Many happy returns Nearing 80, artist Ashley Bryan keeps tapping into human spirit around the globe

Ashley Bryan will be 80 years old this summer. The famed children’s book author and illustrator, storyteller, poet and painter from Little Cranberry Island shows no sign of lessening his daunting pace of world travel and creative production.

Bryan recently returned to Maine from South Africa, where he taught poetry to schoolchildren as part of the Ubuntu Project started by Jacob Lief, whose family lives on Little Cranberry. Bryan’s admiration for the 25-year-old son of the Islesford Dock Restaurant owners is evident as he tells the story of how his friend began the project. A student at the University of Pittsburgh at Philadelphia, Lief had gone to South Africa for a term abroad. Upon arriving, he discovered that the project he was supposed to be involved in had fallen through. Not wishing to return home, he ended up teaching in a township school in Port Elizabeth at the invitation of the principal.

As Bryan describes it, the school had blackboards but no chalk and was severely overcrowded: “The children were doubled up on benches, leaning over on tables.” Since that life-changing experience, Lief has been creating libraries and computer centers in the township schools. The extensive program includes training for health workers to help deal with the AIDS epidemic.

During his two-week stay in South Africa, Bryan visited a different school in the township each day, some of them with as many as 1,000 students enrolled. Bryan describes children arriving every morning “eager for education” in their school clothing. The students speak the Xhoxa language, which entails clicking their tongues, but they begin learning English in kindergarten, a holdover from when the country was an English colony.

Bryan taught them the work of black American poets. While some of the poems were chanted back, others allowed for improvisation. Pitched a line, the students wouldn’t let their visiting teacher go on to the next line until they had finished playing with it.

“They make the most of whatever they have,” Bryan says with a sense of wonder. He speaks with emotion about their voices. “When they sing, your heart turns over,” he says. “They sing from the depths of their souls.” Song has been an important element of survival for these South Africans. “Those who practiced apartheid knew from hearing those voices that they could not break their spirit,” Bryan states. He relates these Africans to enslaved blacks in the United States who created thousands of spirituals as a way of being free “through the spirit of voice.”

Bryan also speaks movingly of the process of truth and reconciliation that has taken place since the end of apartheid.

“If a person could recognize the guilt and speak to it,” he explains, “then you would reconcile and you’d go on from there and you would affirm things.”

For Bryan, the spirit of truth and reconciliation and the messages of Martin Luther King and Ghandi “make the most important fundamental changes in our experience of being.” He acknowledges that “methods of war keep piling on,” but he does not feel cynical. “I always have hope because I stay with the examples of people who despite tremendous odds never became cynical.”

Bryan adopted this attitude growing up in the Bronx after World War II. Even as the Cross Bronx Expressway tore apart communities of Irish, Italians and Jews, even as gangs and drugs swept the streets, there were people who fought to maintain a community.

“We never gave up because it was something we had to do,” he says. This dedication underlies Bryan’s artistic drive: “What I do may not succeed, but I cannot stop doing what I’m committed to doing as an artist, a person.”

The recent trip marked the third year that Bryan has gone to Africa to teach; the previous two he spent in Kenya among the Kukuyu in the region of Nyeri. He plans to continue this “African adventure” in one place or the other to follow up on the work.

Bryan is always happy to return to Maine because, in his words, “the island is home.” He experiences everything that he believes in on Little Cranberry, through his work, walks through the woods and the families and community. While there are “absolute differences” between Africa and the island – climate, landscape, the color of

people – Bryan taps into “the spirit of what it is to be human” wherever he goes.

Bryan first discovered the Cranberry Isles while studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1946 (the year the school opened). When he later taught art at Dartmouth, he would spend his sabbaticals on the island. He eventually made Little Cranberry his year-round residence.

Over the years, Bryan’s home has been the site of amazing creative work, from a host of award-winning children’s books to stained glass windows made from sea glass. The artist’s collection of toys and dolls, from whirligigs to wind-up cars, transform the house into a museum.

Bryan’s most recent book, “Beautiful Blackbird,” grew out of his ongoing research into African folk tales. Working from a reference work that documents the tales, he chooses a motif to develop into a story. The tale of the beautiful blackbird, which comes from the Ila-speaking people of northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), caught his attention. The first part of the tale inspired his story. When asked by the ringdove who the most beautiful bird is, all the colorful birds respond, “Blackbird is the most beautiful. How very black he is.” Bryan found this perspective a welcome change from the many stories in which black is presented in a negative light.

The main message of the story is how individuals are enhanced by something in their lives, be it a ring of black around their necks, a loving mother or the art of another country. Another message of the book harks back to the Civil Rights movement: “Black is Beautiful.” Bryan remembers how this chant rallied people. “People began to try to affirm that they weren’t ashamed of their color,” he says. His stories often reverberate with these kinds of associations. “They give the story a feeling of depth,” Bryan explains, “that you often can’t put your finger on, but you feel the richness of it.”

In the May/June 2003 issue of The Horn Book, Barbara Bader saves the last paragraph of her essay on “Multiculturalism in the Mainstream” to praise Bryan. “In the glorious new Ashley Bryan book ‘Beautiful Blackbird,’ ‘a touch of black’ brings out the best in birds of all colors. But blackbird’s feathers, in turn, ‘gleam all colors in the sun.’ With mutual respect, even admiration, maybe it’s time to dream again.”

As is his practice, Bryan developed the story through pictures, choosing collage as the medium for the illustrations. Although he has worked with this technique in his studio, this was his first collage book. The book’s end papers feature the two scissors Bryan used to cut out the shapes. They belonged to his mother and came to him when she died because he was the artist in the family. In addition to the personal significance, Bryan wanted young readers to know that the illustrations were made entirely using these simple tools.

The book is dedicated to Jean Karl, Bryan’s editor at Atheneum for more than 30 years. Karl became ill with cancer in 2000 and died soon after. Bryan remembers her coming to his studio in the Bronx, viewing his work and subsequently sending him a contract.

More than an editor, Karl was a mentor. “She knew that I was caught up in community work, helping to raise my younger sister’s children, teaching full time and all that,” Bryan recalls, “but she was always asking, ‘What are you working on now? Is that the next one coming? I don’t care if it takes you two or three years, but I’d like to see how you’re developing.'”

What does Bryan think of his momentous birthday coming up? He mentions that when children ask him his age, he always asks them how old they think he is. He then tells them that he is 5 and 15 and 55 and 65, and that he is all of them because he draws and writes for those ages within himself – “so whichever age they pick they’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says with a chuckle.

In the past Bryan has preferred “to scoot away” on his birthday, but this year he is facing the music. Family will be coming and Cranberry islanders will celebrate their neighbor and friend.

Bryan acknowledges his good health. “I sleep well and wake up fresh. I can manage whatever comes up in a day.” This summer, he will be painting in his garden, considering new book projects and, in mid-August, attending the Children’s Literature New England’s 17th annual conference held this year at Newnham College in Cambridge, England. He will also be greeting a delegation from the Maine Library Association, which is coming to Little Cranberry to present Bryan with the 2003 Katahdin Award. This lifetime achievement award recognizes an outstanding body of work of children’s literature in Maine by an author or an illustrator.

Happy 80th, Ashley Bryan, and many happy returns.

Bryan’s illustrations for “Beautiful Blackbird” – and the scissors he made them with – are on display through Oct. 15 at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass.