The Sedentary Benedict Society

At one point in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, a character demands, “Is it really as great as all that? . . . Sitting in a stupid chair doing nothing?” She’s referring to the experience of being in the Whisperer, a mind-control device in the novel.

That description could also be applied to watching television, which the book is quite down on. In fact, the Whisperer involves kids going into a trance-like state and repeating an adult’s thoughts because, for the sort of fantastic reason necessary in middle-grade fiction, the machine needs preadolescents to be effective.

For that matter, “sitting in a stupid chair and doing nothing” might be one way some folks would describe reading.

Ironically, a great deal of the first chapters of The Mysterious Benedict Society consists of characters sitting in a chair doing nothing but listening to other characters. In that part of the book, Stewart sticks quite closely to the point of view of Reynie Muldoon, foremost of the book’s protagonists. Only later does the narrator move into the heads of Sticky Washington, Kate Wetherall, and other characters, and only later does the action heat up.

As a result, in those early chapters, we readers learn about the other characters’ experiences and the requisite Threat to the Entire World as Reynie listens, sitting in a stupid chair and doing nothing.

How the Mysterious Benedict Society Blew Their Cover?

Little, Brown is scrambling to print jackets for the Mysterious Benedict Society books so that they show a character with “light brown skin” as having, well, light brown skin. I thought it worth considering how this discrepancy probably came about, and how people have reacted to it.

In The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, Trenton Lee Stewart describes the character of George “Sticky” Washington as “a skinny boy with light brown skin…and a completely bald head.” The series’ other three young protagonists, and most of the adults around them, are white.

Bookshelves of Doom noted how all three books are illustrated throughout by the same artists who drew their covers: Carson Ellis for the first and Diana Sudyka for the second and third. The interior illustrations show Sticky with skin unmistakably darker than his friends’, as in this sample.

But those are black and white drawings, meaning that:

• “Light brown” comes out as gray, just like apple red, grassy green, and Nike magenta.
• The editor, who knows the book better than anyone else at the publisher, is seeing every stage of production.

In contrast, the jacket illustrations are in color. The style Ellis and Sudyka use probably means they drew the lines in black ink and then added other colors, such as skin tones, with watercolors. And editors don’t oversee the printing of jackets.

A number of bloggers have posted close-ups of Sticky from the printed Mysterious Benedict covers, showing how pale his skin has come out. However, I haven’t seen any that show the other kids for comparison, as in this detail of the second book from Amazon.

The blonde girl at lower right is pale as paper with spots of pink on her cheeks. The white boy at the left has a little more color. Sticky’s face and arms are slightly tanner than the other kids’. Not enough to be “light brown,” but different enough to indicate that Sudyka originally colored him darker than the others.

Sticky lacks the other markers that cartoonists use to distinguish people with some African ancestry from people with mostly European ancestry. He has no hair! The Mysterious Benedict art style doesn’t really include lips or variable noses. And of course Sticky’s skin is “light brown,” so the watercolor wash shouldn’t have been very dark.

I suspect that whoever oversaw the jacket printing didn’t recognize the figure of Sticky as a brown-skinned boy. Furthermore, that character is in the background of two of the three covers, and thus not an obvious prominent detail to worry about. So in color adjustments at the printer, his skin stopped being brown at all.

As long as we’re pondering representations of race, it’s worth considering that the white boy, Reynie Muldoon, is the most prominent child on all three book covers, as well as the character that all three books start with. This is a series about a group of kids, but are the white girls and the black boy secondary to the white boy?

How does the character of Sticky Washington fit with and work against our culture’s dominant stereotypes of young African-American males? He shares a name with a US President, a trait already familiar when Roosevelt Franklin was in elementary school. But in other ways, the character seems designed to negate negative stereotypes: Sticky’s a bespectacled bookworm, usually nervous instead of cool, totally unthreatening. And, apparently, easily overlooked.

Finally, it’s interesting how long it took for a critical mass of people to notice Sticky’s discoloration. Fuse #8 pointed out the discrepancy between text and cover of The Mysterious Benedict Society back in December 2007, the year that first book was published and widely reviewed. But few folks responded until Bookshelves of Doom raised the issue again this month. By then, the blogosphere had been primed by the more visible examples of Liar and Magic Under Glass.