Books You Might Not Get to Read

Hello, children!

A young friend was reading one of the more obscure Oz books by L. Frank Baum to her son, and she came to a part, a character, which she considered racist. She stopped reading and set the book down.

When she talked about this, it made me reflect on how I was raised. No one ever did not read a book to me because it was racist.

I was at an estate sale here on the island a few years ago and saw a book titled “Little Brown Koko,” and I thought, wow! I had that book when I was little.

The book cover was bright blue, with a colorful picture on the front of Little Brown Koko and his Mammy (think  Aunt Jemima, or Hattie McDaniels in “Gone with the Wind”).

I picked the book up and began reading. Oh! Holy gazoly carp shucks! I could not believe my eyes. These stories were written in the clueless racist void of their time, by a woman named Blanche Seale Hunt. She wrote the Little Brown Koko stories for a radio show that ran through the 1930s until 1941. They were little morality tales for the (white) boys and girls. In my experience raising kids, the Berenstain Bears did a much better job of morality tales, for all boys and girls, as well as non-binary children, but don’t get me started.

Seeing that book 60 years down the road made me realize – again - how children my age and younger were and are raised with the bland acceptance of the racism which is the norm in our society.

That is why we white Americans are so dense about what is racist and what is not, and how hard it is to open our eyes to the things we took for granted in our understanding of life and our society.

If you asked us as children if we were racist, we would probably ask, what’s a racist?

Then we would say, oh, heck no. Don’t be silly.

Long story even longer, L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Oz books, was writing at a time (19th century) when racism was simply the way it was. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and then the Union had to win the Civil War to make it stick.

Rick’s Aunt Dodie wanted Rick to uproot the family and move us back to Ohio, where Rick and I and the kids would be close to his mother’s family. She was surprised when he told her he couldn’t move back to Ohio because of the racism there.

“But, Ricky, that’s just the way it is,” she said, and she was correct.

I don’t think Little Brown Koko is coming out in any new printings. Even most white people would understand why not.

Then there are the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, although I believe the Uncle Remus stories had a much wider circulation and more complex history than Little Brown Koko.

Those stories are based on African folklore that Harris first heard at Turnwold Plantation where he went to work at the age of fourteen. Harris spent his time off in the slave quarters. His background as an outsider - the illegitimate, red-headed son of an Irish immigrant – made him feel more connected and comfortable with the slaves. He absorbed the stories, language, and inflections of the slaves he knew there. Their stories later became the foundation and inspiration for Harris's Tales of Uncle Remus.

Thing is, Uncle Remus is a retired old slave telling stories in slave dialect to the rosy cheeked white children who lived in the big house. Uncle Remus’s stories of Brer Rabbit and the other animals – Brer Fox and Brer Bear - were Joel Chandler Harris’s attempt to preserve the African stories he had heard from the slaves.

His efforts are not appreciated now.

Walt Disney made a film, “The Song of the South,” of the Uncle Remus stories, and published comic books with Brer Rabbit, that wily trickster, which I read when I was a child.

The trickster is a common character in world folklore, but Brer Rabbit does not get much press anymore. Don’t look for “The Song of the South,” to be re-released anytime soon, or for anyone to do a cover of, “Zippity Doo Dah,” either, which is a darn catchy tune.

Times have changed, but based on what I’ve seen, I doubt there will ever be true equality of the races in America - not for a long, long time, anyway. Some people need to look down on other people to feel better about themselves.

I think that those of us who realize that we absorbed racism, and we are carriers, need to change what we can, as we can.

I am not saying that will be easy. We are such well-meaning, clueless people, most of us; but we are responsible for our beliefs and behaviors all the same. Dang, huh?