Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Is Little Black Sambo the most racist children’s book ever published? Absolutely not. There have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, that are much more offensive in content — some that even use the N word right in the title. But time and diminishing readership have caught up with these antiquated books, and they’re now long out of print. The problems arise when a tale is so popular that it continues to be read today, as is the case of Sambo, or when a book wins an award and remains in print for decades and decades. Bannerman’s work was long in the public domain when Lester and Pinkney revised it. But what about classic children’s books that remain under copyright? Surely they can’t be edited or rewritten due to charges by censors? Oh, yes, they can. When the complaints concern offensive racial content, these books frequently are changed to reflect more enlightened times. The answer to the question Selma G. Lanes once posed, “PC or not to be?” is often most decidedly “PC.”

  Sometimes the changes are small. In early editions of E. L. Konigsburg’s Newbery Honor book Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, the protagonist peeks around the curtain at a PTA play performance and recognizes her friend’s mother “because she was the only Negro mother there.” In later printings, the word “Negro” is changed to “black.”

  Sometimes the changes are more substantial. The most high-profile instance of this has been the 2011 editions of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered a literary masterpiece (some call it the great American novel) and a near-constant target for censorship in recent decades, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Alan Gribben, a literature professor at Auburn University in Alabama, approached NewSouth Books about the idea of removing the word “nigger” in a volume that includes bowdlerized versions of both books. The word appears 219 times in Huckleberry Finn. (Yes, someone counted.) As Philip Nel points out, such revisions often happen in children’s books, yet the changes to Tom Sawyer received little to no attention in the mainstream news. The edits to Huckleberry Finn nearly caused a national uproar. Nel notes the condescension at play here: the notion that Huckleberry Finn is “canonized as a classic (i.e., for discerning grown-ups),” yet Tom Sawyer is considered merely a children’s book.

  Nevertheless, Huckleberry Finn is studied often in high-school classrooms. Gribben’s intention was to keep the book on the reading lists of high-school and college students across the country, believing that the racial slur itself was the sole reason the book was no longer assigned and read. “I’m by no means sanitizing Mark Twain,” he said. “The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone.” It’s that one word, he told Publishers Weekly, that serves as a barrier to so many readers.

  Cue angry commentary from Twain scholars, readers, and even, in some instances, the teachers for whom Gribben made these changes. “I think authors’ language should be left alone,” said an Arizona high-school English teacher. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.” Indeed, that teacher nails the primary objection to Gribben’s edits: that, by replacing the word “nigger” with “slave” (and using “Indian” for every instance of “injun”), Gribben interprets a society in a specific time and place as less bigoted than it actually was. Writing in the New York Times, Jill Nelson, author of Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, asserts that Mark Twain surely set out to make a point, adding that one of art’s functions is to “provoke and unsettle.” Mark Twain’s intentions were not, she says, for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to soothe — like “Margaret Wise Brown’s lovely and lulling Goodnight Moon.” The edits, so many people protested, damage the book’s literary integrity and help whitewash America’s past. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to erase all reminders that his era ever existed,” said one. “The world of Huck Finn serves as a living reminder of where we’ve been. Sometimes, it’s ugly.”

  And let’s not confuse the narrator for the author, wrote Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, adding that Samuel Clemens was convinced that slavery was heinous and that, even though students’ history books will tell them the same about the institution of slavery, “they don’t require you to look the perpetrators of that evil in the eye and find yourself looking at a kind, gentle, good-hearted Aunt Sally,” which Twain set out to do. Writing in School Library Journal about a 1983 edition of the book that also deleted the word “nigger,” Roger Sutton addressed the same issue as Fishkin, among many others: “Huck is no Simon Legree. He does love Jim, but cannot escape his own racism entirely. That’s the point. The world would be a lot simpler if we had bad guys and good guys, but what we do have is a whole lot of mixed-up, uneasy people positively bustling with ignorance. And that’s Huck — us — the good guys.” And those who seek to remove the hateful word to begin with, he adds, depict that life couldn’t have been so terrible for black people in the South during this time — a mitigation, to be sure, of the racism of that era.

  Not long after the announcement of this new edition of the classic novel, the New York Times’s editorial declared they were “horrified” by the changes. In the opinion piece titled “That’s Not Twain,” they noted that the changes weren’t just applied to the words Twain put to paper, but that the edits actually debase history on many levels — ones that are social, economic, and linguistic in nature. And what’s the point? many readers ask. If Twain’s deliberate use of irony in this tale is exorcised — and if the hypocrisies he exposed are eliminated — what remains for readers, particularly students, to glean from the book? “People should be more offended not by so-called ‘political correctness,’” adds Philip Nel, “but by our unwillingness to help children make sense of offensiveness.” In other words, are those who edit such texts doing what Lester Asheim discussed in a 1953 piece on censorship and selection — losing faith, that is, in the intelligence of the reader, and instead having faith only in their own, as a censor would? Are they any longer Twain’s words, if his words are altered?

  Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series, whose second volume, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, won the 1923 Newbery Medal, features a chatty parrot named Polynesia, whose dialogue contains the worst kind of racial insults. The books’ modern publishers faced a challenging question: Should they toss this much-loved series into the dustbin of history, keep publishing a book that contained the N word, or revise the books for modern readers? Some publishers chose the third option. As the introduction of one later edition noted:

  We are of course opposed to book banning and censorship, but we are equally committed to the principle that no book for young children should be harmful to their self-esteem. We believe that the substitution of Michael Hague’s art for Hugh Lofting’s original black-and-white drawings [which contained a few racial stereotypes], along with very limited text changes, make this volume the perfect reintroduction of this beloved classic to a new generation of readers.

  As if to reinforce the publisher’s reluctance to censor, the same introduction adds, “Revising another author’s work without his permission is not a task we took lightly.”

  But it all begs the question: Can expurgating a text of its racial slurs so easily rid it of its inherent prejudices? Do censored texts fundamentally change their ideological underpinnings? In the first book of the series, Polynesia tricks a black prince in the land of the Jolliginki. Prince Bumpo’s wish is to be a fairy-tale prince, and eventually Doctor Dolittle bleaches the prince’s face white. In a 1988 edition, Polynesia merely hypnotizes the prince. However, says Philip Nel, though the newer edition tries to rid the book of the notion of race altogether, it succeeds not in ridding the book of its colonialism. Such surface changes cannot rid the book of its essential bigotry.

  A different Dolittle publisher chose to issue a volume in the series without making any emendations, using that volume’s introduc
tion to express shock at the “remarkable” idea that anyone would change the words of a classic novel. As they put it, Lofting may have been the only Newbery Award winner to have ever had his work amended for a contemporary audience.

  Not true. Several Newbery and Caldecott winners have had their work “reworked and censored” over the years.

  In 1946, Maud and Miska Petersham won the Caldecott Medal for The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles. If you pick up a copy these days, you may wonder why it won an award. The later editions suffer from poorly reproduced artwork that doesn’t do justice to the quality of the original lithographic illustrations. But there are also other changes from the first edition of the book. While the first and last sections of recently produced copies are identical in format to early printings, the middle section is a real muddle, with the pages and poems no longer following the same order as in the original book. This is because two pages from the first edition are no longer included, and everything else had to be shifted around to accommodate these changes.

  The two deleted pages feature illustrations of stereotyped African- American children and rhymes written in dialect.

  Strangely, there is no mention of these revisions in the later printings. Why not a note on the copyright page saying, “This edition contains slight alterations from the original text” or “Some illustrations from the original edition have been omitted to reflect modern sensibilities”? Otherwise, anyone who picks up a copy will assume they are looking at the exact same book that was published, and honored, decades earlier, the one closest to the creator’s original intent, and the one that provides a window on our history — even the unappealing parts that we try to conceal later on.

  Tampering with Caldecott Winners

  The 2001 Caldecott winner, Judith St. George and David Small’s So You Want to Be President?, includes this statement toward the close of the book: “No person of color has been president.” The book was eventually revised in 2004, but the burning question after Obama’s appointment to the presidency, as Roger Sutton put it, was: What trumps what? “On the one hand it is dated and inaccurate; on the other, the original edition (ending with Bill Clinton) won the 2001 Caldecott Medal.” A revised post-Obama version was published in 2012.

  Robert Lawson holds a unique place in children’s literature. He’s the only creator to have won both the Caldecott Medal (for illustrating the picture book They Were Strong and Good) and the Newbery Medal (for writing the animal novel Rabbit Hill). As it turns out, both of these books have been edited over time to remove insulting racial characterizations.

  They Were Strong and Good is a history of Lawson’s ancestors, so the narrative structure doesn’t really allow for much post-publication revision — especially in the artwork. Therefore the stereotyped racial images in the illustrations are the same today as they were when the book was first published in 1940.

  There have been some changes to the text, however.

  The 1940 edition reads:

  When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota — tame ones. My mother did not like them.

  Today that passage reads:

  When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota. My mother did not like them.

  The 1940 edition says:

  When my father was very young he had two dogs and a colored boy. The dogs were named Sextus Hostilus and Numa Pompilius. The colored boy was just my father’s age. He was a slave, but they didn’t call him that. They just called him Dick.

  The contemporary version differs:

  When my father was very young he had a Negro slave and two dogs. The dogs were named Sextus Hostilus and Numa Pompilius. The Negro boy was just my father’s age and his name was Dick.

  The author’s Rabbit Hill has also seen some changes in text over the years.

  Here is a passage from the original text:

  Their attention now returned to the car, which was quivering and creaking strangely. Two or three bundles fell out, then a whole shower of them, as a very stout colored woman heaved her vast bulk out of the rear door.

  “Well, Sulphronia, here’s our new home. Isn’t it going to be lovely?” the Lady said brightly. Sulphronia looked rather doubtful and, lugging two bulging suitcases, waddled off toward the kitchen door.

  Phewie slapped Father on the back gleefully. “Will there be garbidge? Will there? Oh my, oh my! I’ve never seen one that shape and color that didn’t set out the elegantest garbidge! Lots of it too; chicken wings, duck’s backs, hambones — cooked ta turn!”

  “They are, of course, splendid cooks,” Father admitted, “and as a rule extremely generous and understanding of our needs and customs.”

  By 1972, this section of text had been changed to:

  Their attention now returned to the car, which was quivering and creaking strangely. Two or three bundles fell out, then a whole shower of them, as a rather stout and flushed woman heaved herself out of the rear door.

  “Well, Sulphronia, here’s our new home. Isn’t it going to be lovely?” the Lady said brightly. Sulphronia looked rather doubtful and, lugging two bulging suitcases, made her way toward the kitchen door.

  Phewie slapped Father on the back gleefully. “Will there be garbidge? Will there? Oh my, oh my! I’ve never seen one that shape and size that didn’t set out the elegantest garbidge! Lots of it too; chicken wings, duck’s backs, hambones — cooked to a turn!”

  “Folks can be splendid cooks,” Father admitted, “and as a rule extremely generous and understanding of our needs and customs.”

  Not only is Sulphronia no longer identified in pejorative racial terms, but she’s also slimmed down — gone are her “vast bulk” and “waddle”!

  MODERN CLASSICS, REVISITED AND REVISED

  While some of these books remain in print solely because they are award winners, others continue to be published because they are still hugely popular with young readers. But what happens when cultural sensibilities have changed from the time these books were originally published?

  Case in point: Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Although the book was published in 1964, at the height of the American civil rights era, no one voiced any concern that the Oompa-Loompas — smuggled over from jungles in “large packing cases with holes in them” and now doing factory work for Willie Wonka — were portrayed as dark-skinned African pygmies “from the very deepest and darkest part of the jungle, where no white man had ever been before.” In a controversial 1972 Horn Book article, Eleanor Cameron complained that the Oompa-Loompas were none other than African slaves in a new land. She later wrote further of the Oompa-Loompas and their “enforced servitude.” And when plans for a film adaptation were announced, the NAACP stepped in and demanded changes in the portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas, even asking for the word Chocolate to be removed from the movie’s title. Dahl expressed surprise at the campaign against his book (“real Nazi stuff”) and stated, “They thought I was writing a subtle anti-Negro manual. But such a thing had never crossed my mind.” He did agree to make changes, and the 1973 edition included revised illustrations from Joseph Schindelman. The Oompa-Loompas went from dark-skinned to light-skinned captives. And Dahl revised the text as well. Suddenly, the Oompa-Loompas, now from “Loompaland” and not Africa, had “rosy-white” skin and “golden-brown” hair.

  Though long considered a modern classic, The Five Chinese Brothers, Claire Huchet Bishop’s 1938 adaptation of a legendary Chinese folktale, illustrated by Kurt Wiese, has been repeatedly accused of perpetuating ethnic stereotypes against Chinese people. Albert V. Schwartz criticized it for its negative stereotyping — the “bilious yellow skin and slit and slanted eyes” of Chinese people, for one, adding that the illustrator also succeeds in making all Chinese people look exactly alike. Selma G. Lanes defended the book in a 1977 School Library Journal article, writing that “there seems to me to be a danger to the free growth of the human spirit, as well as an element of the ludicrous, in bringing contempora
ry social sensitivities (many of them entirely justified and commendable) so heavily to bear on books like The Five Chinese Brothers.” The winning joke of the book, Lanes added, was the very fact that all the Chinese brothers looked alike. This, she wrote, isn’t a joke made at the expense of Chinese people everywhere; instead, it is a very particular joke on the foolish townsfolk in the tale, including the judge.

  Illustrator Susan Jeffers came under fire for Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, published in 1991. The text of this picture book is attributed to Chief Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and Duwamish Indians in the Pacific Northwest region of the present-day United States. Chief Seattle’s now-famous message initially was in the form of a speech given in the mid-1850s to Washington, D.C., officials, and at least four different versions of the speech, all attributed to Seattle, have existed. Though in the book’s closing note Jeffers states she adapted the speech, readers may very well leave the picture book, writes Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese, thinking that they just read an abridged version of the Chief’s real speech. Furthermore, the book is touted as one possessing an inspiring environmental message, but the website for Oyate, an organization seeking to portray with honesty and accuracy the lives of Native Americans, writes, “[Seattle] was speaking at a time when all life, as he had known it, seemed to be close to an ending, and his words carry a clear warning: When [Seattle] says ‘We may be brothers after all. We shall see,’ he is not talking about brotherly love — or the environment.” As for the book’s illustrations, many critics noted what they considered Jeffers’s blatantly inaccurate depictions of those of Seattle’s tribe. “As she has changed the words to suit herself,” wrote the Oyate site, “so Jeffers has drawn pictures that, with the exception of what may possibly be a carved canoe on the title page, have nothing at all to do with any aspect of Northwest coast life. In a letter. . . to. . . School Library Journal . . . Jeffers indignantly states that her research for the book was ‘extensive,’ and that ‘Mag La Que, Miyaca, Mahto-Topah, and Bear Woman — all Lakota Sioux — edited the text and sat for portraits.’ That. Is. Not. The. Point. Native nations are not interchangeable. All the research in the world doesn’t mean squat, if it isn’t about the right people!”