Dive into McElligot's Pool

Where the Optimists Swim

Dive right into Dr. Seuss’s delightful  McElligot’s Pool—which won the Caldecott Honor in 1947—and help your child enjoy the swim. But unless you’ve got deeper pockets than I do, you’ll wince at the price: today, Sunday Sept. 10, 2023, the hardcover on Amazon.com is over $145. And used to be more. There’s always somebody nice reading the story on YouTube. But I want the book in my hands. I want to turn the pages and savor the rhymes, the story, the colors, the silly characters.

There’s an idea swimming around like the fish in McElligot’s Pool that babies show race bias at three to six months, and that Dr. Seuss’s World War II anti-Japanese cartoons are proof of an “embedded racism” throughout his work. Philip Nel and various psychologists use disease metaphors to frighten parents into thinking Dr. Seuss’s captivating tale will infect their child with racism. And how are the experts defining that term? So broadly that it’s meaningless. Here’s a sample from Philip Nel’s tiresome tome, Was The Cat in the Hat Black? (Oxford UP, 2017): “Because racism inheres in social structures, it can go unnoticed by those with the privilege to ignore it . . . [my book] intends to help all people more effectively oppose this persistent social disease.” (25). Disease? In The Cat in the Hat? Guess why? He’s wearing white gloves.

Minstrel-show performers wore white gloves, so those gloves can only mean one thing, for Professor Nel, namely, racism. Slim evidence. I can think of lots of people who wear white gloves: waiters, little girls in nice dresses, debutantes, drag queens, doormen and elevator operators. For starters. But for Nel, white gloves on Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse and The Cat in the Hat signal racism! (“People don’t see the blackface ancestry of the Cat for the same reason that they don’t see the blackface ancestry of Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse or the Scarecrow. These images are so embedded in the culture that their racialized origins have become invisible.” (52) These images are so embedded in Professor Nel’s notion of racism that the absurdity of his idea has become invisible to him.

Let’s take Nel at his word. What if Dr. Seuss took his inspiration from a minstrel show? Inspiration comes from lots of places. The cat himself has a circus performer’s ambition and daring, bouncing on that ball while holding a cake and a rake and a bunch of other things, until he falls down. But let’s haul out one of Nel’s bigger guns: he demonstrates Theodore Geisel’s childhood affection for The Hole Book, a 1908 picture book featuring a bullet zinging through every page, hitting things like a Black mammy’s watermelon, and having her speak in AAVE or dialect: “Who plugged dat melon?” Flipping through the book, I wondered why Nels zeroes in on the one stereotype of the Black mammy, instead of the exaggerated features of literally every other single character in the book. Almost everyone is a pop-eyed caricature of somebody—I bet the author. And the book rhymes. Caricature and increasingly hilarious rhymes form Dr. Seuss’s signature style.

One of the earlier representatives of this signature style, McElligot’s Pool isn’t really about a pool or about fish—not one of these swimming creatures looks like a fish. It’s about courage and self-confidence and fighting a naysayer, if not a bully. In this hilariously rhymed tale, Marco, a young boy fishing in a pond hopes to land a big one. Along comes a supercilious farmer. Not content with calling Marco “a fool” and assuring him he’ll never catch a thing, the farmer adds:

But listen, young man...

If you sat fifty years

With your worms and your wishes,

You'd grow a long beard

Long before you'd catch fishes!"

If Marco feels intimidated, he doesn’t show it. Instead of looking crushed and sadly walking home, he says fish might swim in from the ocean through an underground tunnel:

Any kind! Any shape! Any color or size!

I might catch some fish that would open your eyes!

Exactly. Marco wants to open everyone’s eyes to hope and possibility—that’s what children do. Oscar Wilde remarked: “The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.” Boomers think racism lurks everywhere. The middle-aged suspect it does. The young know perfectly well that it doesn’t, and yet we’re teaching them that it does, alas.

Marshalling considerable ingenuity and optimism, Marco explains in a series of engaging rhymes just how fish from all over the world might find their way into the pool. Dogfish. Catfish. Tropical Fish. Stout fish, skinny fish, fish with a checkerboard belly, and then the fish offending Random House and Dr. Seuss Enterprises: Eskimo Fish. Is it the furry parka? The slightly Asiatic eyes? The ridiculous location, “beyond Hudson Bay?” The whimsical expression, so familiar to fans of Dr. Seuss?  And to call these images “hurtful” is really hurtful. Ouch. Every figure—fish wearing mascara and batting their eyelashes, a fish with a “grouchy” expression who reminds me of the Grinch—is gleefully smug, absurdly curious or manic. That’s the fun part. To call any of this racism remains one of more foolish features of our world.

But let’s assume the worst: a child points to the Eskimo fish and says, "Look at their slanty eyes!” Now, what child would do this? Any child who notices mom and dad getting the heeby-jeebies about books, worrying about “I never even SAW how racist this was!” That child will smack his little lips with glee and enjoy tormenting Mom. But take it from me: children love their parents and, especially when they’re young—before they judge them—adopt their attitudes. If Mom harbors racist thoughts, in the sense of feeling hatred or disgust for any ethnicity not her own, she can bet on Junior feeling the same way.

An elderly psychoanalyst told a tale of a Jewish mother he treated—all her life she’d taught her daughter to treasure Jewish traditions and only marry a Jewish man. No other man would do (you can see where this is going). The mother, a talented sculptress, did a number of busts of African heads as the girl was growing up. What drove her to consult the psychoanalyst? The daughter fell in love with a black guy who wasn’t Jewish. Boo hoo, the mom cried on the couch as the doctor pointed out her love for her artistic creations, and how she’d passed that love on to her daughter. All this occurred back in the seventies; it’s hard to imagine such a scene today, but the transmission of attitudes from parent to child is naturally still common.

Enjoy this little gem, McElligot’s Pool: it will expand your children’s sense of optimism and adventure, tickle their literary bones, make them laugh. And you too.