212.252.3152

Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997 Edition)

Yarbrough, Camille (b. 1938), actress, composer, singer, teacher, and writer. Children tease and taunt each other wherever they gather. Some children's teasing is humorous. Occasionally, the taunting leads to hurt, anger, and confusion. Epithets such as "nappy headed," "ole black thing," and "African monkey" are a few of the insults that sting many African American children. Camille Yarbrough explores these taunts and the circumstances and feelings that engender them. Yarbrough's books illuminate intragroup disharmony and offer possible solutions for resolving this complex issue.

Yarbrough appeared on the children's book scene in 1979, with the publication of a picture book, Cornrows (1979). A multifaceted artist who danced with Katherine Dunham and taught Dunham's technique, she has worked with children in various artistic programs performed in plays, and written and recorded music. During the 1980s she served as Professor of African Dance and Diaspora in the African Studies Department of New York's City College.

Children's literature depicting African Americans entered a new phase in the late 1960s and 1970s. A body of literature that reflected African American life and cultures in an authentic manner appeared and was labeled "culturally conscious" by scholar Rudine Sims Bishop. Camille Yarbrough's children's books, Cornrows and The Shimmershine Queens (1989), a novel, fit squarely within the culturally conscious category of children's and young adult literature. Yarbrough attempts to inform readers about the African and African American pasts and their current connections to these ongoing histories.

Several themes recur throughout Yarbrough's two books. African American children are encouraged by adults to acquire knowledge about their histories so that they can survive psychologically unscathed. Typically, Yarbrough creates elderly characters-Great-Grammaw in Cornrows and Cousin Seatta in The Shimmershine Queens-who provide this knowledge in the manner of a griot. Respect for oneself and others is another central motif. Name calling and fighting are discouraged among children because they represent the inculcation of racism. Negative self-images are reversed when the characters accomplish a goal and experience success through reconnecting with their root cultures, histories, and artistic performance. Yarbrough confronts the view that knowledge is not the domain of African American children. Angie, the protagonist in The Shimmershine Queens, demonstrates this in a confrontation with disruptive classmates. She tells them about how Cousin Seatta required that her students learn and achieve academically. She informs them that too many ancestors lost their lives or suffered in order to have the opportunities that they squander. They cannot dishonor the past by remaining ignorant.

Yarbrough's strongest characters are the children who appear in her works. They talk and act like children who are a bundle of conflicting traits. Another characteristic of her work is the realistic use of Black vernacular language.

Camile Yarbrough has written only two works for children, yet these books explore controversial and important ideas usually missing in children's literature.

Rudine Sims, Shadows and Substance, 1982, "Camille Yarbrough", in Children's Literature Review, vol.29.ed. Gerald Senich 1993.
pp.262-275 - Violet J. Harris

Shimmershine Queens

Publishers Weekly
The Shimmershine Queens by Camille Yarbrough
"A remarkable story about self-esteem and achievement"-

Booklist
Angie, a 10 year old inner-city kid, discovers "Shimmershine"-the feeling you get when you believe in yourself and do your very best. "A brave book."

January 1990

Camille Yarbrough
c/o G.P. Putnam's Sons
200 Madison Ave., 16th Fl.
New York, NY 10016

Dear Ms. Yarbrough:

On behalf of the board I am pleased and honored to tell you that the THE SHIMMERSHINE QUEENS has won a Parents Choice Award in Story. Your work is a fine contribution to the lives of children.

Sincerely,
Diana Huss Green
President
Parent's Choice
Parent's Choice Foundation
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Cornrows
Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award

"Camille Yarbrough's stirring, poetic tale provides insight into this distinctive facet of African style, and Carole Byard's illustrations have brought the words to life in magnificent fashion."

Essence Magazine
"This book is a gem."

The Little Tree Growin' in the Shade

Putnam
Booklist section

Camille Yarbrough The little tree growin' in the shade
64 pp. Putnam 2/96 isbn 0-399-21204-2 18.95

Illustrated by Tyrone Geter. With the skill of a weaver, Yarbrough has woven the variegated threads of African-american history into a memorable story for young readers that speaks of the rich culture of the Africans brought in captivity to America. It tells of a people who "refused to die small," symbolized by the shade covered small tree that grew against all odds. Then there is the story of the negro spirituals, the sounds of praise and solace and clevery disguised coded messages of plans from escape - the music form academically called the root of rhythm and blues. The narration further describes the unbroken thread of civil rights leaders across the years and their tireless quest for freedom. Selecting a warm family gathering at a concert in the parks as the background, Yarbrough's informative text is filled with a rhythmic use of language - poetic, alliterative, onomatopoeic - that begs to be read aloud. Geter's black-and-white sketches capture the many moods of the text-celebration, religious fervor, and family love.
Henrietta M. Smith

Tamika and the Wisdom Rings

by George Edward Tait

Nana Camille Yarbrough is an ambassador for culture, an advocate for familyhood, and an artist of truth. In fact, it is as if she has cultivated her name Camille as an acronoym for Cultural Activism Manifesting Into a Legacy of Liberation and Education. With this fertile and functional foundation, she perpetually plants the seeds of sagacity in the soil of storytelling scholarship. Watered with words of wisdom the seeds sprout into crops of consciousness as readers are rewarded by reaping her holistic harvest.

The children's book, Tamika and the Wisdom Rings by Nana Camille Yarbrough, is a masterpiece of meticulous insight and meaningful instruction that simultaneously serves as a mirror of children and a magnifying glass for adults. Chapter by chapter, the challenges of childhood are charted with seamless sequences and seasoned skill. While children are presented as pawns of the environment and victims of each other, adults are depicted as disciples of denial. The book deftly delineates how, through fear and forfeiture, adults have abdicated the gegality and responsibility of their role and have allowed the children to be abandoned to an age of anarchy. In lucid language, Nana Yarbrough presents Tamika as an affirmation of Afrikan tradition assaulted by the times - juxatposed and jarred between family values and foreign vicissitudes.

Tamika is, furthermore, a child of wonder - representing the world of wonder within all children. Wondering is, intrinsically, the inspiration of inquiry and the inquiry of inspiration. It is not only the bridge from ignorance to information, but also the beacon from information to enlightenment. Drugs destroy the world of wonder in children giving artificial answers and superficial solutions. Addicts are the ambassadors of arrested development. Drugs evict them from the world of wonder and entrench them in a wasteland of weakness and wickedness.   When their wasteland of wickedness encroaches upon Tamika's world of wonder, a price is paid with her father's fatality. Tamika internalizes her wondering until it becomes her will and then externalizes her will until it becomes her way.

But Tamika had some help. A plethora of plaudits must go to Tamika's parents. Part of a parent's purpose is to provide protection for their progeny. But a parent's protection is not enough; the proverbial village must protect. However, Tamika's village has been vanquished and replaced by a concentration camp camouflaged as a community. The wisdom rings offer protection by providing Tamika with touchstones of truth and transcendence. The rings represent reference points of reality; they arm and advise Tamika with three hundred sixty degrees of decision-making skills and direction. They are, consequently, her collective compass of clarity. Without wisdom, children are confused and cannot crossover into the age of adulthood. It is through the tenacious teachings of parents that children receive the gift of guidance. Tamika's parents prepared her by supplying her with wisdom rings. Because Tamika revered her parents, she respected the rings. In a sadistic society, most children are clueless because they are "ringless." Either they reject the rings that the parents provide or the parents fail to provide the rings. Tamika activated the worth of the wisdom rings through her acceptance of them.

Moreover, because she had been socialized into self-awareness through the pragmatic pedagogy of her parents, Tamika had a formidable family foundation that connected her to the cornerstone of culture. This foundation made itself manifest in the membership of the Sweet Fruit of the African Family Tree culture club in which the mantra of the group became her motto of guidance until she was ready and willing to receive the wisdom rings. When children chant that they are sweet fruit from an old seed, a deep root, and a strong branch, they are fortified; sweet fruit as opposed to spoiled fruit; sweet fruit as opposed to sour fruit; blessed fruit as opposed to bitter fruit; fresh fruit as opposed to rancid and rotten fruit; fruit from an old seed as opposed to seedless fruit or genetically altered fruit; sweet fruit from a deep root as opposed to plastic fruit; sweet fruit on a strong branch as opposed to dying fruit on a potted plant. Ultimately, children have the choice and challenge of either being sweet fruit harvested from the Afrikan family tree or becoming strange fruit hanging from the Amerikkkan foreign tree. Tamika's mantra initiated her into a harvest of history and heritage; her wisdom rings insulated her against a community of crime and compromise.

Nana Camille Yarbrough's Tamika and the Wisdom Rings is a compelling coming-of-age compendium of culture. It is tantamount to a timely textbook on the trials and tribulations of children in the inner-city who find themselves fighting against enveloping forces of evil. For children in such a stifling and suffocating setting, defeat is often determined to be the synonym of destiny. Only with weapons of wisdom can one win against what appears to be the overwhelming odds of omnipresent opposition. Not only should this masterpiece be required reading both the mantra should be a required ritual.  With such a reading and ritual regimen, children have the same chance as Tamika to triumphantly traverse toxic terrain.

Tamika and the Wisdom Rings is a holistic handbook for the hood and home that returns the neighbor to hood and the nucleus to home. It is a compact cultural curriculum that closes the glaring gap between parents and progeny. As such, it is family friendly and family functional.  In addition to this breakthrough book being applauded by assemblies of appreciative adults, the author has been adopted by aggregates of admiring adolescents.

Finally, Tamika and the Wisdom Rings is a testament which warns that without wisdom, children are sacrificed as chattel slaves in a charlatan society. By being fashioned into folly and formulized into fatality, the children are defenseless and doomed. Nana Camille Yarbrough has comprehensively penned a panacea that provides armor and affirmation to make worlds respond - with wisdom rings.

Gwen Akua Gilyard, President
Sojourner Truth Adolescent Rites Society

"Every group leader should share with their youngsters the rich experience of Tamika's rites of passage--for in essence, the book is about the reality of life for young girls in our communities today. In Tamika's story, wholesome cultural heritage struggles to subsist in the midst of drugs and violence."

"Every sensitive, caring single mother will empathize with the tragedy and struggles of Tamika's mother. Hopefully, they will be guided to use her wisdom and strength in relating to, caring for and teaching their own children."