Who could forget Potato Face Blind Man, Hatrack the Horse, and, of course, Bozo the Button Buster who Busted All His Buttons When a Mouse Came? Apparently, many people have forgotten these bizarre, mythical, magical characters who appear in Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.”
Rare is the American high school student who makes it through required English classes without a glancing encounter with a Sandburg poem, but few have encountered his strange stories for children, an attempt to capture the American fairytale. Many widely read people have never heard of Sandburg’s project, and those who have heard of it seem to miss the point of his nonsense verse and how perhaps it’s not nonsense at all.
The point of the nonsense: fun
Critics suggest that the stories are for children, and anecdotally he did create them for his three daughters. His children, named Margaret, Janet and Helga, he nicknamed “Spink”, “Skabootch” and “Swipes,” strange names that appear in parts of the far-ranging Rootabaga Stories. Sandburg claimed that his stories were intended for readers “5 to 105 years of age.” Experience suggests that bookish adults and children alike can find the tales engrossing. One thing that is for certain is you will not know what exactly is going on in a Rootabaga story; there is a disorienting bizarreness. If you give up the need to know, you can find the stories enjoyable in their strangeness, whimsical and fun.
The stories are in the first place American myths. According to one critic, Sandburg told Karl Detzer, “I wanted something more in the American lingo. I was tired of princes and princesses and I sought the American equivalent of elves and gnomes.” In this, Sandburg succeeds admirably, capturing the rhythms and repetitions of fairytales. Information that is indecipherable carries significance through its repetition, and descriptive phrases that one cannot picture become evocative through their urgent reuse.
The stories are also lyrical, as one would expect from a poet like Sandburg. Sandburg wrote that his Rootabaga Stories were “attempts to catch fantasy, accents, pulses, eye flashes, inconceivably rapid and perfect gestures, sudden pantomimic moments, drawls and drolleries, gazings and musings–authoritative poetic instants–knowing that if the whir of them were caught quickly and simply enough in words, the result would be a child lore interesting to child and grown-up.” And they are!
An example of Sandburg’s magic
How could you not be intrigued by the description of Spuds the ballplayer picking moons from the spraggly branches at the request of Pink Peony, a girl so beautiful that “when she passed a bush of peonies, some of the flowers would whisper, ‘She is lovelier than we are.’”
Not content to make a vaguely poetic scene in “a valley where the peacocks always cry before it rains, where the frogs always gamble with the golden dice after midnight,” Sandburg takes the story to dizzying and disorienting heights, changing perspective and placing in the ordinary a whollopping sense of mystery and magic.
Over the course of the evening, Spuds collects four moons for Pink Peony, which she stows in the backseat of the car: one is a silver hat full of peach-color pearls, one a circle of gold with a blood-color autumn leaf, one a brass pansy sprinkled with two rainbows, and the last an Egyptian collar frozen in diamond cobwebs. You may have though harvesting moons was all the whimsy and magic, but then:
Driving home, the spray of a violet dawn was on the east sky. And it was nearly daylight when they drove up to the front door of Pink Peony’s home. She ran into the house to get a basket to carry the presents in. She came running out of the house with a basket to carry the presents in.
She looked in the back seat; she felt with her hands and fingers all over the back seat.
In the back seat she could find only four oranges. They opened the oranges and in each orange they found a yellow silk handkerchief.
Today, if you go to the house where Pink Peony and Spuds are living, you will find four children playing there each with a yellow silk handkerchief tied around the neck in a mystic slip knot.
Each child has a moon face and a moon name. And sometimes their father and mother pile them into a car and they ride out to the valley where the peacocks always cry before it rains—and where the frogs always gamble with golden dice after midnight.
What it all means is beside the point. There is something mystic in the shapeshifting of a moon that multiplies and gets caught in trees, moons that are plucked and stowed in cars, moons that become oranges that produce scarves that are tied around children that display the qualities of the original moon. That’s not just nonsense; that’s marvelous good storytelling.
How great storytelling works
In the fantastical changing, the constant seeming and becoming, Sandburg’s tales tap into the sense of wonder in folklore and fairytales. The stories documented by the Brothers Grimm are so familiar to us that we lose a sense of wonder in their recitation. There are strange variations that can catch our attention, but we have largely loss a sense of their bizarre qualities. In the mundane setting of the Midwest with ordinary ballplayers and farmers, Sandburg reawakens us to the mystery.
The quality of storytelling also successfully conveys a childlike sense of wonder. The adult’s senses are dulled and narrowed with the assumption that there is nothing new under the sun. Operating on preconceived schema and paradigms informed by past experience, very little of the sensory world is truly taken in. For the child, there are still startling surprises, like being so short you never look above men’s blue jeans, but in the store a child looks up at the towering man above the blue jeans to discover with astonishment he has been following the wrong pair of trousers. Or the dreamy child who muddles sleeping and waking imaginings with the real world to arrive at a sense of bewildering uncertainty: are there dogs bigger than their owners?
These types of perspective change and disorientation are common to folklore, in the shadow of which our explanatory and didactic literature appears flat and lifeless. Grace Lin spectacularly evokes that sense of magic with constant change in perspective. Her series of books based on Chinese folk tales feature rivers that are actually skies, moons that are at once huge and small glowing spheres, tapestries that are entire worlds, people who are animals, kings who are in disguise. Lin, as Sandburg does, taps into archetypal imagery, universal experiences, and constantly changing perspective to express just how absurd the world is.
What the critics miss
Where Sandburg’s critics are so wrong is in their contention that Sandburg’s project was one of deconstructing. On the contrary, he is so very playful. Children, who can be atrociously destructive, when they are playing on creative. Sandburg called children “anarchs of language and speech.” One commentator in the Huffington Post claimed, “The indisputable masters of nonsense are children. Without a lifetime of words to slough off, children remain mostly immune to language’s rules and so give us the Dada-est Dada-isms. But as each day passes, children around the world are sacrificing their verbal freedom for a language that may never be as exciting as their natural blathering.” This is not what Sandburg shows us in his work. Whatever he may have thought his project was, it was one of childlike wonder, creative marveling, and great fun. The “Rootabaga Stories” enliven rather than destroy. For those willing, the madcap universe of the Rootabaga Country is a place to experience the bewildering present in childlike fun.
Despite a quiet legacy, unknown as the Rootabaga Stories are by so many, you’ll find Sandburg’s work in strange places. You can even become a “Junior Rootabaga Ranger”! As evidenced by its persistent staying power, the Rootabaga Stories are worth revisiting.
Edited to add: Book 2 is significantly more enjoyable than Book 1. If you can only read one, make it Book 2!
