Sambo, Babaji, and Sam

hat a difference a few decades make. In the 1960s, the introduction of black studies courses in American colleges and universities was greeted with skepticism: what was there to study? Today no Harvard department excites more intellectual interest than the Afro-American Studies Department headed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In the sixties, jazz was drowned out by rock, country, and R & B, and jazz titans headed for Europe or took early retirement. Today jazz is enthroned as “America’s classical music,” and everybody who’s anybody plays at Lincoln Center.

In the sixties, Little Black Sambo, beloved by generations of children, succumbed to black protests and disappeared from respectable libraries and bookstores, from classrooms and story hours. This fall Sambo is making a comeback, in two new, sharply contrasting guises — as a noncontroversial, “authentically Indian” remake, called The Story of Little Babaji (di Capua/Harper) with the original text (save for the names) and fresh illustrations by Fred Marcellino; and as an exuberantly African-American folk fantasy, titled Sam and the Tigers (Dial), by Julius Lester (text) and Jerry Pinkney (pictures), the pair who reestablished Uncle Remus.

The Story of Little Black Sambo was written, conventionally enough, for the author’s two young daughters. Helen Bannerman, the wife of a Scottish doctor in the Indian Medical Service, had made up wildly fanciful tales since her Edinburgh childhood. She had an artistic bent that inclined toward comic exaggeration, to the occasional discomfiture of family members. The chief exception among her many domestic scenes reproduced in Elizabeth Hay’s solid biography are the stately, gentle figures of Indian servants and friends. Broadly educated in languages and literature, she also had a keen interest in natural history. Only housekeeping, it seems, left her indifferent. As a British colonial, she was hardly the typical, or stereotypical, memsahib.

But like other European mothers, she felt obliged to guard her children against India’s summer heat by taking refuge each summer in the hills. To ease the long separation from her husband, Bannerman returned periodically to Madras, difficult as it was to be parted from the little girls. In 1898, when they were five and two, and eager for her stories, there “came into her head, evolved by the moving of the train,” the story of a little black boy, gorgeously attired by his parents, who cleverly saves himself from a succession of tigers (“Oh! Please Mr. Tiger, don’t eat me up, and I’ll give you my beautiful little Blue Trousers”) and not only regains his finery but gets a stack of tiger-striped pancakes to boot.

For each new character and item of clothing, for each new plot development, there was a picture on the facing page, all in a small compact size for a small child to hold in her hands. Bannerman had wanted just such a book as a child. Back in Madras she finished up the pictures and bound the pages in her own book press. Thus, in one spurt, The Story of Little Black Sambo: a perfect union of words and pictures — with a story that seems timeless, like unburied treasure, and a highly original format that became a model for twentieth-century picture books.

What followed was a concatenation of errors. An admiring friend returning to England on home leave persuaded Bannerman to let her show the little book to London publishers. Grant Richards, the most interested, wanted to purchase the copyright outright, an arrangement Bannerman had been warned against. But before word of her renewed opposition could reach London, the contract was signed. For five pounds, Bannerman not only lost a small fortune in royalties; without a clear copyright, she was powerless to control what happened to Little Black Sambo outside of Britain. Most importantly, she had no rights in the United States, where the adventures of a little black boy — a little black boy named Sambo — were sure to resonate.

The Story of Little Black Sambo appeared in Britain in 1899, and scored an immediate and lasting success. In 1900 the Grant Richards edition was published in the United States by Frederick A. Stokes, a mainline New York publisher, to similar and more far-reaching effect: here was a children’s book, perhaps the only one, that knew no barriers of class, race, or region. Like the best of the new comic strips, it had universal appeal.

All American children did not see the same book, however. Though the authorized Stokes edition sold well and never went out of print, a host of other versions quickly began to appear — from mass-market publishers, from reprint houses, from small, outlying firms unconstrained by the mutual courtesies of the major publishers. A few are straight knock-offs of the book that Bannerman made, without her name on the title page; the majority were reillustrated — with gross, degrading caricatures that set Sambo down on the old plantation or, with equal distortiveness, deposited him in Darkest Africa. Libraries and schools generally stocked the Stokes edition, and a few others selectively. But overall the bootleg Sambos were much cheaper, more widely distributed, and vastly more numerous.

Still, demeaning pictures of blacks were routine, and a little black hero, in a cracking good story, wasn’t. Until the 1930s, small black children appeared in picture books almost invariably as buffoons — Topsys without her high spirits or quick mind. Sambo was popular across black America not only in his own right but also by default. If only it hadn’t been for that unfortunate name . . .

Originally a common slave name of African origin, Sambo next became a generic name for a black slave (used slightingly by whites, indulgently by blacks), then the stock name for a character in blackface minstrelsy. By the time Little Black Sambo appeared, it was commonly understood in the United States as a term of disparagement, the stereotype of the shuffling, grinning, bowing-and-scraping, no-’count darky. Still to come was the sociologist’s use of “a Sambo role” to denote a supposed subservience inherited from slavery. Yet Little Black Sambo wasn’t a Sambo, not by any measure. Among many African-Americans and concerned whites, the inevitable result was ambivalence. If not Sambo, what else?

Changes in children’s books came with changes in black expectations, backed by black action and white support. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in public affairs, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, with Negro History Week (1926), fought for respect. Some Communist nudging, along with the ugly face of prejudice in Hitler’s Europe, stirred white consciences. There was genuine belief, moreover, in the efficacy of common efforts.

What might be called, in retrospect, the campaign against Sambo began with a quest for alternatives in the 1930s and early 1940s. The principal weapon was booklists: lists of recommended books about “Negro life,” compiled by black librarians and interracial committees, and the accompanying commentary. Three were pivotal. “The Negro: A Selected List for School Libraries . . . ” was issued by the Tennessee Department of Education in partnership with the Rosenwald Fund, which conducted several related programs in support of Southern black education. Revised in 1941 and later, the list was valuable for its Southern sponsorship and broad Southern vetting (officially, in the thirteen Southern states) and its implicit focus on enhancing appreciation of black history and African-American life in the segregated South.

Nashville, base of the Tennessee effort, had major black and white institutions of higher education. The other two lists, out of Chicago and New York, were the offspring of two branch public libraries, major institutions in their own domains. Chicago had the George C. Hall Branch, Chicago Public Library, a cultural pivot of the South Side black community; New York had the 135th Street Branch, New York Public Library, its Harlem counterpart. In Chicago’s Charlemae Rollins and New York’s Augusta Baker, both had forceful, knowledgeable children’s librarians, prime movers of the two best known, most influential booklists.

“We Build Together,” the Rollins list, was published by the National Council of Teachers of English, with prominent librarians and educators as consultants, and marketed along with other NCTE publications. At least as important as the bibliography was the introductory commentary, twenty pages discussing criteria, pinpointing offenses, weighing pluses and minuses. Implicitly, what an author shouldn’t do, what an editor shouldn’t publish, in addition to what a librarian should shun.

The Rollins list was first issued in 1941, and revised in 1948 and 1967. The Baker list, “Books on Negro Life for Children,” appeared in a first, tentative form as part of an article by Baker, “Reading for Democracy,” in Wilson Library Bulletin, in 1943; it was reprinted shortly, for independent distribution, by the Council Against Intolerance in America; a 1946 revision was issued by the Bureau for Intercultural Education; and in 1949 the NYPL itself took over publication. Baker, like Rollins, offered some introductory commentary. But apart from providing book-selection guidance to professionals, her list, with its brief, lively annotations, could be used by librarians on active duty, by classroom teachers, by parents and other caretakers; older children could use it themselves. It was given away in NYPL children’s rooms, and even the 1971 edition, a hefty 108 pages, could be ordered in quantity for a modest handling charge.

And what about Little Black Sambo? During the early quest for alternatives, it appeared without reservations on all three lists. In other quarters the book received votes of confidence. The publication of a feeble successor, Sambo and the Twins, was treated as the event-of-1936; a puppet Sambo was mounted at the Chicago Federal Theater Project by Shirley Graham, future biographer of black heroes. But there were also rumblings of disquiet. In the 1931 Children’s Library Yearbook, Ruth Theobald observed delicately that Sambo, though “loved by little children,” “may tend to arouse self-consciousness in older children.” In the Children’s Library Yearbook of the following year, Langston Hughes spoke plainly. For him, Sambo exemplified the “pickaninny variety” of storybook, “amusing undoubtedly to the white child, but like an unkind word to one who has known too many hurts to enjoy the additional pain of being laughed at.”

The second stage of the anti-Sambo campaign shaped up, in the mid 1940s, as an active attempt to discourage the book’s use. Included in the 1946 Baker list with reservations, explicitly for lack of alternatives, Sambo was quietly dropped from the 1949 revision. Sambo’s departure from “We Build Together,” on the other hand, was set forth by Rollins as the outcome of a historic drama. “For a time,” she writes, “only mild objections were raised by sensitive readers to the story or the pictures. As the years passed, more and more adults, both Negro and white, recognized how much Negro children were stereotyped by the word black and the epithet Sambo.”

Because of the many objections to its inclusion, Little Black Sambo became, for Rollins and her group, “a symbol and a yardstick.” Encouragingly, “the strong stand . . . by librarians, teachers, and parents against stereotypes” had brought change. There was now a picture book or two with an appealing black boy as hero, another with scenes of black and white children at play.

Aggressive, disruptive intercultural activism transformed Sambo from a symbol into a target, from a minority cause into a public issue. Taking stringent measure of “book lists devoted to the democratic ideal,” Helen Trager, of the Bureau for Intercultural Education, let loose at Little Black Sambo for more than twenty heated lines. “In this case it is not the story that errs but the illustrations — they are pure caricature. These drawings create a distorted and ugly picture that becomes fixed in the white child’s imagination. They have probably contributed to the sting and smirk . . . ” And so on.

Trager’s article appeared in Childhood Education, the widely circulated journal of the Association of Childhood Education, in November 1945. Time magazine picked up the item and scoffed: “Last week . . . Little Black Sambo was ambushed again. This time no fancy finery could buy off the implacable attackers.” Adjacent was an illustration of Sambo confronting a tiger, with the caption: “Distorted and ugly?”

Children’s book editor and author Alice Dalgliesh, a former teacher and member of the Association, was stung by the imputation that Trager spoke for the Association membership in general and by specific criticisms of books (excerpted but not identified in the article) that Dalgliesh had published. She was not rushing to defend Sambo, she wrote in rebuttal; though the original book wasn’t objectionable, “grotesque editions” were. “But what does bother me is a certain narrow approach to the matter of intercultural relations in books, and the setting up of confining standards to judge them.” In embryo, the “political correctness” conflict of the 1990s.

It was one thing to eliminate Sambo from lists of recommended books about black life. It was quite another to dislodge it as a classic of children’s literature and consign it to the discard pile. For two decades, through the Eisenhower years and the McCarthy era and the baby boom, through even the Brown decision (1954), the Montgomery bus boycott (1955), and the turbulent beginnings of school desegregation in Little Rock (1957) and elsewhere, there was merely a little less to decry in children’s books, a little more to applaud. Persuasion to change, in effect, but not pressure.

Then came the civil rights movement of the sixties, which shaded into the call for black power and black pride. Without blinking, black children faced down insults, jeering, gestures of contempt. They marched, went to jail; some died. Why should they also have to face hurtful books? Why should any children’s book likely to foster racism be tolerated any longer?

There were answers, defenses — muted in the United States, publicly voiced in Toronto after the removal of Sambo from the public schools, put forth in high intellectual circles when the issue surfaced in England. Everywhere there were complaints of “censorship” and “book banning” and mutterings about minority pique. As for the book’s alleged offenses, Bannerman, a Scot in India, hadn’t used “Sambo” as a term of derogation; if anything, she was expressing affection. And it was silly even to speak of Sambo’s multi-colored apparel or hundred-plus pancakes as stereotypes of garishness and gluttony. But most of all, and particularly in the United States, the book was said not to be about Africans at all, but about Indians. Look at the reference to the Indian word for melted butter, ghi; look especially at the tigers, native to Asia but not to Africa.

As Bannerman biographer Hay equably observes, The Story of Little Black Sambo is an imaginary adventure set in an imaginary jungle world. Bannerman’s daughters were familiar with the word ghi, hence its inclusion in a parenthetical aside. Bannerman, a good naturalist, knew very well that tigers don’t live in Africa. But she also knew how to draw Indians, had she wanted to. And she was perfectly aware that pancakes made from “flour and eggs and milk and sugar and butter” were neither Indian nor African.

In the course of the 1960s, nonetheless, the exact nature of Little Black Sambo — whether its locale or its intrinsic merit — came to matter less, to those immediately involved, than the harm it had done and might do. In the 1964 edition of Children and Books, the standard textbook in the field, May Hill Arbuthnot qualified her long-standing praise of Sambo by taking note of objections. The succeeding, 1972 edition, which lists Zena Sutherland as co-author (Arbuthnot died in 1969), omits Sambo entirely; Bannerman’s book has even lost its place in the introductory list of “milestones in the development of children’s literature.” One of the last bastions to fall was the Children’s Catalog, for a half century the Bible of children’s book selection in America. The 1966 edition lists Sambo with a star, as usual; the 1971 edition omits it, without comment. The third and final stage of the campaign against Sambo, for its virtual banishment, was in effect forestalled by total capitulation. Time was moving on. New books were constantly appearing, reflecting new conditions. Maybe Sambo was . . . obsolete.

To some extent, though, Little Black Sambo’s disappearance was illusory. The authorized edition never went out of print, and new mass-market editions continued to appear, more judiciously illustrated. A considerable number of small-town libraries still own the book, and bookstores have been known to stock it under the counter. It was openly sold on 125th Street in Harlem until the recent sweep of sidewalk vendors.

In some places where it was missing, it was sorely missed.

• • •

The Story of Little Babaji, of this fall’s two newcomers, is the latest and most ambitious of many attempts to present Little Black Sambo as a story set in India. Golden Books, a mass-market house with aplomb, went the Indian route from the start. In 1948 Gustaf Tenggren gave Sambo a golliwog head, a tufted thatch of black hair, and a Gandhi dhoti; in 1961 Bennie and Bill Rutherford decked him out like a paper-doll rajah. Platt & Munk shamelessly Indian-ized two illustrations in its 1925 edition, for the 1972 market, also changing Mumbo and Jumbo into Mama Sari and Papa Simbu. Particularly intriguing is Rama and the Tigers, a puppet play published in 1954 and credited to Charlotte Chorpenning, author of the puppet Sambo put on by Shirley Graham in the 1930s.

The Story of Little Babaji supposes that, as the jacket copy states, “the story is clearly set in India.” To firm up that identification, “the characters have all been given authentic Indian names.” Mamaji and Papaji, Anglo-Indian compounds with the suffix ji for respect, do well enough. But ji is inappropriate for a child, and Baba is neither a first name nor anything else that quite fits. The three names do have a nice light ring (as well as a family resemblance to Jumanji — book, film, phenomenon) and pass muster unless one takes seriously the notion of Bannerman’s story as strictly Indian. In looks Babaji is a confection: pert, posturing, Disneyfied figures in a spun-sugar Taj Mahal realm.

In this unreal India, little Babaji’s splendid togs look like ordinary finery, and the encounters with the tigers occur without artistic quickening or heightening. When the tigers quarrel and begin to scrap, the ensuing melee can only be called suspended animation. On the other hand, you do have Bannerman’s text virtually intact, with all its “rhythm, repetition and rollicking humor” (as a leading opponent appreciatively noted). You do have the image of one tiger sporting the “little Purple Shoes” on its ears, another holding the “beautiful Green Umbrella” aloft with its curled tail.

If we don’t ask Marcellino’s pictures to be the equal of Bannerman’s for crispness or vitality, if we don’t expect the illustrations to match the text for sheer fun, then The Story of Little Babaji is a book that someone nostalgic for Little Black Sambo can accept as a substitute. But it may be too bland, too flavorless for children, any children, to take to their hearts as they did the original.

Sam and the Tigers, on the other hand, has so much to offer on its own that you might wish it had nothing to do with Little Black Sambo. In the case of a song, either the words or the music can come first. In the case of a picture book, the words must come first, or what would the illustrator illustrate? But the imaginary world that’s home to young Sam is so instantly real, so familiar and comfortably habitable in Pinkney’s opening bird’s-eye view, that we don’t need a word from Lester to be ready to walk along the streets of this old-time Southern town, with its plain wooden fences, its snug unpainted cabins and tidy garden plots, its street stalls and pushcarts and turbaned heads bearing baskets. We are ready to greet passers-by, all lightly dark-skinned — or furred, feathered-and-beaked, leathery and gray.

Without signposts we are in the backcountry South of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, of folk-Southerness today. (See the frontispiece of the first Lester-Pinkney Uncle Remus collection; see Southern cartoonist Jim MacNelly’s “General Store and Center for Southern Culture.”) This particular Brueghel-rama, this particular Brigadoon, is Lester’s Sam-sam-sa-mara — “where the animals and the people lived and worked together like they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to.” Both Pinkney and Lester add fillips of their own, extra bits of fantasy and nonsense to stash away. The bird’s-eye view that introduces Sam-sam-sa-mara is the view of a hatted and shawled stork, who is carrying a basket of eggs (more of a joke for adults, maybe, but one they can share with kids). And all the people in Sam-sam-sa-mara are named Sam, including of course Sam’s mama and daddy, “but nobody ever got confused about which Sam was which, and that’s why nobody was named Joleen or Natisha or Willie.”

In pictures as anecdotally effective as a Norman Rockwell cover and pungent dialogue that would play well on stage, Sam and his parents shop for new clothes for school. At Mr. Elephant’s Elegant Habiliments, Sam turns down his mother’s conservative choice in favor of “a jacket as red and happy as a heart.” Sam, in short, will have his bright red-green-blue toggery because boys will be peacocks, given a chance.

When the plot of Little Black Sambo kicks in, however, Sam and the Tigers gets in trouble. Sam, dressed to dazzle, leaves for school. “Not very far” from the dooryard a real-live jungle tiger appears and announces its intention to eat Sambo up. The reader is not prepared for the tiger, of all Sam-sam-sa-mara’s wild animals (which include alligators, beers, and wolves) to be a predatory beast. A child might reasonably ask how come the tiger wants to eat Sam if “the animals and people lived and worked together . . . ” And making the answer more of a stumper is the fact that Miss Cat, proprietor of The Feline’s Finest Finery, is not a fireside puss but a wildcat indistinguishable from a tiger, in her enveloping dress, except for absence of stripes on her tail.

Sam himself doesn’t seem much concerned; and given the script, you might suspect Lester was spoofing the whole stylized Sambo-tiger conflict. After relinquishing jacket, pants, and shoes, “Sam didn’t see any point in moving, and sure enough, along came another Tiger.” The tiger rejects Sam’s proffered umbrella as useless, and insists he’ll eat Sam up. “If you do,” Sam begins, “it’ll send your cholesterol way up.” And the tigers are not made to look ridiculous; we never see tiger number three with Sam’s shoes on its ears, or tiger number four holding the umbrella aloft. But Lester and Pinkney do stick to the climax: the tigers, squabbling, spin themselves into a pool of butter that Sam carries home to Sam-sam-sa-mara — whereupon all the animal neighbors join the striped-pancake feast.

Babaji is slight, except for the Bannerman text; Sam and the Tigers is a richly imaginative brew that doesn’t quite cohere as a story. The ideal book would probably be Bannerman’s text, with her pictures redrawn to make all the figures as appealing as her Sambo is in some of the illustrations. But that would still be Little Black Sambo, and problematic in our unideal world.

Will diehard Bannerman fans be content with Babaji? Will folks who loved the little hero Sambo feel the same way about Sam? Will children take strongly to either of the two? Will the appearance of the pair bring Sambo out of hiding? Would it matter?

In the decades of Little Black Sambo’s eclipse, the Sambo image has evaporated – from the historical record, from the sociologist’s lexicon, from popular culture. Today’s stereotypes are different, aggressive and threatening. Out in the open Bannerman’s little book may prove to be a paper tiger, all the less to be feared in the company of Babaji and Sam.

Barbara Bader first wrote about Little Black Sambo in the chapter “Negro Identification, Black Identity” in American Picturebooks: From Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (1976). Her study of Carter Woodson and Arna Bontemps, and their pioneering roles in bringing African-American history to children, will appear in the January/February issue in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary, in 1996, of Black History Month and its precursor, Negro History Week.