Back to the Bean Farm: Rereading the Freddy Books
Freddy and the Popinjay
by Kevin W. Parker
WARNING: These articles are written with the assumption that the reader has already read the story in question. Don’t read this article if you want any surprises to be preserved for you.
When our current president, Nancy Joroff, attended her first Friends of Freddy convention, at the time to chauffeur and accompany her pig-mad daughter, Aladdine, she told anyone who would ask that her favorite Freddy book was Freddy and the Popinjay, simply because it was the only Freddy book she had read. She got some funny looks. Upon this latest reading, I am not sure she deserved such looks.
There are two main plot threads in Popinjay, and one minor one. The one that yields the title involves Mr. J.J.Pomeroy, a robin, who in the early pages of the book mistakes Freddy’s tail for a worm due to his nearsightedness. Freddy takes him to downtown Centerboro to get him a pair of glasses and comes up with the idea of turning him into the mysterious bird seen in Mrs. Winfield Church’s family crest, which Freddy dubs a popinjay. This is a great success, except that J.J. Pomeroy gets very snooty and superior about it, with he and his wife changing their names to Popinjay and lording themselves about until Uncle Solomon takes them down a peg toward the end of the book, and they learn the error of their ways.
Meanwhile, young Jimmy Witherspoon is terrorizing the animals by slingshotting stones at them. Particularly after farm favorite Alice is hit by one of them, the animals decide something needs to be done. They eventually involve Jimmy in some of their games and find a way to give him a bunch of Adoniram and Byram’s nice clothes by calling them prizes in a jousting contest. Jimmy’s father, Zenas, takes exception to this, and returns the clothing, only to get bawled out (in the nicest possible way, of course) by Mrs. Bean, who asks him what he plans to do with all his money if not to spend it on his son. Zenas gradually yields to this and, once his son is nicely dressed and he sees how people react to this, actually buys him some nice clothes himself. There’s a nice conclusion where Mr. Witherspoon gives his son fifty cents to spend as he sees fit, Jimmy invites his father to join him for ice cream sodas, and he graciously accepts.
The third plot comes in late, when Mac the wildcat shows up. This stirs great concern amongst the farm animals since wildcats are fond of eating many of the animals that populate the Bean Farm: rabbits, ducks, and chickens, for example. However, Mac is the consummate gentleman and begins to be accepted, at least until Freddy gets word from over in Herkimer County that Mac and his family participated in a local school for animals until they were booted out for eating some of the students. Apparently, they heard that there was going to be a new school started near the Bean Farm and decided to move in ahead of time in order to arrange the menu, or at least so Freddy thinks. He’s prepared to drive the wildcats away, with some help from Jacob the wasp and his friends. But the wildcats clip their claws and put on muzzles to show their willingness to behave in future. So they are, with some trepidation, accepted.
There’s a striking thematic unity here that’s suggested by the poems Freddy writes early in the story. First, he laments at his inadequate tail, though he’s somewhat reassured by J.J. Pomeroy that it’s a sort of punctuation and doesn’t need to be waggable. Later, reacting to this advice, he produces this piece:
A lesson which we all must learn
Is this: without complaint
To be ourselves, and not to yearn
To be that which we ain’t.
If cats had wings, and cows had claws
And pigs had shaggy pelts,
You’d never know your friends, because
They’d look like someone else.
Then be content with what you’ve got
And do not weep and wail,
For the leopard cannot change his spots
Nor the pig his curly tail.
And that becomes the point of the rest of the book: can people change? Should they? Interestingly, there’s not just one answer. Jimmy Witherspoon changes, but you could argue that he just goes from being messed up to being not messed up: he doesn’t become different, he becomes more himself, the real, good self, hidden away behind a mask of bitterness. The same could be said of Mr. Witherspoon.
Mac the wildcat, on the other hand, certainly does change, and this is an interesting one: I mean, wildcats are supposed to eat small animals. If they don’t, then how do they survive? This seems to be something Brooks glosses over, along with the real fate of pigs, chickens, and ducks on a farm.
Finally, there’s the main plot thread of the Pomeroys, simple robins who become popinjays and then realize that that’s not the way to go. That I have mixed feelings about: I don’t think there was much wrong with them being popinjays so long as they realized it was all for show, that it said nothing about what they were themselves. However, they let their fancy attire go to their heads, and it annoys everyone else until they repent.
So, for a children’s book there’s a remarkable amount of subtlety here. It’s also a fairly gentle book. There’s no four-flushing villain like Flint, Zingo, or Eha, and in a way that’s all to the good. One of the themes throughout the Freddy books is that there aren’t that many real villains, that once you understand someone, you begin to sympathize with him. And that’s borne out in this volume of the series more than any other.
As usual, I’ve glossed over a lot of the fun little bits, like the pit the animals dig out in the field that Mr. Bean falls into. They’re initially horrified, but it turns out that he likes having a place on the farm where he can’t see all the work that needs doing. There’s also a scene where the sheriff tries to confiscate Mrs. Church’s hat since using dead birds for such things is illegal. However, the bird is very much alive and keeps flying back to Mrs. Church, until the sheriff begins to doubt his sanity.
I still don’t think I’d put Popinjay among my very favorites, like Ignormus, Cowboy, and Detective, but at this point I find it one of the stronger books in the series.
(For a very different thematic analysis of Freddy and the Popinjay, see Eric Shanower’s “Of Pigs and Popinjays,” in Bean Home Newsletter, Volume 6, No. 2.)
Kevin has ten of these reviews to go before he finishes the series, with any luck before he retires.
Link to Friends of Freddy Book Club Meeting dedicated TITLE