The Courage of Sarah Noble

Alice Dalgliesh wrote The Courage of Sarah Noble in 1954 and was subsequently awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, which was “given annually from 1958 to 1979 to books deemed to possess enough of the qualities of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland […] to enable them to sit on the same book shelf” (“Lewis Carroll Shelf Award.” Library Thing). Despite this, The Courage of Sarah Noble is problematic in its representation of the Schaghticoke, whom Sarah and her father call “Indians”: Only a few Schaghticoke individuals are characterized and then only in relation to what they do for Sarah and John. Sarah’s mother calls the Schaghticoke “savages,” pronouncing moccasins to be “outlandish” and wigwams “queer.” Because John and Sarah struggle to enunciate Schaghticoke names, they assign English names to the members of one family. John also reassures Sarah that the Indigenous people they meet are “good,” meaning peaceful, suggesting that the tribes who used or reciprocated violence to protect their lands from colonizers are “bad” rather than justified or victimized. The Robinsons, with whom John and Sarah stay for one night, inaccurately tell her that the “Indians” will eat her, chop off her head, and skin her alive. Even the constant repetition of the idea that Sarah needs to “keep up” her courage suggests that there is a real threat of danger: “And it is in the Native people that the heart of the menace and strangeness lies. Although in fact nothing ever endangers this child, neither the animals nor the people, and there is never any need for all this courage, the author carries it to the very end” (Seale, Doris. “Books to Avoid.” Oyate).

In 1954, the language Dalgliesh uses and her characterization of the Schaghticoke was not seen as problematic by white readers, and the text was frequently used in elementary school classrooms. The other winners of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, however, helped to establish the literary context of Dalgliesh’s work in the time in which it was published. Other winners include The Five Chinese Brothers, by Claire Huchet Bishop, published in 1938 and based on a Chinese folktale. The brothers are identical, each featuring the same stereotypical and outdated hairstyle and clothes, providing a caricature of Chinese people rather than a real representation. This is not dissimilar to Sarah’s impression that all the Schaghticoke children “looked alike” at first. Likewise, in Little House on the Prairie, a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner published in 1935, Laura Ingalls Wilder “described one setting as a place where ‘there were no people. Only Indians lived there,’” suggesting that “Indians” are not “people” (Chow, Kat. “Little House on the Controversy.” NPR, 25 June 2018). Similarly, when Sarah’s father leaves her in the care of “Tall John’s” family, she worries about being “alone,” though, in fact, she will be living with “Tall John,” his wife, and his two children, whom she has befriended. This word choice suggests, as does Wilder’s, that “Indians” don’t count as people; Sarah will be the only white person in the community, and thus, her fear of being “alone” signifies an unconscious belief that those who are not white are not human.

While it would be inappropriate to ignore the text’s offensive representation of the Schaghticoke, an understanding of the era in which the book was published is needed to contextualize this representation fully. Sarah’s growth—the result of her experiences with the Schaghticoke—and the book’s themes suggest the benefits of cultural exchange, depicting the necessity of interaction among racial and ethnic groups to foster greater understanding, empathy, and inclusion. Thus, Dalgliesh’s aims seem—in this context—to be rather forward-thinking for a children’s book published in 1950s America.