Books |
The Hundred Dresses
Eleanor Estes
By
Published: Jan 24, 2019
Category:
Children
This is the best book I have ever read for children about bullying. It doesn’t preach. It doesn’t talk down. It just tells a story. Teachers who read it to their first to third graders report dead silence and rapt attention. I’m betting that would happen in your home. Or in a number of homes you know. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
When she was young — this was almost a century ago — Eleanor Estes went to school with a Polish girl who was so poor that she wore the same dress every day. Kids are cruel; the girl got teased. And then she moved away.
In 1944, Eleanor Estes took that memory and turned it into The Hundred Dresses, a short novel — 80 big-print pages, with many illustrations — for children. It was named a Newberry Honor Book. It has never gone out of print.
Unlike children’s book authors who get cute or write down to kids, Eleanor Estes is blunt as a police reporter. As the book begins, Wanda Petronski — poor, motherless, foreign — is not in school, and that means Peggy and Madeline have no one to tease.
It’s not that Peggy and Madeline are witches-in-training. Peggy’s the most popular girl in school. “She protected small children from bullies. And she cried for hours if she saw an animal mistreated.” And Madeline, her best friend, really had no reason to be mean. She was just going along.
And yet, in the schoolyard, they’d corner Wanda: “How many dresses did you say you had hanging up in your closet?”
“A hundred,” Wanda would say. And she’d describe them. Silk. Velvet. In all colors.
"A hundred dresses?" the girls would repeat. "Nobody could have a hundred dresses."
But Wanda would hold her ground: "I have.”
There’s an art competition. Long before the winners are announced, Wanda’s father decides he’s had enough and moves his kids away from the town where his daughter is tormented. And so the announcement of the winner — the never-to-be-seen-again Wanda, for her beautiful sketches of a hundred dresses — has a double wallop. Because the teacher goes right on to read a note from Wanda’s father: “No more holler Polack. No more ask why funny name. Plenty of funny names in the big city.”
A long silence follows.
Just before Christmas, their teacher gets a nice note from Wanda, giving Peggy and Maddie each a sketch.
Maddie takes her drawing home. That night, she looks hard at it and sees something she hadn’t noticed — the face is hers. Wanda had drawn it just for her. And it turned out that Peggy’s sketch is also a portrait of Peggy.
The book ends with Maddie and Peggy admiring their pictures:
“What did I say!” said Peggy. “She must have really liked us anyway.”
“Yes, she must have,” agreed Maddie, and she blinked away the tears that came every time she thought of Wanda standing alone in that sunny spot in the school yard close to the wall, looking stolidly over at the group of laughing girls after she had walked off, after she had said, “Sure, a hundred of them — all lined up…”
Our daughter goes to a school where the very first thing kindergarteners are taught is the power of words. She’s lucky. At many schools, I’m sure, that lesson isn’t taught — and the small, the sensitive and the different do get teased, and pushed around, and hurt.
“The Hundred Dresses” can teach young readers that bullies aren’t just mean boys who threaten their targets physically. A racial or ethnic slur will do just as well. And the kid who watches it happen and says nothing is just as guilty as the kid who talked that trash.
Dress styles change, but this book is endlessly fresh and accessible. Thank racism, prejudice and human nature for that. And then bless the little girl who inspired Eleanor Estes to write such a smart, simple antidote.
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