The meat of the narrative covered in this novel commences in Chapter 4 with eight little words coming out of a teacher’s mouth that are capable of striking fear in the heart of any student: “Put down your pencils and come with me.” Shortly thereafter, a group of students find themselves meeting regularly in room 501 for purposes beyond what the classroom was intended. They also find themselves dropped into a popular storytelling trope most iconoclastically represented by the 1980’s Brat Pack comedy The Breakfast Club.
The trope can vary substantially in term of the set-up and the specific expectations, but generally speaking the storyline is as follows: a group of disparate kids—usually misfits in some ways—are grouped together outside of conventional scheduling standards and isolated from the rest of the student body with the intent that taking advantage of the opportunity to engage in discourse with each other, lessons will be learned, behavior improved, empathy kickstarted and so on. In other words, Jacqueline Woodson’s 2018 novel titled Harbor Me is not exactly based on the most original idea ever.
Which is not necessarily criticism. Originality by itself does not guarantee greatness any more than a lack of originality obstructs greatness. True, the set-up for what happens here has done before but the proof is in the pudding and the taste of the pudding in this case is determined by how the ingredients are mixed. It becomes apparently immediately that the ingredients mixed together here should in no way recall anything about The Breakfast Club other than the trope on which both similar stories are based. The famous poster for that says everything: five white (or predominantly white anyway) high school kids.
Were a poster made for Harbor Me, it would be notably more colorful. Esteban is the son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Tiago’s family hails from Puerto Rico. Amari is black and Ashton is paler than usual shade of white. In other words, the group of students set to the task of discussing anything they want without fear by their teacher is a very diverse group who must deal with problems much more intense than not being popular or being a misunderstood jock with a heart of gold.
The problems and concerns and anxieties discussed in the protected sanctum of room 501 are very topical and very scary: anti-immigration hysteria and the fear of deportation, the epidemic of being killed by police for the crime of being a young and black in America, racial prejudice and discrimination, guns, parents in prison and more. Because the worries confronting these young kids are so overwhelming, it is not a book moving inexorably toward a happy ending where conflict is resolved. But that doesn’t mean it is an unhappy ending because that isn’t the point of the story. The author recognizes that her “plot” is a trope that has been visited time and again and she presents her version of this set-up in a way that suggests she trusts middle-school target audience to recognize this as well. Everybody is in on the anti-realistic structure of the story and so its artificial construction does not matter because the point is not to show that such situations result in resolutions. The point lies not in how such a social experiment ends, but in that fact that it ever gets started in the first place.
