Please stop carpeting over the hard words

by Amy Cipolla Barnes

If you’ve bought an older home, there’s a chance you’ve tried to pull the carpet away from the baseboards — to check for potential hardwoods. You may have pulled up layer upon layer of past flooring choices. You may have researched how to sandblast paint off brick. The white brick trend is back. People are covering hardwood floors with intersecting carpet squares.

Why do people cover red brick houses with white paint? Why do they put down shag carpet over hardwood floors? The answer is complicated. The brick may be cracking. The hardwood floors are worn out. The linoleum has peeled up. The current decorating trend may be for white houses and 1970s shag carpet. I tolerate those interior design trends because they are personal choices but also because the new home owners OWN the homes. Sometimes the wood floors under the carpet are beautiful and lost to some brief trend, sometimes they are indeed better off being covered.

This week, parts of Roald Dahl’s childhood classics got covered in literary carpet, covering what some people read as damaged or controversial or even out-of-literary-style. It’s yet another literary discourse. I don’t own the Dahl books. What I do own (and lots of kids and adults own) is how the Dahl books made us feel and think. Ironically, the people who currently own Dahl’s words are who have chosen to cover them up. They may be taking advice from others — committees, sensitivity readers, board members. As much as I hate to admit it and as much as it makes me angry, they are the owners until the books come out of copyright.

As a geeky kid, Matilda was the friend I wanted. The kids in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book were the ones I wanted punished or judged. The books also gave hope to kids who imagined and dreamed they might own a chocolate factory for finding a golden ticket. The imagination infused in Dahl’s book is what I remember. The imagery. The sensory details. Now, I will remember someone literally white-washing them to take out something that might offend new audiences or even the old ones somehow.

It’s basically become a designer trend. Books like hardwood floors are under scrutiny for being old-fashioned or messy. I live in the South where books are literally being burned in church parking lots and parents are petitioning to remove books that *might* offend a kid or expose them to something shocking or age-inappropriate. Roald Dahl was probably some of the more innocent books that I read as a kid, but even the (actually) scandalous books that I snuck had value. From Flowers in the Attic to Clan of the Cave Bear, I was reading. Dahl also colored how I write as an adult. I wrote this for Full Mood Magazine because of Dahl, not in spite of him: When I am old I shall wear chartreuse.

From Pen America chief executive Suzanne Nossel to Salman Rushdie, people are not happy, with good reason. This article does a good job at exploring some of the changes and reactions. There’s something so prescriptive in this carpeting over of Dahl’s original words and it’s not small changes. It’s akin to an editor making major changes to a published work without telling the author or even asking permission. If the proverbial rolling over in the grave happens, Dahl has to be doing circles.

How do we deal with book burnings and banning and white-washing? Do we buy the old copies quickly before they’re lost? Do we simply preserve the stories as written in our minds like we’re reciting them on a desert island or in prison? How do we keep this from happening to other authors (or our own writing?) What happens a decade from now when our writing is covered up in shag carpet and our books are stiff with white paint? It’s something to think about.

I will be perpetually pulling up the corners on books to see what lies beneath, uncover it again even if the hard words are cracked or aging hard words from a different time. In five decades when the last of the Dahl books and stories are out of copyright, I hope people will read the notes and reactions of 2023 and then look under the book baseboards for the originals, peel back layers of linoleum and censorship and shag carpet to find the cracked and beautiful words that Dahl first laid down.