Beyond the Secret Garden: Growing up away from birth parents continued

In the latest in our long-running Beyond the Secret Garden series, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor return to the subject of the representations of lone children of colour, and look at books published in the 21^st century.

The twenty-first century has seen two major developments regarding books featuring racially minoritised children living away from their birth parents. The first is that such books have increasingly been written by authors who spent some of their childhood in care in one form or another. The other is a proliferation of books set in the past which often highlight how colonialism and racism have impacted questions about who is best placed to raise children of colour.

The line between adoption and forced removal / kidnap within the context of colonialism was often unclear. Forcible assimilation of racially minoritised children into white Christian society was often a strategy of colonialism (discussed in our column on schools in BfK 256). Jemmy Button by Jennifer Uman and Valerio Vidali (Templar, 2013), words by Alix Barzelay, is a picture book telling the story of Orundellico, a teenage member of the Yaghan (or Yámana) people from islands around Tierra del Fuego in modern Chile and Argentina. He was one of the hostages taken to England by Captain FitzRoy on the HMS Beagle in 1830. Fitzroy’s stated belief was that he was introducing ‘Button’ to Christianity and civilization so that he could later return and spread them to his people. ‘Come away with us and taste our language, see the lights of the civilised world.’ It is only in the afternote that the authors use Orundellico’s original name.  Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy (Mammoth 2000) detailed the darker side of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital through the character of Toby, who as a baby was taken from his enslaved mother and given to the hospital ‘for rearing and education’ by a man who intended to later ‘apprentice’ him as a ‘servant’.  Toby has no choice and no hope of escaping the house, where he serves drinks and is treated as ‘a favoured pet’ by wealthy women. He faces being shipped to Virginia and a life of slavery if he disobeys or tries to escape.  Gavin’s depiction of the Foundling Hospital is grimmer than that found in Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather (2009); Wilson’s book includes a mean Matron, but not the blatant disregard for the fate of children who leave the hospital that Gavin includes.

Recent books have also examined informal adoption arrangements in the 19^th century, including the historical Africans and Indians ‘adopted’ by Queen Victoria such as Victoria Princewill’s YA offering, The Diary of Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Novel (2023) or Zetta Elliott’s ghost story for younger readers, The Ghosts in the Castle (2017).  J. T. Williams’ historical mysteries, Lizzie and Belle: Drama and Danger (2022) and Lizzie and Belle: Portraits and Poison (2023) include a fictionalized version of the historical figure of Dido Belle, daughter of an enslaved woman and a British navy officer, brought up by her (white) uncle the Earl of Mansfield.  All of these protagonists struggle with the ‘privilege’ of being looked after while at the same time being treated differently from white children in the family.  Here, the ‘adopted’ children have parents who are alive, but their white guardians (and sometimes their own parents who ‘give’ the children to the white families) feel they can offer better care.

Historical fiction and nonfiction set in more recent times depict children’s homes as kinder places, interested in fostering children’s interests and skills, but also places of exile from families that had rejected them for one reason or another.  Both Hilary Claire’s The Story of Walter Tull (Northamptonshire Black History Society 2007) and Dan Lyndon’s Walter Tull: Footballer, Soldier, Hero (Collins Big Cat 2011) indicate that Walter and his brother were well looked after at the Bonner children’s home where their stepmother had sent them, but it was not home.  Their stepmother had not wanted to send them away, but ‘couldn’t manage’ seven children on her own.  The children’s home is depicted in both books as the place where Tull learned to play football and thus began his career—but the memory of his parents and the love of his brothers and sisters is the reason that Tull is described as excelling.

Proponents of racism have always been obsessed with sexual relations. Apartheid, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Rassenschande (race defilement) laws all prohibited white people having sexual relationships with racially minoritised people. The offspring of such relationships were often stigmatized, and in many cases this impacted decisions as to who would raise them. J.P. Rose’s fictional depiction of a post-Second World War child of a white English mother and an African American soldier father, Birdie (Andersen 2024), and E. L. Norry’s Fablehouse (Bloomsbury 2023) both include children’s homes designed specifically for ‘Brown Babies’.  Mrs Dudley, in Rose’s Birdie, and Miss Isolde, in Norry’s Fablehouse, are both extremely kind housemistresses.  Mrs Dudley loves Birdie as ‘if thou were my own flesh and blood’ and Miss Isolde considers the children in her care ‘Absolutely magical’.  But the children’s homes are both located outside of towns and the children are protected against malicious racism by being taught within the homes.  However, this attempt at shielding the children can only last so long and go so far.  Heather, at Fablehouse, is treated by one of the staff ‘like we were her own real-life dolls’ at the same time that the people in the nearby town of ‘Selworthy liked to pretend we didn’t exist. All because our mums got too friendly with Black soldiers’.  Birdie, in Rose’s book, feels more loved in Mrs Dudley’s care than she does when initially adopted by her Great-Aunt; she has to explain to her how both malicious and casual racism feels, including defending (as Heather does with Miss Gloria) her hair, which her Great-Aunt calls ‘wild and unruly’ and tries to ‘tame’.  Birdie and Heather both experience racist taunts and bullying from local white children and adults.  The care home in both these books is the safest place for the child characters.

After the 1990s, following increased concerns about ‘transracial adoption’, there was a push to find more Black and Asian British foster parents for Black children, although this initiative tended to assume that all Black or Asian communities shared the same values.  Beverley Naidoo’s The Other Side of Truth (2000) includes Nigerian refugee children being fostered by British Jamaican foster parents. Mrs King suggests to Sade that they may be related because her ancestors had come from Nigeria, but Sade finds that there is considerable difference between how she, as an African, is treated in comparison to Black British children from the Caribbean.  Africa is seen as a place of deprivation and Sade is bullied in school by a white British and a Black British girl with Jamaican heritage.  Naidoo’s text highlights tensions between Black communities, but also the institutional indifference to those tensions.

According to government statistics, children of Black or Asian heritage are much less likely to be adopted from foster care than their white counterparts.  This can be seen in recent literature, including Onjali Q. Rauf’s The Star Outside my Window (2019), where the foster mother Mrs Iwuchukwu has adopted the white girl Sophie but not the other foster children—two of Brazilian heritage and one Black British who has been separated from his sister—in her care.  The other children worry that they are too old to be adopted—although Ben and Travis tell Aniyah and Noah that they have a chance, because people like taking brothers and sisters together.

Rico Hinson-King won the Premier League Young Writer of the Year competition with his powerful short story on the topic ‘fearless’. This led to his picture book Strong and Tough (Bloomsbury, 2022) written when he was ten years old and illustrated by Nick Sharatt. He tells the story of Charlie and siblings, their journey through the care system, separation, and eventual adoption by a white gay couple. At the end Rico reveals this to be a true story. The book might offer reassurance to young readers going through similar experiences though its upbeat message is tempered by the note at the outset that, ‘This is Charlie’s personal foster care journey but not every child’s story will be the same. We recommend reading and reflecting on this book with a grown-up.’

Two recent books aimed at young adults provide contemporary stories of young people in care. Marc in Danielle Jawando’s YA Book Prize-winning When Our Worlds Collided (2022) is one of three main characters, and reflects on his experiences as a young gay man dealing with foster families, social workers and teachers. Jawando’s use of alternating narrators highlights the commonalities and particularities between three young Black people in Manchester who witness a stabbing in the Arndale Centre.

In Patrice Lawrence’s Needle (2022), Charlene, the elder sibling, is put in foster care while her younger half-sister Candy is returned to her father.  The pain of sibling separation makes being in foster care much worse, as she feels twice abandoned. Charlene is a keen knitter, whose trust has been eroded to such an extent that she struggles to ever apologise. When a blanket she is knitting for her sister is destroyed by the son of her foster mother, she stabs him in the hand with a needle. Lawrence writes in such a way that we can understand Charlene and root for her even as we see her make questionable choices. The knitted blanket can be read as a metaphor for the delicate fabric of family – tightly-knit yet easily unravelled in careless hands. In contrast to Bernard Ashely’s voiceless Donovan Croft, where we find ourselves gazing upon Donovan just as many of the characters in the story do (BfK 270), Lawrence invites to see the story of a fostered Black child from the inside.

Dr Darren Chetty is a writer and a lecturer at UCL with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip-hop culture. He contributed to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla, and has since published five books as co-author and co-editor. He tweets at @rapclassroom.

Karen Sands-O’Connor is a Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield. Her book British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour (Bloomsbury 2022) won the 2024 Children’s Literature Association Honor Book Award.

Darren and Karen’s book Beyond the Secret Garden: Racially Minoritised People in British Children’s Books is out now, published by English & Media Centre.