About a third of the way into Bud, Not Buddy, one of the best Newbery medalists of all time, a group of Hooverville campers, including our ten-year-old title character, start lining up to hop a train heading West, where they hear there’s going to be more work. There are a group of people blocking the way. Bud thinks they’re cops, but they’re not. They’re Pinkertons:
“One of the cops yelled ‘You men know you can’t get on this train, just go on back to Shantytown and there won’t be no trouble.’ A white man said, ‘This is the only train going west for the next month, you know we got families to feed and have got to be on it. You go get back in your cars and you’ll be right, there won’t be no trouble.’ The cop said, ‘I’m warning you, the Flint police are on the way, this here is private property and they have orders to shoot anyone who tries to get on this train.’ A man next to me said, ‘I’d rather be shot than sit around and watch my kids go hungry.’ The cop said, ‘This is America, boys, you’re sounding like a bunch of Commies, you know I can’t let you on this train. I got kids to feed too, and I’d lose my job.’ Someone yelled, ‘Well, welcome to the club, brother.’ It seemed like we stood looking at the cops and them looking at us for a whole hour. Our side was getting bigger and bigger and the other cops started looking nervous. The one who was doing all the talking saw them fidgeting and said, ‘Hold steady, men.’ One of the cops said, ‘Jake, there’s four hundred men out there and more coming, I don’t like these odds. Mr. Pinkerton ain’t paying me enough to do this.’ He threw his cop hat and his billy club on the ground.”
That’s the only reference to Mr. Pinkerton in the novel. But to be clear, in real life, Mr. Pinkerton is still around, or at least his company is: the private security firm that shares a name with Weezer’s most polarizing album1 is still the premier company you hire to be the willing muscle of the rich and evil. Jeff Bezos hires them to surveil his organizing workers. Executives from Pinkerton went to work for, uh, the toy company Hasbro and sent enforcers to track down missing Magic: The Gathering cards and threaten the guy who got them in the mail by mistake. As we learned from a New York Times piece in 2019, Pinkerton is actively preparing to defend corporations and the wealthy if climate change leaves us all desperately scrabbling for their water and clean air. They’ve come a long way from being amorphous bad guys in Deadwood. But Bud Caldwell doesn’t know any of this, of course, he’s just ten years old, he hears the name, and never thinks about it again for the rest of the novel.
Christopher Paul Curtis grew up in Flint. His mother was a public school teacher. Both of his parents were active in the civil rights movement and the NAACP, and brought him to protests and pickets as a child. When he graduated from high school, he did what a lot of high school graduates in Flint did: he started working on the line at Fisher Body Flint Plant Number One and taking night classes to get his college degree. It took thirteen years of writing and studying, in his spare time when he wasn’t hanging doors on Buicks, before he wrote a novel and submitted it in a writing contest, which he won. And then that novel got re-written and emerged in 1995 as a book called The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963, a story that, as you’d expect, has a church bombing as its climactic event, and yet it’s still a book that I remember, almost three decades after I read it, as being unbelievably hilarious for a children’s historical fiction novel, due especially to the narration by lazy-eyed shy fourth grader Kenny Watson and the tension between him and his pyromaniac older brother.
Watsons tore apart children’s literature, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in eleven languages. The Newbery committee that year did give the medal to yet another work of historical fiction set in medieval Europe2, but the guy from the auto plant with a wicked sense of humor had just burst onto the scene with a debut novel that ended up as a finalist not only for the Newbery, but the Coretta Scott King medal; no novel had ever won both, and no Black man had ever won a Newbery. In 2000, Curtis’ second novel, the also-hilarious Bud, Not Buddy, the story of a Depression-era compulsive-liar orphan in Flint who goes searching for his long-lost dad, who he suspects is a famous jazz bassist in Grand Rapids, won both awards outright. It deserved every award imaginable. But Watsons is about history literally exploding in your face, and Bud, Not Buddy is about the glancing blows history deals you that you don’t feel until much, much later.
At one point in the novel, Bud is walking on a dirt road outside of Owosso, Michigan, and luckily for him, he’s picked up by a good-natured courier named Lefty Lewis, who tells him that “I’ve seen some things out of place before and a young brown-skinned boy walking along the road just outside of Owosso, Michigan, at two-thirty in the morning is definitely not where he ought to be. In fact, what is definite is that neither one of us should be out here this time of night.” 1930s Owosso is a sundown town - a 1950s article in The Montgomery Advertiser once told its Alabamian readership to take heart that there are plenty of northern cities like Owosso that are also violently racist - which is not a term that any character uses at any point in the novel. It’s never directly explained why Lefty wants to get Bud and himself the hell out of Owosso, it’s never directly explained why Lefty really does not want to get pulled over by a police officer in this part of the state. If you read it as a child, you may not get it on the first pass, unless you’re reading it in a classroom and a teacher can build out the context more. If you read it as an adult, especially as an adult in 2023, you will get it right away. And this story is funny enough, and moving enough, that you will want to reread it throughout your life.
One of the packages Lefty is delivering is a stack of union flyers for a group of Pullman porters trying to organize3; that’s what he was scared the cop would discover. He jokes with Bud afterwards:
“‘...that police officer save[d] you from the feared and loathsome labor organizers of Detroit! You are truly blessed…’
I said, ‘What’s a labor organizer, sir?’
Mr. Lewis said, ‘In Flint they are people who are trying to get unions in the automobile factories.’
Before I had a chance to get my next question in Lefty Lewis said, ‘I’m a save your breath for you, Buddy. I’ll bet the next thing out of your mouth was going to be, ‘What’s a union,’ right?
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A union is like a family, it’s when a group of workers get together and try to make things better for themselves and their children.’
‘That’s all, sir?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Then why are the cops after them?’
‘That’s a very good question…That trouble the policeman was talking about at the factory is called a sit-down strike. Instead of walking in front of the plant with signs the people who are on strike just sit down on their job. That way the bosses can’t bring other people in to steal their jobs. They’re going to sit there until the company gives them a union, so the company is trying everything they can think of to get them out. That’s why I said those flyers are so dangerous. The people who run the factories and the railroads seemed to be really scared. To them if a worker has any dignity or pride he can’t be doing a good job.’”
So, obviously, yes, I love this story because it aligns with my personal politics. You got me. But it’s also a story about people hopping trains to find work while Bud hops in cars to find his family. And it’s a story about a boy finding help in unexpected places during an era when we all needed to help each other. And it’s a story about jazz music, which is cool. But, amazingly, none of this is why a child would read Bud, Not Buddy in the first place. They’d read it for Bud, for the incredible narrative voice that Curtis created in his novel, for Bud describing hearing a jazz trio for the first time:
“Every time he patted the strings it seemed like something wide and heavy was walking by slow and easy. Or it seemed like he was the thunder, soft and far away but getting closer all the time.”
Or Bud describing the smell of the public library:
“The next thing about the air in the library is that no other place smells anything like it…I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, the books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the pages in little puffs when you’re reading something or looking at some pictures, a kind of hypnotizing smell.”
Or Bud realizing how much he loves the jazz musicians whose lives he’s worked his way into:
“One second I was laughing my head off and the next second I was feeling very surprised ‘cause something hit me just as hard as Snaggletooth MacNevin had smacked Herman E. Calloway. All of a sudden I knew that of all the places in the world that I’d ever been in this was the one. That of all the people I’d ever met these were the ones. This was where I was supposed to be.”
And, most importantly, for Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself, the series of improvised rules that Bud picked up throughout his life in foster homes and interjects frequently into his story: “Number 3: If You Got to Tell a Lie, Make Sure It’s Simple and Easy to Remember” and "Number 16: If a Grown-up Ever Starts a Sentence by Saying 'Haven’t You Heard', Get Ready, ‘Cause What’s About to Come Out of Their Mouth Is Gonna Drop You Headfirst into a Boiling Tragedy” are particular standouts for me.
In the afterword to his novel, Curtis adds this:
“Much of what I discovered about the Depression I learned through research in books, which is a shame - I didn’t take advantage of the family history that surrounded me for many years. I’m afraid that when I was younger and my grandparents and parents would start to talk about their lives during the depression, my eyes would glaze over and I’d think, ‘Oh, no, not those boring tall tales again!’ and I’d find the most convenient excuse I could to get away from them. Now I feel a real sorrow when I think of all the knowledge, wisdom and stories that have been forever lost with the deaths of my grandparents. Be smarter than I was. Go talk to Grandma and Grandpa, Mom and Dad and other relatives and friends. Discover and remember what they have to say about what they learned growing up. By keeping their stories alive you make them, and yourself, immortal.”
We’re still in an era where people need to help each other. The Pinkertons are still bashing skulls. Unions can still win. Libraries are still great. The stories Curtis tells, that his grandparents told, that my grandparents told, those stories never ended. We’re still living them, and we don’t have to live them alone, we have people who have already grown up during all of this and learned something from it. Bud, Not Buddy is - at least out of everything I’ve read so far - maybe the last Newbery medalist that deserves a spot on the top tier of children’s literature, next to A Wrinkle In Time and Johnny Tremain and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. It’s a story that deserves immortality.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1945 medalist, Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson.
Incredibly, Pinkerton Inc. did unsuccessfully sue Geffen Records for trademark infringement when Pinkerton came out, claiming that the label was trying to capitalize on the security firm’s reputation, as if that reputation was anything close to positive to begin with, and as if some rich asshole would be trying to hire muscle to crack some skulls on a picket line but in the process of typing that all into a search engine get accidentally swept away listening to Rivers’ guitar solo on “Tired Of Sex”.
Which we haven’t covered yet.
Pullman, A. Philip Randolph, and the unionization movement for the porters is also something a child wouldn’t know right away, and honestly I wouldn’t know it now if I didn’t live in Chicago and hadn’t spent some time at the Pullman National Monument myself.