1991: MANIAC MAGEE by Jerry Spinelli
They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring.
“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.”
-Mother Jones
Eleven books into the list of Newbery winners, one thing that strikes me is how many of the works focus on class conflict and class differences. Maybe I shouldn't be that surprised, since, wouldn't ya know it, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Obviously, that's a famous line from early in The Communist Manifesto, although many translations omit "wouldn't ya know it". But the less famous line that immediately follows is "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another," and I wasn't expecting to see each of those literal conflicts in the handful of books I've read so far. Johnny Tremain is a journeyman silversmith who finds himself fighting in a war against the people trying to rule him and take his money from afar, fighting "so a man can stand up". The medieval lords and serfs of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! are constantly at each other's throats, and the only moments of hope we get are when some of their children are willing to look beyond those class divisions. The Bronze Bow is about a plebian boy in Roman-occupied Palestine who dreams of overthrowing his oppressors. In Lincoln: A Photobiography, Russell Freedman describes how one of the objectives of the Emancipation Proclamation was to encourage slaves to leave Southern plantations and blow a hole in the Confederate economy.
Even beyond that initial list of conflicts: Bridge To Terabithia describes the friendship between the boy from a poor working-class family and the daughter of tenured professors, and the tensions caused by the obvious differences in their class positions. Hell, even Joyful Noise has a goofy poem about a worker bee who wants to unionize. And The One And Only Ivan describes the ultimate class conflict, between the proletarian silverback gorilla and bourgeois mall carnie, which Marx, sadly, failed to anticipate.
But what would be the single strangest exploration of class in the Newbery canon? Well, it might be 1991 medalist Maniac Magee.
It's extremely difficult for me to pin down Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee, just like it's difficult for most of the characters in the book to pin down Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee himself. The entire novel is narrated like an old-timey urban legend you'd hear outside a malt shoppe after you finished up your game of hoop-and-stick, as Spinelli describes afternoons "so hot, if you were packing candy, you had soup in your pocket by two o’clock. So hot, the dogs were tripping on their own tongues" or beds that "gave…a weird feeling of slowly rising on a scoop of mashed potatoes." With language like this, Spinelli introduces us to Magee, an eccentric orphan boy in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Two Mills whose exploits become the stuff of lunchroom stories and jump rope chants.
Maniac's most famous trait, of course, is that he's fast. That's how he can beat Mars Bar Thompson in a footrace even while running backwards, or can pull off an amazing football play with James "Hands" Down, or get an inside-the-park frog ball home run off Little League strikeout king John McNab. He's constantly running everywhere, on the train tracks, around the baseball diamond, on both sides of Two Mills.
Maniac is also brilliant, even though he doesn't go to school. He reads every book he can get his hands on, often jogging around town with an open book in one hand. He basically taught himself to read and buys everything he can get his hands on at the public library used book sale. He even teaches an old man to read at one point.
We hear more of the legend of Maniac Magee as the novel goes on. He's the only kid that was ever allergic to pizza. He once snuck into the buffalo enclosure at the zoo and kissed the baby buffalo. He could undo any knot in any shoelace. He wasn't scared to knock on Old Man Finsterwald's door. Truly, he's a living legend. But the part of the Magee legend that is the focus of Spinelli's novel is that Maniac…well…he tried to solve racism.
The town of Two Mills, as it turns out, is heavily segregated:
"Hector Street was the boundary between the East and West Ends. Or, to put it another way, between the blacks and whites. Not that you never saw a white in the East End or a black in the West End. People did cross the line now and then, especially if they were adults, and it was daylight. But nighttime, forget it. And if you were a kid, day or night, forget it. Unless you had business on the other side, such as a sports team or school. But don’t be just strolling along, as if you belonged there, as if you weren’t afraid, as if you didn’t even notice you were a different color from everybody around you."
But Maniac is still a child, with no formal education and no real understanding of prejudice, or really of what "race" even is. Some of this, early in the novel, might come off as a little simplistic, although I think it mostly works in a book meant for children:
"For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange…Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn’t see it, this color business. He didn’t figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren’t any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End)."
What Spinelli is doing throughout the novel is showing you racism and segregation through the eyes of a child, specifically a naive child who doesn't understand where it comes from and struggles to take it at face value. Maniac Magee isn't going to do an in-depth explanation of redlining policy or the challenges black households have in accumulating wealth or disparities in public education, because Maniac is a child. But he's still a child who is upset by the prejudice that he sees, and who concludes that it's mainly driven by ignorance:
"What else would you expect? Whites never go inside blacks’ homes. Much less inside their thoughts and feelings. And blacks are just as ignorant of whites. What white kid could hate blacks after spending five minutes in the Beales’ house? And what black kid could hate whites after answering Mrs. Pickwell’s dinner whistle? But the East Enders stayed in the east and the West Enders stayed in the west, and the less they knew about each other, the more they invented."
Maniac tries to remedy this as best he can, by sharing his stories and, towards the end of the novel, bringing a black friend to a white kid's birthday party. But things get darker. Early in the novel, Maniac crashes with a black family in the East End whose house is eventually vandalized and burgled by their neighbors for the crime of sheltering a white kid. Later in the novel, Maniac crashes with a West End family who lives in squalor and appears to be preparing for a race riot, building a bunker in their living room:
"And he told Maniac what he often imagined, lying in bed: the blacks sweeping across Hector one steaming summer night; torches, chains, blades, guns, war cries; marauding, looting, overrunning the West End; climbing in through smashed windows, doors, looking for whites, bloodthirsty for whites, like Indians in the old days, Indians on a raid…That had been weeks before, and now the pillbox was under way, no longer an idea in the backyard but a reality in the dining room. Now there was no room that Maniac could stand in the middle of and feel clean. Now there was something else in that house, and it smelled worse than garbage and turds."
As apprehensive as I was reading a book from 1990 about a white child who tries to fix racism by getting black and white kids to talk to each other, I found that Spinelli did a decent job, apart from a few lines of dialogue that made me wince ("We gonna race, honky donky"). Importantly, Maniac ultimately doesn't fix racism; his good intentions aren't enough to overcome entrenched prejudices in Two Mills; the problem has far more complications than Maniac can grasp. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the novel, Spinelli just hoped that his story would leave readers with:
"A wish to dance through life with partners of every kind and color…Racism is still a problem, and I’m afraid it always will be. But there will also always be good people who see beyond the surface to the goodness in others. Therein lies hope, as long as people are people."
"People are people" and "see beyond the surface" are fine messages for a child to read as a preliminary introduction to a centuries-old evil. Spinelli wrote an engaging story with a unique voice and a nice message about tolerance. I did not expect him to publish a political analysis on the root causes and potential policy solutions for structural racism.
I kind of did expect Spinelli to do more with the fact that Maniac doesn't have a place to live.
As I said, Maniac Magee is one of the strangest explorations of class in the Newbery canon. I just said that the message of “if we all got to know each other we’d be less racist” is a little oversimplified but fine for a children’s novel, because I don’t expect Spinelli to go into a lot of detail on poverty or root causes of segregation. Except that abject poverty is on every page of this novel, and it is treated like an interesting quirk most of the time, as opposed to a further indictment of this segregated and bitter town. Maniac became Maniac when he ran away from his aunt and uncle's house, fed up with their loveless and silent marriage. He doesn't have parents because they were killed in a tragic accident when he was a toddler. He spends large stretches of the novel unhoused. Presumably, he's hungry most of the time. He dreams, specifically, of having a permanent address "because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other." He memorizes the addresses of everyone who takes him in. In one particularly brutal scene, he has given up hope of finding a permanent place to live or people to take care of him, and lies on the ground for days hoping to die of exposure.
But that's kind of the only brutal scene related to Maniac's poverty. For the most part, having no parents, no place to live, and no schooling is part of Maniac's mystique. "Maniac, Maniac, don't go to school" is part of the jump rope chant he inspired. And a story about a preteen boy trying to fix racism, when it's more likely that he'd be terrified of going hungry or having no place to sleep, is extremely weird.
It gets weirder. One of Maniac's caretakers is Grayson, a washed-up illiterate former minor league pitcher who lives at the YMCA, but share what little he has with Maniac out of compassion, and listens to Maniac's stories about the East End black families with surprise that they can be so similar to white families. When Maniac crashes with the West End McNab family, their race riot doomsaying and bunker-building is presented right alongside their crumbling, vermin-infested home. Maniac tries to get the McNab kids to stay in school by bribing them with pizza. In the novel, poverty, and the absence of it, has a clear relationship to hatred, or the absence of it, and to the fortress mentality symbolized by the McNab family. But it's not even clear from Spinelli's interview, 25 years after he wrote the book, that he finds this particularly important to the book and its themes, or even all that interesting.
And perhaps that's why I felt that he ended the novel very abruptly. Maniac tries one or two things to get kids from the opposite ends of town to talk to each other, and they don't really work, and then one of the families that had taken him in previously offers to take him in permanently, basically out of the blue, and then the book ends. For the most part, the book is well-written; Spinelli has written a lot of great children's novels, and he clearly is trying to spread a good and positive message. But with the unusual voice, the unusual main character, the fact that it's a book about racism where a boy runs around the city reading a secondhand book on the Children's Crusade, and the fact that it's a book about poverty that doesn't seem to know that it's a book about poverty, it's hard to walk away from this story and not say "wow, that one was really strange." Marx definitely failed to anticipate Maniac Magee.
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 1936 medalist, Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink.