1954: …AND NOW MIGUEL by Joseph Krumgold with illustrations by Jean Charlot
I am Miguel. For most people it does not make so much difference that I am Miguel. But for me, often, it is a very great trouble.
This morning, my daughter has earned a Trader Joe's Maple Leaf Cookie for something good she did the previous night. We would have given it to her then, but she had already brushed her teeth so we gave her an IOU for the cookie that we wanted to cash in that morning. So after she finishes her breakfast, I offer her the cookie. She says "no, I want to eat it at school". It's a Saturday morning, so I remind her that school is two days away, so maybe it's just better if she eats the cookie now. She instantly bursts into tears and begins screaming. I have transgressed in some unspeakable way by offering her a cookie 48 hours too early.
This is likely not surprising to you if you have raised a toddler. You are not dealing with a tiny adult who shares your understanding of cause and effect, or linear time, or standard emotional reactions to mundane situations, or the general cosmological barriers between reality and imagination. What's more, you are not dealing with someone who appears to even be developing an understanding of those things. You are watching a Robert Eggers film set within your house1, about a person who processes the world in a fundamentally different way from you.
In a sense, every Newbery medalist falls short of properly capturing a child's way of thinking, because every Newbery medalist was, of course, written by an adult (and edited by adults and published by adults and reviewed and publicized by adults) and the necessities of the form demand that the stories kind of make more structural sense than a typical child's train of thought. The closest you can get, as an author, is to journalistically embed yourself with an actual child for months, which is what Joseph Krumgold did.
Krumgold, the first of only six authors to win the Newbery medal twice2, was a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker by training; one of his films was nominated for the first Oscar for documentary short subject filmmaking. Eventually he was hired by the federal government to produce propaganda films during World War II, with my favorite title among these being "The Autobiography Of A Jeep", showcasing American brilliance in engineering as demonstrated by our Jeep-making.
In 1953, the State Department hired Krumgold to make another documentary, this time to highlight the stories of Hispanic rural workers across the country. Krumgold embedded himself with a family of shepherds in New Mexico and eventually connected with one of their children, Miguel Chavez, who was old enough to tag along with the shepherds but not old enough to take on a lot of responsibilities for the sheep yet. Krumgold told Miguel's story in a 1953 documentary titled …And Now Miguel, which he then published as a novel after fictionalizing some of the details.
I was struck, reading Krumgold's novel, by how accurate it felt when it tried to capture Miguel's internal monologue. Early in the novel, Miguel describes the bleating of a newborn lamb:
“‘I am here! Here. The time has come and I am here! I am here!’...It didn’t speak the words, of course. I didn’t even sound like the words. The cry of the lamb sounded like my friend Juby, at school, when he tries to yell far away and at the same time he keeps coughing. Not like words. But it stands to reason. What else could a new lamb, especially the first lamb born in the whole flock, once he got to his feet and opened his mouth to baa - what else would he say? ‘Me! I’m here.’”
Not only is this generally how a child talks, complete with some passing reference to a kid I’ve never heard of that doesn’t really go anywhere, but “Me! I’m here” is the fundamental thing that every child is communicating, all of the time, about everything. And it’s something that Miguel is desperate to communicate in his large and busy family throughout the novel.
Miguel is twelve years old and easily overlooked because he has endless brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and they’re all surrounded by hundreds of sheep that they’ve got to get sheared and herded up to the Sangre de Cristo mountains so they can get some off-season grazing in. And that’s what Miguel wants, too; he wants to be part of the group of men who lead the sheep up into the mountains, even though he’s not quite old enough yet. Miguel, very authentically, talks and thinks like a child: he has a monomaniacal focus on convincing his parents to let him go to the mountains this year, except for all of the times that he gets very easily distracted, notably when presented with the opportunity to actually make a case that he is old enough and mature enough to help take care of the sheep. In one memorable scene, Miguel scrambles to prove himself by tracking down some lost sheep, and he’s successful, but as he tries to recount the story of how he did it to his family, he keeps getting sidetracked because he’s trying to talk up his own contributions and make himself sound more heroic, and everyone is just trying to get him to talk about the details of, you know, where the lost sheep actually were.
As the deadline for heading up into the mountains draws closer, Miguel pulls out his ace in the hole: he prays to San Ysidro (in Europe, Saint Isidore the Laborer), his village’s patron and the patron saint of farmers. He knows that if you pray to a saint and you ask him for something, you get it. Because he’s a child.
First of all, I know that a lot of these books have ended up being about Christianity in general and Catholicism specifically; I promise you that I did not know that when I decided to start this project, and I also promise you that next week’s book will be about Methodists.
Anyways, I don’t know how to teach my daughters to pray, or about God in general. I am (I think?) raising them Catholic, but I have no idea where to start with any of this, especially considering that my audience will have a complete breakdown if I offer her a cookie 48 hours too early. How do I tell someone who does not share my understanding of cause and effect, or linear time, or the cosmological barriers between fantasy and reality, how prayer works? I don’t know how it works. I don’t know if the concept of “prayer” shares my understanding of cause and effect, or linear time, or the cosmological barriers between fantasy and reality. Here’s how Miguel explains the idea of prayer, in the context of the village’s fiesta to celebrate and petition San Ysidro:
“People come to the fiesta not only from Los Cordovas but from all around, more than come to the church. This is bad, says my grandfather, that they should want to eat more than to pray. Maybe so, but I think if you’re hungry you might as well go ahead and eat if there’s food around all cooked and ready. It’s fine to pray except you never know what’s going to be. But if you are hungry and you have a plate of food, at least you know soon you won’t be hungry anymore.”
This is at least as good as any explanation I would give my own children, perhaps because it sounds, authentically, like an explanation a child would use. So Miguel prays during the fiesta that he’ll be able to go up in the mountains this year, and the thing is, it actually works. He does get to go. But he gets to go because after he prays, his older brother gets drafted and the shepherds need someone to take the brother’s place. In other words, “now what there is to explain is how the worst thing happened, and then how the best thing happened, and then how everything got mixed up, what was good and what was bad.”
Miguel is scared, and his older brother, Gabriel, is scared. But towards the end of the book, they talk about what’s coming for each of them, and Miguel’s main concern - again, Miguel talks and thinks like a child, probably because Miguel was a real child, one that Joseph Krumgold lived with to research a film - is how the hell he’s supposed to pray in the future so that he doesn’t screw things up so badly again. He and Gabriel ponder how much the saints are actually able to help them in the first place:
“...if they give us a wish, they got to abide by the law, the law we have, and take something. Even if they don’t want to. Because down here you can only get something if you give. Even if they wanted to, Mike [Miguel], they couldn’t give us a wish for nothing. Because things got to happen to us in only just the regular ways. And saints got to go along with that like everyone else. And that’s why, when you get your wish, you can always be sure there’s a surprise coming along.”
Miguel, using his child-size logic, starts putting together a rough answer for why things don’t ever seem to work out when he prays: maybe the saints are just really busy all of the time, maybe they’re just getting battered by petitions left and right, and maybe if the saints had a little more time on their hands to take care of things, maybe they’d be able to fix some of the bigger problems, like the war that Gabriel was being sent off to in the first place. So Miguel eventually lands here by the end of the novel:
“All we can do is to stop right now, to make wishes. Because anyway, like you say, it’s dangerous. And if a lot of people stop, then things in general might get better. Because they’d have more time, the saints and the angels and the cherubs. To take care of, like what you said, what’s in Europe…next year on San Ysidro Day I’m going to say a new kind of prayer. Like when we all get out there and it’s the Blessing of the Fields, I’m going to pray like this. ‘San Ysidro. Dear Sir. This is Miguel Chavez who took up so much of your time last year. Things went all right last year, and I have no complaints. Thank you for last year. But this year, I haven’t got any wish. No wish at all. All I wish, San Ysidro, is for things to be the way you wish. Amen.’”
Like I said, I don’t know how to talk about God to my daughters, or about church, or about prayer. Joseph Krumgold hung out with a kid in New Mexico and listened to him for a few months in 1953, and he was able to write something that sounded like a pretty darn good explanation of how we should think about prayer, how we should think about how we talk to God and the saints. I can think of worse things to tell my children, and, as Miguel’s brother points out in the novel, it turns out that Miguel’s thinking sounds an awful lot like the Lord’s Prayer. With …And Now Miguel, I got to read a child’s reasoning on prayer and God, and a child’s reasoning is not my reasoning, but when it comes to God, I’m basically using a child’s reasoning everyday.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1981 medalist, Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson.
Eggers, call me, I want to pitch you on my script for The Toddler.
And the only one who was a dude - the other two-time winners are Speare, Konigsburg, Paterson, Lowry, and diCamillo.