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The Pencil Test

By James Guilford

Kendry detests her prestigious high school and its bullies, her middle-class neighborhood in which her mother hides a drug addiction, and her “toilet bowl of a social life.” The 15-year-old white girl wants to live adventurously, like the black girls she admires from a distance when she rides the train to her therapist’s office every Tuesday. Kendry “wants to belong to the black girls. She wants their brazenness, their sassiness, their self-involved insolence.” She wants their “struggles, their tragedies, and their poverty and resilience.”

The Pencil Test is James Guilford’s debut novel. The title refers to an old racial classification test in which people of indeterminate color were considered white if a pencil slid through their hair and black if it got stuck. This young adult novel, categorized as “children’s fiction” on the book cover, addresses the yearning to belong and the consequences of telling a lie to gain popularity.

When Doris, Kendry’s mother, announces they must move to a less-affluent neighborhood because she’s lost her job as a real estate agent, Kendry is thrilled. She’s even more thrilled to learn she will be attending the same school in East Atlanta that her train-riding idols attend. The very first classmate she meets at the all-black high school is Tandy, the sassy leader of the group from the train. During their first conversation, Kendry fails to correct a misconception about her identity and turns it into a lie. Tandy believes her and immediately invites her into the bookish, affluent life hidden from Tandy’s other friends to protect the sassy image.

The author’s inexperience as a novelist is evident in the lack of plot conflict. Kendry wishes for a change in schools and immediately gets the one she wants. Instead of being tested as a newcomer there, she is told by Tandy, “I got your back as long as you don’t say anything stupid or try to play me and my girls.” Some of the incidents are so far-fetched as to be unbelievable. Is there really a therapist who allows patients free access to his drug cabinets and who sends his wife to keep his appointments?

The Pencil Test flips stereotypes by placing the white girl in the drug culture and making the black girl studious and wealthy. During most of the story, Doris is absent from her home because she is in drug rehab. Her boyfriend sets up a drug lab in the basement, and Kendry shares the house with a man who operates the lab. Kendry begins dating Tandy’s brother, Kush, and joins him and the friends Tandy refers to as “his black-to-Africa henchmen” in their quest to restore an old-world culture. Kendry dreadlocks her hair and changes her name after being told, “You should carry the name of unity, Umoja.”

Guilford, an Atlanta native living in New York City, is an educator who conducts “Diversity in Action” workshops. His website, www.jamesguilford.com, contains lesson plans for using The Pencil Test to teach diversity in the classroom. There is definitely a need for teaching children to be accepting of each other. My daughters attended a predominantly black elementary school, and they frequently wished they were black, too, so they wouldn’t be harassed. Unfortunately, this novel doesn’t encourage better treatment of others.

I could not recommend this book for use in school libraries or classrooms. The completely negative surroundings and actions provide no role models or positive experiences. What are teens expected to learn? Kendry moves through life by lying and thinking only of herself, cursing her mother and teachers, threatening to commit suicide or murder someone, betraying her friends, and generally being dishonest and disrespectful. She acts without regret and suffers no consequences. The other characters are static, without growth or change, except for Tandy, and her change isn’t positive.

Guilford has an admirable goal in wanting to use The Pencil Test to promote diversity. If only it didn’t promote a negative lifestyle instead.