Allen Say,
Home of the Brave.
Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

In Allen Say's recent picture books, one feels that the artist is dreaming directly onto the page. Another person's dream is challenging to enter, but Say's paintings have a beauty and stillness that make you want to linger, as in a dream of your own. His touchstones are potent - and they are familiar. The mysterious journeys he invites readers on are personal investigations into American culture and history.

A lonely feeling pervades Home of the Brave, the story of a man's excursion - across barren California desert, back several decades in time - to one of the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. The cover image depicts the man facing a row of deserted barracks, ominous mountains rising in the background. He holds the hands of two children. All three face the empty camp.

When we meet this man, he is setting off on a journey in a kayak. In a series of large, luminous paintings, he travels down a river in a dark gorge, over a waterfall (which separates him from his boat), and along an underground stream in a tunnel. A shaft of light leads him up a ladder; he emerges in the desert on land with Indian ruins, possibly a reservation. Here he meets the two children pictured on the cover.

The boy and the girl are wearing the tags given to interned Japanese Americans, and they lead the man to the camp. The events that follow are confusing, blending the man's identity with that of his parents, and the present with this painful episode in America's past.

The West appears, on Say's canvas, as a ghost town: ground and sky against which one's own history, and that of the larger culture, can imprint in shifting and surprising ways, like a mirage. (The Indian ruins suggest other ghosts, other American stories that may, in a sense, be unfinished.)

When Say's character opens the door to one of the barracks, he sees the shadow of a man outside the window. Is it his father? A group of children from the internment camp appear before him, asking to be taken home. A chaotic scene follows, and the man finds himself starting from scratch, facing a new group of children, seemingly from the present. But the past is still there to be faced: name tags lie scattered on the ground. The man and the children watch as a gust of wind carries the tags skyward like white birds - perhaps representing the cranes' symbolic message of peace.

Often, as adults, we steer clear of books that lack obvious points of connection for a child. Sometimes it may be worthwhile to come at it the other way around: to find a book that has something unusual up its sleeve and help a young reader find his or her way to it, accepting it on its own terms. This can make for interesting journeys and conversations. It's another kind of reading.

Martha Davis Beck

Summer 2002