Brown Gold

Milestones of African American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002

Michelle Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135949143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Brown Gold is a compelling history and analysis of African-American children's picturebooks from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. At the turn of the nineteenth century, good children's books about black life were hard to find — if, indeed, young black readers and their parents could even gain entry into the bookstores and libraries. But today, in the "Golden Age" of African-American children's picturebooks, one can find a wealth of titles ranging from Happy to be Nappy to Black is Brown is Tan. In this book, Michelle Martin explores how the genre has evolved from problematic early works such as Epaminondas that were rooted in minstrelsy and stereotype, through the civil rights movement, and onward to contemporary celebrations of blackness. She demonstrates the cultural importance of contemporary favorites through keen historical analysis — scrutinizing the longevity and proliferation of the Coontown series and Ten Little Niggers books, for example — that makes clear how few picturebooks existed in which black children could see themselves and their people positively represented even up until the 1960s. Martin also explores how children's authors and illustrators have addressed major issues in black life and history including racism, the civil rights movement, black feminism, major historical figures, religion, and slavery. Brown Gold adds new depth to the reader's understanding of African-American literature and culture, and illuminates how the round, dynamic characters in these children's novels, novellas, and picturebooks can put a face on the past, a face with which many contemporary readers can identify.

SECTION I

History of African-American Children’s Picture Books

The first three chapters of Brown Gold discuss selected historical milestones of African-American children’s picture books that helped to shape the genre into what it has become. Chapter 1 situates “The Story of the Inky Boys,” a story in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1845), as a key forerunner to Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) both because of the visual similarity between Sambo and the Black-a-moor and because Bannerman read this Struwwelpeter story to her own children and was therefore familiar with these earlier images. Furthermore, even despite the problematic nature of Bannerman’s depiction of black characters, she succeeds in giving Sambo what Hoffmann fails to give the Black-a-moor: agency that enables Sambo to defend himself and act and speak on his own behalf. Despite the visual images that many readers consider stereotypical and derogatory; despite the generic names of Little Black Sambo, his mother, Black Mumbo and his father, Black Jumbo; and even despite the fact that the geographical setting of The Story of Little Black Sambo is not Africa, India, nor America, I argue here that Sambo’s agency makes him both an improvement on Hoffmann’s story about a black child and an important forerunner to contemporary African-American protagonists. Hence, even though I have chosen background texts that are not African American at all, I will argue that the dynamics in these two stories lay the groundwork for the positivity that emerged within the African-American children’s picture book when it finally did come into existence as a genre.

Chapter 2, “From Ten Little Niggers to Afro-Bets: Images of Blackness in Picture Books for Young Readers, 1870s to 2000s,” traces changes primarily in abecendaries and counting books from the late-nineteenth century to the present to give an overview of how depictions of black children in these books have changed over the past 100+ years. From The Ten Little Niggers (1875) and Nine Niggers More (187–) to Lucille Clifton’s The Black BCs (1970), the Afro-Bets books, and Tom Feelings’s Jambo Means Hello (1974), these alphabet and counting books reveal a startling story of the literary and artistic renaissance that took place within these texts over time. While the indoctrination of racism permeated texts even for the very young in books by E. W. Kemble and some of his white contemporaries, many writers of the Harlem Renaissance played a key role in developing a literature designed to encourage black children to feel proud of their heritage.

Chapter 3 discusses the influence of the Black Arts Movement on this genre. Although children’s books are not an appropriate platform for some of the ideas that came out of this movement, certain other ideas have surfaced in African-American children’s picture books. In fact, these ideas appear not just in books that came during and directly following the 1960s and 70s, but they also continue to show up in the children’s books of some contemporary black authors and illustrators. This chapter explores both the uplifting messages that these books convey and some of the underside of life for black children who have to live with realities like poverty, incarcerated parents, and the constant pressure of trying to live their lives against a white standard.

1

“Hey, Who’s the Kid with the Green Umbrella?”

A Reevaluation of Little Black Sambo and the Black-a-moor

Place the Black-a-moor, the protagonist in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” from Struwwelpeter (1845), next to Helen Bannerman’s protagonist in The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), and the resemblance is obvious (figs. 1.1 and 1.2).

Fig. 1.1. Reprinted by permission from Dover. Hoffmann, Heinrich. Struwwelpeter: In English Translation. London: Routledge & Kegan, 1845. New York: Dover, 1995. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899.

Fig. 1.2. Illustrated by Helen Bannerman. The Story of Little Black Sambo.

Both children have dark skin, curly or Afro hair, and bright red lips. Both carry green umbrellas and wear a red garment. Even their body positions look similar: the illustration of Little Black Sambo walking home after regaining possession of his clothes mirrors the image of the Black-a-moor before and after his encounter with the three ruffians.¹ The Black-a-moor wears only a pair of red shorts, and after Sambo’s encounter with the tigers, he spends six illustrated pages in the same near-naked state as Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor. Both amateur artists, Bannerman and Hoffmann illustrated these books with crude, somewhat surreal, and perhaps even childlike sketches.

Writing just prior to and during the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, respectively, Hoffmann and Bannerman transgressed mainstream practices in writing about children of color. The fact that positive images of black children were rare in American children’s literature until the 1960s makes these early images significant.² Sharing visual similarities, common controversial publication histories, and important ideological messages that affect the depiction of black children in juvenile literature even today, The Story of Little Black Sambo and “The Story of the Inky Boys” beg comparison as forerunners of contemporary African-American children’s picture books.

Aside from abolitionist literature, Hoffmann’s “Inky Boys” features one of the first positive European depictions of a black child in a children’s text. The Story of Little Black Sambo bears significance not only as a revision of Hoffmann’s earlier image but also as a means by which messages about the black child were disseminated to a substantially wider international reading audience than Struwwelpeter reached. Despite the sixty-year controversy concerning racism in The Story of Little Black Sambo, Bannerman’s book remains an important touchstone within historical children’s literature because of its longevity and its permeation of so many facets of American society. Thus, as seminal representations, the texts of Hoffmann and Bannerman have strongly influenced American depictions of black children in juvenile literature both positively and negatively. In terms of its role within minority literature, The Story of Little Black Sambo substantially improves upon Hoffmann’s image of the Black-a-moor in its implicit messages about the protagonist’s race, class, and intelligence. These two texts were written fifty-four years apart, the former at the dawn of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, the latter at the close of this significant era; hence in addition to reflecting common racial ideologies of their historical eras, they also embody the late-nineteenth century shift in children’s literature from instruction to delight.

To uncover intertextual connections between Struwwelpeter and The Story of Little Black Sambo, one need only look at interviews with Bannerman’s children. Robert, one of her two sons, confirms that he owned a copy of Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter as a child and, although he did not specify the reasons, decidedly disliked it.³ Living in India with many native house servants, Bannerman was surrounded by dark-skinned people with whom she interacted daily. Given her experience with people of color, her illustrations of Sambo could have looked less like Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor, who is of African descent, and more like the Indians she saw on a daily basis. Nineteenth-century British education clearly delineated class and race distinctions, and as Elizabeth Hay contends in Sambo Sahib (1981), Bannerman was too well educated and observant to confuse Africans with Indians (28). Given the resemblance between Hoffmann’s illustration of the Black-a-moor and Bannerman’s of Sambo, however, the similarities between the boys seem intentional on Bannerman’s part. She also seems to have deliberately made Sambo’s appearance somewhat ambiguous ethnically since he looks convincingly neither African nor Indian.

Home schooled in science, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Latin, art, and music by her father, the Reverend Robert Boog Watson, Bannerman was well read due to her passion for books (6–7). As the daughter of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, however, she also received a rigorous religious education. Critic Phyllis J. Yuill suggests that in the conservative, religious home in which Bannerman grew up, moralistic tales would probably have been highly regarded for their didacticism.⁴ Although Yuill sees a resemblance between the tales of Bannerman and Hoffmann in both their violence and their moralism, I find The Story of Little Black Sambo conspicuously void of a moral (18).

The similarities between Struwwelpeter and Little Black Sambo go beyond their visual images and the moral values of their authors; the books also share complex publication histories. Both texts enjoyed an overwhelming reception during the years after their initial publication but both fell prey to censorship, though for different reasons. In a personal interview, Robert Bannerman said, “‘My mother would not have published the book had she dreamt for a moment that even one small boy would have been made unhappy thereby’” (qtd. in Hay 155). Having created fantastic stories more for delight than for instruction, Bannerman and Hoffmann would probably be astounded at the attention these texts have received from critics. For instance, Elizabeth Hay’s book, Sambo Sahib, offers a psychoanalytic reading of Little Black Sambo. Just as resistant to a critical reading of a book intended solely for enjoyment as Bannerman’s son, Rosemary Dinnage, in her 1981 review, “Taming the Teatime Tigers,” says that “[Bannerman] would be appalled, and more than appalled, at the flood of dizzying rubbish stimulated by her little book, but fortunately died full of years and wisdom in 1946, when the world still had sterner things on its mind.”⁵ Despite such resistance to critical readings of Little Black Sambo, this picture book still gets its share of attention from both critics and censors.

Like many challenged and banned books, both Little Black Sambo and Struwwelpeter still delight children who do manage to gain access to them. Susanna Ashton and Amy Jean Petersen state that while early nineteenth-century readers enjoyed Struwwelpeter, later in the century, the German audience began to see the tales as morbid.⁶ Ironically, while psychiatrists have attacked the book for its potentially damaging messages to children, Hoffmann “established and ran one of the finest and most progressive mental hospitals of his time” later in his career as a mental specialist.⁷ Thomas Freeman says that nineteenth-century Struwwelpeter critics objected to its violence, but twentieth-century critics have challenged its authoritarian method that upholds the “prevailing attitudes of the nineteenth-century German nursery” in which fathers “expected their children to obey them without question or qualification; and severely punished any deviations from their socially acceptable code.”⁸ Jack Zipes claims that this text is a children’s classic not because of its popularity but because it upheld nineteenth-century values of the ruling class-values inculcating obedience to adults, government, and God.⁹

The controversy over The Story of Little Black Sambo as a racist text began appearing in professional journals as early as the mid-1940s (Yuill 13). In addition to arguing that the “smiling darkie” caricature in Sambo had the potential to destroy the self-image of African-American child readers, some critics, like the director of Fisk University’s special collections, felt that the book damaged “ ‘the developing minds of white children by giving them a model caricature that demeans and ridicules black children’” (Shockley qtd. in Yuill 19). However, other critics felt that while many white Americans early in the twentieth century considered black people invisible within the culture, Sambo made whites acknowledge the humanity in black people.

In loving Sambo, unreservedly, in some way, every white had the feeling that he was also accepting the black man as a fellow human being. The nursery bookshelf was integrated, and no prejudice could exist in a home where Little Black Sambo and Peter Rabbit stood side by side on the same shelf. (Yuill 9)

Unlike opposition to Struwwelpeter, the controversy surrounding Little Black Sambo has come just as strongly from the mainstream as from minority groups.

Yet despite the criticisms of librarians, teachers, and parents, both texts have remained continuously in print since their nineteenth-century publication. Before 1870, forty-seven editions of Hoffmann’s text appeared in print; by 1876, the book celebrated its hundredth edition.¹⁰ Copyright problems prevented Twain’s “freely translated” version, Slovenly Peter, from being published in the United States until 1935 (Ashton and Petersen 35), but by that time, the original text had been through 562 editions.¹¹ In 1977, Thomas Freeman cited that “five German publishers currently keep it in print, despite the fact that over 600 editions have already been printed” (Freeman 808). Struwwelpeter enjoys such popularity in Germany today that certain phrases derived from the book have emerged in common speech. Dana Bernitzki, an East German resident, comments that everyone knows the text. A child with poor hygiene is called a “Struwwelpeter,” and those who pay little attention to where they are going are called, “Hanns Gluck-in-die-Luft” or “Hans Head-in-the-Air.”¹²

Like Struwwelpeter in Germany, The Story of Little Black Sambo was a “runaway best-seller” in England and the United States from its beginning. Its first four editions sold 21,000 copies (Hay 1); between 1900 and 1981, over fifty different versions were published in the United States alone (156). The image of Little Black Sambo and his plethora of permutations have permeated American culture, surfacing in such diverse places as stuffed doll patterns, a restaurant chain in Santa Barbara, California, and even in Marjorie McDonald’s psychoanalytic speech at the 1974 American A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I History of African-American Children’s Picture Books
• Section II The Professional Evolution of African-American Children’s Picture Books
• Section III Criticism and Pedagogy of African-American Children’s Picture Books
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index