Echoes of the Old Plantation

ome years ago Julius Lester freed Joel Chandler Harris’s Brer Rabbit stories from their plantation trappings — the “genial old darky” storyteller Uncle Remus and his audience, the planter’s young son. And angelic, abused Elsie Dinsmore and her devoted mammy have long since lost the appeal they had when Anne Carroll Moore banished the series from the New York Public Library. But despite myriad exposures and expungings, images of African Americans rooted in a make-believe Old South have a way of resurfacing — as, of late, in picture books. Perhaps uniquely in picture books.

The historian George Fredrickson, author of The Black Image in the White Mind, has a name for this mindset: romantic racialism. In the “happy days on the old plantation,” the story went, there had been genuine affection between whites and blacks, masters and slaves. One proof was the loyalty of slaves during the Civil War, their frequent bravery and sacrifice. Moderate Southern whites cultivated this benevolent, essentially demeaning image of blacks as an alternative to active, hostile, Ku Klux Klan racism, and Northern whites bought it. When, in time, the extremists managed to rob Negroes of their voting rights and impose segregation throughout the South, there were few protests nationwide. Uncle Remus and little Elsie’s Aunt Chloe and their like didn’t inspire much respect.

Generation after generation of children grew up with the cozy, child-friendly stereotypes. The Elsie books (1867–1905) were joined by Two Little Confederates (1888), the Little Colonel series (1895–1912), and The Littlest Rebel (1911). Shirley Temple danced her way through the Little Missy roles in the 1930s movie versions; Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers played the mammy parts — many, many mammy parts — in the films of the 1930s to the 1950s.

Today we know better than to believe that slaves generally loved their masters or that latter-day black servants enjoyed cooking and cleaning and doing laundry in other people’s houses. Ingrained ideas are hard to shake, even so. Take Berenice, the black maid in Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding. Though she doesn’t indulge Frankie, the pesky daughter of the house, and speaks longingly of leaving domestic service, virtually everyone familiar with the book or the movie thinks of Berenice as yet another mammy figure.

This is where picture books come in. Put a white child and a black adult together, and it’s commonly assumed that the black person is the caretaker, the family retainer. Multiculturalism adds another dimension. The impulse to do honor to African Americans in all walks of life gives rise, sometimes, to images that might be regarded as romantic racialism updated.

The Doorman, written by Edward Grimm and illustrated by Ted Lewin, concerns an African-American doorman at an upscale apartment house who has a cheery personal word for every tenant, young and old, and an especially chummy, joshing relationship with one particular girl. Without warning, he dies of a heart attack — which sets up the verbal clincher. “It’s a shame,” says the second, night doorman, “that John had such a bad heart.” “He did not,” the girl retorts, “he had a good heart.”

The book is politically correct through and through. The tenantry is multicultural; the second doorman is white; and nobody has any ethnic traits. So what difference does it make that genial, good-natured John is a warm, glowing brown? Why do I even allude to his identity when the text does not? Either his identity is incidental, in which case we have to try to envision a white doorman — or a Latino, Asian, or Arab doorman — with the same stereotypical attributes; or his identity is integral, in which case he is a throwback, conscious or not, to the smiling Pompeys who kept the Big House in order in plantation days.

Another misguided attempt to do good — or to feel good — is Dear Willie Rudd, written by Libba Moore Gray and illustrated by Peter M. Fiore. Here, a middle-aged woman calls to mind the black housekeeper of her childhood in the segregated South and writes “Dear Willie Rudd” to apologize for “anything any of us might have done to make you sad” and to wish that she, Willie Rudd, could return and enter by the front door (“not my back door”), sit at the dining table (“not in the kitchen alone”), etc., etc. Then the white woman, Elizabeth, sends off the letter tied to a kite and retires to her front porch to sip a cup of tea.

Never mind the flagrant unlikelihood. Never mind — for now — the pernicious notion that one white woman’s private regret a half-century later constitutes some sort of recompense or restitution for what blacks endured under segregation. When the middle-aged Elizabeth envisions Willie Rudd’s present-day return, it is not she who is depicted opening the front door, sitting at the dining table, and so on, it is her childhood self. What she regrets is not having had Willie Rudd for a companion, a pal.

Two recent, higher-profile books raise the stakes.

Mr. George Baker, written by Amy Hest and illustrated by Jon J Muth, draws upon the poignant, post-slavery image, in photographs and drawings, of elderly black men in school with young black children; at last, they can learn to read. Mr. George Baker, for its part, is ostensibly a contemporary story of a black man — and famous drummer — who, at the age of a hundred, goes off on the school bus every morning with his young white neighbor and buddy, also to learn to read. The book is cute as all get-out. See the two sitting side by side, with their red book bags, on George’s front stoop; see George break into a fox trot with his ninety-year-old wife when she brings out his lunch. That this implausible claptrap is supposed to touch the hearts of white children, who will identify with the little white boy, is the book’s most objectionable feature.

The Friend, written by Sarah Stewart and illustrated by David Small, is as sophisticated as Mr. George Baker is gauche. At a mansion by the sea a little white girl left behind by her swank parents spends her days delightedly doing housework — in her own playful way — with the goodhearted, womanly African-American housekeeper. The day’s work done, the two head for the beach: “Belle and Bea, hand in hand, by the sea.” Then a crisis: little Belle goes off to the beach alone, follows her ball into the water, and has to be saved from drowning by a distraught Bea. On the final page we see the author as a mature woman, not unlike the protagonist of Dear Willie Rudd, gazing out to sea and thinking of her onetime caretaker-friend.

A vintage car and certain other details, indications that this is a period story, will be lost on most children. It hardly matters; the situation is not time-bound. In Bea’s room is a pair of family photos, presumptive signals that she has another life. That hardly matters either; Bea is almost as isolated, in this context, as little Belle herself. And while it is understandable that Belle would regard Bea, her sole companion and only confidante, as her friend, that is the typical, self-centered notion of a child — stretched to imply, in this instance, equivalence and reciprocity.

The same is true to one degree or another of all these books. Along with a residue of romantic racialism, it’s the basis of the genre.

Tony Kushner’s recent musical drama Caroline, or Change is also an autobiographical work centered on the relationship between a young white child and an African-American maid. Noah hangs around Caroline in the basement laundry room, seeking intimacy even more than attention, and then there’s a rupture. When a reconciliation is in sight, he asks her if they’ll be friends again. She replies brusquely: “Weren’t never friends.” The story takes place in the South in the 1960s, and Kushner’s Caroline is on the cusp of change. With the psychological insights and the social awareness of a thinking adult, Kushner has escaped the shadow of the plantation.

Would that others could, too.

Barbara Bader is the author of “Sambo, Bajabi, and Sam” in the September/October 1996 Horn Book and many other articles about multicultural children’s literature.