2016: LAST STOP ON MARKET STREET by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson
CJ pushed through the church doors, skipped down the steps.
CJ, the protagonist of 2016 medalist Last Stop On Market Street, just wants to go home after church. He just wants to get in a car and ride home, like his friends get to do. He sure as hell doesn't want to stand in the rain at the bus stop with his grandma and ride the smelly crowded bus.
But CJ's grandma tells him to keep his chin up, tells him that there are all sorts of wonderful things on the bus, all sorts of wonderful things in the neighborhood he's heading to, if he would just care to look. So CJ boards the bus, and the bus driver does a magic trick for him. A blind man sits next to him and explains that you don't just need your eyes to see. When two teens sharing an iPod board the bus, CJ laments that he doesn't have one himself, and his grandma points out the busker sitting across from them. The busker launches into a song, and CJ, taking a cue from the blind man, closes his eyes and lets the music lift him above the city, into a world of light and color. The people around him on the bus may not have much, but they have each other, and they have this moment, and it turns out that may be all you ever really need.
Eventually, the bus reaches the "last stop on Market Street", and CJ and his grandma begin their walk down a clearly blighted, dismal city street. Again, CJ, apparently having forgotten everything that has just happened on the bus, laments how gross Market Street is. But his grandma, again, encourages him to find the beauty where other people may not care to look, and CJ takes in a rainbow over one of the buildings before he and his grandmother reach their final destination, the place they always go after church every week.
It's a soup kitchen; CJ and his grandmother leave church and take a bus every week to go to the soup kitchen…where they work as volunteers serving soup to the less fortunate. So by the final pages of Last Stop On Market Street, CJ and the reader come to realize the ultimate lesson: it's okay to spend time around the filthy stupid poors, as long as you are very careful to never become one of them yourself.
Wait.
Ok, so the most famous thing David Foster Wallace ever wrote, or at least the thing he wrote that the highest number of people have read start to finish, was a 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College, almost a decade after Infinite Jest made him a legend, and three years before he would take his own life. The speech was later published as "This Is Water", taken from an old joke Wallace tells at the beginning of the speech:
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”"
Now, I'm not going to attempt to say what Wallace said better than he said it. Because he said it very well in his speech, and in Infinite Jest, and in most of his short fiction1, and in his unfinished novel that was posthumously published as The Pale King. What he is saying is this: the central struggle of every human life (assuming that life lives in a sufficiently developed society) is to understand that every other individual possesses consciousness just like you, that you are not the main character of reality because everyone is equally the main character of reality. Here's how he sets up our default mindset:
"Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us…Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real."
From here, Wallace explains to the Kenyon students that, as it turns out, most of life for educated adults in comfortable white-collar jobs is boredom and frustration and loneliness. It's standing in line at the pharmacy and remembering to pay the gas bill and dealing with people who also didn't get enough sleep last night. It's just a long, long grind. And the reason you struggle for your entire life to try and escape the prison of thinking that you are "the realest, most vivid and important person in existence" is because it's one thing that can make your life a little bit less of a grind:
"Most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it."
CJ hasn't heard Wallace's speech, of course, but he learns the same lesson from his grandma when they take the bus to market street: this is water. You are surrounded by something you don't even realize, something sacred and on fire with the same force that made the stars. Every bus is a place where something sacred happens.
Wait.
I had a sociology professor in college for two courses on marriage and family studies. At one point during one if these courses, she said, emphatically, with an inflection that I'm going to try to capture using punctuation and typeface, "being poor? Sucks." This is a very effective summary of the entire academic field of sociology.
My professor was not trying to summarize the entire field of sociology in one sentence. She was speaking from her own experience - she had grown up in poverty - and was making a clarifying point about some policy, likely Clinton's mid-90s restructuring of the federal welfare program from AFDC to TANF2. Her point was this: poor families need material help. When you are so poor that you don't know when you'll next be able to eat a meal that contains meat, you do not find solace in your family and the tighter bonds you've forged from living such a meager life. It is not The Waltons in here. Being poor makes you stressed and tired and angry. And on top of all of that, you have to ride the bus.
The Chicago Transit Authority has severely reduced service of trains and buses, to even below early-in-the-pandemic levels; buses and trains are running anywhere from 20-60% as frequently as they did in 2020. The reason we know this is because reporters and citizens did their own analysis of public data. It's certainly not because the CTA admitted it, because they continued to tout their levels of service long after those levels had collapsed, and the head of the CTA refuses to show up to City Council budgeting meetings to explain where his money is going and what he would need to get things running at the right levels. There are, bluntly, not enough employees right now to operate the trains and buses that the city needs, and the city is not willing to invest in wages and benefits to attract new operators, although they seem to have enough money to keep throwing cops into these overcrowded, 30-minute-late trains.
The result is that our city doesn't know if their transit system can get them to their jobs or their doctor's appointments or home to see their families. They stand on the platform for 30 minutes in the dark after hours of getting yelled at by customers, waiting to get home so they can finally piss and eat dinner and try to sleep before doing it all over again. As one city alderman put it, "People are late to work, people are late to appointments, people are no longer able to trust that this vital public service is going to get them where they need to go on time.” The people most affected by this collapse, of course, are the city's poor and working people, the people whose jobs can't be done from home because they're garbage collectors or firefighters or librarians or line cooks or hotel maids or barbers or teachers or pharmacists or nurses or child care workers, because they're the people who have to hold civil society together. The people most affected will be the ones who can't afford to just buy a car, or can't afford to put gas in it more often.
It is, as it turns out, within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. But no matter how many times you say "this is water" to yourself, you cannot forget that things are crowded and hot and slow because people made choices to leave them that way, that it doesn't have to be like this.
Last Stop On Market Street isn't just the 2016 Newbery medalist. It was also a finalist for the Caldecott medal in the same year, and the Coretta Scott King medal in the same year, making it one of the most decorated children's books of the past decade or so. More importantly, it's a picture book, and picture books do not win the Newbery medal. This one, according to the Newbery committee, was just that good.
But Last Stop On Market Street doesn't entirely sit right with me. The writing is good, the illustrations are excellent (the author, de la Peña, and the illustrator, Robinson, have each written several other acclaimed works), and there are many worse things to tell a story about than a kid riding the bus, encountering people who are different than he is, and helping out at a soup kitchen. But this is still a story, on paper, about a kid who is taught to look with wonder and awe at people who are poorer than he is, to marvel at all the cool beauty they can reveal to him, and some of that feels almost condescending to me, as though poor people are something we can visit in a zoo-like enclosure, people who are expected to teach us about the hidden marvels of the world and the True Meaning Of Life when, in reality, they're probably just like you and me, trying to be awake and alive people for one more day, enduring a shitty job and a broken transit system.
Had the book ended with CJ as a patron at the soup kitchen and not a volunteer, I think it would have been better, although not "has three major ALA medals on the cover" better. This still feels like a book about uncomfortable people written for a very comfortable audience. This is water, and it should be the same water for all of us.
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 1992 medalist, Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.
"Mister Squishee" and "Octet" being my personal favorite stories by Wallace on this particular topic.
This is outside the scope of this essay, but: my professor thought Clinton's welfare policy was bad, and I did and do agree with her.