Seven Years Ago Thursday: Fireboat and Other Books About September 11

Seven Years Ago Thursday: Fireboat and Other Books About September 11

That day, we were all trying to be normal, at least at work. I had a cold, but came to school in the afternoon to teach a class; it was the kindergarteners’ very first library session and I didn’t want to miss it. For most or maybe all of them, it was a regular first week of kindergarten; we were in Seattle, far from the attacks, and they didn’t know what was going on, maybe just that the grownups were weirdly jittery. 

I was a mess: disorganized, stuffed up, exhausted. And terrified. At one point, I left the story rug and went to my desk to find a book, trying all the while to keep up a cheerful patter so I wouldn’t lose the kids’ (always tenuous) attention. Standing there at my desk, I heard a single plane. I looked up and saw it out the window, up in the clear and empty sky. Everyone knew by then that all flights were grounded.

I did the weirdest thing: I ducked down, next to my desk. Then I looked at the kids and saw that they were all staring at me, bewildered. So I pulled myself together, stood up, picked up my book, and went back to the story rug to read it. I didn’t refer to what I had just done; there was no way I could explain it.

A year later, the first books started to appear. The first one I saw was called September 12…We Knew Everything Would Be All Right. Written by first graders in Missouri, and published as the winner of that year’s Scholastic Kids Are Authors contest, it was a simple illustrated list of the reassuring ordinary things that happened for them the day after the attacks, simple things like going to school in the morning, playing at recess, and doing homework. I snapped it up at the Scholastic warehouse, glad to have something to give the primary teachers who needed to present the issue with their students before the memorial ceremony the school was holding.

Another early title was Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, written and illustrated by Maira Kalman. Ultimately, it’s a tale about working together and not giving up, as well as a worthy companion to older titles about underdog machinery and buildings, like Little Toot, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, and even The Little Engine that Could.

But unlike September 12, which only briefly mentions the actual terrorist attacks, Fireboat directly tells what happened in New York on 9/11, and the true story of a group of friends and a scruffy retired fireboat who helped in the rescue effort.

In 2004, Fireboat was nominated for a Washington Children’s Choice Picture Book Award, so I read it—with some trepidation—to most of the primary classes, which were filled with kids who’d been too young in fall 2001 to have much or any memory of what had happened.

I remember blanching when I got to the pages where Kalman’s vibrant, colorful painted illustrations show planes flying into the World Trade Center. But the kids I read it to were more curious than upset, and their most urgent questions were: Was there really a fireboat? Did it really help put out the flames? How much of the story was true?

I think, for those kids, it was already something in the vague past before their own personal memories kicked in: not something directly to do with their lives.

When I was a kid, the grownups all remembered where they were when John F. Kennedy was killed. It was on the news every year in November, but to me the story was just background noise. I didn’t truly understand the import—and how it must have felt to hear that news when it was news--until much later, far into adulthood.

Most people who can remember the events of September 11, 2001, seven years ago this Thursday, are adults or at least adolescents themselves now. The kindergarteners I taught that day started 7^th grade last week, and if any of them recall the moment when their brand-new librarian flipped out because a plane (probably, in retrospect, an aircraft carrier from a nearby base) flew by outside the window, it’s as a bizarre, maybe disembodied image in a week filled with new events.

Even the books will take on different meanings, different uses, as current events pass into history: informational titles like A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 And Its Aftermath are as valuable and useful today as they were when first published soon after the attacks, but September 12…We Knew Everything Would Be All Right (now out of print) is most meaningful now not as a comfort to other children who’d witnessed September 11 in person or on television, but as a tool to help kids understand that whatever happens, caring grownups and comforting routines can help you get through it.

I haven’t read Fireboat to a group for a few years now, but imagine that if I did, the class response would be even more detached, much as it is to books about World War II and other faraway events. The illustrations are still gorgeous, and the story is still compelling, but now it’s a book about a historical event, with more in common with The Little Red Lighthouse than with the evening news.

And I’m one of the grownups who experienced something that my daughter will learn about only as a lesson in school.

September 9, 2008

Comments

[Lise]

It's interesting how an event defines a generation. My mother remembers when they turned the neon lights back on in Copenhagen after WWII, but her mother remembers the day five years earlier when the Germans invaded Denmark.

I was a baby when Kennedy was shot, and six when Martin Luther King was shot, so the grownups' talk about them went right over my head. But I vividly remember the next year, when the astronauts first landed on the moon, and we saw for the first time the blue marble of earth from as viewed from space, so small and precious. In that one picture were thousands of words about peace and environmentalism, which influenced my whole generation. (See http://www.space.com/news/070421_astronauts_earthday.html)