Back when I taught fifth grade at an elite independent school, we used to laugh that all the children’s books we knew prepared our students for waking up one morning to find that they were required to save the world — which perhaps they were and one day would be. Even the texts that didn’t feature the vanquishing of grave magical threats were about leaving behind home and family to find adventure, get into trouble, and return (or emerge) as heroes.

I teach now at a middle school whose students are all African American, and we read a lot more books by black authors and about black urban protagonists. Many of these books — not all, but a substantial mainstream — set up a quite different pattern. Their protagonists begin not in safety but besieged by trouble — and not story-trouble (monsters) or child-trouble (bullies) but real-world, long-term trouble, of the sort that rarely appears in middle-grade novels about white children: drug addiction, unintended pregnancy, violent death. In these books, the consequences of getting into trouble are unambiguous and unforgiving; they are embodied in the persons of backgrounded children — siblings or cousins or friends — who chose wrongly and irredeemably. Rather than outwitting or defeating some distant evil, then, the protagonists who share my students’ circumstances more often flee the threat of badness in themselves. Rather than striving for independence or freedom, they tend to move toward the protection of benevolent adults. About the most popular novel in this category is Sharon Flake’s The Skin I’m In, which won the CSK John Steptoe New Talent Award in 1999 and which sometimes makes the summer reading list even at majority-white schools such as the one at which I used to teach. (On their website it is tagged with three asterisks, for “especially challenging” — presumably because of the subject matter rather than the complexity of the prose.) Its heroine, Maleeka, begins the novel under the influence of the awesomely bad and “crazylike” Charlese, “the baddest thing in school,” who smokes, steals, cuts class, bullies teachers, and threatens and abuses her own disciples. Working against Charlese is their new teacher, who describes herself to her students as “smart. Sassy. Sexy. Self-confident,” and who encourages Maleeka to study and write.

The features that distinguish Maleeka’s story from the more traditional (and traditionally white-oriented) standing-up-to-bullies problem novel are those it shares with numerous other books about black adolescents: first, her peers pick on Maleeka precisely because of her intellect and promise, because of her grades and reputation, because she might be “too good” for them. Her potential for goodness is what marks her out as the heroine; the novel requires her to be not especially capable of saving the world around her but especially available to be saved from it. Second, Charlese is both more dangerous and less interesting than the bullies in books like Bridge to Terabithia or Harry Potter; by the end of the novel she has threatened to beat Maleeka in order to coerce her to set fire to her teacher ’s classroom — then framed her for theft in order to prevent her from “snitching.” There is no sense that the children already lost to badness might themselves deserve compassion or redemption; Charlese’s last lines echo the vitriol of her first, and Maleeka’s problems resolve in part because Charlese has been sent away (to relatives in the South), a fairly common literary tactic for disposing of those bad children who do not die.

And in the end, Maleeka’s triumph is not quite one of self-assertion. In the climactic classroom-vandalism scene, she yields to Charlese; her rejection of badness comes only after Maleeka has been caught and punished, when she returns to her teacher and reveals Charlese’s involvement. Maleeka tells us she is tired of “doing what other folks want me to,” but by telling the truth she is not so much establishing her own agency as giving herself over to her teacher’s guidance and protection, as well as reconnecting with her mother and the memory of her father. This belated climax closes with, “Miss Saunders hugs me to her, and I feel safe inside.” Perry Nodelman names the most familiar children’s literature pattern as home-away-home: in short, adventure. In The Skin I’m In, on the other hand, the protagonist journeys from danger and estrangement toward shelter and interconnection.

Elements of this homeward journey and its perils turn up in books by almost all of our favorite black writers for the middle grades. When Jacqueline Woodson’s Miracle’s Boys opens, the bad brother has already become so impenetrably wicked that the narrator dubs him “Newcharlie”: “The old Charlie had feelings.” Unlike Charlese, Charlie gets better at the end of the novel; but the transformation is so abrupt and total that it reads more like an exorcism. Literally overnight, he turns his back on the “gang guys” with whom he’s been associating and thus loses an entire set of habits, opinions, and even speech patterns that characterized his badness. Walter Dean Myers writes young-adult books that tolerate a bit more ambiguity, but in his middle-grade novel Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff, the central characters start a club that they actually name the Good People. One of the boys they know chooses not to join; the next time he appears, he has become a drug user and subsequently dies of an overdose. The Good People never dabble in drugs or violence, and yet they readily accept his role as object lesson and mortal threat: “We’re all from the same background as Charley, and I don’t see how it can’t happen to one of us.” It is because of their “background” — because of being black kids in the city — that their goodness requires vigilant defense.

Angela Johnson’s lovely The First Part Last, aimed at slightly older readers, feints at first toward offering its hero more nuanced possibilities and greater freedom. Bobby is a talented, sensitive artist who is raising his infant daughter himself for reasons that are not clear to the reader at first. He struggles believably to manage his responsibilities, his family, and his friends, none of which suggest themselves as all good or all bad. In two exuberantly joyful scenes, the reader imagines briefly that art or sex might allow Bobby to make peace with his sudden manhood. But his effort to “find the baby’s face” when he paints an elaborate graffiti mural leads to his arrest and the near loss of his child; and in the novel’s final twist, we learn that his spunky, college-bound girlfriend suffered irreversible brain damage in childbirth and will never regain consciousness. For her, at least, teenaged sex was terminal; and in the end, Bobby undergoes his own sort of metaphorical death. He leaves New York City — suddenly “too big” for him — and moves with his daughter to a rural town named Heaven.

I first began to wonder and write about these books before I changed schools, when I was looking for a more diverse array of characters to offer my students. At the time I felt frustrated and worried by the strictly dichotomized roles these books offered for black children. Goodness was passive, compliant, boring (see Bobby, now a tediously saintly mentor to the younger protagonist in Heaven, Johnson’s 1998 sequel), yet under constant attack. Vigorous badness was in some ways more welcoming — but a reader who failed to repudiate it quickly enough might find him- or herself condemned by the conventions of the genre to exile or death. These otherwise racially conscious and positive authors were reinforcing an essentialized, born-bad image of some black youth as wild, wicked, and threatening beyond any possibility of empathy or redemption. Though the characters were children themselves, the evil in these novels seemed to originate in them — without reference to the cultural or historical forces that disenfranchised them, which by and large escaped critique.

These novels also seemed to me to limit the work that literature could do. Because these authors could not resist warning, hectoring, and praising, their fiction offered little more than story versions of the wall of pamphlets in the guidance counselor’s office rather than any exploration of youthful autonomy. I supposed that this pattern might push kids away from reading; in my master’s thesis I asked, how much would I read if the books most available to me mainly featured characters who learn at their peril never to run late for work, eat birthday cupcakes for lunch, or complain about coworkers behind their backs?

 In my current job, though, I’ve come to see these books a little differently. My kids love them. I feel sheepish beginning with that classic professor-infuriating teacher’s line, but it’s true. They love other books too — Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The Princess Diaries and Coe Booth’s deliciously undidactic and decidedly YA Kendra and Tyrell — but even after a very long day of constant reminders to be good and listen to the grownups, my kids seek out the more didactic books for pleasure and comfort. These are the books that get reread twice before they are relinquished; the books that never get checked in, only passed to the next child in line; the books I must buy new and in hardcover every quarter in order to keep up with backpack-related wear and tear. And just as every girl in my own fifth-grade class, even the meanest, identified with rebellious Leslie Burke and reviled the bullies who picked on her, every one of my current students reads him- or herself confidently into the role of the heroic adolescent struggling to be good against a back-ground of constant temptation and threat.

It’s true that the world of these books is troublingly dark and dangerous, even vengeful; but it is also true that my students’ world is sometimes troubling, and that the road away from trouble may be a narrow and high one. It is not only in literature that they are less safe than their middle-class white counterparts. Being good, accepting the protection of institutions and adults, seeking community and family, may well be their best hope for growing up well.

I do want to push them toward a richer matrix of options — together we read Virginia Euwer Wolff’s powerful Make Lemonade, which complicates these very questions of goodness, badness, and their consequences, while my students push back with complaints about the text’s unwillingness to judge its characters and reward o rpunish them accordingly — and I do want them to explore and adventure, to trust themselves as heroes. But I believe that the purpose of story is to help us explain our lives to ourselves; and these are the stories they are choosing. Flake, Woodson, Myers, Johnson, and the rest suggest that amid the very real risks is a definite and tangible plan for redemption, not alone but bolstered by the love of parents, teachers, and friends. Go ahead and call me a hopelessly unliterary child person: if this is what my children choose to read, I have to entertain the possibility that this is what they need to be reading.

Lelac Almagor teaches seventh-grade English at KIPP DC: AIM Academy in Washington, D.C. From the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Special Issue: Trouble.