Rewriting and Re-Whiting The Little Colonel: Racial Anxieties, Tomboyism, and Lloyd Sherman

The Little Colonel books, Annie Fellows Johnston's popular series for children, were published in America between 1895 and 1912. The bestselling books feature Lloyd Sherman, the tomboyish heroine who is nicknamed the "Little Colonel" for her imperious ways and hot temper, like her Confederate colonel grandfather. The series originated with The Little Colonel in 1895, intended at first as a singular story, but soon book followed book almost annually due to public demand. Issued in multiple languages and read worldwide, their popularity was capitalized upon with merchandise, including games, paper dolls, picture postcards, and diaries.¹ When Johnston published her autobiography, The Land of the Little Colonel, in 1929, she had a reputation as her generation's "best beloved story-teller" (ix), the natural successor to Louisa May Alcott. In 1935, a highly successful film adaptation starred Shirley Temple in the titular role, and broke boundaries with its first interracial dance scene between Temple and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. But by this time, Johnston's books were already diminishing in popularity, and within two generations they had all but disappeared from library shelves and schools. There has been very little critical discussion of them subsequently.

The Little Colonel series was produced in a time of radical social change, and was written and published when Reconstruction in the American South was giving way to Jim Crow laws, enforcing racial segregation. This coincided with a number of pro-South movements which endeavored to preserve the culture of the antebellum Southern plantation as a positive element of American history. With portrayals of life in a small Kentucky town (fictionalized as "Lloydsboro"),² Johnston's series can function as "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" literature, promoting ideology that centered the South as a site of true civilization and a kind of American nobility.³

I argue that Johnston's books have much to communicate about the way American girlhood was portrayed at the time and in that place. By examining the collective cultural inheritance of the first Little Colonel book, and by exploring the complicated racial and class anxieties it communicates in the context of white privileged perspectives about girlhood and national identity, it is possible to read Lloyd's behavior as negotiation of those racial and gendered circumstances. I interrogate Lloyd Sherman as a hybrid American girl who ostensibly consolidates the best of North and South in one traditional literary "Beautiful Child,"⁴ examining her social power, boundary transgressions, and agency. However, when she is contextualized within a framework of gender, class, and racial performativity, Lloyd actually reveals particular American and Southern anxieties. By considering issues of gender through hybridity, transgression, performance, and constructed race, Lloyd's function as heroine in the first book also reveals her as an object of her grandfather's patriarchal reclaiming.

Literary Heritage and Contexts

The plot of the first Little Colonel book centers on how a bitter Kentucky colonel is finally reconciled with his daughter, Elizabeth, and her Yankee husband, Jack, through the actions of his five-year-old granddaughter, Lloyd. Although Jack Sherman is "a splendid fellow, and enormously wealthy," Old Colonel Lloyd forbade Elizabeth from marrying Jack because "he was a Northerner. That was enough for the old Colonel," who "hates Yankees like poison" (20). The couple eloped to New York, and continued to live there for the first five years of their daughter Lloyd's life. But bad investments and a bank failure necessitated their move to Lloydsboro, while Jack goes West to "make more" money (21), the point where the novel begins. Once in Lloydsboro, Lloyd disobeys her mother and her mammy, Mom Beck, to sneak to her grandfather's house, where the Old Colonel catches the child eating up all of the strawberries in his garden. The Old Colonel is shocked at Lloyd's disheveled appearance and lack of propriety, and yet is captivated by her winsomeness, even though he doesn't initially recognize her as his own granddaughter, his kin.

The Colonel's extreme hatred of Northerners, especially the Yankee, Jack Sherman,⁵ drives The Little Colonel's main conflict. From...