineator of character.
Though Smith did not know it at the time A Taste of Blackberries had broken a taboo in the field of children’s literature by dealing with the death of a child’s playmate. The book details a young boy’s feelings when his friend suddenly dies, and does so without providing easy, simplistic, pious, or contrived consolations. Critics and the public praised its honesty and sensitivity. Blackberries has remained in print continuously since its publication in 1973.
In the children’s literature pantheon of those who die too soon, there are two major types: the beautiful snoot who’s killed off so that her uglier friend can guiltily brood forever upon her own ugliness and jealousy, and a vibrant being who helps a timid friend get bolder just in time to die in some typical act of heedlessness. (Fine Lines readers will here recall Bridge to Terabithia, as well as Constance C. Greene’s Beat the Turtle Drum, in which a horse-tamer plunges off a tree to her end.) But I was introduced to death in the late 70s through Doris Buchanan Smith’s A Taste of Blackberries, which for some time served as the semester’s literary selection for 7-year-olds in my part of the country. (It was a kind of amuse-bouche for a main course of strangulation in Of Mice and Men.) And through the intervening decades, Buchanan’s gentle, juice-stained depiction of early tragedy has, for me, set a standard neither Oprah pick nor Pen/Faulkner has ever faintly rivaled.
Young Jamie is the kind of friend who darts into a neighbor’s garden to steal apples, hitches a ride in a car with a stranger, and pokes a stick right into a bee hive. Though his best friend the narrator is, after all, the narrator, we never do find out his name. (Or do we? He’s called “Chicken” by Jamie; “Honey,” “Sweetie” or “Darling” - as in “Jamie is dead, darling” - by everyone else in the narrative.) But Jamie pays heavily for having top billing, as he’s killed off just a few pages into the book when he pokes a stick into an underground beehive, gets stung by the swarm of bees and goes into anaphylactic shock, then is left behind to die by our nameless narrator who assumes he is only fooling around, as usual.
After Jamie’s death, the bulk of the narrative is taken up by our narrator’s learning to cope, which actually follows the stages of grief from anger (“Jamie is a freak”) to denial (“It seemed as long as I acted like Jamie wasn’t dead, he wouldn’t be dead anymore”) to acceptance (“I cried and cried and cried”). Lying in a bath, the narrator tries to make soap lather to bring life back to Jamie; wandering in his neighbor’s garden, he feels bad about trespassing. Looking at Jamie’s younger sister, he decides he has to be a big brother for her now, and picks a bunch of blackberries for Jamie’s mother, who says kindly that she’ll bake them in a pie - an act that allows the narrator to release his guilt and run to play with the other neighborhood kids, who have been playing “‘May I’, but in hushed tones, because of Jamie.”
When I was 7, these scenes, most of which barely span a hundred words, seemed vast swaths of narrative. I think that was less because I was a slow reader than because Buchanan so successfully rendered the way the smallest act in childhood takes on monumental significance - not only, of course, a death, but far smaller crimes, like stealing an apple, or triumphs, like figuring out how to string a tin-can phone across two windows (my friend and I never quite managed that one). In the world of a child, placing a flashlight up to your chin to make a spooky face can loom far larger in the memory than a tragic death, and while I remembered the narrator being frightened about wandering into Mrs. Mullins’ garden without asking, I had forgotten entirely that as Jamie writhed on the ground, our protagonist left him to eat a popsicle.
I was going to have this Fine Lines focus heavily on the fine pencil illustrations of A Taste of Blackberries (by Charles Robinson), which are so intrinsically connected to the book’s quiet, melancholy power. But I moved this week, and unfortunately left my 1973 edition in some presently inaccessible pile. (That’s what I get for being old and forgetful.) Instead I have the 1988 version, which seems to have mainly updated the illustrations in order to fit the hairstyles to that era. In the picture in the 70s edition, Jamie’s mother has long straight hair parted in the middle and is wearing jeans and a loose shirt. Standing at her kitchen’s screen door, she cups the narrator’s chin with a kind of pre-Reagan-era intensity. Our 1988 mom has Farrah waves and a mom-like sweater, and her front door is graced with a nice plant. You can analyze which one is on the right side of history. Either way, Buchanan Smith is on the right side of childhood.
Awards and Honors:
- Georgia Children's Book Award (1974-75)
- Newbery Medal nominee for “A Taste of Blackberries”
- School Library Journal & Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
- ALA Notable Children's Book
- Parents Choice Award
- Children's Best Book Prize in Holland
Titles:
- A Taste of Blackberries, illustrated by Charles Robinson (New York: Crowell, 1973; London: Heinemann, 1975).
- Kick a Stone Home (New York: Crowell, 1974).
- Tough Chauncey, illustrated by Michael Eagle (New York: Morrow, 1974).
- Kelly's Creek, illustrated by Alan Tiegreen (New York: Crowell, 1975).
- Up and Over (New York: Morrow, 1976).
- Dreams & Drummers (New York: Crowell, 1978).
- Salted Lemons (New York: Four Winds, 1980).
- Last Was Lloyd (New York: Viking, 1981).
- Moonshadow of Cherry Mountain (New York: Four Winds, 1982).
- The First Hard Times (New York: Viking, 1983).
- Laura Upside-Down (New York: Viking Kestrel, 1984).
- Return to Bitter Creek (New York: Viking Kestrel, 1986).
- Karate Dancer (New York: Putnam's, 1987).
- Voyages (New York: Viking, 1989).
- The Pennywhistle Tree (New York: Putnam's, 1991).
- Best Girl (New York: Viking, 1993).
- Remember the Red-Shouldered Hawk (New York: Putnam's, 1994).
Doris Buchanan Smith
