Faith Ringgold grew up during the Depression years and was nurtured by hope.  Now she creates bold, brilliant children's books that shine with color.  Ringgold celebrates the hope that once nurtured her, and offers it to children living in another difficult era.

Ringgold, who has been honored with fifty awards for art including the Guggenheim, and will be recieving her seventh honorary doctorate, is finding great joy in creating for a new audience.  "Children are imaginative, open, inquisitive and excited about everything.  Isn't it wonderful to have an audience coming to you with all that open feeling?  The things they experience in childhood will be with them for the rest of their lives and it's nice to be a part of that."

Ringgold's art and story have found a new freedom when she writes for children. "One of the things you can do so well with children is to blend fantasy and reality.   Kids are ready for it, they don't have to have everything lined up and real. It's not that they don't know it's not real, they just don't care."

Dinner at Aunt Connie's House (Hyperion, $14.95; ages 6 and up), Ringgold's third children's book, "comes from a quilt that I did in 1986, but the original quilt isn't as fanciful.  The original Aunt Connie makes placemats with women's names and she talks about women. In the book, Aunt Connie's a painter and the women talk directly to the children.  I think we make a mistake not using fantasy as much as we can in teaching children about all kinds of things, including all the bad things that go on in the world.   Fantasy has a lot of hope."

Dinner at Aunt Connie's House is a story built on concentric rings of hope.  First, Ringgold offers hope to Lonnie, an orphan newly adopted by Aunt Connie.  The story is told by his cousin, Melody who falls "in love with him the first time I saw him."  Ringgold herself remembers "falling in love with little boys I never saw again.  I had wonderful two minute love affairs where we got married, had children and planned a beautiful life.  And it was over and that was it.  Maybe that's the way it should be."

Not only does Ringgold sustain Lonnie with a caring cousin and the magic of immediate relationship, she fortifies him with the strong Swahili proverb.  When Lonnie quotes at dinner, " A good tree grows among thorns",  readers get the sense that he's taken the strength to heart. "This little boy," Ringgold says, "is going to need all the help he can get.  He's an older orphan, which means he's got a past, and he's got to have a lot of people working on him and this family's doing it!"  Ringgold's next book with Hyperion will be about Lonnie's exploration of his roots.  Its working title is Bonjour Lonnie and Hyperion plans to release the book in 1994.

Lonnie and Melody fall into fun easily and the fun leads them to magic.  During a game of hide-and-seek, they discover speaking portraits created by their Aunt Connie.   From the walls of Aunt Connie's attic gallery speak twelve African-American women whose inspiration is as strong as Ringgold's art.  Ringgold's choice provides another support for children.  She focuses on women because" when the African-American woman succeeds, she's done things from a completely difficult situation and she rises in a magical way that I think children can appreciate."

From all fields of endeavor, all different backgrounds and times, Ringgold introduces children to Fannie Lou Hammer, civil rights activist; sculptor Augusta Savage;  actress Dorothy Dandridge, and nine other women including well-known figures like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.  All the women faced difficult situations and so have an important message of hope to bring to today's children.  Ringgold believes, "since we are going to encounter scary situations we need reinforcement when we do.  We need to be aware that life is very scary. We also need to understand what other people have gone through in their lives to understand who they are and why they are as they are.  Children  learn by seeing people doing things. If all they see are people that don't try,  it's going to be difficult for them to try.   People who reinforce us in these deseprate times are to be celebrated.  Like Harriet Tubman, they came through."

Dinner at Aunt Connie's ends with a gathering of family. "People did that when I grew up. They made big dinners and invited not just their family, but other people.   I have two extra people that are invited, Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, who are as welcome as the family."  Ringgold grew up in a time where the community that surrounded her was like an extended family.

In the thirties, "there was no welfare or unemployment benefits, and  it wasn't acceptable to hit somebody in the head and take their money."  Ringgold describes House Rent Parties, a enterprising, creative, community-based way to make money where people provided dinner and dancing in exchange for money to pay their rent.  Lack of air conditioning meant "we had to go up on the roof, where we were forced to be together and we had to share things.  On Christmas night my mother would pack   some of the things friends gave us to give to people who had nothing for their kids."

Storytelling began early in Ringgold's life.  "As a child all of our family teachings were done through stories.  Someone would give us a story of  something that happened to them as a child to teach us or give guidance as to what we should do.  People didn't say you should be a role model, I never heard that term until the sixties, but everyone was a role model and was responsible to kids and felt like they had to tell kids something uplifting.  The thirties was such a bad time because of the depression that everybody had to be kind of hopeful."

Ringgold's art provides her with hope too.  "Hope isn't something you get and then you've got it and you don't need it anymore.  You need a daily dose of it. Sometimes you need it three, four, five times a day."

©Susie Wilde 1998