What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money: Beverly Cleary’s ‘Otis Spofford’
Last week, we looked at Beverly Cleary’s Ellen Tebbits, the story of a young girl living in Portland with parents who, as I put it, “can afford to be a little old-fashioned because their income doesn’t require them to take modern shortcuts.”
We first see Otis Spofford as a secondary character in Ellen Tebbits, but even before we meet Otis, we are introduced to his mother:
Because she taught dancing, people did not call her Mrs. John Spofford. They called her by her full name, Valerie Todd Spofford.
Ellen Tebbits was published in 1951; Otis Spofford followed in 1953, and Valerie Todd Spofford is still living her unconventional life, the one that requires people to call her by her full name. She and Otis live together in a small apartment (we never learn what happened to Otis’s father). She heats up cans of chili for dinner. She doesn’t prioritize domestic tasks, like ironing Otis’s shirts—even though we do see her begrudgingly admitting that at least the front-facing part of the shirt should be ironed before Otis goes out in public.
Valerie Todd Spofford, busy with her job and role as family breadwinner, comes up with workarounds for the parts of daily domesticity that she can’t afford or doesn’t care for.
Her son, Otis, does the exact same thing at school—and it’s presented as misbehavior.
To be fair, much of what Otis does at school is in fact misbehavior, in the sense that it disrupts and/or harms other people. Not content to sit quietly and wait for his classmates to finish their math problems (because Otis is good at math and is already done), Otis begins throwing spitballs at his friends. Bored with his role in the school’s Mexican Fiesta, Otis convinces his friend Stewy to help him improvise a new ending to the toreador scene (spoiler alert: this time, the bull wins).
Otis’s life is about improvisation, which makes sense when you consider that he’s the child of a dancer who has figured out a way to scrape by and get the entire neighborhood to call her by her full name, instead of “that divorced woman” or “the woman who’s husband ran off.” (I am pretty certain Valerie Todd Spofford is not a widow, because someone in the story would have mentioned it.) Otis makes do with what he has, like putting on extra pairs of socks until his feet are large enough to fit a pair of secondhand ice skates, or building a bug collection by unscrewing light fixtures and checking out what’s inside.
But then Otis makes a mistake. He chases Ellen Tebbits and her friend Austine to school one too many times, and they decide to chase him instead—which leads to Otis’s shirt getting torn, and his classmates learning that he wears a pink undershirt (it turned pink in the wash and his mom couldn’t afford to buy a new one).
After spending most of the day getting teased about his undershirt, which is to say “getting teased about his socioeconomic status” and “getting teased about his masculinity,” Otis retaliates by improvising: in this case, imagining that he is someone more powerful than he currently feels.
He jumped out of his seat. “I’m an Indian,” he announced. “I’m on the warpath.” He put one hand behind his head and held up two fingers to look like feathers. The other hand he patted over his mouth while he war-whooped.
(Yes, there is a lot of cultural appropriation/racism passed off as educational objective in this book, from the school’s Mexican Fiesta to the way the students learn about Native American culture. We can discuss that in the comments.)
Then Otis, fully committing to this role, cuts off a chunk of Ellen’s hair.
That’s where it gets hard to forgive Otis, even though Cleary writes the entire scene from his perspective in the hopes that we will, at least, understand him:
Stewy needn’t think Otis was going to back out now. He couldn’t. Anyway, now that he had started, he had to know what it felt like to cut that hair. With all the strength he had, he forced the blades together on the thick locks in his hand. Triumphantly he held up a brown handful. “Me scalp ‘um,” he announced.
Then Otis saw Ellen staring at that handful of hair, her eyes round with horror. She felt the side of her head with her hand. “My pigtails!” she whispered, as if she couldn’t believe what had happened.
Otis stopped being an Indian and stared too. Ellen’s pigtails. Why, she had been waiting months for her hair to grow long enough to braid. What had he been thinking of, anyway? It had all happened so fast.
It was hard to read this scene as a child, and it’s a lot harder to read it as an adult—both because of Otis’s casual racism and because he acts on Ellen without her consent.
In the following chapter, Ellen and Austine get their revenge by stealing Otis’s shoes and snowboots, forcing him to walk home from the local pond on his secondhand ice skates, which ruins them. Otis cut Ellen’s hair, so Ellen and Austine make Otis wreck his own personal property—and it’s clear Otis won’t get a new pair of skates any time soon.
This was another scene that was hard to read as a child, even though it’s presented as “justice,” and the book ends there: Otis goes home with his ruined skates, Ellen and Austine show up to return his boots and shoes, and Otis promises to stop teasing them.
But he keeps his fingers crossed as he says so, which doesn’t suggest that anything about Otis will change at all.
I know I took y’all on a journey with this post, from the plucky kid with the unconventional mom to the boy who literally violated a girl’s body, but that’s the story Cleary writes for us, so that’s what we have to discuss. Certainly the Spoffords’ financial situation plays a role in a lot of Otis’s actions, especially in his decision to make himself feel strong after his classmates make fun of his clothing and the way he acts on Ellen as a result—but he doesn’t cut Ellen’s hair because his mom has less money than other people. He could have crumpled up another piece of paper and thrown another spitball, if he needed to destroy something to feel better about himself, but this time he makes a different choice.
I’ll turn the discussion over to you. What should we make of Otis? How do you feel about him, at the end of Cleary’s story?
