The Brooklyn Rail

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children prompts readers to question their relationship to the natural world. Novelist and longtime gardener Jamaica Kincaid and contemporary artist Kara Walker’s new picture book lists the plants, starting with “A is for Apple” and ending with “Z is for Zea Mays” (the term for corn in Northern England), that make up the “colonized world.” The book’s subtitle—“Alphabetary of the Colonized World”—also acts a nod to other forms of colonization, including modern agriculture’s roots in slavery and indentured labor. These flowers, trees, and produce touch on themes relevant to the climate crisis—exploitation, greed, and destruction—in addition to symbols of humans’ mistreatment of each other.

At the book’s launch at the New York Public Library, Kincaid explained that she started writing this book after reading a New York Times article discussing the need for more books for “children of color.” The wording bothered Kincaid, as it excluded white children from needing diverse perspectives in their literature. So, she wrote a book that neither prioritized white children nor marginalized nonwhite cultures. The marker “for Colored Children” does not refer to an exact age or reading level for her book, but rather a state of mind in which readers of all ages can reconfigure their worldview and be receptive to new information.

Each entry features evocative illustrations by Walker, created often without reading the full text in advance. While Walker is known for shadow puppet-like silhouettes, most of her illustrations in the book are roughly sketched watercolors. “E is for Earth” shows pencil-drawn babies and toddlers cocooned in and emerging from the soil’s womb. These depictions of life and decay loosely relate to the text, in which Kincaid explains “the atmosphere in which we humans, individual gardeners, now live is the result of one hundred million years’ rain of toxic natural chemicals, so here we are.”

The garden Kincaid presents in this encyclopedia features cash and food crops, medicinal aids, and more. Within each entry, she describes the physical properties, common uses, and historical significance of the crop. Entries also explore the men, such as Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Carolus Linnaeus, who influenced our understanding of agriculture and botany and disrupted the way Indigenous groups used plants. “A is also for Amaranth” explains how Spaniards forced the Aztec and Inca to eat European grains like barley and wheat versus the indigenous amaranth. Meanwhile, entries for daffodils and roses note how these flowers inspired English poets, whose words were memorized by children living in countries conquered by the Spanish, English, and Dutch.

The picture book format and letter recognition motif mimic early instructional materials, allowing readers to accessibly engage with contrary ideas. In “G is for Guava,” Walker shows that guava can also symbolize exotification. She depicts a Black girl in a flowy lime green dress standing on a crate with the words “for export” and “exotic fruits.” She picks a guava seemingly out of the sky as a white boy below peaks up her skirt. The image prompts the questions: what is “exotic” and who “for export”—the fruit or the girl? Meanwhile, “O is for Orange” quotes from Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography to illustrate the fruit as a symbol of wealth on a Maryland plantation, in addition to its association with sunshine and health. Readers must hold multiple truths at the same time.

The tone of a children’s book also smooths over tragic moments in the text. In “L is also for Liriodendron (tulipifera and chinense),” Kincaid explains the connection between the tulip tree, a symbol of familial love, and the poplar tree, which the song “Strange Fruit” uses as a symbol for the history of lynching in the American South. Walker’s watercolor shows bright tulip-colored flowers and decayed plants. A hooded figure dressed in a long tunic looms over a baby. The same plant known to African Americans as a symbol of violence and brutality can also be a symbol of familial love. In “S is for Solanaceae,” Kincaid offers a new way of understanding both the Irish potato famine and modern Italian cuisine by explaining the botanical properties of this poisonous plant family indigenous to the South American continent. Death, beauty, innocence, famine, or trauma exist in the same plant’s history. Plant properties can be used, misused, or abused depending on the values and education a community holds.

Kincaid and Walker’s book centers the relationships humans create with various plants, showing, as Kincaid mentions in “S is also for Sugarcane,” that the plants are innocent. The meanings or purpose we have attached reflect more about a society’s values than the plant’s qualities. Understanding this may be a key step in adequately addressing melting ice caps and increasingly hot summers.