Let me proceed carefully here.
1. Here Comes the Garbage Barge is based on the true story of the barge loaded with Long Island garbage that meandered up and down the Atlantic coast, rejected at every port from New York to Belize, during the summer of 1987.
2. Jonah Winter is a terrific author of children's nonfiction. I would not and will not assemble a school library without his biographies of Sandy Koufax
, Dizzy Gillespie
, Sonia Sotomayor
, Diego Rivera
, and others.
3. The miniatures that illustrate this book, made of polymer clay, trash, household items, paint, glue, spit and banana peels by the immensely clever (and, one suspects, just a teeny bit OCD) Red Nose Studio, are worth spending about a month poring over. As the garbage ages, it gets visibly grosser. It's like a Claymation Christmas special made by the Spitting Image folks. Which - yay!
BUT.
In order, one presumes, to make the people and locations in the story more personable, the characteristics of each are exaggerated. Vernacular spelling is used to distinguish the North Carolinians who don't want the garbage from the Louisianans who don't want the garbage. The Floridians who don't want the garbage are old folks floating in swim rings and the Texan who doesn't want the garbage is riding a horse in a boat dressed like Teddy Roosevelt in Night at the Museum. Ok so far. Cute.
BUT I SAID BUT.
The "boss," the waste management guy back in Long Island, is named Gino Stroffolino. He tawks wit' a Noo Yawk accent and looks like Fredo in The Godfather. Gino makes arrangements with various other characters: Joey LaMotta, who is shown doing business out of a phone booth and who also looks like Fredo; "dis guy down in Mexico... goes by da name of John Smith"; and Rico D'Amico in Belize.
Now listen to me. If the waste management guys - clearly coded as shady characters - in this story were similar in that they were all African American, instead of having a vowel at the end of their names, we'd be up in arms about this depiction. I lived in New York City and I know that the waste management industry was dominated by firms with Italian American names, but those firms didn't operate out of phone booths, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of them don't wear sharkskin suits to the office.
The moral of the story is "Don't make so much garbage!" but, intentionally or not, the villain is Gino. Reading the story to my kids, when we got to Gino, my six-year-old pointed, "That's the bad guy!" My son does not know the history of mobbed-up waste management in NYC - he was reading the code of slicked-back hair, ducked-down head, accent, and suit.
Maybe I was on the fence when the anti-Italian-American Defamation League or whoever they were protested that The Sopranos was making them look bad - oh it was hard to disagree with a show that brought us the comedy-drama stylings of Aida Turturro on a regular basis - but here I draw the line. I won't have a kids' book in my library that so clearly - and, I think, gratuitously - casts a single ethnic group in such a pejorative light.
And all right, blast it. Just as I was ready to regretfully reject this thing on the basis of its ethnic stereotyping, I saw this video, in which the ADORABLE Chris of Red Nose Studio lovingly describes his process in making and photographing the sculptures that make up the illustrations of the book.
You tell me. Are we won over?
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