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4 Countering White Supremacist Attitudes: The Construction of New Images

4.1 Racial Discourse in Literature for Children She does not know Her beauty, She thinks her brown body Has no glory. If she could dance Under palm trees And see her image in the river She would know. But there are no palm trees On the street, And dish water gives back no images.416

Images are crucial to the development of a self-concept, but, as mentioned earlier, virtually the entire reading material which was available when Du Bois published The Brownies’ Book was designed for the use of white boys and girls. As a consequence, black children hardly ever appeared in books for the young, and if they were included, they had to look at distorted pictures which were constructed by the white members of society who tried to enforce their cultural supremacy upon African-Americans. 417 Ethnocentric perspectives, the tendency to view alien 416 Waring Cuney, “No Images,” Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young

Readers, comp. Arna Bontemps (1941; New York: Harper, 1982, print) 28. 417 In a few cases, Blacks managed to publish books for children even before Du Bois launched

his periodical; not all of them necessarily also included black characters, though (See Footnote 57). For the time of the publication of The Brownies’ Book, there is no specific data available on the quantity of books with black characters. The first research project which dealt with this question was conducted by Nancy Larrick in 1965. She found out that of the 5, 206 children’s books published in 1962, 1963, and 1964 only 6.7% included even one black child in either text or illustration (See Nancy Larrick, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” The All White World of Children’s Books and African American Children’s Literature, ed. Osa Osayminwense (Trenton, NJ: African World, 1995, print) 349). Larrick presented her findings in her article “The All-White World of Children’s Books” and apparently managed to rouse the readers because when Jeanne S. Chall et al. conducted a similar study in 1979, they found out that the percentage of books including at least one black character in text or illustration had more than doubled to 14.4% (689 out of 4,775) (See Jeanne S. Chall et al., “Blacks in the World of Children’s Books,” The Black American in Books for Children: Readings on Racism, ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, 2nd ed. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1985, print) 215). Still,

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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/8/2018 12:23 PM via CAL STATE UNIV FULLERTON AN: 488151 ; Schaffer, Christina.; «The Brownies’ Book»: Inspiring Racial Pride in African-American Children Account: s8984376.main.ehost

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cultures with disfavor and thereby fueling the belief in the superiority of one’s own culture, were still standard in America in the 1920s. White Americans kept holding strongly to the perpetuation and promotion of what Raymond Williams calls a selective tradition and tried to preserve common racist stereotypes and myths which presented African-Americans of lesser value than white Americans and, what is worse, helped to make Blacks themselves believe in their alleged inferiority. Institutions like schools, churches, libraries, and the press played a decisive role in shaping reality according to the belief in white supremacy, and literature proved to be a helpful medium to promote racist ideas.

To secure their hegemonic status and guarantee its continuity, white Americans had to make sure that their belief system was taught to and believed in by the young. Children’s books and periodicals did not only serve the purpose of socialization, they were also counted “among the several agencies that can contribute to the internalization of a given social order.”418 At a very early age, white children learned through books that they were the natural leaders of Blacks and in all ways superior to them while black children only looked at white faces in their storybooks, schoolbooks, and magazines, if they had access to them at all. In the rare case that they were represented, they only had the chance to see themselves as the adult white establishment saw them. Dharathula H. Millender states that in the early 1900s there was still little or no contact between the races, and most authors “had no real way of knowing the Negro about whom they were writing, but they wrote about Negroes, nevertheless, and people believed their farcical presentations.” 419 These circumstances entailed that African-American children mainly encountered negative images and racist stereotypes which denied them the opportunity to develop a healthy self-concept and to take pride in their race.

In the following, I will examine the depiction of Blacks in white children’s literature to demonstrate which stereotypes Du Bois and Fauset had to combat in The Brownies’ Book. The analysis of the images assigned to African-Americans will be based on Sterling A. Brown’s 1933 study on the portrayal of Blacks in

the number of children’s books featuring black characters remains small until today. The latest data was published in a statistics by Kathleen T. Horning et al. According to their findings, there were about 5,000 children’s books published in the United States in 2010 from which they received 3,400 for their analysis and among those 156 were about African-Americans and 102 by African-American authors (See Kathleen T. Horning et al., “Children’s Books by and about People of Color Published in the United States: Statistics Gathered by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center School of Education University of Wisconsin-Madison,” CCBC, U of Wisconsin-Madison, n.d., web, 28 June 2011.

418 Gordon R. Kelly, Mother Was a Lady: Self and Society in Selected American Children’s Periodicals 1865-1890 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974, print) xv.

419 Dharathula H. Millender, “Through a Class, Darkly,” The Black American in Books for Children: Readings on Racism, ed. Donnarae MacCann and Gloria Woodard, 2nd ed. (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1985, print) 110.

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books for adults because it appeared shortly after Du Bois’ publication for children and provides an insightful discussion of the (mis)representation of Blacks in the literature of the time. Brown came to the conclusion that, “although overlappings do occur,” there are seven major stereotypes to be found: the contented slave, the wretched freeman, the comic Negro, the brute Negro, the tragic mulatto, the local color Negro, and the exotic primitive.420 His findings have been the starting point for further research for many years. Dorothy M. Broderick relies on them in her outstanding work on the depiction of African-Americans in books for the young entitled Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction (1973). Even though Brown never focused on children’s literature in particular, Broderick drew similar conclusions with regard to children’s books and periodicals.

My analysis of the portrayal of African-Americans in children’s literature will include books as well as magazines, but there will be a special focus on St. Nicholas (1873-1943) and in particular on the years around the publication of The Brownies’ Book. Together with The Youth’s Companion (1827-1929), St. Nickolas can be considered the most famous nineteenth century periodical for white children, which means that it was The Brownies’ Book’s direct white counterpart and its main antagonist.421 St. Nicholas was launched by Scribner & Co., the same company which published Scribner’s Monthly and The Century. Du Bois identified these magazines as the two most hostile ones on the market because they were particularly biased against Blacks.422 It seems natural that St. Nicholas, became influenced by its adult counterparts because their authors and illustrators contributed to it, too, and therefore reflects their ideology of white supremacy.

Elinor Desverney Sinnette was the first to call attention to the periodical’s negative attitude towards African-Americans when she mentions that the impression of the black child, as it was presented to the white reader in St. Nicholas, “is clearly that this black creature is not a part of his society, but ‘something’ apart.” 423 To prove her point she cites the “poem ‘Ten Little Niggers.’”424 She quotes: “Ten little nigger boys went out to dine/One choked his little self and then/there were nine […].”425 Sinnette is most certainly right in 420 Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro

Education 2.2 (1933): 180, print. 421 It seems, though, that also black children belonged to the magazine’s readership, as a letter

printed in 1916 indicates. Here, Phil Lord quotes “the younger Mr. Harrison” – a member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers – who relates that he had read St. Nicholas from the time he was ten (Phil Lord, letter, St. Nicholas Feb. 1916: 382, print).

422 See Abby Arthur Johnson, and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979, print) 28.

423 Sinnette, “The Brownies’ Book: A Publication for Children” 134. 424 Sinnette, “The Brownies’ Book: A Publication for Children” 134. 425 Sinnette, “The Brownies’ Book: A Publication for Children” 134.

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suggesting that Blacks are ridiculed in this poem, but I want to stress that she misquotes one word and thereby – intentionally or unintentionally – increases the negativity of the image conveyed in the poem. This misquote appears in secondary literature till today, and it has been used by renowned scholars of African- American children literature such as Dianne Johnson and Donnarae MacCann. 426 Thus, clarification is called for. The said poem is included as part of a book recommendation in Mary Mapes Dodge’s “Jack-In-The-Pulpit” column in December 1873 under the heading “A Very Funny Book.” Before citing the rhyme, Dodge adds the following remark: “It is called ‘The Ten Little Niggers;’ and I’ll tell you the thrilling story it illustrates, if you’ll allow me to change one little word throughout the poem, so as not to hurt anybody’s feelings: The Ten Little Black Boys [my emphasis].” 427 Although the image of the black child still remains negative in the final analysis, this statement shows that assumptions concerning racism in St. Nicholas should be made carefully because writers such as Dodge, who even was the magazine’s editor from 1873-1905, apparently were cautious to avoid at least overt racism by evading the degrading term “nigger” for example.

Sterling A. Brown’s stereotype of the contented slave was widespread in children’s fiction, which is not surprising since the depiction of the ferocities of slavery was not fit for children and would not have supported the myth of the happy plantation life which especially pro-slavery authors wanted to promote. Many books portrayed slaves as constantly cheerful and regularly contained references to singing, dancing, and smiling to strengthen this assumption. They depicted Blacks not just as surrendering to their fate but oftentimes as even supporting the institution of slavery with enthusiasm. The slaves were devoted to their masters who were delineated as kind and paternal and who provided for their supposed children. The notion of an idealized relationship between benevolent whites and loyal Blacks remained the same even after the slaves were freed and attitudes towards the institution of slavery itself changed.428 Especially local color writers availed themselves of the image of the contented slave during the post Civil War period by working towards a reactionary nostalgia in their attempt to reconcile the North and the South. The image of Blacks as perpetual children incapable of maturity and lacking reasoning power was very popular as well. Leslie R. Millender states that the habit of “calling all Negro men, even grey-haired old men, ‘boy’” in fact originated in the slave era but was still common for a very long time

426 Johnson uses Sinnette’s misquote in Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African

American Literature for Youth (1990) and MacCann in White Supremacy in Children’s Fiction: Characterizations of African Americans 1830-1900 (1995).

427�Mary Mapes Dodge, “A Very Funny Book,” St. Nicholas Dec. 1873: 101, print. 428 See Leslie R. Miller, “The Power of Black and White: African Americans in Late-Nineteenth

Century Children’s Periodicals,” Defining Print Culture for Youth, ed. Anne Lundin (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003, print) 65.

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afterwards.429 A case in which adult black maleness is affronted in this way can be found in St. Nicholas in 1897. In “An Old-Time Christmas Gift,” one reads about the “‘boy’ Tom,” a minor character, who seems to be a grown-up house slave.430

One encounters an example of paternalistic racism in the 1873/1874 serial “What Might Have Been Expected.” In this story, two white children decide to adopt an old black woman to save her from the almshouse (chapter two is indeed entitled “The Adoption”). As to Aunt Matilda’s precarious situation, the reader learns that

there could be no doubt about her case being a pretty hard one. She was quite old and decrepit when the war set her free, and, at the time of our story, she was still older and stiffer. Her former master had gone to the North to live, and as she had no family to support her, the poor old woman was compelled to depend upon the charity of her neighbors. For a time she managed to get along tolerably well, but it was soon found that she would suffer if she depended upon occasional charity, especially after she became unable to go after food or help.431

This passage does not only depict white children as the nurturers or, as they are called, “guardians” of a grown-up black woman and reverses the actual child-adult relationship; it also substantiates the idea that whites had to help Blacks to survive even after the Civil War because without white protectors, the former slaves were allegedly unable to help themselves.432 Aunt Matilda can also serve as an example of what Brown calls the “wretched free Negro,” a stereotype which was set up as “a foil to the contended slave” especially by pro-slavery authors.433 A freed Black was often described as miserable, sad, lonely, despised by whites and Blacks alike, and of a low standing in society with the intention to turn the status of freedman into an undesirable condition.

A paragon of a devoted slave appears in Martha Finley’s children’s book Elsie Dinsmore (1868). Aunt Chloe is the ultimate example of a happy slave who is loyal to her master. She is also the incarnation of the mammy stereotype because she affectionately takes care of her master’s daughter Elsie, as the following excerpt demonstrates:

[Aunt Chloe] comprehending at once how her child was suffering, she raised her up in her strong arms, and laying the little head lovingly against her bosom, she smoothed the tangled hair, kissed the tear-swollen eyes, and bathed the throbbing temples, saying, “My precious pet, my darlin' chile, your ole mammy loves you better dan life; an’ did

429 Millender, “Through a Glass, Darkly” 112. 430 Ruth Mc Enery Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift,” St. Nicholas Dec. 1897: 94, print. 431 Frank R. Stockton, “What Might Have Been Expected,” St. Nicholas Nov. 1873: 24, print. 432 Stockton, “What Might Have Been Expected” 24. 433 Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 186.

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my darlin’ forget de almighty Friend dat says, “I have loved thee with n everlasting love, an’ I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee”? . . . “Hush, hush, darlin’; old Chloe nebber could ask dat; dis ole heart would break for sure. Yous all de world to your old mammy, darlin’; and you know we must all wait de Lord’s time.”434

Aunt Chloe is satisfied and sees the purpose of her life in helping to raise little Elsie. Although female Blacks have often been portrayed as loving mammies who took good care of their masters’ children, they were, at the same time, frequently depicted as being bad mothers and far less loving when it came to their own offspring.435 The St. Nicholas story “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” is about a black boy, who goes by the name of “[l]ittle Jim Crow,” and his mother and sister. The reader learns that between the two of them he “received ‘more kicks than ha’pence,’ and more cuffs than kisses.”436 Since the white lady who employs the black women takes better care of the child – she provides him with clothes, teaches him manners and the ABC, soothes him when he is ignored by his white playmates, and protects him from his mean sister – little “Jim Crow’s” loyalty and affection is with her. His own mother has to force him to leave the household with her when she is fired in the end.

The image of the contented slave was again reinforced in the Reconstruction era by relying on feelings of nostalgia. Many books sentimentalized the plantation times, and various authors tried to prove that the slaves actually did not even want to be free. Choel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880) and Uncle Bella in Thomas Nelson Page’s Two Little Confederates (1888) are typical examples because both want to stay with their former masters even after the Emancipation Proclamation. 437 In the above- mentioned St. Nicholas story “An Old-Time Christmas Gift,” the slave girl Yuyu also does not want her freedom and decides to stay with her little mistress Mimi. When the girls were born, they were tied to each other by a special ritual, which is reminiscent of the bonding procedure between the kind white gentleman Marse Chan and his loyal slave Sam in Thomas Nelson Page’s “Marse Chan” (1884):438

434 Martha Finley, Elsie Dinsmore, 1868, Project Gutenberg, 1 Sept. 2004, web, 29 Nov. 2009 n.

pag. 435 See Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 185. 436 Clara Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow,’” St. Nicholas Dec. 1898: 149, print. 437 For a discussion on Uncle Remus’ role as stereotypical African-American promoting the Old

South, see Darwin T. Turner, “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies,” Southern Literary Journal 1.1 (1968): 20-41, print. In defense of Joel Chandler Harris, Robert Cochran points to subversive elements in the construction of Uncle Remus in his “Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris,” African American Review 38.1 (2004): 21-34, print.

438 Page describes the ritual which establishes the life-long bond between Marse Chan and Sam as follows: “‘Ain’ you Mymie’s son?’ [asks Marse Chan’s father Mr. Channing] ‘Yass,

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. . . the master of the house bade her [old Milly, the house slave] place the children side by side, and then he gently opened their tiny right hands, and laying them one within the other, closed them for a moment. Then he lifted the white hand and placed it on the black baby’s head. This last was of a double significance, and meant obedience on one side and protection on the other. The joining hands meant simply that the children were pledged to lifelong friendship, and that they should stand by each other as long as they both should live.439

The message of her newly gained freedom infuriates Yuyu. “‘Ef a pusson haf to be free, whe’re or no, I don’t call dat freedom. I calls dat cheatin’. I calls it freedom ef a pusson is free to be free ef dey want to be free!’” she proclaims. Then, she asks Mimi to repeat the ritual of their childhood and renews their bond at her own free will.440 Thus, the idealized relationship between the benevolent white and the loyal Black was not contested in children’s literature. In general, one can observe that when Blacks were finally emancipated, their images did not truly change, and the tendency remained “to attribute to free black the same characteristics as were applied to slaves: dumb, superstitious, illiterate, but oh, so loyal.”441 The former slaves simply took over the parts of servants, and the predetermined social order was not challenged.

Closely related to the stereotype of the contented slave is the image of the “comic Negro” because, as Brown states, “if the Negro could be shown as perpetually mirthful, his state could not be so wretched.”442 Black children were

seh,’ ses I [Sam is the narrator of the story]. ‘Well,’ sez he, ‘I’m gwine to give you to yo’ young Marse Channin’ to be his body-servant,’ an’ he put de baby right in my arms (it’s de truth I’m tellin’ yo’!), an yo’ jes’ ought to a-heard de folks sayin’, ‘Lawd! marster, dat boy’ll drap dat chile!’ ‘Naw, he won’t,’ sez marster; ‘I kin trust ‘im.’ And den he sez: ‘Now, Sam, from dis time you belong to yo’ young Marse Channin’; I wan’ you to tek keer on ‘im ez long ez he lives. You are to be his boy from dis time. An’ now,’ he sez, ‘carry ‘im in de house.’ An’ he walks arfter me an’ opens de do’s fur me, an’ I kyars ‘im in my arms, an’ lays ‘im down on de bed. An from dat time I was tooken in de house to be Marse Channin’s body-servant.” (Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan,” 1884, In Ole Virginia: or Marse Chan and Other Stories (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969, print) 6). Matthew R. Martin states that “Sam sees himself and his master as inextricably bound in a kind of twinship in which either of their lives is incomplete without the other” (Matthew R. Martin, “The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt,” Southern Literary Journal 30.2 (1998): 22, print). Sam becomes Marse Chan’s boyhood playmate, his loyal servant at college and during the Civil War, and he is also the one to take his body home for burial when Marse Chan is fatally wounded in battle.

439 Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift” 94. 440 Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift” 102. 441 Dorothy M. Broderick, Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction (New York: Xerox, 1973,

print) 62. 442 Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 188.

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typically portrayed as comic Negroes or pickaninnies, and their pranks and their stupidity were meant to amuse the readers. The minstrel tradition frequently included clown-like black characters as well, whose physical appearance enforced their comic effect even further because the depiction of certain body parts like eyes, lips, and hair was often exaggerated.443 As already explained, black dialect was another element which added to the fact that African-Americans were perceived as funny characters, and their supposed inability to use proper English substantiated the belief that Blacks were intellectually inferior. Brown lists additional features

443 Originally minstrelsy was performed by white actors in blackface who presented African-

Americans and appropriated the slaves’ dances and music to amuse a white audience. As already explained, to “make the black slave appear as different as possible from,” the actors used burnt cork and make-up to exaggerate their eyes and mouths and ridiculed black dialect (Lisa M. Anderson, “From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth- Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro,’” Theater Research International 21.1 (1996): 17, print). In 1855, the first black minstrel troupes appeared. Lisa M. Anderson argues that although African-Americans tried to reclaim their dances and songs by signifying on white minstrelsy, they had to realize “that despite their efforts to change the minstrel show into something that presented African American folk culture, the images of blacks associated with the earlier white shows remained embedded in the minds of the audiences. Because the audience perceived the black minstrels not as ‘actors’ but as real- life exhibits, or freak shows, the effort of black minstrels to change the minstrel icon were doomed” (Anderson, “From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro’” 23). In his Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy (2010), Robert Nowatzki explores the relationship of the minstrel tradition and the abolitionist movement in America and Great Britain and points out that the blackface performances helped to establish a platform for representation of African-Americans. In general, scholarship on minstrelsy mainly debates whether this tradition is a celebration of African-American culture and a means of representation for Blacks or a racist practice which enforces white cultural domination. Eric Lott documents this “dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation, counterfeit and currency” in his book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995) and his article “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture” (1996) (Eric Lott, “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture,” Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996, print) 6). In “Du Bois and the Minstrels,” Scott Herring argues that in Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois sought to re-appropriate the music which minstrelsy had debased by reclaiming the Sorrow Songs as unique black heritage (See Scott Herring, “Du Bois and the Minstrels,” MELUS 22.2 (1997): 3-17, print). For further information on the minstrel tradition, see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1974, print), who provides a comprehensive history and analysis of the minstrel show; and Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1996, print), who include primary material as well as scholarship on minstrelsy.

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which are typical of the black buffoon: “his love for watermelon and gin, for craps, his haunting of chicken roosts, use of big words he doesn’t understand, grandiloquent names and titles, ‘loud’ clothes, bluster, hysterical cowardice and manufactured word-play.”444

A classical example of a “comic Negro” in a children’s book appears in Helene Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899). Especially the illustrations are degrading in many editions; this book is a typical case which ridicules physical features of Blacks. The illustrators often show the protagonist Sambo as “simian- like or with protruding eyes and large, red lips, extremely dark skin, and, in the case of males, long, gangly arms.”445 Being black was equated with ugliness, and this seemed to have been the rule in most publication. A famous pickaninny roams through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). Tobsy’s antics and her kleptomania are exploited to entertain the reader and provide a comic relief to an otherwise severe story. This observation reveals that even anti-slavery authors like Stowe employed certain stereotypes assigned to African-Americans. Uncle Tom’s Cabin cannot be considered a typical children’s book, though.446 The above-

444 Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 190. 445 Harris, “African American Children’s Literature: The First One Hundred Years” 542.

Bannerman’s book was first published in England. It originally told the story of an Indian boy with black skin color who outwits a tiger. Marjorie N. Allen observes that the illustrations of the earliest American edition of The Story of Little Black Sambo (1905) were different from the English version. They “showed subtle changes that implied Sambo was African rather than East Indian. Many subsequent editions in the United States presented the work of different illustrators – with John Neill’s pictures blatantly caricaturing Southern Blacks and creating the stereotype heretofore blamed on Bannerman” (Marjorie N. Allen, One Hundred Years of Children’s Books in America: Decade By Decade (New York: Facts on File, 1996, print) 32).

446 Originally Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not written for a child audience, but Caroline M. Hewins, a librarian who worked with children at the Hartford Public Library, included Stowe’s work in the first of her influential lists “Books for the Young” in 1982 (See Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’s Fiction: Characterizations of African Americans 1830-1900 (New York: Garland, 1998, print) 197). Children’s editions appeared almost immediately after Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Pictures and Stories from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Peep Into Uncle Tom’s Cabin were launched by Stowe’s British and American publishers, for example, and in 1901, Grace Duffie Boylan adapted the story in her Young Folks Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Barbara Hochman discusses these revisions in her “Sparing the White Child: The Lesson of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Children in an Age of Segregation” (2011). She observes that Boylan’s edition was “radically different from the tale that adults wept over and children eagerly devoured when Stowe’s novel first appeared” because the Young Folks Uncle Tom’s Cabin reflects the anxieties about race relations at the turn of the century (Barbara Hochman, “Sparing the White Child: The Lessons of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Children in an Age of Segregation,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4.1 (2011): 58, print). Hochman concludes

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mentioned St. Nicholas character “‘Jim Crow” can serve as another example of a pickaninny. The title – “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” – is already significant in establishing the image of a young version of the “coming Negro” because “Jim Crow” was originally used as persona by the well-known blackface actor Thomas D. Rice (1808-1869) in the 1830s. He caricatured African-Americans on stage by performing a “kinetic, crazy dance” while singing a song entitled “Jump Jim Crow.” 447 With his shows, Rice helped to perpetuate the view of African- Americans as funny and irrational but oh so happy creatures. 448 Clara Morris stresses that “[l]ittle Jim Crow” has “all the malicious mischievousness of a monkey,” he sings, dances, does summersaults, stands “on his wooly head,” and enjoys hanging from the ceiling clung to a lamp with his toes. 449 However, his “dearest, sweetest moments” are allegedly those he spends with white children.450 He loves to entertain them with little tricks, and, as the author assures, if “they laughed, that was enough; he leaped, danced, sang, and wore himself completely out for their amusement.”451 When they read this passage, white children must have gotten the impression that Blacks are the happiest if they are able to please whites.

The brute stereotype was not very common in the antebellum years because pro-slavery authors were mostly trying to emphasize that slavery was beneficial to African-Americans. 452 Children’s books did not frequently employ this image either, which shows mostly male Blacks as drunkards and thieves who behaved rather like violent, lusty beasts than human beings. Thomas Dixon’s novels The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905) are prominent examples of adult books which make use of the brute image to the fullest.453 Some children’s books also availed themselves of this stereotype but in a milder way. “My Little ‘Jim

that “children’s editions of the Jim Crow period virtually eliminate Stowe’s moral, social, and religious concerns” (Hochman, “Sparing the White Child” 60).

447 Tim McNeese, Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate But Equal (New York: Chelsea House, 2007, print) 20.

448 In 1841, a railroad company borrowed the name Jim Crow to designate the separate cars which were set aside for African-Americans. Later, the term came to define various other forms of racial segregation, widely known as Jim Crow laws (See Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The African-American Odyssey, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Hall, 2003, print) 153). For further information on the origin of the term Jim Crow, see McNeese, Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate But Equal 20-21.

449 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 148-49. 450 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 153. 451 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 153. 452 See Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 191. 453 The Clansman was turned into a movie by D. W. Griffith in his The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Since it was strictly told from the Confederacy’s point of view and helped to fix the assumption of the brute black beast in the public consciousness, Du Bois fought fervently against its racist propaganda. See Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois Biography of Race, 1868-1919 506-509.

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Crow’” stresses the immorality of some black characters by references to thievery and drinking. Either the boy’s mother or his sister steal a chicken pie from their employers, and the narrator explains that, adding to their thieving and laziness, “too much liquor and a narrowly averted conflagration caused the dismissal of them all” in the end.454 Dorothy M. Broderick found out that from “the first mention of the Africans to the last in Tarzan of the Apes, the emphasis is on bestiality and cruelty,” and although once transported to the United States where their masters did their ‘best’ to ‘civilize’ them, they never really seemed to lose their innate sadistic and violent nature.455 A last example can be located in Booth Tarkington’s Penrod (1914). Here, Tarkington writes about the black character Verman who attacks a white man with a rake: “He struck as hard as he could. And he struck with the tines down – For in his simple, direct African way he wished to kill his enemy, and he wished to kill him as soon as possible.”456

The image of the primitive Black has two dimensions. The first one is very similar to the brute stereotype because primitivism often also equates blackness with cruelty, as well as superstition, and judges African cultures from a white, Euro-American perspective. This Euro-American point of view holds that Africans and their descendants are uncivilized barbarians and savages, that they do not possess any cultural achievements, and that they are therefore inferior. The second dimension depicts African-Americans as hedonists who adhere to their carnal wishes. Brown refers to this image when he talks about the stereotype of the exotic primitive, whom he calls “merely a ‘jazzed-up’ version” of the contented slave, “a creature of his appetites.”457 This alleged side of the African-American character was very appealing to many whites at the dawn of modernism. They trailed off to Harlem in masses to leave the world of rigid Victorian rules behind in order to enjoy their lives to the fullest while indulging in dancing, alcohol, and sex.

Obviously, the depiction of the primitive in children’s books never mentioned these immoral aspects. If they made references to primitivism, authors of children’s literature mostly followed in the footsteps of missionary texts which maintained that the wretched uncivilized Africans could be elevated by adopting western standards in general and Christian values specifically. The St. Nicholas story “An Old-Time Christmas Gift,” for example, elucidates that African-Americans have to overcome superstition and convert to the allegedly only right belief system: the Christian religion. Even though some of these superstitious beliefs – which are said to have their origins in Africa – are, according to the author, “poetic and beautiful,” many are “uncanny” and held responsible for Yuyu’s fear of the dark.458 Yuyu’s

454 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 157. 455 Broderick, Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction 99. 456 Booth Tarkington, Penrod, 1914, Project Gutenberg, 15 Mar. 2006, web, 30 Nov. 2009. 457 Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 198. 458 Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift” 98.

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young white mistress reasons with her, claiming that her beliefs are “not true” and that “only ignorant people believed in them; that there were no such things as ‘platties,’ or ‘ha’nts,’ or ‘hinnies’; that white geese could not prophesy; that rabbits’ feet could not protect; that faith in a loving God was the only faith worthy of his children.”459 Although afraid to let go of her rabbit’s foot and magic fishbone at first, the black girl converts to the Christian faith when she receives a “little Testament with her own name on it” and in the end gives up her supposedly primitive and “foolish” African belief system.460

The tragic mulatto stereotype was not common in children’s literature because this image was too closely connected to the topic of miscegenation, which was not suitable for children. “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” includes a mulatto character, the boy’s “buff sister,” who is even worse in her treatment of little “Jim Crow” than his mother. 461 Clara Morris stresses that the white lady often had to rely on her “authority” to save the boy “from the vengeful wrath of his buff and sullen sister.” 462 Just like many works for adults, such as Dixon’s The Clansman, children’s literature depicts mulatto characters as the worst of their kind because, as one theory holds, they are the “victim[s] of a divided heritage” who inherited “the vices of both races and none of the virtues.” 463 Even if they did not avail themselves fully of the mulatto stereotype, books for children often conveyed the impression that lighter shades of black were more desirable than darker skin colors.464

When examining all St. Nicholas issues of the years 1920 and 1921, one realizes that Blacks and their history are seldom – or only marginally – included. In the rare cases in which they are depicted, the images are mostly still under the sway of the ideology of white supremacy, and one re-encounters many of the above- described stereotypes. There are more references to Blacks to be found in 1920 and 1921 than Violet Joyce Harris (1986) and Fern Kory (2001) include in their analysis of these years. In January 1920, one reads in the news column “The Watchtower” under the title “’Planing the Antipodes” that in Java, the Australian aviator Captain Ross Smith “rounded up two hundred blacks from the neighboring villages and made them dig out the machines and cut thousands of bamboo poles, constructing a bamboo track over the bog.”465 A girl mentions in a letter – which is 459 Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift” 99. 460 Stuart, “An Old-Time Christmas Gift” 99. 461 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 148. 462 Morris, “My Little ‘Jim Crow’” 153. 463 Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” 194. 464 The image of the local color Negro does not have to be dealt with in depth here because most

of the attributes of this stereotype have been mentioned already. In short, authors included this image if they wanted to show peculiar African-American speech habits or customs to emphasize the picturesque aspects of the plantation life in the South.

465 Edward N. Teall, “Planing the Antipodes,” St. Nicholas Jan. 1920: 275, print.

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published in “The Letter Box” – that a black woman, Aunt Fanny, taught her how to swim.466 In February, there is a reference to a black coachman in “His Tribute” who “respectfully touched his hat”467 when he was done with his work.468 In May 1920, the reader learns more about Monticello in “St. Nicholas League,” a section reserved for young contributors. In “My Happiest Memory,” a boy recounts his trip to Jefferson’s estate and briefly mentions that he saw the slave quarter there.469 This issue also contains a reference to an escaped slave, old Hen, who “ruled the farm” which the protagonists pass on their way through the woods in “The Order of the Arrowhead.”470 In the June 1920 pageant “America the Beautiful: Democracy’s Goal,” which is concerned with the development of democracy in the U.S., the author wants the “Negro Spiritual” “March out, Freedom!” to be sung during the performance by a school choir.471 The pageant includes a scene in which members of the House of Burgesses, the first representative body in America, discuss the arrival of the first slaves brought from Africa. “This would be a great help in the tobacco-fields,” one member says.472 “Or a great menace! What if the Egyptian bondage of the Israelites should be repeated in our new land of promise,” another one replies. 473 He might expose slavery as inconsistent with America’s democratic ideals here, but it seems more likely that his words rather reveal his fear that, like the Israelites who overcame Egyptian bondage, the black slaves will, one day, free themselves from American bondage and triumph over the American people. The scene concludes with the song “Way down upon the Swanee River” – again sung by a school choir – which seeks to remind the audience of “the slaves singing in the cotton-fields.”474 Unlike Native Americans (even though played by whites), the Africans have no active part in this pageant and do not appear on stage – they are only talked about. The same issue also features an African-American porter in the

466 See Virgina H. Cowperthwaite, letter, St. Nicholas Jan. 1920: 286, print. 467 Mary Wells, “His Tribute,” St. Nicholas Feb. 1920: 294, print. 468 There might be another black character included in Feb. 1920. In the serial “The Treasure

Chest of the Medranos,” the reader meets Josefa, the family’s religious nurse and cook (See Elizabeth Howard Atkins, “The Treasure Chest of the Medranos,” St. Nicholas Feb. 1920: 306-13, print). A drawing is added which shows her with a dark complexion and black hair. The image presents her as overweight woman with a long dress and an apron who carries pastry in her hands. Thus, we encounter typical stereotypes assigned to Blacks. The story, which is set in California, never mentions specifically that Josefa is African-American.

469 See Jean M. Tod, “My Happiest Memory,” St. Nicholas May 1920: 663-64, print. 470 Samuel Scoville, Jr., “The Order of the Arrowhead,” St. Nicholas May 1920: 583, print. 471 See Margaret Knox, “America the Beautiful: Democracy’s Goal,” St. Nicholas June 1920:

743, print. 472 Knox, “America the Beautiful” 741. 473 Knox, “America the Beautiful” 741. 474 Knox, “America the Beautiful” 741.

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background of a drawing which depicts a train station in “St. Nicholas League.”475 The August 1920 issue includes a cartoon entitled “The Soft Step” which follows in the footsteps of the minstrel tradition and ridicules the African-American characters. It presents a black boy who is sitting on a board fishing. His mother wants to catch “this rapscallion,” and one reads her thoughts – which are quoted in dialect in the caption: “‘I jes step soft-like on dis board.’”476 The following picture shows the board hitting her face, she falls into the water, and the boy is catapulted away. The same issue contains the story “The Magic Gem,” which has an oriental background; it is set in Bagdad. Charles Federer and George Van Schaick relate the adventures of Vereef, a gem polisher, and his black slave Ali (there is a drawing of him included) who turns out to be brave and loyal to his master and is therefore granted his freedom in the end. 477 The last references to Blacks in 1920 are published in the October issue. A girl contributed the story “The Turning Point” which is set in Africa to “St. Nicholas League.” She tells of an African who plans to kill his white master. This murderous character is modeled upon the brute stereotype. The savage can be missionized by his master’s little daughter, though, who gives him a piece of her birthday cake. The girl’s generous gesture makes the African ashamed, and he abandons his “evil deed.” 478 Moreover, there are references to “dark cooks” who are counted among the amenities of a private train car in the adventure story “E.L.’s Baptism of Fire”479 and a drawing in “The Letter Box” which presents a black boy with a turban and oriental attire among two other exotic children, possibly from India and China, and an Arab.480

In 1921, the February issue presents a text entitled “Washington on Horseback” which reveals that Washington was taught how to ride by a slave called Uncle Ben.481 The March 1921 issue includes the narrative poem “The Memoirs of the Marquise” which focuses on a French marquis and marquise who fled from the reign of Robespierre to the United States. When they hear of the end of his “Reign of Terror,” they release their “four black negro slaves” – thus allegedly showing their “gentle nature” – and return to their home country.482 This poem gives the impression that if Blacks obtained their freedom it had to be granted to them; like in the pageant before, they do not have an active part. There are also two brief references to African-Americans in “How the Money Went to Bradford.” First, the readers learn that the protagonist Esther “might pass an occasional negro” on her 475 “St. Nicholas League,” St. Nicholas June 1920: 762, print. 476 E.W. Kemble, “The Soft Step,” cartoon, St. Nicholas Aug. 1920: 898, print. 477 See Charles Federer, and George Van Schaick, “The Magic Gem,” St. Nicholas Aug. 1920:

920-24, print. 478 Meredith Wilson, “The Turning Point,” St. Nicholas Oct. 1920: 1144, print. 479 T. Morris Longstrength, “E.L.’s Baptism of Fire,” St. Nicholas Oct. 1920: 1081, print. 480 See “The Letter Box,” St. Nicholas Oct. 1920: 1151, print. 481 See H.A. Ogdell, “Washington on Horseback,” St. Nicholas Feb. 1921: 293, print. 482 Rose Mills Powers, “The Memoirs of the Marquise,” St. Nicholas Mar. 1921: 389, print.

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way to Bradford.483 Later, they read that she “threw the reins to a negro who was lounging” in town.484 In “Inauguration Days” – a text which introduces the readers to various American Presidents – the children find out that Franklin Pierce maintained slavery and upheld the Fugitive Slave Law.485 In April 1921, there is a reference to “half breed negroes” who serve as paddlers in the adventure story “Boy Hunters in Demerara,”486 and “St. Nicholas League” contains a photo which shows black bootblacks at work.487 In a story entitled “Peter to the Rescue” (May 1921), the reader encounters the first African-American, “the dusky little urchin” Peter, who is not merely a minor character.488 The author relates that Conrad Carter revisits his “old plantation home.”489 He evokes images from the plantation myth in the description of the plantation, such as moonlight, “the majestic beauty” of the oak trees, and “the romantic and quiet beauty” of the mansion.490 When Carter’s old home is threatened by a fire, the black boy Peter wants to help to save the place. Carter is “touched by the child’s loyalty” – who speaks dialect and is described as “barefooted, clad in rags, hatless, but with a bright and smiling face.”491 In the end, Peter even rescues Carter; a picture presents both of them fighting their way through the flames. The May issue also features a cartoon similar to the one described earlier. This time, the reader follows a black boy who tries to learn to roller-skate but makes a complete fool out of himself.492 The same issue briefly mentions a black janitor called “Old Tom Juniper” in the boarding school story “Preservers.”493 Kenneth Payson Kempton’s “Phantom Gold” (Aug. 1921) holds references to Blacks, too. Here, one character says about another one’s feet that they are “like those of a negro comedian” because they are so big.494 In addition, the August 1921 issue includes an allusion to “jovial negro boys” in “The Conquest of the Reaper.”495 In September 1921, there is a drawing of fairies who dance with a white girl, a Chinese, and a black woman who is depicted stereotypically. She has huge eyes, big lips, and wears a head turban, a long, dress, and an apron.496 In

483 Beulah Amidon Ratliff, “How the Money Went to Bedford,” St. Nicholas Mar. 1921: 422,

print. 484 Ratliff, “How the Money Went to Bedford” 424. 485 See Harriette Wilbur, “Inauguration Days,” St. Nicholas Mar. 1921: 401, print. 486 George Inness Hartley, “Boy Hunters in Demerara,” St. Nicholas Apr. 1921: 532, print. 487 See “St. Nicholas League,” St. Nicholas Apr. 1921: 570, print. 488 Archibald Rutledge, “Peter to the Rescue,” St. Nicholas May 1921: 637 print. 489 Rutledge, “Peter to the Rescue” 636. 490 Rutledge, “Peter to the Rescue” 636. 491 Rutledge, “Peter to the Rescue” 637. 492 See E.W. Kemble, “Using His Head,” cartoon, St. Nicholas 1921: 649, print. 493 Adeline K. MacGilvary, “Preservers,” St. Nicholas May 1921: 627, print. 494 Kenneth Payson Kempton, “Phantom Gold,” St. Nicholas Aug. 1921: 874, print. 495 Mary R. Parkman, “The Conquest of the Reaper,” St. Nicholas Aug. 1921: 893, print. 496 Reginald Birch, drawing, St. Nicholas Sept. 1921: 1033, print.

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November 1921, the story “The Spelling-Match” contains a drawing of a black genie who only wears a loincloth, shoes, and a huge necklace.497 The same text features a picture of a sultan’s “three large and powerful Ethiopian slaves” who seize upon one of the characters to walk him out when he starts to annoy the others.498 Like the genie, the Ethiopians are topless, they wear no shoes but turbans, huge earrings and necklaces, have big lips and eyes, and carry huge oriental sabers. 499 Both drawings equate blackness with primitivism and savagery. In addition, one can observe that by mixing African and oriental elements, especially turbans, the various artist discussed here intended to produce an image of the exotic other which stands in stark contrast to the reader’s (white American) self in order to raise curiosity and, even more importantly, to establish Anglo-Saxon superiority. The November 1921 issue also includes a minor black character called Aunt Persis, who serves as a cook and a maid for a white family in the serial “The Turner Twins.”500 Lastly, the December 1921 “St. Nicholas League” publishes a small drawing of a black child with huge eyes who is scared by a Jack in the box, again a stereotypical depiction which foments the belief that Blacks are natural cowards.501

Although there are more references to Blacks in St. Nicholas in 1920 and 1921 than hitherto assumed, blackness is nevertheless mainly constructed as absence because the great majority of Blacks are merely minor characters or only briefly mentioned in a half sentence and have no active part at all. Ali in “The Magic Gem” and Peter in “Peter to the Rescue” are the only two black protagonists included in two years. The first story has an oriental setting and equates blackness with exoticism. The second one relies on feelings of reactionary nostalgia because it builds on the plantation myth and depicts the black child as loyal to the white protagonist. Most of the other black characters in 1920 and 1921 are adults who, in one way or another, work for whites, mainly as cooks, maids, and nannies. As smiling servants, they are always happy to please their white employers, and the pre-Civil War social order is replicated. Black children are scarcely included in St. Nicholas. Apart from Peter in “Peter to the Rescue,” they only appear as pickaninnies or fools in drawings and cartoons and are incorporated to amuse the readers. St. Nicholas was consequently still under the sway of the selective tradition, subtly upheld the myth of white supremacy, and contained various – though mainly mild forms – of Brown’s stereotypes, such as the “comic Negro,” 497 Harold Sichel, drawing, St. Nicholas Nov. 1921: 47, print. The picture also presents the other

characters who figure in the story. Although Violet Joyce Harris is right in claiming that they are more attractive than the black genie, they are, however, not “representing geographical regions,” as she suggests, but are members of a king’s entourage (Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature” 91).

498 Tudor Jenks, “The Spelling-Match,” St. Nicholas Nov. 1921: 48, print. 499 Harold Sichel, drawing, St. Nicholas Nov. 1921: 48, print. 500 See Ralph Henry Barbour, “The Turner Twins,” St. Nicholas Nov. 1921: 3-10, print. 501 “St. Nicholas League,” St. Nicholas Dec. 1921: 221, print.

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the contented slave – or servant for that matter –, and the exotic other when Du Bois published The Brownies’ Book. Yet, what really distinguishes the analyzed St. Nicholas issues is not so much the misrepresentation of black characters but their consistent absence. African-Americans, and especially African-American children, were rarely featured in stories and pictures and were therefore, for the most part, invisible.

All in all, the discussion of St. Nicholas has shown that black children normally did not find their images in books or periodicals for the young available in the 1920s, or they had to look at distorted pictures and cope with caricatures and stereotypes. The first step towards a feeling of racial pride consequently meant for Du Bois that Blacks had to gain power over their images. It was not enough, though, to simply “disseminate non-stereotypical, ‘universal’ images of African American people,” which was the priority of many white authors and illustrators in favor of the Blacks’ struggle. 502 The emphasis had to be on the creation of “identifiably African American images, which acknowledge and celebrate differences as well as similarities of experience in black communities.”503 Du Bois had to thwart the myth of white supremacy by constructing new images for the African-American children with which they would identify, which gave them a feeling of equality, and which provided evidence that they had no reason to be ashamed of their blackness. In short, images which, as Fauset puts it in a letter to Du Bois, taught “colored men and woman race pride, self-pride, self-sufficiency (the right kind) and the necessity of living [their] lives as nearly as possible, absolutely, instead of comparing them always with white standard.” They had to make young African-Americans “conscious of the tremendous powers lying latent within” them so that black children would finally be able to develop their full capacities and turn into healthy and strong individuals.504 The next chapters will demonstrate how Du Bois made Blacks visible and how he challenged the misrepresentation of African-Americans by countering the stereotypes prevailing in children’s literature. In the following, this study will discuss the new images which The Brownies’ Book created for its young readers.

502 Johnson, Telling Tales 7. 503 Johnson, Telling Tales 7. 504 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Hampton Idea,” 1906, Education of Black People; Ten Critiques

1906-1960, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1973, print) 8.

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4.2 The Beauty of Blackness Faced too often by the segregation and scorn of a surrounding white world, America’s Negro children are in pressing need of books that will give them back their own souls. They do not know the beauty they possess.505

The previous section established that African-Americans grew up in a predominately white society which perpetuated the belief that all the glory and beauty were of the white world. African-Americans were bound to see their black skin color as stigma because they conceived it as the main source of their alleged inferiority. Many identified with the white beauty ideal and were ashamed of their blackness. A great number of Blacks considered dark skin color as well as black, curly hair or any other physical feature which reminded them of their African descent undesirable, even ugly, and mulatto types were hailed as being especially beautiful. If their skin color was light enough, some African-Americans even decided to pass for white.506 For Du Bois, this attraction to whiteness and the admiration of white beauty standards meant denying their black heritage and “wowing false gods and invoking false means of salvation.”507 Together with his team, he attempted to counter the negative concept of blackness in The Brownies’ Book. The strategies are later mirrored in the Black Power movement and its “black is beautiful” slogan because the writers and artists stress the attractiveness of blackness as well as of all the other physical features which are considered typically African-American again and again throughout the magazine. 508 The editors did not only try to prove to the young readers that their skin color did not lessen their humanity but also proclaimed that they could be proud of their blackness and that all shades of black were beautiful and attractive, hoping that

505 Langston Hughes, “Books and the Negro Child,” Children’s Library Yearbook 4 (1932): 110,

print. 506 At the turn of the century, many African-American authors wrote novels of passing in which

racially mixed characters, who searched for their true selves, crossed the color line by living and working as white people in order to explore what it means to have a white identity. Famous examples are Charles W. Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1928), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). For further information, see Juda Bennett, The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Fiction (New York: Lang, 1998, print) Modern American Literature, New Approaches 6. For a detailed account on the conception of the color black and the construction of blackness in African- American novels, see Barbara Haider, Blackness and the Color Black in 20th Century African-American Fiction (Frankfurt: Lang, 2011), Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik: Eine europäische Hochschulreihe 57.

507 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 7. 508 See Boyer, The Enduring Vision 858.

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they would ultimately join James Alpheus Butler who declares in a letter to “The Jury”: “I am a colored boy, brownskinned [sic] and proud of it” (TBB July 1920: 215).

“The Crow is black and O so beautiful,” with this very first outcry, which opens Du Bois’ column, the Crow turns into the ultimate symbol of the “new black is beautiful ideal” and can be considered The Brownies’ Book’s most outstanding literary invention to counter the negative images connected with blackness. Heretofore, the color black had often been associated with such attributes as death, deceit, desolation, despair, the devil, disaster, fear, gloom, grief, hatred, hideousness, ignorance, inferiority, sin, the sinister, superstition, the unknowable, vengeance, witchcraft, the lack of moral goodness, and ascribed to primitive men as well as to savages.509 In “As the Crow Flies,” however, it becomes connected with such values as beauty, love, kindness, and intelligence.510 The introduction of the Crow continues with a strong emphasis on the beauty of his black plumage; he states that it is “shining with dark blues and purples” and that he has “little hints of gold in his mighty wings” (TBB Jan. 1920: 23). This description is remarkable because Du Bois emphasizes the Crow’s color stratification. He is not merely black, but his feathers display different shades of blackness – blue and purple –, and they also contain a golden shimmer which connects the Crow to the sun and unites him with the African-American children whom Du Bois names the “children of the sun.” The magazine promotes similar color stratifications when it comes to the portrayal of black children and adults in the magazine. Some authors introduce them as being simply black, but very often they look at their characters more closely and describe the many different nuances of the color of their skin, such as brown, yellow, jet-black, sable, dull gold, golden-brown, bronze, dark brown, or nut brown, and they present very dark characters as well as mulatto types. Du Bois’ periodical introduces a wide range of color because it embraces an African- American perspective, which, in contrast to the white perception, recognizes all the different nuances which the skin color of the darker races can have. Many of the words, such as jet-black, sable, gold, and bronze, also evoke positive associations of riches and preciousness on top.

A great majority of these different shades of black are linked with beauty and attractiveness and not with ugliness. To make young African-Americans internalize this positive concept of blackness, Du Bois refers to the connection of beauty and blackness repeatedly in his “As the Crow Flies.” He talks of the Crow’s “black and splendid plumage” (TBB Feb. 1920: 63). Later, the Crow says that his feathers are “dead black and sleek” (TBB Aug. 1920: 234). He also makes references to his 509 See Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, vol. 1 (New York:

Scarecrow, 1961, print) 221. 510 See Claud Anderson, and Rue L. Cromwell, “‘Black is Beautiful’ and the Color Preferences

of Afro-American Youth,” Journal of Negro Education 46.1 (1977): 76, print.

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“sweet, little, black crowlets” who are “black and sweet and bonnie” (TBB Apr. 1920: 118). 511 Many other writers also use positively connoted adjectives in connection with the description of black skin color or other typically African- American physical features as well as black children in general. The readers discover many rather standard adjectives referring to beauty, including beautiful, pretty, cute, fine, pleasant, neat, graceful, delicate, splendid, and handsome, but also more elaborate expressions such as “glorious head” (TBB Sept. 20: 270), “striking appearance” (TBB July 1920: 211), “impressive figure” (TBB Apr. 1920: 121), “clean-cut features” (TBB July 1920: 211), “dainty curls” (TBB May 1920: 133) “soft little curls” (TBB July 1920: 180), “fine silky black hair” (TBB July 1920: 180), “crinkled hair of midnight shred” (TBB Jan. 1920: 28), “bright, black eyes” (TBB Feb. 1921: 46), “quizzical eyes” (TBB Jan. 1921: 7), and “lovable brown baby” (TBB July 1920: 180). There are many references to sweetness related to the portrayal of black children which further add to the positive image of blackness. They cannot only be found in the above quoted passages from “As the Crow Flies” but also in Carrie W. Clifford’s letter to “The Grown-Ups Corner” where she writes that all Brownies are “just the cutest, sweetest, dearest creatures ever” (TBB Nov. 1920: 347) or in such descriptions as “a soft, sweet smile” (TBB Jan. 1921: 29). Moreover, Georgia Douglas Johnson states in “Brown Eyes” that the black girl presented in her poem is “sweeter far than breath of morn” (TBB May 1920: 158), in “Winter Sweetness,” Langston Hughes speaks of a “maple-sugar child” (TBB Jan. 1921: 27), and Peggy Poe states that her protagonist Happy is “as fat and round as a brown cookie” (TBB Jan. 1920: 3).

Also remarkable is the use of the adjective “noble” which is employed in the biographies of Katy Ferguson – “a noble colored woman” (TBB Jan. 1920: 27) – and of Benjamin Banneker who is said to be “a brave looking, pleasant man with

511 Not only are the associations with the color black challenged in the column. The symbol of

the crow itself is reinterpreted. It ought to be noted that crow is often a collective name for all kinds of black carrion birds and especially the raven, and thus, the characteristics ascribed to the raven can also be attributed to the crow (See Ad De Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing, 1974, print) 120). For example, crows and ravens “prosper when men slaughter one another, and so they are associated with battlefields and gallows and more generally with imminent death” (Michael A. Ferber, Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, print) 167). Other negative associations to be found in connection with black carrion birds are, for instance, “devil, disease, falseness . . . foulness, greed, ill-omen, impudence, rapaciousness, war, [and] wickedness” (Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols, vol. 2 (New York: Scarecrow, 1961, print) 1325). By assigning positive characteristics to the Crow and by stressing the beauty of the color black, Du Bois must have intended to point out to his people that they did not have to take all images or interpretations which were provided by the white members of society as given facts and that different interpretations and points of view are also in existence and justifiable.

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something very noble in his face” (TBB June 1920: 172). By using the word “noble” to describe their heroes, the authors counter the misrepresentation which depicted Blacks as dimwits and buffoons and instead underline that their appearance is regal and their behavior dignified. The references to the characters’ nobleness go even further in the biography of Benjamin Banneker because he is distinguished as having very fine personal qualities as well as refined manners. The author writes that his “manners were those of a perfect gentleman – kind, generous, hospitable, dignified, pleasing, very modest and unassuming” (TBB June 1920: 172). Banneker is said to possess all the qualities typically ascribed to nobility, and thus, the author created a new image, namely that of the noble, beautiful black character, in which the readers could take pride. The fiction and poetry, too, include Blacks of noble appearance. In “May-Queen,” Wendell Philips Gladden refers to a traditional May Day custom. To celebrate the advent of spring, a white girl is usually dressed up as queen to lead the May parade. In Gladden’s poem, however, the girl who wears the crown made of flowers is a “dusky Queen” (TBB May 1920: 133). Lucian B. Watkins describes a black boy as “Sable youth! Crown Prince of Night” in “Little Brown Boy” (TBB Jan. 1921: 28). In “The King’s Dilemma,” the white prince Nyanza makes friends with common children and the black boy Zanzibo against his father’s will, who does not believe in the principle of equality. When the King learns of his son’s new friends, he orders Zanzibo to his palace and tries to reason with Nyanza. The two boys enter the throne room together, and the stage directions stress that “[b]oth are dressed in the finest garments, and the black boy looks equally as princely as the white” (TBB Dec. 1920: 377). The author emphasizes that the black boy is in no way inferior to the white prince, and even though he is not of royal birth, he is on a par with Nyanza and displays noble features as well. The story “Big Round Date and Little Bean” also evokes a positive black beauty concept in connection with references to the noble appearance of a character who is not exclusively of noble blood. His mother was a slave before she married his father, a wealthy Tuareg. Akrabous, or Little Round Date as the protagonist is also called, is introduced to the readers as follows: “His bearing even on horseback was remarkably erect, and one could see at a glance, [sic] that he was of the nobility even though his skin was brown and his features broad and full like those of the people of Sudan” (TBB Sept. 1920: 259). Since Akrabous is a member of the Tuareg, a desert tribe which mainly lives in the Sahara, Caroline Bond Day extends the positive blackness concept to the continent of Africa, and the image of the uncanny, ugly African is challenged in The Brownies’ Book.512

It is striking that some texts even refer to black skin color as source of pride because it is God-given. Madeline G. Allison writes in her poem “Children of the Sun”: “God in his Wisdom gave you hue/Of which He’s proud – yes, proud of 512 Caroline Bond Day must have deliberately chosen this particular tribe because Tuaregs are

commonly perceived as tall and handsome.

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you!” (TBB May 1920: 152). In “Little Brown Boy,” Annette Christine Brown even claims that black skin color and curly black hair are, quite contrary to the white supremacist interpretation, no stigmata but actual and especially visual signs of God’s love for black children. Brown addresses a black boy in her poem and declares: “God loved you an awful lot, I know” because “he tinted your body that beautiful brown,/So the angels might guard you from Heaven on down” (TBB Jan. 1921: 14). She goes on explaining that the angels “loved” him “so dearly” because they “might have made [his] hair plain and straight on [his] head,/But they fashioned those crisp little curls there instead;/They gave them with their love for [him] and put them on to stay,/They wanted them always to grow just that way” (14). Brown creates a new image here – that of the God-given beauty of black children – and, at the same time, even inverts the old white supremacist image to a certain degree. Although she does not directly maintain that white physical features are ugly – which would have been too overt an opposition to Du Bois’ ideal of diversity –, she implies that curly hair is more beautiful than straight hair because it is an indication of the love of God’s angels.

Moreover, the biographical sketches do not only reveal the inner beauty of some prominent members of the African-American community which grew out of their heroic deeds but they also stress their physical beauty in a vast number of cases. In her biography of Denmark Vesey, Madeline G. Allison says that his “‘beauty, intelligence and alertness’ caused him to be separated from the rest of the slaves and made [him] a sort of pet among the [ship] officers,” and later she emphasizes again that he “was a black man, and handsome. He was physically strong and had a powerful mentality” (TBB Feb. 1921: 57; 58). In Vesey’s case, there is even a strong link between his physical beauty and his intellectual capacities because Allison maintains that his attractiveness was beneficial to him because he was treated better than the rest of the slaves on the ship. In addition, in the biographies of Sojourner Truth and Crispus Attucks, the authors emphasize that their appearance is impressive and point to their physical beauty. Of Sojourner Truth, the readers learn that she “must have been an impressive figure as she stood there, for she was very tall and dark, with a keen, unflinching eye” (TBB Apr. 1920: 121). And Crispus Attucks is presented as “a tall, splendidly-built fellow” who “must have been very impressive as he rushed with his handful of men pell-mell into the armed opposition” (TBB July 1920: 216).

As said before, besides the various forms of texts, also the drawings and photographs helped to create new beautiful images of the members of the African- American community in The Brownies’ Book. In his autobiography Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois stresses that the portrayal of “the faces and features of colored folk” was incredibly rare at the beginning of the 20th century.513 He laments that the “colored papers carried few or no illustrations; the white papers none. In many great 513 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 752.

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periodicals, it was the standing rule that no Negro portrait was to appear. . . .”514 But then he prides himself that “[t]hrough our ‘Men of the Month,’ our children’s edition and our education edition, we published large numbers of most interesting and intriguing portraits.”515 With his magazine for children, Du Bois sought to make the beauty of African-Americans visible, and the periodical featured a myriad of drawings but especially photographs showing beautiful and healthy black children. The editors praised black winners of the country’s various healthy baby contests by including their names, and they were eager to add their pictures as visual proof of the existence of the “perfect” black child (TBB Aug. 1920: 254).516 The fact that Du Bois attached great importance to hygiene will be discussed in more detail later.

Many of the photographs support the belief in black middle-class respectability because a great number of children are not only beautiful and happy but also nicely dressed and well-groomed (Fig. 10; Fig. 11). On the whole, the photos display a wide range of different people. Some have very dark skin while others are rather

514 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 752. 515 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 752. 516 Babies, “whose little bodies are perfect” are honored in “Little People of the Month” in Apr.

and Aug. 1920 and Apr. and Nov. 1921 (“Little People of the Month,” TBB Apr. 1920: 116, print). The advocacy of better baby contests shows that Du Bois adapted eugenic ideas for his theory of social uplift. These kinds of contests, which involved not only infants but entire families, were held at state and county fairs from the 1920s onwards and were one manifestation of the interest in good breeding (See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1988, print) 61-62). Daylanne English states that “[d]ispite the obviously protectionist, elitist, and white supremacist nature of much of the period’s eugenic activism, U.S. eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s cannot be characterized as solely white or whole reactionary phenomenon” (Daylanne English, “W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis,” American Literature 72.2 (2000): 295, print). While Du Bois refuted reactionary racist eugenics, which aimed to conserve Anglo-Saxon supremacy, he embraced the belief that uplift could be achieved by promoting hereditary superiority. He expresses this conviction in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, for example. In support of the birth control movement, he writes: “. . . the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly” (W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control,” Birth Control Review 16.6 (1932): 166, print). And the African-American middle-class, so he claims, is “quite led away by the fallacy of numbers. They want the black race to survive. . . . They must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts” (Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control” 167). Daylanne English explores Du Bois’ use of the eugenic discourse in her article “W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis.” She argues that The Crisis’ prize baby contests and the periodical’s publication of photographs which show ideal African-Americans are parts of Du Bois’ agenda of racial hygiene. For further information, see Daylanne English, “W.E.B. DuBois’s Family Crisis” 291-319.

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light; there are people with long, curly hair and others with short hair, for example. What is striking is that many of the children, and especially the ones in the portraits, are dressed entirely in white, which further underscores their black skin color. The Brownies’ Book does not include a single caricature; all of these different types of African-Americans reflect beauty and attractiveness. Since photography “was a standard technique of realist representation and the photograph a standard form of evidence,” Gillian Brown argues that “photography appears the obvious medium through which the humanity of African-Americans can become visible and irrefutable.”517 Du Bois and Fauset thus consciously used this advantage of photography in their interest to change the prevailing images which depicted Blacks as ugly and denied them their humanity.

Du Bois advocates a positive connection to Africa in “As the Crow Flies” when the Crow declares: “The dark mystery of my plumage reminds me of sweet nights 517 Gillian Brown, “Thinking in the Future Perfect: Consent, Childhood, and Minority Rights,”

REAL 19 (1982): 126, print.

Fig. 10 Our Little Friends, photographs, TBB Apr. 1920: 114, print.

Fig. 11 Little People of the Month, photographs, TBB Apr. 1920: 117, print.

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in Africa, and its glint and gleam are light, the first sunlight on the Alps and Berne. I like my black feathers – don’t you?” (TBB Apr. 1920: 118). Du Bois challenges the typical associations with the night here. The image of the night is usually negatively connoted, standing for the uncanny, the uncivilized, the supernatural, and death. The same is true for Africa – the so-called Dark Continent. The Crow links Africa and the night with positive images, namely with sweetness and mystery, which demonstrates that he is proud of his black heritage. The sun also plays an important part in this description. The Crow implies that he sparkles brightly because his dark feathers reflect the sunbeams. Du Bois makes the readers aware of the bird’s beauty by using the alliteration “glint and gleam,” but, what is more, he even establishes that the sight of the shining black animal is as beautiful as the Alps and Berne at sunrise. This passage affirms that Africa is in no way inferior to the western world when it comes to the aspect of beauty and elucidates that blackness can draw its splendor both from darkness and light. In another column, the Crow evokes positive associations with blackness and the image of the night again when saying: “I love the night that rises warm and dark as my plumage” (TBB Feb. 1921: 52). In September 1921, he refers to his little crow babies as “my dark children of the Sun” – using the magazine’s expression commonly applied to black children (272). He makes clear that African-Americans are both children of the night as well as of the sun and that light and darkness, though fundamental opposites, nevertheless belong together to make a whole. The Crow consequently serves as shining example for the children because he displays pride in his blackness.

The concept of beauty in relation to the African continent also figures in a discussion between the Judge and the children on the legendary island of Atlantis, which Leo Frobenius had located in Africa. Since so little is known about the Dark Continent, Billie decides that new history and geography books have to be written, and Wilhelmina concludes: “Especially a new geography, I think I’ll have to help you there, Billie. I’ll do the illustrating. And instead of these uncanny types that I learned of, when I was a child, as the people of Africa, we’ll put in beautiful, mysterious faces” (TBB July 1920: 202). Wilhelmina refers to the selective tradition prevailing in schoolbooks here, and her comment is reminiscent of Alice Martin’s letter to “The Jury” in which she complains about the fact that all the people in her books are depicted as being beautiful except for the Africans who “always look so ugly” (TBB June 1920: 178). The children in “The Judge” realize the need for new depictions of the inhabitants of Africa as well, but Wilhelmina goes further and crushes the negative images connected with blackness by pointing to the beauty of Africans. Similar to the Crow, the girl connects Africa with mystery. The image of Africa, as delineated here, still has an enigmatic character, but in contrast to the word “uncanny,” the word “mysterious” seems to be positively connoted in the context of The Brownies’ Book and, contrary to “uncanny,” it does not evoke feelings of fear.

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Besides “Big Round Date and Little Bean,” which has been discussed earlier, there is second story which stresses the beauty of African characters. In “The Twin Heroes,” Alphonso O. Stafford uses a poetic comparison to describe the African twin brothers Mansur and Luembur. He writes that they have “the color of dull gold,” and then underlines that they “grew tall, strong, and pleasing to the eye, like the graceful pine trees around their home” (TBB April 1920: 125). Apart from referring to their beauty, the choice of the color of their skin – “gold” – evokes associations of prosperity while the adjective “graceful” connotes dignity and nobility again. Masur’s future wife is presented in equally poetic terms: “Yuka was said to be beautiful. Her beauty was like the dusk at twilight, when the stars begin to twinkle in the afterglow of the western sky” (TBB April 1920: 125). In both descriptions, the beauty of blackness is mirrored in the beauty of nature, and in the case of Yuka, there are references to the night which is again connected with positive images, such as the twinkling stars.

The Brownies’ Book also refers to the dispute over African-Americans adopting white beauty standards. This topic is in the center of “The Judge” when he and Wilhelmina discuss her wish of buying a new hat. The Judge assumes that Wilhelmina simply wants to have a particular kind of hat because she has seen famous white people wearing it. He urges Wilhelmina to ask herself if the hat really suits her or if she is just longing for it because white women introduced this particular item as a fashionable accessory. He says:

Does it really set off your figure and your gown and your smooth, brown skin? Or – and here I have a deep suspicion – do you choose it because Katie Brown has one like it and the Ladies of Avenue K. and – but hold! Who are K. B. and the L. of A. K? Are they persons of taste, or simply of power? Do you imitate them for love or fear? Does the choice of this hat represent your freedom of thoughtful taste, or your slavery to what the flamboyant Kitty does or to what rich white folk wear? (TBB Jan. 1921: 13)

In this lecture, the Judge encourages African-Americans to cultivate a personal aesthetic, a “thoughtful taste,” which supports the beauty of blackness. The Judge makes it very clear that imitating white beauty standards has nothing to do with freedom of choice but rather amounts to enslaving one’s self to the white world’s taste and white opinions. By aspiring to a white beauty ideal, African-Americans enter a new kind of dependence which Fauset illustrates with her references to freedom and slavery. The Judge does not begrudge Wilhelmina the hat; he simply wants her to choose an accessory because it suits her personally and stresses her individual beauty and not someone else’s.

“Dolly’s Dream” is another story which describes a black girl who aspires to white beauty standards, but, in the end, she learns to appreciate her typically African-American physical features. This tale has received much negative attention from scholars, such as Dianne Johnson, though, who argues that texts like “Dolly’s Dream” indicate “that the ambivalence about looks expressed by adults was

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categorically being internalized by youth” because black children often took over the all-too common belief, expressed by many African-Americans at the time, that their “Americanness, belongingness or worthiness” was measured “according to the color of their complexions.”518 They thought that the lighter their skin color and the more they aspire to white beauty standards, the higher their acceptance by white Americans.519 Violet Joyce Harris’ interpretation is similar. She claims that the story “inform[s] the reader of the pervasive power and entrenchment of certain beauty standards and their effects.”520 From the beginning, the narrator puts an emphasis on Dolly’s beauty and introduces her as opening “her big, bright eyes, her deep, deep, brown eyes” (TBB Nov. 1920: 351). However, Dolly is not happy with her appearance at all and especially not with her curly, black hair, and she is longing “oh so much for long, golden curls” just like her favorite doll’s” (351). This doll with her long, golden curls mirrors the white beauty standards. Dolly’s wish to be like her proves how effective and powerful these standards were and that many African-Americans had indeed internalized the notion that white was better than black. To lure their readers away from this white beauty ideal and the attraction to white dolls – which would also be the focus of the famous Clarks’ Doll Experiment in 1939 –, the editors included one ad for colored dolls in February 1920. 521 They raised the parent’s awareness that colored dolls did exist and encouraged them to buy them for their children. The Brownies’ Book contains two more passages which also promote black dolls and in particular stress their beauty. In December 1920 – tellingly the number following the one which includes “Dolly’s Dream” –, Fauset emphasizes in a story that her little protagonist possesses a French doll, a rag doll, and a black doll, the latter, however, being “her favorite, of course . . . a beautiful brown creature with rosy cheeks and raven hair” (356). In “The Jury,” a young reader includes an anecdote about “a big beautiful, brown doll with long black curls” whose little child mother “loved it very much and took it everywhere she went” (TBB Dec. 1921: 348).

518 Johnson, Telling Tales 23. 519 Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) deals with this topic. The story focuses on

Pecola Breedlove, a black girl who wishes to be Caucasian with blue eyes because she believes that beauty and love come with whiteness. Morrison reveals the hopelessness, even destructive power, of her desire which eventually drives Pecola to insanity.

520 Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature” 218-19.

521 Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted an experiment to discover the color preferences of black children using black and white dolls. They found out that many African-American children preferred white dolls over black ones and that white skin color was perceived as beautiful while black skin color was considered ugly. See Kenneth C. Clark, and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” Journal of Negro Education 19.3 (1950): 341-50, print.

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In “Dolly’s Dream,” the narrator also rejects the girl’s attraction to the white beauty ideal, declaring: “I am sure if she could have known how lovely she was with her soft ‘cwinkley’ . . . black ringlets around her little, dimpled face of rosy tan, she would not have wished for long golden curls” (TBB Nov. 1920: 351). In the course of the story, Dolly does indeed learn to appreciate her appearance, namely through a dream in which she actually gets long, golden curls. This dream turns into a nightmare because neither her friends nor her family recognize Dolly anymore and reject her. When she awakes, she is happy to have her black curls back, and she tells her mother: “I am so glad it was all a dream and I just love my ‘cwinkly’ black curls” (352). Dolly has to realize that without her crinkly hair she is not herself anymore and that her identity is changed so drastically by adopting white physical features that she is even excluded from her own community. Thus, this text tries to teach the young readers a lesson. However, it does not only confirm that black, crinkly hair is beautiful, it also makes sure that the Brownies understand that it is a part of their identity and that the desire to change it means a step towards self-effacement.

Both Harris and Johnson claim that the fact that Dolly is described as a mulatto “mitigates the power of [the] lesson.”522 Harris says that Dolly “fits the Mulatto stereotype who desires the physical characteristics of Whites” and argues that The Brownies’ Book was not able to free itself completely from the prevailing stereotypes either.523 Johnson, too, accuses the narrator of backsliding into the old ways which held that light skin color was far more favorable than a dark complexion. She regrets that the “narrator cannot quite force herself to describe a person any darker than a mulatto.” I do not concur with Harris and Johnson on their interpretation of “Dolly’s Dream,” though, because, as outlined earlier, Du Bois wanted to emphasize that the skin color of African-Americans had various nuances, and the mulatto type was simply one of them. Moreover, as my reading of the story has shown, Nora Waring constructed her text in such a way that it makes the reader realize that the fulfillment of the wish to be white would only lead to negative consequences. Hence, she must have intended to distance young African- Americans from the desire to aspire to whiteness and to appreciate their blackness indeed by exemplifying that their dark skin constitutes an essential part of their identity.

522 Johnson, Telling Tales 24. 523 Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature”

218.

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Fig. 12 The Gift of the Good Fairy, advertisement, TBB Dec. 1920: p. pag., print.

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Johnson continues to criticize The Brownies’ Book’s treatment of white beauty ideals by arguing that the message that lighter skin color is more favorable than black would be “reiterated” constantly in Du Bois’ periodical.524 “The ultimate assault in this vain,” she says, appears in the advertisement for Madam C. J. Walker’s beauty products entitled “The Gift of the Good Fairy” because the fairy’s gift is meant “to make beautiful those unfortunate ones whom nature has not given long, wavy hair and a smooth, lovely complexion (TBB Sept. 1920: n. pag.).525 The ad features a drawing which shows a light-skinned but dark-haired fairy in a white dress, touching flowers with a magic wand (Fig. 12). Madame Walker was not always praised by her contemporaries either. E. Franklin Frazier, for example, also accused her of adhering to white beauty standards and running advertisement which told “how the Negro can rid himself of his black or dark complexion, or how he can straighten his hair.” 526 The Walker System, however, was invented to treat a common scalp disease and not to straighten hair, and while Walker was alive the company never sold skin bleaches, as her great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles clarifies.527 Du Bois, on the other hand, was an advocate of her company and her products and promoted them regularly in The Crisis.528 In his obituary for Madame Walker, he praises her charity work and emphasizes that she “revolutionized the personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings” by educating them about hygiene and grooming.529 For him, her advertisement was in accordance with his plea for refinement and health, which might, in this case, have even carried more weight than his goal to make African-Americans visible. Moreover, one has to consider the possibility that the publishers may have simply had to succumb to commercial pressure when including this ad because the Walter Company was, after all, one of the few paying advertisers, and The Brownies’ Book needed consistent sources of income.

Even though “The Gift of the Good Fairy” seems to promote white beauty standards at first glance, it does not automatically mean that Du Bois’ publication promotes them in general. Lenetta Raysha Lee rightly argues that the ad “exemplifies the integrationist attitude of the editors.”530 I suppose that the Walker Company was merely trying to make their advertisement suitable for a children’s 524 Johnson, Telling Tales 24. 525 Johnson, Telling Tales 24. 526 Edward Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United

States (1957; London: Collier Books, 1969, print) 158. 527 See A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (New

York: Scribner, 2001, print) 20. 528 When The Brownies’ Book was published, the business had already gone over to Walker’s

daughter A’Lelia Walker who was soon to become a leading hostess for black intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance.

529 W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Great Woman,” Crisis July 1919: 131, print. 530 Lee, “Whose Images: An Africological Study of The Brownies’ Book Series” 121.

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magazine and consequently chose a fairy theme. Before the publication of The Brownies’ Book, black fairies were unknown in the U.S., and the advertising designers had to work with the tradition they were familiar with and hence included white fairies. What supports this assumption is that the Walker ads in The Crisis usually depict beautiful African-Americans promoting their products. The designers might have even tried to modify the white fairy tale tradition at least somewhat in Du Bois’ children’s periodical by depicting their fairy not with blond but with black hair.

One story entitled “Impossible Kathleen,” which Johnson also criticizes, remains indeed problematic regarding the references to skin color. Augusta E. Bird writes that Crystal – the protagonist’s best friend – “was much the prettier of the two girls. She was just about two shades lighter than Kathleen” (TBB Oct. 1920: 300). Of Kathleen, she says that the girl “knew she was of a darker hue than any of the girls in her clique, but she knew she was slenderly built, looked well in all her clothes, and her grandmother dressed her as well, if not better than most of the girls . . .” (303). These two passages either imply that “Bird avoids attributing Kathleen’s intellect and drive to a partial White ancestry,” as Courtney Vaughn- Roberson and Brenda Hill suggest, or that this particular author really was caught in the common belief that light skin was more beautiful than black skin.531 Since both girls are intelligent members of the black community, they are classmates at Fisk University, the first assumption stands on weak ground. Yet, even if Bird’s own color preferences shine through the story, Du Bois and Fauset must have thought the text valuable enough to be included in The Brownies’ Book despite its tensions because “Impossible Kathleen” is remarkable for its promotion of service to the race and its advocacy of the social gospel.

To conclude this discussion, I want to stress once more that Du Bois’ periodical includes a wide range of skin colors, and the mulatto simply embodies one of the nuances which people of African descent can have. One can assume that the editors wanted to promote diversity, and it would have been deceitful to exclude characters with light complexions. To ostracize people with light or even white skin and ban them from the magazine would have amounted to the establishment of another kind of selective tradition but this time from a black perspective. Such a result would have been diametrically opposed to Du Bois’ ideal of human brotherhood, though. The editors wanted to give rise to a positive concept of blackness, which they certainly did in their periodical by stressing the beauty of blackness over and over again. Achieving this goal, however, did not mean that Du Bois and Fauset wanted to denigrate light skin or the white beauty concept. White skin was beautiful, too, which is, for example, shown in the advertisement for 531 Courtney Vaughn-Roberson, and Brenda Hill, “The Brownies’ Book and Ebony Jr.!:

Literature as a Mirror of the Afro-American Experience,” Journal of Negro Education 58.4 (1989): 502, print.

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Madam C. J. Walker’s products, but the editors wanted to clarify that the white beauty standards should not be the ultimate answer to the question of beauty. All in all, The Brownies’ Book made sure in its texts as well illustrations that black children internalized the feeling that they were as beautiful as white children and in no way inferior to them. Du Bois and Fauset underlined again and again that African-Americans could be proud of the color of their skin which did in no way lessen their humanity.

4.3 The Glory of Learning Education is the development of power and ideal. We want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be, and we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people. They have a right to know, to think, to aspire.532

Attaining access to education has always been a crucial part in the process of the liberation of Blacks in the United States. At first, the “question of whether Africans were human was less related to color than the possession of reason.”533 Learning how to read and write and to prove their “capacity to create ‘arts and science’” was consequently of paramount importance to African-Americans because it meant that they had to be accepted as “members of the human family on the Great Chain of Being.”534 However, with only few exceptions, white Americans were determined to prevent Blacks from learning – teaching them how to read and write was even made a crime in the South in the mid-1830s – because ignorance was a major instrument of controlling slaves.535 Even after slavery was officially abolished, the majority of white Americans still tried to prevent African-Americans from gaining real education and aimed to control their thinking. They sought to keep their minds enslaved because they hoped to secure their power and influence over them and to justify their claim of white supremacy by upholding the belief in the intellectual inferiority of African-Americans. The editors of The Brownies’ Book wanted to make sure that the children realized how great a blessing it was to get an education, and how much their forefathers had struggled to give them the opportunity to learn.

Du Bois and the advocates of his Talented Tenth theory considered education the ultimate means through which social uplift could be achieved. A young reader, who had to face prejudice on a daily basis, cuts right to the core of the matter in the

532 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 620. 533 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her

Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003, print) 25. 534 Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley 26. 535 See Boyer, The Enduring Vision 326.

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first issue of the magazine: “[T]he only way to fight these white people is to get an education and fight them with knowledge” (TBB Jan. 1920: 25). In the eyes of the Talented Tenth, neither Booker T. Washington’s concept of accommodation nor violent activism would ultimately lead to equality. They firmly believed that African-Americans had to gain a good – and at best higher – education because it would enable them to be on a par with their white antagonists. In addition, their academic success was meant to prove to white Americans what their fellow black men were capable of and in consequence destroy the stereotype of African- American (intellectual) inferiority. The editors of The Brownies’ Book and many of its authors and artists were members of the intellectual elite of the country. Du Bois himself was the embodiment of his demand for excellence: hard working, willing to make sacrifices, strong-willed, and, above all, the first Black in history to receive a Harvard degree. The very existence of African-American intellectuals like Du Bois, Fauset, and Dill proved to black as well as white America that the belief in white intellectual supremacy was erroneous. These intelligent black men and women could serve as role models for the young readers and encourage them to join their ranks and to strive for excellence themselves. That they were indeed ready to do so and proud of their intellectual leaders becomes obvious in a letter which Du Bois received from a high school class in 1925. Asking him to send them a photo, the students declare: “A large picture of you will inspire us and all of our fellow students to go on and upward.”536

There are also numerous examples of successful and intelligent African- American children in The Brownies’ Book. They challenge the image of black intellectual inferiority even further and, what is more, they serve as role models for other readers. Especially the “Little People of the Month” column exemplifies excellence because, as shown in the descriptive analysis, more than half of the life stories focus on education. The editors honor many children with scholastic success. In October 1921, for instance, the column reports on Mabel Agenor who “has always been among the best students in her class, so no one was surprised when she won the prize at the end of the school year for having attained the highest average in the sixth grade” (290). Du Bois and Fauset are also eager to mention if one of the children won a scholarship, such as Marguerite Jackson Lingham who “was permitted to apply for one of the ten scholarships given each year by Brown University. The University gave nine $50 and one $100 scholarships. Of those who applied, Miss Lingham was considered to be most worthy of the $100 award” (TBB Oct. 1921: 290). As Violet Joyce Harris found out, children are “especially acclaimed if they achieved in competition with Whites” and in non-supportive environments, so for example in integrated schools where Blacks still had to face

536 First Senior Class of Du Bois High School, IL, letter to W.E.B. Du Bois. 23 Feb. 1925,

Aptheker, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1877-1934 308.

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prejudice and opposition.537 In this respect, the editor praises Alverna Blanchard who “was the only colored pupil in her high school class and made the highest average, 98” (TBB Dec. 1920: 354). In many cases, the Brownies are called on to imitate – or even beat – their fellows’ brilliant achievements at school by means of editorial remarks, such as “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every child who reads the Brownies’ Book should have a record like that of Lucile Spence?” (TBB Jan. 1920: 28); “How many little girls and boys are doing likewise?” (TBB Feb. 1920: 58); or “Wouldn’t you like your school to win a silver trophy, bearing your name?” (TBB Mar. 1920: 92).

Following in the footsteps of The Crisis, which included an “Education Number” each July honoring African-American college graduates, Du Bois’ children’s periodical has a special focus on education each July, too, – including a follow-up article in August 1921. Here, the editors celebrate black high school graduates. In July 1920, Madeline G. Allison specifically writes that they have secured pictures and names for the Brownies “to read about, admire and emulate” and thus encourages them to follow the given examples (204). The article mentions separately who graduated from mixed or white and who from colored high schools. This approach is meant to prove again that African-Americans can compete with whites and also succeed in a non-supportive environment. Although Allison also honors graduates from “colored normal schools,” which actually form the great majority, and states that they are proud of each one of their 3,015 Brownies Graduates in 1920, these articles in general favor higher education and reflect Du Bois’ educational philosophy (TBB July 1920: 210).538 The July 1920 article reads in this respect: “We get through grammar school, somehow, easily, but it takes perseverance to be graduated from high school” (204). And in August 1921, the editors close this specific thematic complex with expressing the wish that they “may . . . in time greet [the new high school graduates] as college graduates in the columns of The Crisis Magazine” (237).

To spur the young Brownies’ enthusiasm to start a college career, the August 1921 issue includes an article entitled “Retrospection” by Nina Yolande Du Bois. She shares her impressions of her college experience at Fisk with the readers and tries to capture the “college spirit” by introducing the Brownies to the Fisk Jubilee Singers and by describing the atmosphere of a football game, saying: “Only you who have been to college can know what a wonderful feeling it is to follow your team, your boys, to do battle for you. And as for you who have never been to college – you’ll never know how much of all that is worth while [sic] in life you

537 Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature”

199. 538 The total of 3,015 African-American graduates in 1920 is made up of “121 graduates from

mixed high schools, 865 graduates from colored high schools and 2,029 graduates from colored normal schools (TBB July 1920: 210).

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have missed” (TBB Aug. 1921: 238). Du Bois himself does not explicitly reflect on any of his educational philosophies in The Brownies’ Book, but his “As the Crow Flies” mirrors his attitude concerning the importance of education in general and higher education specifically. In August 1920, he establishes in “Honey” that “of all crimes idleness is the worst” (TBB Aug. 1920: 232), and in January 1921, he warns the readers of the “great danger of idleness among children” in “As the Crow Flies” again when informing them of a study which found out that of “354,000 between 12 and 18 years of age, 181,000 are in school and 113,000 at work, leaving nearly 60,000 who are idle” (17). He is, however, especially eager to compliment five colored students who received a Master of Arts, and he is pleased that “379, of whom 60 came from the great Northern colleges, received the degree of Bachelor of Arts; and 129 received professional degrees” at “the great commencement season last June” (TBB Jan. 1901: 24). Du Bois must have been very proud to report on black college graduates because their relatively high number proved that more and more African-Americans were advancing into the field of higher education and were setting a good example for the Brownies.539 The Crow furthermore refers to the ideal of learning when he expresses his desire that children should read more. He refers to books as “precious things” and explains that “[o]nce upon a time there were no books and only Kings and Priests could know. Now all may learn from books” (TBB May 1921: 158). The privilege to read and write had long been denied to Blacks, which kept them from acquiring knowledge and consequently hindered them from really understanding the whole extent of the injustice done to them. In his essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois writes that African-Americans realized fast that the “ideal of ‘book-learning,’” the “longing to know” and “to test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man” was “the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.”540

With Frederick Douglass, The Brownies’ Book introduces its readers to one of their forefathers who recognized the glory of learning early in his life and who had to overcome many obstacles to learn how to read and write. After his master orders his wife, who had allowed Douglass to learn some letters with her son, to “stop teaching the little ‘nigger’ at once,” Laura E. Wilkes underlines that it “was out of 539 The Brownies’ Book includes impressions of Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, even though it

was the main institution to promote the rivaling concept of industrial education. There are two photos depicting the life at Tuskegee – “Celebrating Baby Week at Tuskegee” in Jan. 1920 and “Commencement at Tuskegee” in July 1920 – and in “Little People of the Month,” the editors also honorably mention if a child attends classes at Tuskegee. This observation illustrates that Du Bois and his Talented Tenth also recognized the need of vocational training despite their general advocacy of higher education for African- Americans.

540 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 9-10.

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the question to expect [Douglass] to give up trying to learn” (TBB Sept. 1920: 267). It is only mentioned in passing that some white schoolboys assisted him in learning how to spell in the end. With his little money, Douglass bought the Columbian Orator, a “popular collection of classic poems, dialogues, plays and speeches,” an act which is presented as one of the pivotal moments of his life (267). Wilkes states that it was his reading of the Orator and especially Sheridan’s speech on “Catholic Emancipation” 541 and “A Dialogue between the Master and his Slave” which “increased his dissatisfaction” at being a slave himself (267). 542 Being able to

541 Douglass was mistaken regarding the author of this speech. He is, in fact, not referring to

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), the Irish political leader and playwright, but to the “Speech in the Irish House of Commons, in Favor of the Bill for Emancipating the Roman Catholics, 1795” by Arthur O’Connor (See Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence (1797; New York: Collins and Hannay, 1832, print) 243). O’Connor (1763-1852) was a member of the society of Irishman, a political organization which, inspired by the American Revolution, sought to end British rule in Ireland and to establish an independent Irish republic (See John Cannon, ed., A Dictionary of British History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, print) 647). His speech was delivered in this context, and he stresses the “rights and liberties” of his countrymen again and again (Arthur O’Connor, “Speech in the Irish House of Commons, in Favor of the Bill for Emancipating the Roman Catholics, 1795,” The Columbian Orator Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence, ed. Caleb Bingham (1797; New York: Collins and Hannay, 1832, print) 243). O’Connor appeals to the members of the Irish House of Commons to adopt the bill for Catholic emancipation, thereby proving that their loyalty is with the people of Ireland and not with the British Prime Minister. He furthermore declares that Great Britain should have learned a lesson from America “which should serve as a lasting example to nations, against employing force to subdue the spirit of a people, determined to be free!” (O’Connor, “Speech in the Irish House of Commons, in Favor of the Bill for Emancipating the Roman Catholics, 1795” 245). This thematic complex must have been very appealing to Douglass because African-Americans were also trying to free themselves from foreign rule.

542 “Dialogue between a Master and Salve” was written by the British doctor and writer John Aikin (1747-1822). The dialogue is a forceful denunciation of oppression and vindicates human rights. The conversation starts out with the master asking his slave why he has tried to run away repeatedly even though he is “comfortably fed and lodged, not overworked” and treated with “the most human care” on his plantation (John Aikin, “Dialogue between a Master and Slave,” The Columbian Orator Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces Together with Rules; Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence, ed. Caleb Bingham (1797; New York: Collins and Hannay, 1832, print) 240). The slave explains that this supposed kindness cannot compensate the injustice done to him. He declares that there is nothing “humane” about slavery: “Does it deserve that appellation to keep your fellow-men in forced subjection, deprived of all exercise of their free will, liable to all the injuries that your own caprice, or the brutality of your overseers, may heap on them, and devoted, soul and body, only to

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enhance his knowledge via the ability to read books meant for Douglass that he could augment his self-awareness, and he begins to see the wrongs of slavery more clearly. By learning how to read and write, Douglass begins to unchain his mind, an act which I perceive as the first step towards the process of liberating his body. Du Bois’ periodical clarifies that Douglass was not an isolated case but that it was many a slave’s “heart’s desire” to learn how to read and to gain knowledge. This subject also figures in the biographies on Paul Cuffee, Blanche K. Bruce, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Binkley, and in the second part of “Girls Together” (TBB May 1921: 140). Literacy was thus depicted as a crucial step on the way to freedom, and the readers were called upon to appreciate this powerful gift.

Like the Crow, the Judge attaches great value to books. In April 1920, he states that if “talking with your friends is fun, then reading with the greatest Friends that ever lived, is more than fun, – it is a miracle” (108). Elsewhere, he even explains that books are “probably the greatest single blessing in the world” because they are “short cuts to knowledge gained by actual experience,” and “all education is for, is to produce knowledge” (TBB Apr. 1921: 108). However, the Judge laments that many people do not learn how to read properly. They only “skim and skip and half understand and don’t use the dictionary; and then, worse than that, still fewer people know what to read” (TBB Apr. 1920: 108). Since she does not want to add the Brownies to this group, Fauset establishes some reading rules in a subsequent column – “Don’t skip;” “Read straight through;” “Finish” – and dedicates two of her columns wholly to book recommendations (TBB June 1920: 176). This passage displays the editors’ desire to turn African-American youth into well-read citizens and to challenge the image of the ignorant, dimwitted black child.

The books which the Judge recommends are meant to “stimulate thinking [and] to broaden one’s conception of the world.” 543 Fauset set out to introduce publications which were perceived as inherent parts of the general knowledge of a cultured person. So as not to lag behind white children, learned black children had

your pleasure and emolument? Can gratitude take place between creatures in such a state, and the tyrant who holds them in it? Look at these limbs; are they not those of a man? Think that I have the spirit of a man too” (Aikin, “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” 241). In the course of the dialogue, the master learns that he has to free his slave – to sacrifice “interest to justice” – in order to secure his loyalty (Aikin, “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” 242). As his servant, the ex-slave is now willing to support his former master and reveals that the slaves are waiting for a safe opportunity to revenge upon him and other planters “all the miseries they have endured”(Aikin, “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” 242). The servant warns his employer that “no kindness” will “soften the obduracy of their resentment” but that “[s]uperior force alone can give. . . [h]im security” (Aikin, “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” 242). Thus, he advises him to free his other slaves, too.

543 Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature” 149.

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to be familiar with Shakespeare, for example. That the British dramatist has a central position in the Judge’s canon becomes apparent in his outcry: “. . . (would you believe it?) I know a boy who has been in this world for twelve years and he’s never read a single play of Shakespeare!” (TBB June 1920: 177). The very first book which the Judge presents is the Bible. He declares that “every child ought to read certain chapters . . . not because they tell you to be good but because they are awfully interesting” (TBB June 1920: 176). Fauset singles out two characteristics of the Holy Scripture in particular, which were also crucial to the agenda of The Brownies’ Book. The Bible was meant to teach a code of ethics but also had a recreational aspect, as indicated by the words “awfully interesting.” With this emphatic expression, the Judge might refer to the remarkable life stories and accounts of miracles to be found in the Bible, for instance, or maybe he even intended to make young African-Americans aware of the fact that the Scripture contained passages which bore witness to the glory of the African continent, such as the Psalms or the Canticles. These chapters and verses were important to the concept of Ethiopianism, as will be discussed in detail in the section on Africa.

Since The Brownies’ Book was a publication for children, the Judge also discusses suitable reading material for the young. He presents fairy tale and fable collections, which were meant to spark the readers’ imagination, such as Mother Goose, Aesop’s Fables, Arabian Nights, Animal Fables of the Dark Continent,544 Czechoslovak Fairy Tales, and Hans Christian Anderson’s, Andrew Lang’s, and the Grimms’ collections. With Sir Thomas Malroy’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485) and Padraic Colum’s The Children’s Homer (1918), he praises two famous heroic epics. Both tales were filled with action, excitement, and suspense and were bound to appeal to a juvenile readership. Most of these works are central European texts; only Arabian Nights, the well-known collection of folktales mainly originating from the Middle East, and Alfonso O. Stafford’s Animal Tales from the Dark Continent (1906) set themselves apart from the white canon. The former was well- established in European and American mainstream culture as well, but the latter was written by “one of us,” as the Judge stresses, and familiarized the children with African folklore (176). Fauset also recommends a wide range of American and European (children’s books) classics, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Johann David Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus (1880), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and his collection of poems A Child’s Garden of Verse (1885), Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1884) and Captains Courageous (1897), Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1894), 544 Fauset gives a wrong title for Alphonso O. Stafford book which was really published as

Animal Fables from the Dark Continent (1906). In the following, the correct title will be employed.

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and Maurice Maeterlinck’s Life of Bees (1901). Although not all of these books were originally written for children, they were acknowledged as appropriate reading material for the young when Du Bois launched his periodical. Especially the fantasy tales and adventure stories must have appealed to children as much as to adult. Over the years, many of them were published in children’s editions and still have a huge juvenile readership. Du Bois himself rewrote the Life of Bees for the Brownies. Worthy of note, Fauset includes Uncle Remus and Huckleberry Finn in the Judge’s reading list. Both books would cause many controversies later, especially in the politically correct efforts in the 1980s.545 Various scholars claimed that Twain’s stories were biased against Blacks, but they were not perceived as racist when The Brownies’ Book was published because they can be interpreted in a positive way. Uncle Remus can be seen as a celebration of the African-American folktale tradition, and Huckleberry Finn can be read as criticism of the nostalgia of the ante-bellum South and as a tale of friendship between a white boy and a black slave. In the course of events, the boy learns about the wrongs of slavery. Mark Twain favored the abolition of slavery, and Joel Chandler Harris often promoted racial reconciliation in his writings.

In addition, the Judge also advocates a few contemporary books for children, such as Gelett Burgess’ children’s book series “The Goops” (published between 1900-1950), Eleanor Schorer’s fairy tale Wishing Ring: A Christmas Story (1919), and Mary White Ovington and Myron T. Pritchard’s anthology The Upward Path (1920). The latter book stands out in the white canon again because it contains “stories and poems by colored writers, mostly about colored people” (TBB July 1920: 214). With fairy tales and fantasy stories, Fauset tried to meet the taste of younger children, and she also presents books which she believed to be of special interest to older and “in-between-age” boys and to older girls (214). For the boys, she mainly chose adventure or war stories, including Austin Bishop’s children’s book Bob Thorpe, Sky Fighter in the Lafayette Flying Corps (1920), Flavia Canfield’s The Refugee Family (1919),546 Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) – a memoir focusing on his sea adventures –, and a collection of short stories by Benjamin Heydrick entitled Americans All: Stories of American Life of Today (1920). For the girls, she turned towards books for adults entirely. To satisfy Wilhelmina’s desire to read about life, love, and romance, the Judge suggests books by Alice Brown, Margaret Deland, and Anne Sedgwick as well as

545 The newest attempt to “sanitize” Huckleberry Finn comes from Alan Gribben who has

produced a new edition, published by NewSouth Books, which replaces the word nigger with slave. See Michiko Kakutani, “Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You,” New York Times. New York Times, 6 Jan. 2011, web, 24 Mai. 2011.

546 Fauset suggests Canfield’s book for boys, but it was originally written for girls, as the subtitle indicates: A Refugee Family: A Story for Girls.

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Mary White Ovington’s The Shadow (1920) as “the latest output” (214).547 He underlines that these women’s novels “are all very fine and sweet and sound – and immensely interesting” and establishes their works as valuable reading material despite the fact that they contain love stories (TBB July 1920: 214). In The Awakening of Helen Richie (1906), Deland discusses the double standards for women in American society, for example.

Romance can, according to the Judge, also be found in French novels, such as George Sand’s Mare au Diable (1846), Ludovic Halévy’s Abbé Constantin (1882), André Theuriet’s Bigarreau; the latter text is in particular advertised as “beautiful love story” (214). It seems that Fauset was looking for light-hearted literature here because she wanted the Brownies to read these particular books in French so that they can put their theoretical knowledge of the language in practice and improve their language skills. She also recommends French plays, especially French comedies, because they are “marvelously funny,” and at the children’s age, so the Judge clarifies, laughing is still “better on the whole than loving” (214). 548 Although she advised the Brownies to “[g]et a good dictionary,” Fauset may have asked too much of most of her readers when she suggested to read French authors in their original language. Lastly, there are also informative books of non-fiction on various topics on the Judge’s reading, such as Jean Henri Fabre’s Story Book of Science, Thornton W. Burgess’ Bird Book For Children (1919), and Geoffrey Parson’s Land of Fair Play: How America Is Governed (1919).549 Like the French books, these publications are mainly added to improve the children’s education.

On the whole, it is striking that Fauset presents an almost exclusively white canon to the readers. African-Americans were merely involved in two of the forty- six book recommendations: Animal Fables from the Dark Continent and The Upward Path. Apart from these two books, only Arabian Nights was not written by a white author either. That Fauset advocates authors like Aesop who was once a slave in Greece and, as Du Bois observes, might have even carried a “Negro strain” in him,550 or Mary White Ovington whose The Shadow was, in her own words, “based upon a gorgeous theme, an illegitimate white child hidden among colored

547 Fauset suggests Alice Brown’s The Story of Thyrza (1909) and Bromley Neighborhood

(1917), Margaret Deland’s The Awakening of Helen Richie (1906) and The Iron Woman (1911), and Anne Sedgwick’s Tante (1912).

548 Fauset includes two examples of French comedies: Eugène Marin Labiche and Édouard Martin’s Le Voyage de M. Perrichon (1860) and Édouard Pailleron’s Monde où l’on s’ennuie (1881).

549 Fauset furthermore presents a book entitled Battle of the Nations here, allegedly by an author named “Cummings.” It is very likely that she miss-spelled his name and wanted to refer to Frederic Arnold Kummer’s The Battle of the Nations, 1914-1918: A Young Folks History of the Great War (1919).

550 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; Rockville, MD: Wildside, 2005, print) 85.

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people” is in keeping with the magazine’s philosophies.551 Yet, even though his stories were appealing to children because they incorporated fantasy and adventure, it seems rather inconsiderate to include Rudyard Kipling who, after all, perpetuated the concept of “the white man’s burden” in his famous poem of the same name. One reason for Fauset’s preference of white authors is that she wanted the black child to be on a par with the white child regarding its general education. Many of her suggested books were part and parcel of American mainstream culture. It remains unclear, however, why Fauset did not add more works by African- Americans, which were, admittedly, still rare – especially in the children’s book department. However, this shortage of books by black authors could have been all the more reason to alert the Brownies to the few publications which were available. Fauset’s white canon will be taken into account again later in the discussion on the magazine’s appropriations of the Euro-American traditions, which will shed some more light on her choice of books.

The African-American community shared the editors’ opinion on the importance of books and lamented that their experiences did hardly ever appear in print. In November 1921, Du Bois’ periodical publishes a photo of two black boys who are completely absorbed in reading a book or magazine, which could even be The Brownies’ Book itself and might thus be another example of the magazine’s self-advertisement. In “The Grown-Ups’ Corner,” a mother reveals that her daughter asked her if black people had ever done anything of importance. The mother relates: “When I tell her as much as I know about our folks, she says: ‘Well, that’s just stories. Didn’t they ever do anything in a book?’” (TBB Feb. 1920: 45). This statement proves that African-Americans were yearning for texts which acknowledged their backgrounds and disclosed their glory because having their stories printed in books would legitimize their experience and prove in their eyes and in the eyes of the world that they, too, had a history and a culture worth writing about. Du Bois’ choice of a name for his magazine becomes remarkable in this respect because he picked the title The Brownies’ Book.

One of Fauset’s columns focuses in particular on the glory of learning because the Judge clarifies for the children that education means more than simply the accumulation of knowledge. Herbert Aptheker observes that Du Bois “saw education as basic to the production of what – in his youth – people called character.”552 Fauset’s column mirrors this attitude when the Judge explains that

551 Mary White Ovington, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an

NAACP Founder, ed. Ralph E. Luke (New York: Feminist P, 1996, print), rpt. of “Reminiscences,” Baltimore Afro-American Sept. 1932-Feb. 1933: 126.

552 Herbert Aptheker, introduction, The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques 1906-1960 by W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1973, print) xi.

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. . . the value of education consists not in what you take in but in what it brings out of you. If a person has to study hard to get his lessons and does it, he develops will power, concentration and determination, and these are the qualities which he carries out into life with him. (TBB Oct. 1920: 306)

The Judge argues that to make the most of their education, the children have to be capable of putting their acquired knowledge into practice, which is, according to him, far more important than getting high grades in tests.553 In Fauset’s column, when Wilhelmina boasts of her good grades in French, the Judge supports this utilitarian aspect of education again: “It’s a great deal more important to be able to speak and understand French than it is to read it or to be able to give the principal parts of every verb in the language” (TBB Oct. 1920: 306). Therefore, he praises William whose grades are not as good as Wilhelmina’s, but, unlike her, he is eager to apply the language in conversations with foreigners. He profits more from his language skills and is likely also to remember more than Wilhelmina in the long run. She merely crams random words into her head which, after the exam, are lying idle there, waiting to be forgotten again. Education, as seen by Du Bois and Fauset, is consequently a process of life-long learning and should be used to enrich one’s own life – however, not in the sense of merely striving for good grades. At the same time, education can contribute to the general welfare of humankind, which is also established in the same “The Judge” column. The human race has to wait for the day when “vast knowledge and the ability to use it will come together” because then “[t]here’d be no more suffering” or “war” or “want, or sorrow, or anything,” as the children optimistically conclude the Judge’s lecture on the importance of education (306).

The children who are presented in The Brownies’ Book, especially in “Little People of the Month” and “The Jury,” display a great interest in learning. In “The Jury” section, many children express their wish to get a good education because they believe knowledge to be crucial in order to advance in life. An orphaned girl from Fairmount, West Virginia, who had to work at a white household, writes: “Realizing that I did not always want to be a scrub girl, I have tried to educate myself, as I could not go to school” (TBB Feb. 1920: 32). Then, she asks the editors to help her find a nice black family “where she could go to public schools” (32). And H. Viola Lott declares regarding “the benefit and usefulness of an education”: “Anything that is worth [sic] trouble in getting, is worth having” (TBB Feb. 1921: 62). Both girls understand that to receive a good education they, themselves, have

553 The study at hand has already established that the same attitude can be found in a discussion

between the Crow and a little boy in Du Bois’ introductory “As the Crow Flies.” In this column, the boy urges the Crow to tell him more about World War I “before they stick it into [his] history books and make [him] study it three times a week at 2:45 p.m. and examination Thursdays with dates” (TBB Jan. 1920: 23).

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to make an effort. There are also numerous examples of children, particularly in “Little People of the Month” but also in “The Jury,” who work after school to save up money to go to college later. Thus, they know that it is crucial to plan ahead in order to obtain a university degree. As explained in the synopsis of the first issue, many children sent letters asking for advice on which books to read or simply tell the editors how much they enjoy reading in general and how fond they are of books. So, for example, Beulah Martha Howard, who calls herself “a dear lover of books” and who discloses that she spends every spare moment reading at the library (TBB Dec. 1921: 348). The readers often stress in their notes that they are proud of their scholastic achievements. Eleazer Parratt, for instance, relates that he is the best speller and historian in his grade, and Dorothy M. Parrratt takes pride in being “among the brightest” of her class (TBB June 1920: 178).

There are also many fictional characters who realize the glory of learning. One of them is Fauset’s Billikins who is very glad when he is finally old enough to go to school because he believes that it is “splendid to live in these fine days and study and learn lots and grow big and do things” (TBB Jan. 1920: 12). Again, The Brownies’ Book presents education as opportunity because Billikins explains that studying hard will ultimately enable him to “do things” which most likely means that he will be competent enough to find a profitable job and advance in life (12). Moreover, in a story aptly entitled “The Wish,” the readers encounter a girl whose parents, being very poor but knowing “how eager” their daughter is to go to school, try very hard to make her “dream” come true (TBB June 1920: 190). One last example can be found in “Black Cat Magic” which adds the aspect of thrift to the agenda of receiving a good education again. The author stresses that some of the silver dollars which Ray earns after school “were meant to swell the fund he was saving to pay his expenses at State University” (TBB May 1921: 131). In addition, many texts hail the virtue of hard work and stress the importance to accept one’s responsibility for the African-American community. These kinds of stories often try to foster “a capacity to endure” even under conditions of hardship because the editors knew that it was far more difficult for black children to advance in life than for white children because of the prevailing racism in society.554 The emphasis on endurance is typical of Du Bois’ attitude towards education. Herbert Aptheker states in this respect that in many of Du Bois’ essays on education, one “will find the demand for sacrifice, for a life of service, and an insistence that while such a life will bring hardships and temptations it also will bring fulfillment.”555

“Polly Sits Tight” and “A Girl’s Will” are outstanding stories because they depict two poor African-American girls who are highly intelligent and excel even under conditions of hardships due to their determination. The problems which Polly has to face are not as high as the obstacles which Helen in “A Girls Will” has to 554 Aptheker, introduction xi. 555 Aptheker, introduction x.

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overcome, though. Pointing to her intelligence, the narrator introduces Polly as being “the star scholar in the class, and although she seemed unconscious of her brilliancy, her teacher and her classmates were not” (TBB Nov. 1921: 308). One day, everyone is surprised that after a question has been repeated three times, Polly still has not raised her hand to provide the answer. The narrator discloses that the girl had worked on the solution until late at night and even had risen early in the morning to “tackle the problem again” (308). Polly knows the answer, but, she nevertheless does not dare to raise her hand because it would mean that she has to go to the board to demonstrate the solution. The crux is that Polly is ashamed of her mother’s old, worn-out shoes which she has to wear because hers are broken, and her family does not have enough money to afford a new pair. The narrator states that Polly “had come to be proud of her record and of the pride her class had in her,” and thus she comes to the following conclusion: “What was a pair of over- large shoes against the faith the twenty-odd persons in that room had in her? And what of her mother’s faith in her and her own? Would they laugh at her feet? Then let them!” (308). All in all, the Brownies find a role model in Polly. On the one hand, she proves that also black children are endowed with outstanding intellectual capabilities, and the stereotype concerning the intellectual inferiority of Blacks is deflated once more. But she is, on the other hand, also depicted as a hardworking girl, who does not only do her schoolwork but, at the same time, also earns some money to help her family to survive. The text demonstrates that her life is not carefree and that she has to make sacrifices. However, she learns to endure and does not give up. In the end, her perseverance is rewarded by the feeling of fulfillment which she experiences when providing the correct answer. No one even notices her shoes. The story thus shows the irrelevance of the outward appearance and stresses that education, inner values, and character are by far more important to achieve true greatness.

In “A Girl’s Will,” the readers meet Helen, another hardworking but poor black girl. The most important attribute which is promoted in this story – strength of will – appears already in the title, and the narrator reveals right at the outset that “the most striking thing” about Helen’s character was “its deep unrest and consuming ambition, coupled with a high-minded, lofty idea of the infinite power of the human will” (TBB Feb. 1920: 54). Since her father could not afford to pay the tuition of her school, she earned the money herself, and she is determined to work her way up through college to be a teacher, just like Booker T. Washington who is advertised as role model in this text. Resolutely, she tells her friend: “I can do anything I want to, if I want to hard enough” (54). Her hopes for higher education seem to be thwarted at first, though, because her mother dies, and she has to take care of her little brothers and sisters. “Quietly, unobtrusively,” Helen takes up her mother’s place without ever revealing to her father “what the sacrifice of her plans meant to her” (54). This quote demonstrates that Helen knows of her responsibility towards her family and dutifully helps her siblings to get an education and to find their

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places in life. When she is thirty-five, everyone is finally taken care of – the “baby” is in his senior year at Howard University –, and at long last, Helen is able to lead her own life. Even though her “figure had grown thin and old-maidish and her brown cheeks had lost their soft roundness,” her strong will is nevertheless not bro- ken because her eyes “that had held such a marvelous vision of achievement and such undaunted hope in the future, were as deep and dark as ever” and still full of

unrest (56). This story stresses that character is more important than out- ward appearance, too. He- len has sacrificed parts of her life for the good of her family and, as Katharine Capshaw Smith observes, she has lost “her youth and her physical vitality,” but she is still driven and has not given up her dream to go to college. 556 In the end, her aspirations come true. Thus, this text depicts an African-American girl who has to go through hardships and who shows the capability to endure, to make sacrifices, and to work hard until she finally finds herself able to fulfill her desire to learn.

There are also in- stances in which children express their indifference towards school. The “great danger of idleness” (TBB Jan. 1920: 17), as Du Bois calls it in “As the Crow Flies,” is central to the

September 1921 cover entitled “My! But It’s Hard to Choose” (Fig. 13). In this drawing, Marcellus Hawkins depicts four boys and two signs, one leading the way to school and the other one to the swimming hole. One of the boys has already 556 Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance 41.

Fig. 13 Cover Drawing “My! But It’s Hard to Choose!” drawing by Marcellus Hawkins, TBB Sept. 1921: n. pag., print.

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climbed the tree to which the swimming hole sign is pinned and lures another boy off the road to skip school and play with him in the water. The third boy waves him goodbye but follows the path to school determinedly. The last boy stands there hesitating and scratches his head because he cannot decide which way to choose. In the title, the artist admits that it is often difficult for children to prefer school over leisure time. Nevertheless, it can be assumed that the editors would have expected their readers to follow the path to wisdom because, as shown in this chapter, they take great pains to demonstrate the importance of education in The Brownies’ Book.

If a child scolds school in the magazine, it has to realize that education is a blessing and should not be taken for granted in the course of events. One of these children is Fauset’s Billie who announces that if he had three wishes, he would use them all to wish for “that children didn’t have to go to school” (TBB Apr. 1921: 108). The Judge replies that “[a]s a matter of fact, some children don’t have to go to school . . . but if they haven’t a certain amount of training and knowledge when they get to be men and women, they’re mighty sorry for it just the same” (108). He makes sure that Billie understands that to get on in life, he needs a certain degree of education. Another example in which a black girl wants to give up learning can be found in “The Heritage.” In this story, Julie decides to leave school because she is “tired of working herself to death” in order to stay there (TBB Aug. 1920: 249). Not only does she have to do her schoolwork, she also has to earn money for her living and the tuition. Julie laments that she “never had decent clothes or any good times” and that her life has only consisted of “work, work forever” (250). However, Mother Mason, an elderly African-American woman, can convince Julie that she must not give up because she has an obligation to the race. She owes it to her forefathers who had struggled hard to make it possible for her generation to learn and to advance African-Americans with the knowledge they acquire at school. In the end, the girl regains her determination to study because she understands that she has her “whole race to work for” (250).

Finally, I want to stress that The Brownies’ Book was an educational tool itself and that the discursive prose, which was in general highly informative and instructional, comprises roughly one third of the magazine after all and even takes up more space in the second year of publication, as the descriptive analysis has shown. Du Bois’ own column “As the Crow Flies” is, of course, of prime importance here because its main purpose is to turn the Brownies into knowledgeable citizens who know what is going on around them. Fauset’s highly didactic column “The Judge,” the biographies, and the myriad of instructional articles, such as the travel reports, the anthropological texts, and the contributions concerning natural science, also play a significant role in adding to the educational impetus of the periodical. In various cases, even the focus of the game section is more on the increase of the reader’s knowledge than on entertainment. Many black teachers were grateful for the publication and used Du Bois’ magazine in the

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classroom, especially because it filled the void of white textbooks by presenting the black experience and by exercising revisionist history.

All in all, The Brownies’ Book points to excellence again and again within its pages and thus mirrors Du Bois’ and the Talented Tenth’s belief that education was of paramount importance for the uplifting of the race. The magazine represents young African-Americans as future members of the rising African-American elite and depicts black children as intelligent, hardworking, determined, and willing to go through hardships to acquire a good education. The Brownies come to realize that they are not only struggling for themselves but for the good of the whole race and prove themselves willing to accept this responsibility. Together with his team, Du Bois successfully destroys the image which had been constructed by white Americans who claimed that Blacks were intellectually inferior to them and did consequently not deserve to be considered and treated as equals. The image created by The Brownies’ Book instead is one in which black children could take pride because it displays African-Americans as intelligent and shows that they are aware of the value of education and acknowledge its importance in the fight for equality.

4.4 The Cultivated Black Child: Culture, Refinement, Health, Ethics, and Religion

When Du Bois’ magazine was published, the pickaninny image was still the dominant racial caricature pertaining to black children. As explained earlier, many books and periodicals but also movie productions included these younger versions of, what Sterling A. Brown labeled, the coming Negro to amuse the white audience. 557 Entirely uncultivated, poorly dressed – or even entirely naked –, unkempt, and constantly greedy for food, pickaninnies lacked refinement and modesty as well as moderation. They were depicted as immoral creatures that stole, lied, and played evil pranks on others. The pickaninny caricature was often rounded out by adding superstition which provided the basis for further ridicule, as shown in the discussion of “An Old-Time Christmas Gift.” To combat this stereotype, The Brownies’ Book portrays refined black children with good manners and a sense of beauty and culture. The editors introduce a code of ethics to counter the impression of immorality and also stress the importance of the Christian religion for African- Americans to compliment the image of the cultivated African-American child by emphasizing its piety.

A striking characteristic of the periodical is that it promotes a middle-class value system as well as refinement and culture. Du Bois believed that the moral decay and the high crime rate among African-Americans was a symptom caused by a lack of culture. He was confident that this depravity could be remedied because 557 Brown, “Negro Character as seen by White Authors” 180.

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he took the black middle class as proof that Blacks, too, were capable of “cultural development” and could turn into cultivated and respectable members of American society.558 In the 1920s, the black middle class was not only defined by economic status, which will be further discussed in the next section, but, more importantly, also by self-esteem and standing within the black community based on intellect and cultural ability. The Talented Tenth, who were exceptional men and women in both knowledge and character, had to “be made leaders of thought” and also “missionaries of culture among their people.”559 Fauset’s “The Judge” is the most outstanding contribution with regard to teaching middle-class refinement and culture to the readers. As most of her fictional characters, Billikins, Billie, William, and Wilhelmina are members of a middle-class family, which becomes evident through their life style. They are well-educated, speak a foreign language, are interested in politics and economics, and participate in cultural events, such as going to the theater. The April and May 1920 columns add further characteristics of the refined child who, as mentioned earlier, has to learn to be presentable in good social circles and know how to dance, carry on a conversation, and acquire table manners (TBB Apr. 1920: 108). In addition, cultured black children were expected to take care of their body and health not only by nourishing food but also through sports (“tag” and “swimming”), be interested in art and literature and develop creativity of their own (“reading,” “writing,” “drawing,” “making things”), be considerate and thoughtful in their interactions with their fellow beings (“loving people”) and, above all, come to appreciate “the great Trinity of Life – Truth and Beauty and . . . Love” (TBB Apr. 1920: 108-109; TBB May 1920: 138). I already clarified in the synopsis of the first issue that the Judge’s whole concept of refinement is based on discipline and moderation because, as he says, “we shall have to swallow the little pill which is called a moral . . . don’t overdo. This is the law of life. Run, but don’t strain your muscle; eat, but stop when you are no longer hungry; read, but read the worth while [sic] things; talk, but not always; dance – some” (TBB Apr. 1920: 109).

Several of the attributes of the refined black child which the Judge accumulates here reoccur in various other texts. In “Little People of the Month,” many achievers are especially acclaimed for exhibiting great ability in various art forms, such as music, acting, painting, and dancing. Some of them were already or would turn out to be well-known for their talent, such as the artist Loïs Mailou Jones, who was only fourteen years old when The Brownies’ Book drew attention to her gift, the musicians Gwendolen and Hiawatha Coleridge-Taylor, who inherited their father’s genius, and the little child actor Frederick Ernest Morrison, known as “Sunshine Sammy,” who co-starred with the white comedians Harold Lloyd and Harry

558 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 693. 559 Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” 50-51.

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“Snub” Pollard and became one of the original Our Gang members in 1922.560 The existence of groups like Amanda E. Kemp’s “Dancing Dolls” or clubs like the Victory Girls’ Musical, Literary and Debating Society or the Y.W.C.A. Dramatic Club, which are introduced in “Little People of the Month” as well as in various articles on the Girl Reserves, add to the impression that the rising African- American generation was eager to participate in the cultural scene. Moreover, The Brownies’ Book itself with its beautiful artwork as well as its myriad of texts, which introduce the readers to the three great genres of prose, poetry, and drama, did not only sharpen their sense of beauty, it is also further proof that African- Americans joined the cultural landscape in the U.S. and – more importantly – also helped to shaped a distinctly American cultural setting.

Du Bois and Fauset put great emphasis on the promotion of hygiene because they shared the assumption of the fit body as “the universal sign of one’s physical and mental health.” 561 They followed the old saying “Mens sana in corpora sano,” as indicated by the Judge when he recommends “eating,” “tag,” and “swimming” (TBB Apr. 1920: 108). In “Little People of the Month,” the editors lament: “One of the most distressing things about our people, [sic] is the number of poor, unhealthy children who come into the world. In some sections, half of the colored children born, die before they are one year old, . . .” (TBB Apr. 1920: 116). As a consequence, they celebrate the ones who won in various baby contests all the more in their magazine to show that, under the right conditions, African-American children can grow up happily and healthy as well. Starting a health movement of its own, which is reminiscent of Booker T. Washington’s understanding of hygiene as brought forth in Up from Slavery (1901), The Brownies’ Book was not only concerned with its readers’ minds but also their bodies and underlines that the cultivated black children have to pay attention to their wellbeing by eating properly and exercising regularly. 562 The article “Girl Reserves Conference” includes an entire health code which reads:

560 Our Gang, also known as The Little Rascals, was a famous American comedy series created

by Hal Roach (1892-1992). From 1922, when it was first produced, through 1944, a total of 220 episodes and one entire movie were made – “more films than in any other movies series” before (Leonard Maltin, and Richard W. Bann, The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang (1977; New York: Three Rivers P, 1992, print) 4). Our Gang focuses on a group of children, featuring Blacks and whites as well as boys and girls, and tells of the daily adventures they have in their neighborhood. In 1994, Universal Pictures released a movie based on the series entitled Little Rascals. For further information, see Maltin, and Bann, The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang.

561 Anna Makolkin, Anatomy of Heroism (New York: Legas, 2000, print) 97, Language, Media & Education Studies 17.

562 Booker T. Washington attached great importance to personal hygiene because he was convinced that cleanliness and a healthy appearance would earn African-Americans the respect of white Americans. In Up from Slavery, he writes that when he arrived at

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Drink a glass of water before breakfast each morning. Clean teeth at least two times a day. Sleep with windows open. . . . Take at least one hour’s exercise daily (out of doors). Eat three regular nourishing meals a day. If hungry between meals, eat only nourishing food. (TBB July 1921: 214)

In “Food for Lazy Betty,” the readers get advice on wholesome food and are made aware of the “danger in lack of nourishment for the child,” which lies in the fact, “not so much that he remains a sickly and nervous youngster, but that he produces the listless and inefficient grown-up” (TBB Feb. 1920: 61). “Her First Party” and “The Pink Banana” tell of the temptations of sweets and warn the Brownies not to overeat because, in both cases, indulging in too much candy and ice cream causes a stomach-ache. “Her First Party” ends with the words: “. . . I feel quite tearful,/And, oh, I am fearful –/That I ate a wee bit too much!” (TBB Nov. 1920: 336). The consequences in “The Pink Banana” are even worse because the young protagonist feels so sick in the end that she has to stay at home and cannot go to her friend’s party. In his poem “Mister Sandman,” Langston Hughes even adds restraint when it comes to food to his list of prerequisites for receiving a nice dream from the sandman. First, he states that “the greedy boy, with his stomach too full,/Has a bad, bad dream of a raging bull” and then explains: “For those who’d have dreams that are charming and sweet,/Must be good in the day and not stuff when they eat, . . . (TBB Aug. 1921: 244).

To heighten its readers’ health standards, The Brownies’ Book encourages them to keep their bodies fit through sports. Regular exercise was not only promoted in “The Judge” and the Girl Reserves’ health code but also in other articles which report on the Y.M.C.A.’s and the Y.W.C.A.’s sport activities, such as “The First

Hampton, “[t]he matter of having meals at regular hours, of eating on a tablecloth, using napkins, the use of the bathtub and of the tooth-brush, as well as the use of sheets upon the bed, were all new to [him]” (Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901; New York: Norton, 1996, print) 31). Washington furthermore states: “I sometimes feel that almost the most valuable lesson I got at the Hampton Institute was in the use and value of the bath. I learned there for the first time some of its value, not only in keeping the body healthy, but in inspiring self-respect and promoting virtue” (Washington, Up From Slavery 31). As stern believer in the significance of hygiene, he also promoted cleanliness at Tuskegee. He says: “The students were making progress in learning books and in developing their minds; but it became apparent at once that, if we were to make any permanent impression upon those who had come to us for training, we must do something besides teach them mere books. The students had come from homes where they had had no opportunities for lessons which would teach them how to care for their bodies. . . . We wanted to teach the students how to bathe; how to care for their teeth and clothing. We wanted to teach them what to eat, and how to eat properly, and how to care for their rooms” (Washington, Up From Slavery 60).

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Annual Y.M.C.A. Inter-Branch Athletic Meet” (TBB Aug. 1921), “Inter- Association Track and Field Meet, Y.W.C.A. Girls” (TBB Sept. 1921) and “To the Girl Reserves” (TBB Jan. 1921). The latter article is about a Girl Reserves dramatic club’s camping trip where a group of girls engaged in water sports, outdoor games, and hikes. They enjoyed these activities immensely because, as they state, they are “going to work hard this winter to deserve” their next summer camping trip (TBB Jan. 1921: 14). This positive statement is most likely added to inspire other Brownies to work hard and join the next trip as well. In addition, the article advises the readers to play outside in the fresh air because it is good for their health. The poem “Tomboys,” too, encourages girls to turn into “Children of the great out- doors” and enjoy nature by climbing trees, chasing butterflies, and having fun in the water (TBB Sept. 1920: 287). By the poem, the Brownies find a photo of a black girl in sportswear holding a ball. In June 1920, the editors included another photo of children who do sports. This time, the picture shows a whole group of Puerto Rican female students who are busy with their “‘Setting-up’ Exercises,” as the caption reveals (168). In general, one can observe that Du Bois’ magazine puts a special focus on girls when promoting its agenda on hygiene and appearance because black women, who were commonly believed to be immoral and overtly sexual by whites, had to establish themselves as fair and cultured members of society. As the above examples demonstrate, however, health seems to be superior to refinement at times because The Brownies’ Book does not ban girls to the domestic sphere but encourages them to join the boys in doing sports and in enjoying the great outdoors. Annette Christine Browne’s choice of title for her poem – “Tomboys” – is telling in this respect.

The poem “A Model Program for My Little Lady” is outstanding with regard to the periodical’s health agenda because it presents much of the above-mentioned health advice in lyric form. Again, the text is addressed at girls, but the image of the tomboy fades into the background because Carrie W. Clifford intends to present a program apt to educate little ladies, as the title indicates. The first stanza starts out with “[w]ake, my little lady!/Plunge into your morning tub,” which reveals the importance of cleanliness (TBB May 1921: 160). The second stanza reads “Eat, my little lady!/Toothsome porridge luscious fruit,/And a square of toast to boot, . . .” (160). It points to the significance of wholesome food. Like others before her, Clifford distances herself from the female ideal of domesticity and stresses that refined girls ought to be in the fresh air and exercise: “Run my little lady!/Out where garden-roses grow,/Skip and frolic to and fro, . . .” (160). Thus, she does not give up the image of the tomboy entirely either. Finally, the last stanza – “Sleep, my little lady!” – makes sure that a child also needs enough rest to remain strong and healthy (160). Four out of five stanzas are concerned with the body; only the forth stanza – “Learn, my little lady!” – focuses on the mind and promotes ethical behavior, which shows that the refined and cultured black girl was expected not to neglect its body over nourishing its head (160).

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The cultivated child had to pay attention to its personal appearance. In one column, the Judge clarifies that not only girls but also boys had to pay attention to looking proper. Wilhelmina criticizes her brother for not being “fresh and smart looking” and announces that she “won’t be seen on the street with [him]” like this (TBB Mar. 1921: 92). William turns to the Judge for help and asks him to reason with his sister: “Aw, Judge, tell her a boy can’t go about all dolled up like a girl; all the fellows would make fun of him and besides it’s too great a nuisance” (TBB Mar. 1921: 92). The Judge, however, sides with Wilhelmina and gives William a lecture on the value of decent clothing because the way one dresses adds to the impression one makes on others. He illustrates this axiom in the following example (92):

Well now suppose William and Harvey Wilson . . . come to my office for a job. They are in the same grade at school; they bring equally good recommendations. I look them over and I say to myself. ‘This boy is untidy and wrinkled; he’d probably keep my papers in an awful mess and any way he doesn’t care whether I like his appearance or not. Now this other fellow is clean and smart looking. He wants me to be pleased with him, and I’m sure he’ll keep things in order. Harvey,’ I say out loud, ‘you can have the job’. (92)

The Judge explains that ability is not the only quality which is relevant to succeed in life. “Neatness and trimness” are often also crucial factors because, as he concludes, “the boys and girls who take care of their personal appearance usually have a good deal of respect for themselves and that causes other people to have it too” (92).

However, the Judge is not an advocate of style and fashion, as becomes clear in his discussion with Wilhelmina concerning her new hat, which has already been dealt with earlier (TBB Jan. 1920: 13). Clothing has to be chosen to underline a person’s decency, and moderation is called for again. Wilhelmina’s parents, for example, buy her a “nice, broad, healthy foot with plenty of room for toes and no second-story heel” and neglect her wish for a “little, narrow, inch-and-a-half singe- toe foot perched on a two-inch high heel” (TBB Aug. 1920: 240). The Judge’s choice of words – “nice, broad, healthy” – proves that he sides with her parents. In the article “Girl Reserves Conference,” the female readers learn what kind of dress code is necessary to make a refined appearance:

Wear serge or other simple dark dresses for winter; simple gingham dresses for spring and fall, and middies and skirts at any time (school dress). Low-heeled sensible shoes. Wear no flashy jewelry or too much of any kind. Use no cosmetics except enough powder to take the shine off. No socks. (TBB July 1921: 214)

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The emphasis on moderation is again striking. In the discussions on the right kind of clothing and also by including many photos of well-groomed children, The Brownies’ Book counters the stereotype that African-Americans were unkempt and neglected their looks. Instead, it stresses their propriety over and over again. By defying extravagancy, the magazine underscores respectability even further, especially when it comes to girls because simplicity in dress evokes associations of virtuousness and chastity and counters the prevalent belief that black women were lascivious and promiscuous in nature.

Fauset also treats the topic of black female morality in her February 1920 column where she tries to clarify for her female readers why they sometimes have to face double standards. As mentioned before, Wilhelmina is deeply upset because she is not allowed to go to a basketball game with her father and her brothers. She does not understand the reasons for her exclusion from this recreational activity because her father did not provide any explanation for his refusal. She comes to the Judge to complain about the injustice of her father’s decision. The Judge admits that “[t]his world has long been unfair to women and girls” (TBB Feb. 1920: 50). Nevertheless, he supports the father because, as he explains, a basketball game is a public event which everyone could attend, and the “teams that were to play were composed of young fellows, – good-hearted, but poorly disciplined” (50). Consequently, these games turned out to be places “where rude and undesirable people were thrown in the company of good folk, and where the teams instead of playing basketball, spent their time in quarreling and even in fighting” (50). Since “out of a circumstance like that could come the most unpleasant consequences,” girls should not be present at these kinds of events. “One of the worst things that could happen,” the Judge stresses, “is for a half-grown girl to be found, quite innocently, in some assembly of this kind, and then be blamed for the actions of other people” (50). By denying her to come along, her father simply wanted to protect Wilhelmina from experiencing harm – maybe even from sexual abuse as the terms “unpleasant consequences” and “innocently” might connote. Black girls were not to acquire a bad reputation; quite on the contrary, they had to rid themselves of the image of immorality and open sexuality, as explained above. Although his decision seemed unfair to his daughter, Wilhelmina’s father made the right choice in not letting her attend a sports event because he protected her reputation as a respectable and refined African-American girl.

Also adding to the image of the cultivated black child is its capability to employ Standard English. As discussed earlier, The Brownies’ Book – for the most part – tries to avoid dialect and thus foreshadows the debate over the use of African-American Vernacular English by African-American writers which would flare up during the Harlem Renaissance. Like Claude McKay, Fauset, in particular, exhibited a negative attitude towards black vernacular. Carolyn Wedin Sylvander observes that “[h]eavy use of dialect always bothered Fauset, perhaps because that characteristic alone was enough to relegate a black to the bottom of any heap in her

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growing-up years for mocking, scornful humor.”563 In “The Judge,” Fauset clearly promotes Standard English. There are instances in which one of the children uses incorrect words and phrases, such as the expression “ain’t,” but most of the time they immediately correct each other, so for example in the May 1921 issue. One column is even entirely devoted to the use of correct language. In the October 1921 issue, Billie refuses to employ Standard English even after Wilhelmina urges him to mind his language. William relates the problem to the Judge: “‘Mr. Judge – this afternoon, Wilhelmina corrected Billie when he used ‘ain’t.’ Billie told her that she knew what he meant, so what difference did it make if he did say ‘ain’t’’” (TBB Oct. 1921: 294). The Judge turns to Billie with the following explanation: “‘It makes a world of difference,’ he says. ‘I know a boy who goes to school and pays attention to his lessons. He learns, Billie-boy. He is a cultured lad, with a bright future.’” (294). The acceptance of correct language is another attribute of the cultured and refined person, and the Judge tries to point out to Billie that he has to employ proper English if he wants to gain positive recognition and to succeed in his life. With this argument, he convinces Billie who declares: “‘I’m going to pay attention to my lessons and be a cultured boy, too!’” (294).564

Moral behavior is presented as additional attribute of the cultured child, as for example in the initial “The Judge” column. It is worthy of note that the promotion of ethics comes from a child here. Billikins concludes his introduction with the following lecture:

All the time, I must be true. I try to be good. But you cannot always be good. You CAN always be true, and that is better. Of course, SOMETIMES, almost all times, you can be Good, too. But if you’re not good, you say so and try, try, again. That’s what the world does, and Life is Trying. (TBB Jan. 1920: 12)

The youngest of the siblings has already come to realize the significance of certain prime virtues, such as being good and true and the importance of trying. Du Bois’ periodical advocates these three major qualities over and over again. In the January 1921 “The Judge,” the children declare that they do not believe in New Year’s resolutions because they are hardly ever kept. The Judge encourages them to make good resolutions nevertheless because trying to keep them is more important than really keeping them. He illustrates his opinion by modifying a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “‘Hitch your wagon to a star! . . . and if it can’t be done, hitch it to a mud-turtle, or don’t hitch it at all – just let it stand and rot.’” (TBB Jan. 1921:

563 Sylvander, Jessie Redmon Fauset 109. 564 The use of correct language is also a minor topic in May 1921 and Nov. 1921.

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11).565 The Judge manifests that one needs high ideals and is obligated to attempt to reach them persistently or otherwise there will be no progress and human life stagnates. In “Pumpkin Land,” the Pumpkin-Man teaches Happy a similar lesson in a less philosophical and more child-oriented way when he says: “T-R-Y; why try has made all the wonderful things in the world, – ships, trains, wagons, ice cream, and candy – they were all made by try” (TBB Jan. 1920: 4-5). Yetta Kay Stoddard identifies honesty and truthfulness as “the high of principles” in one of her letters concerning parenting in “The Grown-Up’s Corner” (TBB Sept. 1920: 265). She stresses that if parents want their child “to grow up fine and honest and true, steadfast to principles of right, fair and square every minute of his precious life,” they have to serve as role models and make sure that their lives “turn towards these qualities” as well (265).

Robert Louis Stevenson combines manners and morals in his four-liner “The Whole Duty of Children.” He writes:

A child should always say what’s true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table, At least, as far as he is able. (TBB Jan. 1920: 10)

In this short poem, he points to the significance of honesty and determination and promotes courtesy as well as a proper etiquette when it comes to eating. To render his lesson more interesting to children, he refrains from merely preaching manners and morals and concludes his rhyme with a humorous last line. Here, he puts his rules into perspective so that they do not appear too rigid to the young readers. Good table manners are also advertized in the Judge’s above-discussed list of qualities which the cultivated child ought to acquire. Courtesy, as presented in Du Bois’ magazine, seems to mean more than simply speaking when spoken to and being quiet if not addressed. To clarify the concept of politeness, The Brownies’ Book includes an old saying which holds: “Politeness is to do and say/The kindest thing in the kindest way” (31). In April 1921, “Little People of the Month” honors a child especially for its courtesy. The boy won $50 for his politeness, a prize awarded daily by the Chicago Tribute to the politest person discovered by its “Polite Editor” (124). This example proves to the Brownies how much importance society attaches to fine manners and thus how crucial it is that they turn into cultivated boys and girls to advance in life.

565 “Hitch your wagon to a star” is a quote from Emerson’s essay “American Civilization”

published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 in which he argues for the emancipation of the slaves (See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “American Civilization,” Atlantic Monthly 54.9 (1862): 505, print).

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Parental obedience is also an essential attribute of the refined black child. In one column, the Judge explains to the children that their parents punish them sometimes to teach them that obeying parental rules and acknowledging their parent’s authority is important to keep them from harm. When Billikins complains about his whipping, the Judge clarifies:

Mother gives you pain and makes you suffer for a little while, so that you may not suffer a great deal more in the future. If she slaps your hands now . . . for playing too near the red-hot stove, she may keep you from suffering a terrible burn, or even from losing your hand altogether. (TBB Feb. 1920: 49)

The same lesson is brought home in the poem “Baby Bluebird” which focuses on a small bird which ignores its mother’s order not to leave the nest and almost gets killed by a hawk. In the end, the baby admits: “To me/That proves, dear Mother, you were right/To keep me up here out of sight” (TBB June 1921: 179). Parental obedience is also vital because parents have more experience than their offspring. They stand “high above” their children, “on a great mountain made of years” and know “what the World and Life means” (TBB Feb. 1920: 50). If they order them to be back from the playground at a certain time, for example, they do so because they want to keep them from being “one-sided,” meaning, as the Judge elucidates, a child “who can slide down hills, but who doesn’t read books; who can run fast, but cannot listen to music; who knows how pretty the snow is, but doesn’t know how pretty pictures are” (50). Parents command obedience for their children’s own good and to turn them into respectable members of society. Parental rules often seem unfair to the younger generation because obedience frequently calls for sacrifice. However, the Judge makes clear that sacrifice is crucial to the development of character, a concept which was of paramount importance to Fauset and Du Bois. He concludes that “in a world where there was no need of Sacrifice, no need of hard and unpleasant work, it is a question whether we could develop the kind of sound, strong character in human beings that we ought to have. Such characters are beautiful; the need of the World is Beauty” (50).

To complement the image of the cultured black child, The Brownies’ Book promotes the ideal of piety. Religion has always played an essential part in the lives of African-Americans, and although Du Bois himself was often critical of the church and the Christian faith itself – David Levering Lewis even believes him to be an agnostic566 –, he saw the importance of the Christian religion as an ethical system which “encouraged individual morality, social equality, and universal

566 See Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of Race, 1868-1919 65.

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brotherhood.”567 He concludes his study on The Negro Church (1903) stating that the “race problem will be solved when Christianity gains control over the innate wickedness of the human heart, and men learn to apply in dealing with their fellows the simple principles of the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.”568 The Golden Rule, which is considered the highest of ethic principles, is inherent in many different cultures, but the western world attributes it to Jesus. Since this particular ethical code advances the brotherhood of men, it is not surprising that it also made its way into Du Bois’ publication for children. In the poem “A Model Program for My Little Lady,” the readers learn that they should “[a]lways heed the Golden Rule,” and the biography of Gandhi even includes Jesus’ exact wording, albeit not under the name Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you” (TBB May 1921: 160; TBB Dec. 1921: 344).569

Du Bois also considered the church to be important because he believed that the great black leader, who would ultimately win the fight for equality, would come from the ranks of the clergy. In The Souls of Black Folk, he substantiates this conviction, and one might even argue that he predicts Martin Luther King when declaring:

The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil. A leader, a politician, an orator, a “boss,” an intriguer, an idealist, – all these he is, and ever, too, the center of a group of men, now twenty, now a thousand in number. The combination of a certain adroitness with deep-seated earnestness, of tact with consummate ability, gave him his preëminence, and helps him maintain it.570

As this passage reveals, Du Bois sees the black preacher as natural leader because he possesses intellect, great personal magnetism, and a powerful rhetoric and is able to prompt the masses to follow him but also to stand up against the enemy. One Brownies’ Book text – “How Johnny Got to Boarding-School” – deals with the fascination concerning the black preacher. The protagonist of the story, Johnny, describes his first encounter with a clergyman as follows:

Once, on a visit to his grandmother’s farm, his father had taken him to a Baptist Revival, and the impression of waving arms and thumped tables, and talking through

567 Edward J. Blum, “‘There Won’t Be Any Rich People in Heaven’: The Black Christ, White

Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W.E.B. Du Bois,” Journal of African American History 90.4 (2005): 373, print.

568 W.E.B. Du Bois, ed., The Negro Church: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together with the Proceedings of the Eighth Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, May 26th, 1903 (Atlanta: Atlanta UP, 1903, print) 208.

569 Jesus teaches the Golden Rule during the Sermon on the Mount (See Matt.7.12). 570 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 191-92.

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one’s nose to a chorus of “Amens” of the congregation, had made a deep impression on his mind, and he was determined to move audiences to do likewise by his eloquence. He didn’t remember very much about that revival, but he did remember the long, lank man in the shabby Prince Albert coat talking and gesticulating and drinking water every now and then, while the congregation voiced its approval of his words by loud moans and shrieks and weeping. (TBB June 1921: 163-164)

This episode mirrors Du Bois’ belief in the importance of the minister for the black community because it shows the preacher in his role as leader, emphasizing his charisma and especially his ability to move the masses with his eloquence. Above this, he is also depicted as role model because he rouses Johnny’s wish to become a public speaker.

As the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, religion was crucial to Fauset, and it may be assumed that it was her and not so much Du Bois who ultimately advanced the Christian faith in The Brownies’ Book. Tellingly, religion often plays an important role in her texts. The Bible is the first book which the Judge recommends in his reading list. As a matter of fact, her column is interspersed with Bible quotes and references to God. In May 1920, Fauset writes, for instance, that “God is love and Love is God,” and in January 1921, she states that “God creates the Heaven and the Earth, the Sea and all that in them is” (138; 11). She furthermore introduces the readers to events which are of paramount importance to Christians in her poetry: the birth of Jesus, “the little Savior Christ,” as she calls him in “Christmas Eve,” and his crucifixion and resurrection (TBB Dec. 1920: 384).571 Various others of her texts are concerned with the Christian faith as well; some in a very overt way. In the periodical’s initial biography, for example, Fauset familiarizes the readers with “Kathy Ferguson, colored, and once a slave” who was the founder of the first Sunday School in New York City (TBB Jan. 1920: 27). That the very first biography in the magazine honors a woman who dedicated her life to the religious upbringing of the youth already clarifies that the promotion of the Christian religion was crucial to The Brownies’ Book. However, Fauset even stresses the significance of the black child’s piety more explicitly here: She writes:

If you are being brought up as I hope you are, you go to school every week-day, except Saturday, and on Sundays you go to Sunday School. There you sit and listen to the really wonderful church music and learn a great many beautiful texts and chat with other boys and girls and enjoy yourself famously. Then you go home feeling very good and somewhat solemn, not very sorry that Sunday School is over, but on the whole perfectly willing to go back next Sunday. (27)

571 Apart from Fauset’s “The Easter Idyll,” “The Crescent Moon,” and “Christmas Eve,” The

Brownies’ Book also includes another poem and one story which in particular refer to the Biblical Christmas and Easter story: Leslie Pinckney Hill’s “A Legend of the Easter Children” and Annette Christine Browne’s “How Little Bud Found Christmas.”

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This quote clearly displays Fauset’s belief that the cultivated African-American child should not only increase its knowledge at school but that it should also receive instruction in the Christian faith.

To foster piety among its readers, the periodical gives many examples of religious black families and pious black children. In November 1920, the editors included a whole page photo entitled “Coming Home from Church” which depicts African-Americans who had just attended service. Sunday Service is a communal event where everyone comes together: men, women, and children. All of them are dressed in their best clothes, and the women are wearing elegant hats. Their attire underlines the importance of the ritual. Many of the worshippers are gathering in small groups in the yard and are engaged in lively conversations. The image is a self-conscious enforcement of the black community spirit. It demonstrates that going to church did not only fulfill a spiritual need, but it also had an important social function for African-Americans because it inspired a sense of community by offering the congregation an opportunity to exchange ideas and opinions and to meet family and friends.

In “The Adoption of Ophelia,” the Johnsons write a letter of introduction to the orphanage to demonstrate that they will be decent adoptive parents for little Ophelia. Among their good qualities, they add that they are both “Christians and belong to the Catholic church” (TBB June 1920: 180). Another example is “The Wish.” In this story, the author introduces the readers to a poor black family who are devoted Christians. Their piety becomes apparent in the description of their scarcely furnished home. They only have two pictures on their wall: “One was of a waterfall, the other was of ‘Christ Blessing Little Children’” (TBB June 1920: 190). The text substantiates the belief in divine justice and righteousness because in the end, the readers find the parents thanking “God for His goodness in restoring the health of their darling and the wealth which was rightfully theirs” (191). In addition, The Brownies’ Book presents numerous cases of African-American children who show their piety by praying. In the poem “Mother,” a child asks God to bless his mother, for example, as “he knelt in prayer at the side of his bed,” and in “A Narrow Escape,” the Brownies learn that Betty “prayed a tiny prayer” in a moment of peril (TBB July 1920: 224; TBB Oct. 1921: 300). In the playlet “The Little Orphans,” God even answers the children’s prayers. He sends them an “Angelic Messenger” who promises that they shall have a home and love, “for there is no happiness without love,” as he says (TBB May 1920: 136). In the end, they meet a rich woman and their son who is searching for playmates and convinces his mother to adopt the two orphans. This example – as well as many others before – reveals that Du Bois’ publication promotes the concept of a just and merciful God who loves little children (regardless of the color of their skin).

The periodical objects to superstition in two texts. In “The Ouija Board,” Gloria wants to have her fortune told. Her friend, however, clarifies right away that it is “a sin,” and in the course of the story, soothsaying is exposed as nonsense

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(TBB Jan. 1920: 18). Gloria cannot be kept from seeing a fortune-teller, but the prophecy – which makes the girl believe that she will win the first prize in a writing contest at school – turns out to be false. She has to leave empty-handed and is punished for her superstition and her over-confidence. In Fauset’s story “Ghosts and Kittens,” the child protagonists manage to scare their detested maid Mary Henderson off by using her superstition. The maid believes that dead animals and people can come back to life and is afraid that the family’s cat will return from the dead to haunt her because she left it outside to freeze to death. Knowing of her fear, the children play a prank on her. One of them puts on a cat costume, and they wake Mary up at night, chanting: “You murdered our body;/So we bring you our souls,/ Find us somewhere else to live” (TBB Feb. 1921: 50). The maid is so terrified by the alleged ghosts that she leaves the house immediately and never returns. Fauset ridicules Mary’s superstition because the children use it against her and, on top of that, they are much wiser than the adult maid, knowing that ghosts do not exist.

However, there is also one contribution – “The Luck of Cindy Ann” – which shows that superstition is an intrinsic element of many African-American belief systems. The story is set in the South, in

a funny little place – the sort of place where people believe all sorts of funny things, you know, like: if you comb your hair at night, it will make you forgetful; if you sing before breakfast, you’ll be in a fuss before night; if you meet a cross-eyed person in the morning, you’ll have bad luck all day, and a lot of other such funny things that your grandmother knew about. (TBB Feb. 1921: 35)

The author distances herself from the described superstitious convictions through place (the rural South), time (they belong to grandmother and the past), and her choice of words (funny is repeated three times), but she does not overtly mock or criticize them. In the end, the protagonists even assume that they found a long lost fortune because Cindy Ann wore her dress wrong side outwards all day. This text does not deny that superstition is a part of the African-American heritage but considers it outdated, a queer relic of the past which only survived in antiquated parts of the rural South.

One can observe that The Brownies’ Book promotes a code of manners and morals similar to the one of the Girl Reserves, which reads as follows:

G racious in manner I mpartial in judgment R eady for service L oyal to friends. R eaching toward the best E arnest in purpose S eeing the beautiful E ager for knowledge R everent to God

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V ictorious over self E ver dependable S incere at all time. (TBB June 1920: 187-188)

All in all, the magazine presents the cultivated black child as refined and cultured, susceptible “to beauty and form, color, and music,” and pious.572 It reveals that young African-Americans adhere to a middle-class value system and a code of ethics which ought to include hard work, perseverance, a healthy life style, simplicity, love for other human beings, courtesy, honor, honesty, obedience, sacrifice, modesty, and respectability. Du Bois managed to dismantle the pickaninny stereotype because he proved that black children, just like white children, were able to develop character and turn into cultivated members of American society, too, if raised according to middle-class and Christian standards. As this chapter has shown, gender issues were of great importance in the construction of the cultured black child. There is a special focus on girls when it comes to such topics as refinement and appearance because Du Bois and Fauset wanted to counter the impression of black female immorality and promiscuity. They did not forget to instruct the boys on proper clothing and personal hygiene either, though. It is striking that The Brownies’ Book’s view on health issues corresponds with Booker T. Washington’s ideas on cleanliness in many ways. Although Du Bois and Washington generally supported opposing concepts regarding the uplift of African-Americans, they seem to have agreed on the significance of hygiene. Yet, while Washington saw in cleanliness a means to gain the respect of white Americans in general, Du Bois must have also considered hygiene to be a crucial factor to make the black middle class visible. He must have believed that their well-groomed appearance would help to set them apart from lower-class Blacks.

4.5 Depictions of the African-American Family and Community

During slavery, it was extremely hard for African-Americans to establish stable nuclear family relations because they could be sold apart at any time. Even if a slave couple had the opportunity to live together in a marriage-like relationship, it was most of the time impossible for them to assume distinct gender roles. The husband could not take over the function as provider of the family and was unable to protect his wife from sexual abuse by the master. Hence, it was very hard to build a functioning family life for the slaves, and the picture which generally prevailed in society was that of the promiscuous Black who frequently entered 572 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 661.

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loose sexual relationships and did not care about his offspring. As explained in a previous section, embracing this negative image, most white authors did not depict black parents “as nurturers of their own children” but as “disinterested [and] amused by their children’s contretemps,” or “as slightly remiss in the performance of their parental duties.”573 The common opinion of male Blacks was that they often left their children behind because they were not interested in them. Female Blacks, on the other hand, were portrayed as loving and caring mothers – as mammy figures – not for their own children, though, but for their master’s offspring. For his children, they were said to have an “undying devotion” while they showed a “cold, often inhuman, indifference” for their own offspring.574 The Brownies’ Book persistently challenges these negative images by presenting well- working nuclear or extended families and loving parents, who are proud of their children, who care about them, and who want them to be able to advance in life.575

Looking at the letters in the “Grown-Ups Corner” alone would be sufficient to deflate the stereotype that black parents are uncaring and indifferent to their children’s feelings and well-being because the letter writers constantly express deep concern and love for their offspring. How fond African-Americans in fact 573 Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s Literature”

177. 574 Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939; Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1966) 33. 575 Franklin Frazier studied the circumstances concerning the destruction of the black family in

detail in his book The Negro Family in the United States, and he puts the assumption that African-Americans were bad parents into perspective. Despite the fact that the preservation of family life was hard for the slaves, it was nevertheless very important to them. Frazier, for instance, observes that “some of the mothers undoubtedly were cold and indifferent to their offspring” but that the slave family on the whole “developed as a natural organization, based upon the spontaneous feelings of affection of the family members in the household” (Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States 361). He goes on arguing that even though “the emotional interdependence between the mother and her children generally caused her to have a more permanent interest in the family,” there were also fathers “who developed an attachment for their wives and children” (Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States 361). The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation by Wilma A. Dunaway is a more recent study treating the topic of slave marriages and the slave family. Dunaway focuses on small plantations in the Appalachians, arguing that both slave marriages black family life were in particular fragile in this area because slaveholding in the Mountain South was limited and, “[s]o as not to circumscribe their reproduction capacities, small slaveholder more often encouraged ‘abroad spouse’ arrangements” in which husband and wife lived apart (Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003, print) 61). Dunaway also discusses additional habits which made family life difficult for the slaves, such as the practice of hiring out slaves or the sexual exploitation of women. For further information, see Wilma A. Dunaway, The African- American Family in Slavery and Emancipation.

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were of child-rearing becomes apparent in one letter in particular. Here, a couple deplores that they “are not blessed with children” and turn to the editors for help in their plan to adopt a girl (TBB Feb. 1920: 45). The woman writes:

There are so many poor little children in the world without mother or father and my heart goes out to them each day, and if I could only get one out of so many, all for my own, and love and bring up as my own, I would be so happy, as myself and husband dearly love children and have a good home and can give a child anything a child’s heart can wish for. . . . (45)

Her words reveal a deep sense of responsibility and prove that African-Americans offered their offspring love and care in a stable home. Moreover, many contributions depict functioning nuclear families – poor as well as affluent –, and the children have both mother and father who love and take care of them. Other texts even include extended families where grandparents as well as aunts and uncles join in to work together for the good of the family and help to raise and educate the young. There are also instances in which one parent or both parents are dead, but the children are nevertheless not neglected because the remaining family members step in and support each other. If a child is left without any relatives to turn to, The Brownies’ Book makes sure to stress that it finds nice foster parents in the course of events, such as in “The Adoption of Ophelia” and “The Wish.” “How Little Bud Found Christmas” is the only exception which features a father who is indifferent to his son’s existence. Annette Christine Browne does not blame the father personally for failing to take proper care of his Bud but rather holds the living conditions responsible for his shortcomings. Being poverty-struck, he has to settle in “one of those alleys . . . that are peopled with that unfortunate class of mortals whose souls are as unlovely as their surroundings,” and since “the alley atmosphere had entered and settled” into the father’s soul, he rarely comes home to take care of his boy (TBB Dec. 1920: 367). However, Bud is not forgotten either. Society takes responsibility for the wretched child, and he is taken in by an orphanage where he encounters love and kindness. Like the shepherds, Bud follows a star on Christmas Eve which leads him to a place where the streets are “clean and the lights brighter” (368). Here, he observes other children through a window who are dancing merrily around a Christmas tree. When the matron, who had “the kindest face he had ever seen,” becomes aware of Bud, she invites him inside, washes him, and offers him a “clean little bed” (368). The boy finds a home in the orphanage, and Browne concludes: “Christmas had truly come to him – not just for a day but to stay with him always, and you may be sure that he never lived in the dark alley again” (368).

On the whole, parental love is an important recurring theme in The Brownies’ Book. Having already established that the Crow can be considered a member of the African-American community, he can again serve as an example here because he is a good and caring father for his little “crowlets.” He mentions his children various

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times throughout the column, which shows that they are always on his mind, and he is happy to see them after his long journeys. In one column, he says: “I think I’ll advertise for some real nice sweet tempered little Crow-baby to be home when I come back” (TBB June 1920: 183). Although the Crow is a traveler, he clarifies that he “belong[s] at home,” and thus he proves that he knows of his responsibility for his community and his family (TBB Feb. 1920: 63).576 In “Polly Sits Tight,” the readers also encounter a caring father, who rescues his daughter from a bolting horse. He gives her the advice to “sit tight,” and she explains that even though her father died soon afterwards, “that command hurled at her in time of danger had always stayed with her” (TBB Nov. 1921: 308). Her her father managed to provide her with strength to tackle complicated situations, and remembering her father’s advice helps her to appear self-confident in front of her class even though she is embarrassed about her worn-out shoes.

The depiction of motherly love is even more common than the portrayal of caring and loving fathers, which might be accounted for by the fact that that most of the writers were in fact female. As outlined in the descriptive analysis, the magazine contains a large number of poems – often in form of a lullaby – which reflect a mother’s affection for her child. One example is Kathryn Tabron’s “To Arizona Rose” which ends with the following lines:

So, I’ll nurture you tenderly, close to my breast, Little rosebud in whom I feel supremely blest. I’ll stand between you and each cold wind that blows, Till you stand forth full blown – my Arizona Rose. (TBB Feb. 1920: 57)

Tabron depicts a mother who is deeply devoted to her child. Not only does she nurture little Arizona Rose and promises her protection till she is old enough to take care of herself, she also reveals her love for the girl, which becomes apparent in her choice of words. She uses the adjective “tenderly,” which implies affection, refers to the bond between mother and child – which also connotes safety and security – and states that she feels “supremely blest” with her girl. She identifies her child as the highest blessing possible and as the center of her life. The mother’s 576 By describing the Crow as a responsible member of the community, Du Bois challenges the

common associations with crows in general again because they are often considered to be restless and untrustworthy (See Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery 120). As said before, the crow and the raven are not always distinguished in literature, and thus associating the crow with unreliability might spring from the Bible. There, it is said that Noah “sent forth a raven” before the dove to find out if the waters had dropped (Gen. 8.7). It is assumed though that the raven “found a floating corpse and began to eat at once” and therefore proved to be unreliable because he did “not come back in corresponding,” which would have been his duty, while the responsible dove brought an olive leaf as a sign that the waters were abating (Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery 381).

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choice of name for her girl also reveals how much she adores her because she chose to christian her baby after the queen of flowers – the rose – to evoke images of beauty and grace as well as dignity and nobility. 577 Motherly love is often expressed with hugs and kisses. In C. Leslie Frazier’s “Good-Morning, the Brownies read: “Tears from yawning/Must be kissed./Want me to hug you?/My! My! My!/Sure I’ll hug you –/Now stifle that sigh”(TBB Sept. 1921: 257). Another example in which a mother expresses her affection by means of caresses is “Jerry’s Favorite.” The poem contains the following passage:

My Mother’s just as proud of me! She said she thought George Washington And Douglass, Lincoln, too – all these Were boys no better than her son. She hugged me then real close and hearty. And gee! She gave me some swell party! (TBB Feb. 1921: 64)

Again, the poet depicts a caring mother, who truly loves her son, and who displays her affection openly, but the poem also stresses how proud she is of her boy. For her, he is as great as such outstanding men as George Washington, Frederick Douglass, or Abraham Lincoln. This comparison clearly inspires self-confidence in the child.

Motherly love does not only figure in the Brownies’ Book poetry but also in the magazine’s prose. Another mother who loves her child dearly – despite the fact that she is not her biological daughter – can be found in “The Adoption of Ophelia.” When Mrs. Johnson sees Ophelia for the first time, her eyes are said “to hunger for mother-love,” and it is stressed that she “couldn’t resist the temptation to kiss [Ophelia’s] dimpled brown hands” (TBB June 1920: 181). The narrator explains that “[n]o energy or money was spared” to turn Ophelia into a “happy, healthy baby” and that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson “were more than happy as they planned together for the future education and happiness of that small bit of humanity” (181). In the end, it turns out that Mr. Johnson’s long lost brother Howard is Ophelia’s biological father, who had deserted her and her mother when she was a baby. One might think that the story harks back to the old negative image of the indifferent black father, but the author in fact deflates this stereotype because Howard soon comes to realize his mistake and truly repents his misconduct. When he returns to seek his little family’s forgiveness, he cannot find them again. In the end, however, Howard is happy to be reunited with his daughter and will most likely help to raise her together with his brother and his wife. At the orphanage, the

577 The Arizona Rose has an orange color and is named after the desert state in the Southwest.

Maybe Tabron lived in Arizona, and by choosing this particular name, she did not only point to her daughter’s beauty but also intended to provide a connection to her home.

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Johnsons find out that Ophelia’s biological mother is dead. An employee tells them that the young woman tried to be a good mother for Ophelia and that she “struggled with wretchedness and poverty” to sustain herself and the child (182). Looking at the various mothers and fathers in Du Bois’ periodical and at their relationship to their children thwarts the stereotype that black parents did not love their offspring and neglected their children’s well-being.

The Brownies’ Book also reveals that this love is mutual and that the children cherish their parents’ concern for them. There are two poems which are dedicated to mothers: “Mother” by G. Smith Wormley (TBB July 1920: 224) and “To Our Mother” by Madeline G. Allison (TBB Sept. 1920: 286). Although being written by grown-ups, the poems are nevertheless told from the children’s perspectives. They honor their mothers and thank them for their devotion and care in these little songs of praise. Wormley’s contribution reflects a boy’s thoughts; he kneels in prayer and asks God to bless his mother because, as he concludes, “without a mother I could not grow” (TBB July 1920: 224). Moreover, the magazine regularly emphasizes that all the family members work together for the good of the family. Not only do the parents take care of their children, the children, too, take over responsibility, as for example Helen in “A Girl’s Will,” Kathleen in “Impossible Kathleen,” or Bennie in “Why Bennie Was Fired.” Helen’s great sacrifice for her family and her role as a mother for her siblings has already been discussed in detail. Kathleen, too, forgoes her college education to raise her half-brothers and sisters together with her widowed father, realizing that her “life was really cut out to be a mission instead of the grand career” that her grandmother originally planned for her (TBB Oct. 1920: 303). Of the third girl, Bennie, the readers learn that she “was the little mother of the family” as well – this time the eldest child substitutes the dead father – and that she “cheerfully” gives half of her earnings to her mother for “the general upkeep of her smaller brothers and sisters” (TBB July 1920: 222). However, in all three cases, it is the oldest girl who helps to support the rest of the family. This approach is reminiscent of the image depicting women as nurturers who are responsible for the children and the household. Hence, the conventional gender roles are upheld in these texts.

A boy who proves that he does not only think about himself but also takes care of his family is Cless in “The Story-Telling Contest,” though his contribution is rather minor compared to Helen’s or Bennie’s. Because of his grandmother’s help, Cless is able to win a story-telling contest at his school at Thanksgiving and is rewarded with a turkey drumstick, which he does not eat right away. He takes the food home to share it with his grandmother. Julian Elihu Bagley wrote five stories for The Brownies’ Book which include Cless and his grandmother, and they all reveal that Cless respects his old grandmother deeply. Bagley stresses that he follows “every word of Granny’s with eager interest” (TBB Nov. 1920: 325). In “The Judge,” too, the children show great respect for the older generation. Wilhelmina picks up a book for the Judge, for instance, stressing that she does it

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“[o]ut of reverence for [his] grey hairs” (TBB Aug. 1921: 224). The members of the older generation are associated with wisdom, and the children are eager to listen to them and to learn from them. In Cless’ case, his grandmother provides a connection to his past for him by telling him stories about the Old South.578 All in all, Du Bois’ periodical repeatedly underscores that the relationships of the different family members are based on mutual love and respect – especially for the elders of the society –, that everyone, adult as well as child, takes over responsibility for the other, and that there is a deep rooted family loyalty prevailing in the African- American community.

After having described the primary group of the black family, it is also important to examine the portrayal of the African-American community because the editors did not only want to prove the existence of functioning black families whose members were loyal to each other but also that the entire African-American community was shaped by integrity. Du Bois and Fauset were eager to prove that

578 In the African-American family, the grandmother was not only a repository of folklore and

family history who helped to preserve black culture. In his book The Negro Family in the United States (1939), E. Franklin Frazier examines the importance of the grandmother during slavery and also the Reconstruction period, declaring that she was the “guardian of the generations” because it was “the granny” who “held the generations together when fathers and even mothers abandoned their offspring” (Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States 114; 117). Especially during the slaver era, the grandmothers were regularly responsible for their grandchildren’s welfare because the mothers could not perform their tasks as nurturers and caretakers of their offspring themselves. Many slave narratives bear witness to this significant function of the grandmother. Frederick Douglass relates, for example, that he had lived with his grandmother “on the outskirts of the plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the younger women” (Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nelly Mc Kay (1845; New York: Norton, 2004 print) 398). Harriet Jacobs writes that she was “indebted for many comforts” to her “good grandmother” during her childhood, and later she was “indebted to her for many more important services” (Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; San Diego: Harcourt, 1973, print) 5). Fearing her master’s persistent sexual threats, Jacobs hid herself in her grandmother’s attic for several years. Today, grandmothers often remain “guardians of the generations.” For studies discussing the role of the grandmother nowadays, see Dorothy Smith Ruiz, “The Increase in Intergenerational African-American Families Headed by Grandmothers,” Social Work Practice with African-American Families: An Intergenerational Perspective, ed. Cheryl Waites (New York: Rutledge, 2008, print) 89-104; and Dorothy Smith Ruiz, Amazing Grace: African American Grandmothers and Caregivers and Conveyers of Traditional Values (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004, print). For an analysis of the historical role of grandmothers, see Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States 114-124; and Mildred A. Hill-Lubin, “The Grandmother in African and African-American Literature: A Survivor of the African Extended Family,” Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, ed. Carole Boyce and Anne Adams Graves (Trenton, NJ: African World, 1986, print) 257-70.

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there were similarities between the white and the black community to thwart the stereotype of inferiority, to gain acceptance among the white members of society, and, ultimately, to be treated as fellow Americans. To do so, The Brownies’ Book depicts many middle-class families and puts great emphasis on upward mobility. White Americans had been trying to conceal that a black middle class existed for a long time because it would have meant to acknowledge that there are indeed parallels between the black and the white community. Hence, most African- Americans were depicted as belonging to the working class.579 Du Bois and Fauset, however, saw in the members of the black middle class representatives of what African-Americans are capable of achieving, and therefore they did not only promote a middle-class value system, as explained in the previous chapter, but often presented middle-class families as examples of the race’s progress. Violet Joyce Harris argues that depicting middle-class African-American families is an opposition to the selective tradition in itself because the middle-class status “suggests that the family is educated, is economically stable, and possesses a greater degree of independence than most Blacks.”580

Fauset, in particular, was known for almost exclusively portraying members of the middle class; this preference also shows in all four of her fictional Brownies’ Book texts (“Turkey Drumsticks,” “Merry Christmas to All,” “Ghosts and Kittens,” and “Cordelia Goes on the Warpath”) and her “The Judge” column. This approach, however, was not free of criticism, and Du Bois and Fauset were often accused of being too fond of the middle class. Barbara Christian observes in this respect that Fauset’s

fiction is peopled by characters who are “trying for a life of reason and culture,” culture in this case being Western refinement. Her novels insist that the upper-middle-class Negro has the same values as the upper-class white. . . . “She records a class in order to praise a race.” Her Negroes become apologists for the race, indicators of the heights of refinement blacks might attain, given the opportunity.581

Yet, promoting a class system and celebrating the members of the newly rising African-American middle class was, in the eyes of both editors, important to prove that African-Americans were not naturally morally degraded, criminal, and ignorant, as claimed by the majority of whites who believed them to be “one undifferentiated low-class mass.”582

579 See Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 688. 580 Harris, “Race Consciousness, Refinement, and Radicalism: Socialization in The Brownies’

Book” 194. 581 Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976

(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980, print) 41-42. 582 Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn 688.

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Du Bois and Fauset were keen on emphasizing that Blacks did not only have typical working-class jobs but that they had advanced into all walks of life. The professions of doctor and teacher are the ones which are most frequently cited to identify a family’s middle-class or even upper middle-class status. In “The Jury,” three readers disclose that their father’s are doctors (TBB July 1920; TBB Sept. 1921; TBB Nov. 1921), and many fictional texts also mark a family’s middle-class standing by stressing that the father works as a doctor, such as “A Guilty Conscious,” “Merry Christmas to All,” “Herbert and Frederick,” and “Those Who Have No Turkey.” The latter story draws attention to the fact that the head of the family, Lawrence Wilson, “became one of the wealthy and well known colored doctors in his city” (TBB Nov. 1921: 324). Teaching, as depicted in Du Bois’ magazine, is a typical female profession. This tendency becomes apparent in “Little People of the Month” and the article “Brownie Graduates,” (TBB July 1921) because many African-American girls mention this field as their future career. Middle-class status often implies that a family participates in the social life of their community. Various letters and instructional articles reveal that middle-class African-Americans attend church and join organizations such as the Y.M.C.A and Y.W.C.O. Moreover, “The Adoption of Ophelia” introduces Mr. and Mrs. Johnson as “prosperous and industrious colored people” who are “well known in social activities” (TBB June 1920: 181), and in “Those Who Have No Turkey,” the author stresses that Mr. Wilson’s wife had “gained an enviable social position” which came with many “social duties” (TBB Nov. 1921: 324).

It has already been explained in the previous section that values such as education, culture, and refinement were typical markers of middle-class status. One can observe that material assets, in particular houses and cars, turn into visual indicators of middle-class standing, too. In “Dolly’s Dream” the author underlines that the girl’s family lives in a nice neighborhood, “in a pretty, white cottage with a porch and a small garden in which grew the loveliest flowers in the world” (TBB Nov. 1920: 351). Other examples can be found in “Those Who Have No Turkey,” where the wealthy black family resides “in a beautiful house on a shady street” and has a “big car” (TBB Nov. 1921: 324), and in “Herbert and Frederick,” where they “lived up in a great house on the Terrace, with wonderful trees surrounding it and a beautiful garden of roses on the side nearest the street” (TBB Aug. 1921: 219). Mr. Butler even has a car and a chauffeur who drives his son Frederick “the short six blocks home” from school every day (220). Mr. and Mrs. Johnson also emphasize that they have a six-room house and a seven-passenger Cadillac when they try to prove to the orphanage that they can be good parents for Ophelia in “The Adoption of Ophelia” (TBB June 1920: 180), and in “The Jury,” a young reader proudly announces: “My father has a big automobile and sometimes he takes my mother and me for a ride” (TBB Sept. 1921: 263). Fauset developed yet another different way to display middle-class standing in “Turkey Drumsticks,” “Ghosts and Kittens,” and “How Cordelia Goes on the Warpath” (these stories always depict the

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same family), and “Merry Christmas to All.” Not only are her characters refined colored people who possess a car and a nice home, they also employ a maid who cooks and helps with the children.

The Brownies’ Book includes poorer families and working-class characters, too, but the focus remains on upward mobility. Most members of lower social strata are either eager to get an education and to uplift themselves, as for example in “The Wish,” “Tip-Top O’ the World,” “A Girl’s Will,” and “The Heritage,” or they serve the purpose to make the middle class aware of their duty of social commitment and their responsibility for less fortunate members of the community. This emphasis on the social gospel, which Violet Joyce Harris identified as noblesse oblige theme, is closely related to Du Bois’ Talented Tenth theory because he hoped that the members of this group would dedicate themselves to uplifting less fortunate African-Americans. The readers encounter this special kind of charity, for instance, in Fauset’s “Turkey Drumsticks.” In this story, the child protagonists visit their grandparents for Thanksgiving and find out how their grandmother and their grandfather came to know each other. When they were young, the children’s grandfather was a poor boy who had run away from his cruel uncle. One day, their grandmother found him in the backyard, and she started to give food to the starving young man. When she stole a turkey drumstick from her parent’s Thanksgiving dinner, they, too, found out about the boy’s miserable situation, and the children’s grandmother recounts that her own father “hunted up [the boy’s] uncle and told him he didn’t know how to treat a brave boy, and that he was going to adopt him” (TBB Nov. 1920: 346). In “Cordelia Goes on the Warpath,” the children themselves show their social commitment and help their poor, widowed neighbor Mrs. Hart. When she loses fifty dollars, her entire monthly allowance, they give her their savings, and later Cordelia even manages to find Mrs. Hart’s lost money, which the children’s pet blackbird had stolen and hidden in the chimney. “Merry Christmas to All” – again a Fauset story – introduces Hilda Blair, the daughter of wealthy parents, and the poor girl Edith Jenkins, whose father had been an alcoholic and whose mother (and older brother) worked hard when he died to sustain the family; they even managed to get a nice home. Then World War I breaks out, and shortly before Christmas, Hilda learns from her maid that Edith’s family had plunged into poverty and distress again. Mrs. Wing explains:

If you want to see somebody really miserable, look at little Edith Jenkins. There’s her mother, a widow, her oldest son killed in the war with three small children besides Edith and she only thirteen. There’s misery for you. Christmas is comin’ on and Edith instead of plannin’ like other folks for a merry Christmas, is hopin’ that she and her mother will get work enough to do so as to give the rest of the children a descent dinner that day. No turkey or chicken or fixin’s just enough to keep ‘em from goin’ hungry that one day. (TBB Dec. 1920: 356)

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On hearing this, Hilda decides to help the Jenkins family. She plans to give three of her dolls to Edith and her two sisters, one of her own brother’s toys to little Benny Jenkins, and to buy a nice meal and a Christmas tree for the entire family with her savings. On Christmas Eve, however, the children accidentally set the Jenkins’ house on fire when lighting the candles. Hilda wants to get help and runs into her oldest brother Henry and Edith’s brother Clarence who, contrary to expectations, both survived the war and had just returned home. Even though the house cannot be saved, both families are happily reunited, and the Blairs do not only invite the Jenkins to join them for Christmas, they also offer them a room in their “big house . . . until Lieutenant Clarence Jenkins gets on his feet” (360).

The social gospel also plays a central role in the stories “The Elusive Idea,” “Impossible Kathleen,” “Herbert and Frederick,” “Those Who Have no Turkey,” “The Melody Man” and the one-act plays “The Little Orphans” and “The Gold Piece.” “The Elusive Idea” tells of the refined boy Marcus Cornelius Smith who makes friends with the poor but “noble and enduring and optimistic and courageous” boy ‘Lias and develops a “desire to help” him and his mother (TBB Oct. 1920: 312; 314). Kathleen leaves her nice home with her grandmother and forgoes her college education to help her widowed father to raise her half-brothers and sisters. This story relies on traditional gender roles again. In “Herbert and Frederick,” the Brownies learn of yet another friendship between a rich and a poor boy. When Herbert saves Frederick’s life, the middle-class family offers the working-class boy to live with them.583 In “Those Who Have No Turkey,” the reader encounters a girl again who convinces her family to invite a poor family for dinner because they cannot afford a Thanksgiving turkey themselves – as mentioned before, charity and hospitality are presented as typical values of the rural South –, and in “The Melody Man,” a renowned singer decides to leave the comfort of his home behind to lead a vagabond life and to bring joy to less fortunate members of society with his music because helping others makes him happier than to live in luxury. The same altruistic motive can be found in “The Gold Piece.” Here, a poor couple gives up their dreams of a wooden clock, a kettle, a shawl, and a spoon and offers their savings to another poor woman who needs the money even more because her son is sick.584 In the course of the play, they realize that material 583 Herbert’s parents belong to the working class and are apparently unable to take proper care of

their son. Therefore, Courtney Vaughn-Roberson and Brenda Hill rightly argue that “without blaming those who are impoverished, this story effectively conveys the message that poverty carries the potential to disrupt the Black family” (Vaughn-Roberson, and Hill, “The Brownies’ Book and Ebony Jr.!: Literature as a Mirror of the Afro-American Experience” 503).

584 It is not clear if the boy and the girl are African-Americans because the drawings depict light- skinned characters who can either be whites or mulattos. It is possible that Langston Hughes wanted to spread the spirit of charity on a broader basis and not just in an African- American context.

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assets are unimportant compared to the satisfaction of helping others. “I’m very happy,” the boy declares upon giving the old woman the gold piece, and the girl agrees: “I’m happy, too. I’m happier than any wooden clock could make me” (TBB July 1921: 194). In “The Little Orphans,” a rich family adopts two poor orphaned children. At first, the mother only intends to donate toys as act of charity, but her son, a spoilt single child who feels very lonely, urges her to take the orphans home so that he finally has playmates. His motives are not entirely unselfish, but the story ends by asserting that they will be “a very happy family” together (TBB May 1920: 136). To conclude, all these characters show a deep commitment to helping other members of society, mostly belonging to the black race, who are less fortunate than they are themselves and consequently set a good example for the readers.

All in all, The Brownies’ Book depicts the African-American family and the black community as units whose members love each other. They take over responsibility for one another, work together, and they accept their obligations to promote group advancement as well as racial integrity. Many stories focus on racial uplift, and there are numerous examples of middle-class families to illustrate that Blacks, too, could attain a higher social status. However, one ought to bear in mind that even though Du Bois’ magazine also portrays the majority of poorer characters as righteous and honest people, it does not depict content working-class families in the way it includes happy middle-class families. Working-class characters are always eager to advance in life by gaining an education, or they need the help of the higher class to rise in society and to reduce their misery. Hence, there is always an emphasis on upward mobility. Like the treatment of dialect, which – as explained earlier – is often used to mark a character’s working-class origin, this particular preference, might be another manifestation of Du Bois’ and Fauset’s elitist tendencies and their bias for the middle class. Be this as it may, though, it remains by far more important that the periodical destroys the stereotype which depicted Blacks as irresponsible in their relationships to one another and as bad parents for their children and also counters the assumption that African-Americans could not rise in their social standing and acquire a middle-class life style.

4.6 Portrayal of Whites . . . you are for the first time going to what is called a “white” school and there are two attitudes which children often develop. One is the feeling of withdrawal and isolation, homesickness for your own group and consequent unwillingness even to try to cooperate. There is an equally dangerous opposite attitude, that is the feeling that you have come into contact with unusual and super-human people who can do things better than you and your folks, and are altogether above and beyond you, so that you make every effort to bow down to them. Both of these attitudes are I am sure you see altogether wrong. These people are human beings just as you are. There are among them

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the good and the bad, the kind and the cruel and they are part of the world in which you are going to live and work.585

This is the advice which Du Bois gives his granddaughter DuBois Williams when she entered a formerly all-white school in Massachusetts in 1946. In his letter, he anticipates all the emotional problems which his granddaughter would encounter in her new and predominantly white environment. However, he neither wanted the girl to shun her white classmates to prove her loyalty to her own race, nor did he want her to fall prey to a false admiration of the white world which, as explained earlier, would ultimately lead to the development of an inferiority complex. Instead, he hoped for her to realize that Blacks and whites were fellow human beings. White Americans were not “necessarily better people,” as he explains, but merely “have had better opportunities” than African-Americans so far.586 More than twenty years earlier, he had already assumed the same approach in The Brownies’ Book. Even though the magazine was designed for black children, it did not ban white characters from its pages entirely. Since Du Bois wanted to keep the two races from further separation, he relied on an integrationist stance, and his magazine was not to denigrate the white members of society but meant to prove to the young readers that Blacks and whites were indeed fellow human beings. However, he sought to destroy the stereotype of the “super-human” whites at the same time which meant that the depiction of white people could not be entirely positive. How his publication for children tried to achieve both of these aims will be demonstrated in this chapter which will examine the portrayal of white characters in the magazine.

The most striking text pertaining to whites comes from Annie Virginia Culbertson, a white collector of folklore. As said before, the original poet was in all probability black, and Culbertson only collected and hence preserved his work. “The Origin of White Folks” explains why some people have dark and some light skin color. At first glance, the poem seems entirely humorous. Contrary to Violet Joyce Harris’ assumption who claims that the text is free of racial chauvinism, one can detect anti-black prejudice on close examination.587 Right at the beginning, the poet declares that the white folks have no reason to “putt [sic] on airs” and consider themselves better on account of the color of their skin because God created the “culled folks” before them (TBB Jan. 1920: 7). Thus, Blacks belong to the “oldes’ uf de races,” which implies that it is in fact them who have a higher standing (7).

585 W.E.B. Du Bois, letter to DuBois Williams, 7 Oct. 1946, Aptheker, The Correspondence of

W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1944-1963 117. 586 W.E.B. Du Bois, letter to DuBois William, 7 Oct. 1946, Aptheker, The Correspondence of

W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1944-1963 117. 587 See Harris, “The Brownies’ Book: Challenge to the Selective Tradition in Children’s

Literature” 233.

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The adjectives the poet uses to describe skin color also clearly show a color preference: Blacks have “sunburnt [sic]” while whites have “wash’out” faces (7). The first adjective evokes positive associations which are connected to the sun, such as warmth and happiness, even passion and vitality if the burning aspect is taken into account, while the second adjective, which refers to colorlessness, is negatively connoted, implying dreariness and boredom. The poet furthermore clarifies that Blacks have sunburned faces because when God finished them, he left them in the sun to try. Whites, on the other hand, have washed-out faces because “Ole Nick” tempted them to eat the forbidden apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Knowing that they had fallen “in deep disgraces,” they tried to hide when they heard God calling out their names, and, since they were so deeply afraid of his wrath, their faces “turnt so pale dey stayed dat way” (7). This explanation reinterprets the common associations with the colors black and white: White implies guilt because it is a visual mark of the Original Sin while black stands for innocence since it was the common skin color before the Fall of Man. Blacks are descendants from those inhabitants of Paradise who did not eat the forbidden fruit which indicates that they, unlike the whites, are free of the Original Sin. In the final analysis, “The Origin of White Folks” wants to foster black pride. To do so, the poet indeed assumes a black supremacist attitude but in a mild form since the overall tone of the poem remains humorous which means that its main intention was to entertain the readers and not to evoke feelings of hatred against the whites.

The Brownies’ Book contains a second text, a story entitled “Gyp,” which tries to account for color variations among humans as well. It is striking that both of these contributions appear in the initial issue of the magazine and help to set the tone for the entire project. Unlike “The Origin of White Folks,” “Gyp” is a modern fairy tale and does not refer to the Bible. A.T. Kilpatrick’s portrayal of whites is not as negative as in Culbertson’s poem. As a matter of fact, whites are only mentioned in passing because the emphasis is on “little brown” and “little red children” and thus on Blacks and Native Americans (TBB Jan. 1920: 31). Of them, the readers learn that they “amused themselves by playing with the paints” which belong to the fairy Gyp who is painting apples high up in a tree. When he comes down and finds the children asleep, he decides to play a prank on them, and since “they liked red and brown best,” he “determined to paint their faces, knowing they would be delighted” (31). The children never find out why their faces changed color, but the Brownies come to know that “their descendants still live” and that “the little red children still love to roam about in the forest and on the plains” and the “little brown children can be found most everywhere, carrying happiness and sunshine to all they see” (31). “Those children who were at home remained white” (31). The brown and red children are described positively – there is a connection between Blacks, the sun, and happiness again – while the white children are not characterized any further. The fact that they stayed at home might be seen as a sign of passiveness. This interpretation sheds a negative light on the white race again

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because their attitude – which is entirely free of curiosity and lacking love of adventure – would ultimately lead to stagnation.

In her poem “Ideals,” Carrie W. Clifford compares the career whishes of two boys. She does not state directly which skin color the first boy, John, has, but she introduces the second one as “dark-faced Paul,” which suggests that John is white. This assumption is strengthened when one looks at John’s “ideals” which promote the notion of “the white man’s burden.” He wants to be the “ruler of the word” like Woodrow Wilson, Emperor Wilhelm, or Emperor Napoleon, he is drawn to capitalism and desires to be rich like Rockefeller, and he assumes an imperialist attitude when he declares that he wants to “colonize” “that old backward planet, Mars,” for the United States and then “annex all the stars” (TBB Aug. 1920: 244). John is depicted as a white aggressor who lusts for power and money and wants to lead his country into expansionist adventures because he believes that it is his people’s destiny to rule the word and to spread civilization to “backward” places. Planet earth and humankind do not even seem enough for him any longer since he plans to conquer the whole universe for his country to prove the greatness and influence of the United States. Quite contrary to the white boy, the black boy’s “ideals,” are connected to the love for humankind because, like the famous botanist Luther Burbank, he wants “to help mankind to grow” and to give all human beings “happy homes!/With children for their treasure-trove,/And work and food and fun enough/And oh, such lots and lots of love!” (244). The image of the black child is a positive one because Paul embodies love and promotes the ideal of human brotherhood while Clifford’s depiction of the white child tends towards the negative because all of John’s ambitions characterize him as aggressor and imperialist.

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There are other instances in The Brownies’ Book in which whites and western countries are depicted negatively as supremacists. It has already been demonstrated that the Judge and the Crow exhibit an anti-colonialist attitude. The Crow states, for example, that in Nicaragua and Honduras most people are colored and that the “trouble [in these countries] has often been fomented by Americans and other white

people” (TBB May 1920: 159). And the Judge asserts that “Big Nation[s],” in- cluding England, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the United States, al- ways desire to gain supre- macy over “Little Na- tion[s]” and, in the course of history, have already frequently stolen their land and exploited the native people there and still have not given up their hunger for power and their expan- sionist ambitions (TBB Aug. 1920: 240). In “The Quaintness of St. Helena,” the Brownies find out that the natives of St. Helena “have very little cash, be- cause the white merchants (and they increase slowly but surely) know how to make a mortgage cover practically everything the farmer has – crop, land, ‘creetures’ . . . and almost the man” (TBB Aug. 1920: 243). Du Bois’ periodical, however, refrains from in- cluding too many examples in which whites are de-

picted as aggressors and exploiters. Fomenting anti-white prejudice would have been too great an opposition to Du Bois’ intention to bring the black and the white race closer together. After all, he believed that African-Americans were meant to

Fig. 14 Frontispiece “Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven,” photograph by Underwood & Underwood, TBB Apr. 1920: 98, print.

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follow in Paul’s footsteps and advance human brotherhood, which will be dis- cussed in detail in a separate chapter.

In order to keep Blacks and whites from further separation, The Brownies’ Book regularly includes examples which are meant to demonstrate that their relationship is based on sympathy, respect, and friendship. The April 1920 frontispiece is leading the way (Fig. 14). In this photograph, the readers see a white woman who is surrounded by four black children. The caption includes the statement: “Of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” This quote refers to the Bible passage in which Jesus scolds his disciples for trying to keep the children from him (Matt. 19.14). With this image, Du Bois and Fauset did most likely intend to call upon the association that friendship and brotherly love between Blacks and whites will give rise to “the Kingdom of Heaven” and restore earth to a paradisiacal state or rather simply make the world a friendlier place. This interpretation is supported by the intense sense of security and physical closeness which the image radiates. The youngest child is sitting on the woman’s lap and holds her thumb in its small hand. One of the boys is leaning in a nonchalant way against her left leg, and the girl rests against her right side, touching the white woman as well as the black baby. If the woman was black, this photo could have easily been a regular family portrait. Even though Du Bois did most certainly want to raise feelings of friendship, I want to draw attention to the fact that the inclusion of this picture is not entirely unproblematic. It conjures up the old image of the kind master, or mistress, taking care of the wretched little slaves who would be forlorn without him. Even if unintentionally, the editors use an image here which is, at least in some ways, reminiscent of the stereotypes they were trying to combat.

Clearly striking in its portrayal of friendship between Blacks and whites is “The King’s Dilemma.” In this one-act play, the King’s son Nyanza befriends “common” white children and the black boy Zanzibo (TBB Dec. 1920: 373). His son’s choice of playmates infuriates the King, and he reminds Nyanza of his royal blood. The Prince, however, explains: “Each of us picked himself with a needle’s point and gave one drop of blood upon a parchment. Then walking at a distance, turned again to where the parchment lay, but could not tell one drop of blood from the other” (376). Willis Richardson mocks the so-called one-drop rule here because this little experiment does not only prove to Nyanza that white people of higher and lower social standing are equal but also that Blacks and whites share a common equality. That the Prince cares about the individual merit of a person and not his skin color becomes even more obvious when the King orders him to pick one of his playmates and to forgo the others. “The Prince (Putting his hand on the shoulder of the black boy who stands beside him)” declares: “Then I choose Zanzibo,” and his father cannot convince him to select “a white one” instead (376). The King tries to trick his son into giving up the black boy by telling him that he has to grant Zanzibo half of his kingdom because he believes that “Nyanza will tire of this unreal equality when he sees one rising from far below to share his power” (377).

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The prince’s friendship to Zanzibo is so deep and sincere, though, that he is not only willing but even very happy to share his power with his friend. However, since the King is not as open-minded as his son and does not want a black person to rule his kingdom, he decides to abolish monarchy altogether and declares that the “power shall go into the hands of the people” (377). With his last words “[n]ow glory in your equals,” he leaves the stage, full of cynicism and scorn for his son’s belief in equality (377). Nyanza, on the other hand, is “[p]leased,” and he and Zanzibo “join hands as the others go out” (377). This tableau is the play’s last manifestation of the friendship between a black and a white boy.

There are also prose texts which disclose the friendship between black and white children. In “America For All: Benefits of Enlistment in the United States,” the readers learn that “Sam was white, Billy Boy was brown. . . . They were always together, and the one apple or the last dime was shared equally between them” (TBB July 1920: 195). Moreover, Happy, whom Peggy Poe introduces as being “brown as a cookie” in “Pumpkin Land,” has two playmates, Boy and Waddy, who are identified as “little white boys” in “The Watermelon Dance” (TBB Jan. 1920: 4; TBB Sept. 1920: 265). In “The House of Broken Things,” the Brownies meet the same triumvirate again, but this time the story remains colorblind. Poe only mentions that “Boy and Waddy were as clean and shiny as the moonbeams” and that “Happy was glad that Mammy Tibbet let him wear his white suit and he was smiling finer than the biggest moon could ever smile” (TBB Jan. 1920: 8). She reveals that the white boys are of a higher social standing than the black boy because Happy supposedly does not wear his best suit on a regular basis. He is all the more happy that he is not lagging behind his friends this particular day. The fact that Poe does not stress the children’s skin color continuously strengthens the impression that the boys’ friendship is based on mutual respect and equality; the differentiation between black and white – as well as high class and low class – is insignificant for them.

In “A Criss-Cross Thanksgiving,” the readers encounter the black boy Paquito who is friends and even in love with the white girl Mildred and plans on giving her “a diamond engagement ring” when she is eighteen (TBB Nov. 1920: 320). When he travels down South to meet his mother’s relatives for Thanksgiving, he meets the black girl Rose, though, and finds himself torn between these two girls: “He had met Rose and was very much impressed. He didn’t know it, but in his mind he was comparing her soft curling dark ringlets with Mildred’s straight yellow braids . . .” (321). Back home, he tells Mildred of his holidays and declares that he is going to marry Rose now as soon as he quits school and finds a job. At first glance, it seems that Paquito has chosen the black girl over the white one, but the final word is not yet spoken. When Mildred announces that he is “the type of fellow” who actually never marries at all, she and Paquito find themselves in a lover’s quarrel again which is typical of their relationship and proves that the boy has not quite chosen the woman of his dreams yet (330). Both girls are appealing to him,

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and even though he compares their physical appearance and emphasizes distinct racial attributes, he does not base his decision on external features. It appears that, in the final analysis, his choice will depend on the girls’ typical character traits and not on the color of their skin or their racial origin. This story does not only show that black and white children can be friends, but Augusta E. Bird, being quite ahead of her time, even points to the possibility of intermarriage even though anti- miscegenation laws were still in force when The Brownies’ Book was published. 588 It is striking that she chose to include the word “Criss-Cross” in her title which might not merely refer to the confusion caused by Rose at the Thanksgiving dinner but maybe even encourage miscegenation by foreshadowing a potential racial mixing in the case of Mildred and Paquito.

“Why Bennie Was Fired” and “The Luck of Cindy Ann” depict the relationship between a white employer and a black employee in a positive way. Bennie does chores for a white lady called Mrs. Blair every morning before school and is “very proud of her job” because it enables her to help her family and to save up some money for herself (TBB July 1920: 222). When the girl finds out that the winner of her school’s oratorical contest will receive twenty-five dollars, she decides to win the money to put it on her bankbook, and she starts to practice doggedly. Her relationship with Mrs. Blair has always been a good one. The white woman is a charitable employer who offers Bennie leftover cake for her family, for example. However, the girl nevertheless does not confide in her that she needs some extra time to prepare for the contest. When Bennie shows up late for a whole week, the child’s unpunctuality starts to infuriate Mrs. Blair. She resolves to dismiss her. In spite of her annoyance at Bennie, the woman is not happy with her decision to let the girl go and offers her to come back to work next time she sees her. Bennie, however, has won the contest in the meantime and plans on having her very first “delightful vacation for winning the first prize” (224). She does not want her job back but merely pays her former employer a visit to show her the prize and to explain why she was always late for work. “Mrs. Blair’s eyes grew larger with surprise and admiration as Bennie proudly relates the incidents which led to her victory,” so the narrator states (244). When she hears the real reason for the girl’s tardiness, her old sympathy for her former employee is restored entirely, and she scolds the girl for not having told her that she needed time to practice. The story implies that racial bias had nothing to do with Bennie’s dismissal: Mrs. Blair fired her because the girl neglected her duties as household help and not because she believed unreliability to be a typical black character trait; otherwise she would not have offered to give Bennie her job back as soon as she understands the girl’s 588 Anti-miscegenation laws existed from the 1660s onwards till they were ruled unconstitutional

in 1967. These laws were “among the longest lasting American racial restrictions” (Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of American History 83.1 (1996): 49, print).

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reasons for being late. Mrs. Blair does not only forgive her former employee, she is also proud of her and “could not but help rejoice with Bennie as she almost danced out of the kitchen door and happily hummed one of her school songs all the way home” (244). The story upholds the conventional racial hierarchy – the black girl works for the white lady after all –, but the narrator emphasizes repeatedly that the relationship between Bennie and Mrs. Blair is based on mutual respect.

“The Luck of Cindy Ann” also focuses on the employment relationship between a black and a white woman. The readers learn that Cindy’s Aunt Venie enjoys working for Miss Jennie – a former Southern Belle – the most although the “‘thankey-pan’ was not much in evidence there as at some other places” where she was also employed because both women “had a fellow sympathy for each other” (TBB Feb. 1921: 35). This sympathy is based on the fact that both of them were “bearing a cross” (35). They had to face “the hard, every day things of life” alone since Aunt Venie had been a widow for many years, and Miss Jennie’s male providers – her father and later her uncle – were also dead, and both had only scarce financial means at their disposal. Obviously, Aunt Venie is poorer than her white employer. Not only does she have to provide the living for herself and her orphaned niece, she is also “struggling to see that last cent of debt paid off the little place that she and Cindy Ann called home” (36). However, Miss Jennie’s financial means are meager, too, because she has lost her former wealth, her home, and her family in the Civil War. For some time, she found a new home with her aunt and uncle, but when they die as well, they only left her an old house, old furniture, and “her memories of earlier days” (36). The relationship between the white lady and her black employee is based on female sympathy because both have learned through experience that being a single woman, who can only rely on herself to get on in life, is excruciatingly hard and deserves respect. Since both characters share this attitude and value each other for their strength to bear their individual lots gracefully, the color of their skin loses its importance for them. They see each other as fellow women.

Moreover, many biographies express that white Americans respect their African-American fellow men even though they are or once were their slaves. Since they are based on real and not fictional characters, the biographical sketches in particular prove that among whites, as among any other people, there are “the good and the bad, the kind and the cruel,” as Du Bois explains to his grand- daughter. 589 Of Blanche K. Bruce, the Brownies learn, for example, that “the people of Mississippi, both white and colored [my emphasis], called on him to take one of the greatest positions a state has to offer; – to be a Senator from the State of Mississippi, in the great Congress at Washington (TBB Mar 1920: 95). Thus, the author points out that there were cases even shortly after the Emancipation 589 W.E.B. Du Bois, letter to DuBois Williams, 7 Oct. 1946, Aptheker, The Correspondence of

W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections, 1944-1963 117.

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Proclamation, in which white Southerners had already come to hold their former slaves in high esteem and even trusted them with high responsibility. Frederick Douglass, too, was a former slave who came to be admired and respected by both Blacks and whites. To prove this, Laura E. Wilkes stresses that upon his death, “upward of ten thousand people of both races [my emphasis] viewed the remains as they lay in state in this church, he loved so well, while nigh three thousand gained admission to the services” (TBB Sept. 1920: 270). His funeral turned into the ultimate acknowledgement of Douglass’ life and into a visual manifestation of respect, demonstrating that he was not only esteemed by his own but also by the white race. Another African-American who was held in high esteem by whites, although not by his American countrymen, is Paul Cuffee. In his biography, the author emphasizes that when Cuffee sailed to England to lay his ideas of how to help the natives in Sierra Leone before the Board of Managers of the African Institution there, the British “listened to him with great respect and assisted him in every way in carrying out his plans” (TBB Feb. 1920: 38).

The Brownies’ Book, however, makes sure to clarify that this respect was often mutual. One out of numerous examples can be found in the Douglass’ biography. Here, the children learn that, in his second marriage, Douglass chose a white wife – a decision for which he was often scorned and ostracized by whites and Blacks alike. Many African-Americans tried to deny his love for Helen Pitts because, in their eyes, his marriage to a white woman blemished the image of one of their races greatest heroes (TBB Sept. 1920: 266). Du Bois’ periodical acknowledges his marriage to Helen Pitts by stating that his second wife was “a lady of the Caucasian race” (266).590 Du Bois and Fauset did not condemn him for his feelings for a white woman. Their impartiality proves again that they wanted their readers to see the white members of society as fellow human beings. In addition, The Brownies’ Book includes biographical sketches focusing on white men and women, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, the Buffum family, the Grimké sisters, and John Brown, who respected the black race and often risked their own reputation, in some cases even their lives, to fight against slavery. Their biographies all sprang from the pen of Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman who, especially by introducing her abolitionist family, wanted to show that even during slavery there was “a great deal of love and kindliness between white and colored Americans” (TBB Apr. 1921: 109). She

590 In the October 1920 “Little People of the Month” column, the Brownies learn of another

famous black icon, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor whose father, “a West African Negro,” had already transgressed racial boundaries by marrying a white British woman, Alice Hare. With Jessie S. Fleetwood, also an Englishwoman, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor himself entered an interracial marriage, too (“Little People of the Month,” TBB Oct. 1920: 307, print). The fact that both marriages are acknowledged in The Brownies’ Book and that the readers even get to know the women’s names is also meant to illustrate that there often was mutual respect between Blacks and whites.

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clarifies: “. . . there has always been a special bond of affectionate sympathy between those white people who, for more than one hundred years, have been trying to help colored people” (109). Du Bois seems to agree with Wyman that these white men and women had earned to be respected by African-Americans and honors their deeds by publishing their biographies in a magazine which was in particular designed to celebrate black achievements. This topic will be discussed in more detail in the chapter on hero-worship.

To sum up, The Brownies’ Book does contain contributions which deflate the stereotype of the “super-human” whites. Sometimes, the magazine even depicts the white race in a negative way as power-hungry aggressors and capitalists. These negative accounts are never extensive or exaggerated, though, but rather stay on the informative side in order not to raise feelings of hatred. Although the topics of slavery, lynching, and racism in general have not been included in this section because they will be treated separately later – the analysis will add some more examples of negative images pertaining to whites – one can conclude that the instances in which whites are portrayed positively are more numerous than those in which they are treated in a negative way. The periodical’s emphasis was indeed on demonstrating that Blacks and whites can live together on the basis of friendship, sympathy, and respect and ought to consider each other as fellow human beings.

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