Book Review: “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World,” by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World, by Jamaica Kincaid. Illustrated by Kara Walker.

It bears considering that had anything resembling “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children” actually existed in the days of antebellum plantation culture, it would have been forbidden fruit: Few enslaved people, young or old, were allowed to learn to read or write.

With its mordantly anachronistic title and schoolroom-green cover, the book also serves as a reminder that the segregationist term “colored,” brought to you by the Jim Crow era, which extended well into the 20th century, drew lines almost as stark, limiting opportunities for many Black children to experience gardening as an activity of pure enjoyment. Jamaica Kincaid, now as well known for gardening writing as for fiction, once put it this way (about her garden in Vermont): “I have joined the conquering class: Who else could afford this garden — a garden in which I grow things that it would be much cheaper to buy at the store?”

In collaborating with the fiercely imaginative visual artist Kara Walker, Kincaid has transposed this mode of thinking into an amalgam of erudition, discourse, storytelling and picture book art. A simple child’s garden of ABCs their “encyclopedia” is not.

Kincaid’s adult base, too, will gravitate toward it, and occasionally want to elucidate for younger readers some of its references and allusions — the H.M.S. Bounty sailing in jauntily under “B Is for Breadfruit”; the oblique treatment of Thomas Jefferson; the classification of Carl “L Is for” Linnaeus, the proud papa of taxonomy, as “notorious.” Art collectors will pounce on the book for the rich contribution it makes to the continuum of Walker’s work.

Playfulness, in its world, never comes without a price. Walker’s opening illustration, a lacy ball of greenery and graphics, is not a toy; it’s a declaration of intent, spelling out the book’s subtitle. As an “Alphabetary of the Colonized World,” the book sets about peeling back botany to display the history behind it — to reveal conquest as arrogant and destructive, economics as exploitation, the brutal privileges of slaveholding, the propagation of racial injustice. Plants are the pawns of trade routes and of encounters that don’t end well for Indigenous peoples.

The book names names, including species’ Latin nomenclatures, because Kincaid believes that the rigors of language as well as its profuse bounty have much to teach. Witness her own roots and cultivation: Born Elaine Potter Richardson in what was still the British colony of Antigua, she was sent by her family at 17 to work as an au pair in the United States, where she proceeded to launch herself on a singular trajectory that eventually deposited her at The New Yorker.

In illustrating Kincaid’s fancifully wonky entries, Walker takes down a notch the natural-world metaphors of the monumental cut-paper silhouettes that brought her to prominence — the ocean waves charting the Middle Passage; the pastoral Southern landscapes blooming with violence and violation; moonlit trees that are lynching posts.

Cunning and often anthropomorphic, the alphabet book’s imagery interpolates child-driven versions of her acidly sardonic shadow art with soft-edged, watercolor-drenched vignettes that play hide-and-seek with the letters they’re called on to represent. Sometimes, as with the burdens cotton placed on those shackled to an inhumane system, she lets subjects simply speak for themselves.

You can feel the nostalgic tug of precedents on the book. It places itself within the tradition of the pre-Raphaelites reanimating fairy tales and mythology for the Kelmscott Press, Salvador Dalí tackling “Alice in Wonderland,” Alexander Calder taking on Aesop.

In Kincaid’s view, the elements of the past we miss or regret form a paradise we’ve been cast out of, by force or life’s unforeseen circumstances — an Edenic ideal that impels gardeners high and low to make their mark.

After all, as she reminds us in “K Is for Kitchen Garden,” the luxury of a just-because garden “feeds and nourishes our souls and inspires us to think about ‘things’: the little doubts we harbor deep inside ourselves, our hatreds of others, our love of others, the many ways in which we can destroy and create the world and live with the consequences.”

The resemblance between Kincaid’s own explosively colorful, emphatically personal Vermont garden and her distinctive writing style has been remarked upon. “Her hundreds of plants,” the critic Darryl Pinckney recently observed, “are layered into a composition of informal design, expressive of her refined aesthetic and untroubled eccentricity.”

Sure enough, “An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children” has ideas looping hither and yon, the musicality of repetition, a generous embrace of idiosyncrasy, a punching up of symbolism.

Some of those redundancies and quirks might have benefited from pruning, and clarifying sunlight. As a collaboration, though, the book is charming and instructive. Kincaid and Walker are unafraid to spin the world differently and make it matter in new ways.