On the subject of milk: Gayle tells me about Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, which she is able to quote readily, having read it often with her kids. I’m visiting her in Saint Louis and finally meeting her two children, who are now five and three. We’re well into the pandemic, and Gayle and her partner have had few people over. To their older child, I’m a new audience for his exuberant, arrhythmic dance moves. To the younger, I’m a strange object who has come from beyond. He will keep a wide, uncertain eye on me at all times.
The book sounds wild. Something about a boy and a massive milk bottle. Gayle hunts down their copy, and I page through it at the kitchen table, a few steps from the gallon of milk, full fat, in the fridge.
Here’s the storyline: Waking up in the middle of the night, toddler protagonist Mickey tumbles down through his house and out of his clothes into the “night kitchen” below, where he lands in a bowl of cake batter. The night kitchen into which he has fallen is a surreal dreamscape: a kitchen that is also a city. Flour sacks and jam jars double as buildings. A slender unlabeled bottle (of oil, perhaps, or wine) stretches to the stars, the highest skyscraper.
When he drops into the bowl, three lookalike bakers, rotund and disproportionately large, mistake Mickey for milk. Gleaming with a jolly malevolence underscored by their Hitler mustaches, the bakers fold him in. “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter!” they chant ritualistically. “Scrape it! Make it! Bake it!” One baker carries the loaf toward the oven, next to which another waits, gazing at the bread bump as if entranced. The third baker rests an arm along the top of the stove, labeled “Mickey Oven.”
But just before the bakers slide him onto the rack, our worthy hero sprouts from the top of the loaf to declare: “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!”
The bakers seem to have been well aware of this, as evidenced by their Mickey oven. But Mickey does not know that they know and so, with the unsettling confidence of a well-adjusted child, announces himself as himself: he’s Mickey.
Oh, to be so sure of oneself. Oh, to know one’s name! If only I shared this self-knowledge.
A more conventional story might end here, but this is Sendak, beloved for his strange worlds and surreal logics. Now that Mickey has come to understand what he is (Mickey) and what he is not (milk), he takes it upon himself to go in search of replacement milk. First he outfits himself in a roomy jumpsuit made of batter; then he creates a Mickey-sized, batter-based airplane. Finally he grabs the bakers’ measuring cup and plants it on his head, a hat. Now he’s off to “get milk the Mickey way,” which involves flying high, high, over this night kitchen to find—what’s that we see? An impossibly tall bottle glowing brightly against the night sky? And what does it hold, pale and opaque?
It’s milk!
Mickey dives out of the airplane and into the bottle, where his breadsuit easily disintegrates. He floats, singing: “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me / God bless milk and god bless me!” After a quick, joyful swim—sensuous, even—Mickey fills the measuring cup, climbs to the lip of the bottle, and in one long, unbroken stream pours the milk into the sticky batter below. The bakers get busy: mixing, beating, baking. And Mickey, his mission accomplished, crows “cock-a-doodle-do!” He slides down the side of the glass and into bed.
* * *
This, children, our narrator concludes, is why we get to eat cake every morning—thanks to Mickey. But who eats cake in the morning? Not me. I like to cook up an egg scramble with veggies. No milk, or Mickeys, required.
The book’s odd-seeming assumption of daily morning cake leads me to wonder if it’s not American in origin but of some other cultural provenance. A stranger in our midst—like me, to Gayle’s youngest. I’ll have to keep my eye on this one.
But I’m wrong. Sendak was born in Brooklyn, a Polish-Jewish American who grew up during World War II; like his other books, In the Night Kitchen was first released in the U.S. in 1970. And “morning cake,” I learn, is a generic category that includes the more familiar (to me) coffee cake.
It still seems deeply strange, a book from another place, and I guess it is, since Brooklyn then and now are hugely different. In any case, now that I know it’s American, I can’t unsee the Americanness. It’s there in the self-satisfied white boy invoking God from inside a giant milk bottle (has this been paid for by the Dairy Farmers of America?). It’s in the night sky’s resemblance, with its five-pointed stars, to the top-left corner of the American flag. And it’s in Mickey’s song, which calls to mind the patriotic hymn “God Bless America” and its associations with Christian conservatism. Encountered in 2022, as rightwing conservatives increasingly brazenly use ‘wholesome” American—i.e., white straight Christian—family values as an excuse to enact legislative and material violence against those who are immigrants, pregnant, BIPOC, queer, and/or trans, the book’s glittery milk magic would seem to sour on the tongue.
But Sendak was Jewish. That he and his family lost many relatives during the Holocaust gives distressing new meaning to the bakers’ Hitler-style mustaches and their menacing “Mickey Oven.” And, though it has since become associated with conservative values, the hymn “God Bless America” was written during World War I (though not debuted publicly until 1938) by Jewish composer Irving Berlin, formerly Israel Baline, who fled Russian persecution of Jews with his family as a child. Berlin pulled the song’s titular refrain from his immigrant mother, who repeated it often after they had arrived in the U.S. In this light, the song reads like the expression of a Jewish assimilationist desire to belong.
The book can be read similarly: When he springs from the cake batter, Mickey recognizes he must “mix” himself into the situation not as milk but as a useful denizen of the night kitchen. And so he makes himself an airplane that most closely resembles a WWII-era U.S. military fighter jet. While the hymn’s refrain rings like a plea or a prayer of belonging, Mickey’s “God bless milk and God bless me” is a gloat of triumph, communicating defiantly an assurance of his place: in the milk, which may stand for America at large.
Another friend who is a parent offers a second possibility: that Mickey’s song references not “God Bless America” but a popular nursery rhyme, sung to the tune of “Hush Little Baby.” There are a number of variations; the shortest and perhaps most common is this:
I see the moon and the moon sees me
and the moon sees somebody I can’t see
God bless the moon and God bless me
God bless that somebody I can’t see
Oh—yes, Mickey’s syntax and cadence snap into place easily along these guiding lines. I find an online lyric video featuring a happy and slow-blinking full moon, soporific by design. Mickey’s song is less lullaby, more exultation: he’s awake and he’s himself. He’s Mickey. God has blessed him.
I find I’m jealous of Mickey. I want his confidence, his self-assured braggadocio. I want his dream and his morning cake.
Do I also want his name?
Probably not. In the U.S. it’s so strongly associated with Disney.
The Milky Way—through which Mickey navigates—is another name. According to Greek myth, the band of light that gave our galaxy its name sprang from Hera’s breast. She woke in the middle of the night and found Zeus had affixed another woman’s child—Heracles—to her breast. If the child drank her divine milk, he would become immortal. Understandably upset by this nonconsensual consumption of her body, Hera pushed the child away. The milk spurting from her breast lit up the sky.
To read the rest of this essay, you can purchase the Spring 2023 SomaFlights special issue here.
