Josepha: A Prairie Boy's Story

Ted McGee is a professor of English at St. Jerome’s College,
University of Waterloo.

Historians of Canadian children’s literature would probably slot
Josepha: A Prairie Boy’s Story into the “realistic picture book”
category. Set in 1900, the story is a flashback interjected into a
moment of farewell. Parting are the narrator, a young boy, and his
14-year-old hero and friend, Josepha, who is leaving school for
“Dollar day. Dollar day. Dollar day a baggink.” I quote Josepha’s
own words because language—“Eaton catalog English,” “sheep
talk,” and so on—is a crucial element in this book’s
representation of characters, colonization, alienation, and, ultimately,
though in a nonverbal form, friendship. Leaving school is liberating for
Josepha. Despite his admiring friend and a supportive teacher, Josepha
is victimized by a humiliating system that requires that he, though 14,
sit in the primary row; like many others before, when Josepha “braved
to speak,” he was “made the fool.”

Disturbing at first, this tale remains rather haunting. This effect is
partly a consequence of the style, which uses repetition and sentence
fragments as if to dramatize the narrator’s effort to remember. More
important are the illustrations. In almost every picture, dark shadows
qualify the depiction of bright, breezy, and vast prairie spaces.
Laughter is conjoined with coughing, and dancing bare feet unite with
bare shoulders scratched by twine suspenders. And counterpointing the
images of Josepha’s happiness are the sombre faces, bowed heads, and
stooped shoulders of Josepha and others. All in all, a realistic picture
book combining a sense of life’s tough struggles and special kinds of
friendship. Highly recommended.