"Hey, Who's the Kid with the Green Umbrella?" Re-evaluating the Black-a-Moor and Little Black Sambo

Place the Black-a-moor, the protagonist in Heinrich Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” from Struwwelpeter (1845), next to Helen Bannerman’s protagonist in The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), and the resemblance is obvious (see figures 1 and 2). Both children have dark skin, curly or Afro hair, and bright red lips. Both carry green umbrellas and wear a red garment. Even the body positions are similar: the illustration of Little Black Sambo walking home after regaining possession of his clothes (Sambo 45) mirrors the image of the Black-a-moor before and after his encounter with the three ruffians (Struwwelpeter 12, 14). The Black-a-moor is seen only wearing red shorts, and after Sambo’s encounter with the tigers, he spends six illustrated pages in the same near-naked state as Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor. Both amateur artists, Bannerman and Hoffmann illustrated these books with crude, somewhat surreal, and perhaps even child-like sketches.

Writing during “the golden age” of children’s literature, Hoffmann and Bannerman ventured into uncharted territory in writing about children of color. The mere fact that black children were virtually invisible in children’s literature until the 1960s makes these early images significant (Harris 109). Sharing visual connections, common controversial publication histories, and important ideological messages that affect the depiction of black children in juvenile literature even today, The Story of Little Black Sambo and “The Story of the Inky Boys” beg comparison as forerunners of contemporary multiracial children’s literature.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Hoffmann’s “The Inky Boys” features one of the first—and maybe the first—European depiction of a black child in a children’s text. The Story of Little Black Sambo bears significance not only as a revision of this earlier image but also as a means by which messages about the black child were disseminated to a substantially more vast international reading audience than Struwwelpeter reached. In spite of the sixty-year controversy concerning racism in The Story of Little Black Sambo, Bannerman’s text remains an important touchstone within historical children’s literature. Thus, as seminal representations, both Hoffmann’s and Bannerman’s texts have strongly influenced American depictions of black children in juvenile literature in positive and negative ways. In terms of its role within minority literature, The Story of Little Black Sambo improves upon the image of the black child created in Hoffmann’s “The Story of the Inky Boys” in its implicit messages about the protagonist’s race, class, and intelligence. These two texts were written fifty-four years apart, the former at the dawn of the golden age of children’s literature, the latter at the close of this significant era. To further situate this comparison within the history of children’s literature, I will discuss the ways in which these two texts embody the nineteenth-century move from instruction to delight.

To discover intertextual connections between Struwwelpeter and The Story of Little Black Sambo, one need only look at interviews with Bannerman’s children. Robert, one of her two sons, confirms that he owned a copy of Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter as a child and, although he did not specify the reasons, decidedly disliked it (Hay 174). Living in India with many native house servants, Bannerman was surrounded by dark-skinned people with whom she interacted daily. Given her experience with people of color, her illustrations of Sambo could have looked less like Hoffmann’s Black-a-moor, who is of African descent, and more like the Indians she saw on a daily basis. Nineteenth-century English education clearly delineated class and race distinctions, and as Elizabeth Hay comments in Sambo Sahib (1981), Bannerman was too well-educated and observant to confuse Africans with Indians (28). She made a strategic literary choice in her decision about this character’s ethnicity. Given the resemblance between Hoffmann’s illustration of the Black-a...