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  • Little Black Sambo Revisited
  • Nina Mikkelsen (bio)
Pictus Orbis Sambo: A Publishing History, Checklist, and Price Guide for the Story of Little Black Sambo (1899-1999), by Phyllis Settecase Barton. Sun City, Calif.: Pictus Orbis Press, 1998.

The 1960s produced in America the civil rights movement, the assassinations of three political leaders, a debilitating war, baby boomers protesting that war, flower children, a new look at class consciousness and the race problem, and multicultural authenticity as a vital concept for the arts. The children's book world responded by opening the doors to writers of color and "cleansing" library shelves of racist words and pictures. One of the first books to go was Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo, originally published in 1899.

In 1959, the editors of the textbook classic Anthology of Children's Literature included Bannerman's story in the picture book section, asserting that the charm of this simple and dramatic story lay "in the happy choice of incidents and in the ingenious way little Sambo of India overcomes apparently impossible difficulties" (77). The problem for those just awakening to the notion of white supremacist thinking was that although the story of a small boy outwitting four large tigers was simple, dramatic, and ingenious, the pictures presented harsh caricatures of the members of a "black" family that seemed to be African rather than Indian. And her story presented a puzzling mix of foods (Indian "ghi," or butter, and a recipe for Scottish hoecakes) and cultures—an Indian bazaar, Bengal tigers, and a boy called "Sambo," a name used on several continents, long before Bannerman wrote her story, to describe African, not Indian, males.

Bannerman's eclectic experiences may account for some of the mystery. Her Scottish clergyman father accepted a post on Madeira, an island off the coast of West Africa, where she lived before marrying a physician and setting off for India, where she would rear four children. But questions remained. Why would Bannerman have given an Indian child an African name? And why would she have given him and his parents large accentuated lips and rolling eyes, unless she wished [End Page 260] to present this black family as the same comical curiosity that writers and illustrators often presented in that era, in Europe and America?

By the time the next edition of the Anthology appeared (1970), The Story of Little Black Sambo was no longer in sight. (Black educators had been erasing it all along.) Yet like the bad penny, it has been turning up ever since—in memorabilia of popular culture, canon wars, and new versions. In the past thirty years, six reader stances have emerged: benevolent censorship (dismissal of the book as racist), nostalgic recollections of the book, defensiveness and veiled bigotry, even-handed analysis, rehabilitation (attempts to defend and restore the original text), and revision of the book—words, pictures, or both.

Favoring the fifth stance is Phyllis Settecase Barton, who has authored a large tome, Pictus Orbis Sambo. The title arises from an idea of Johannes Amos Comenius, the seventeenth-century progressive educator from Bohemia, to give children lessons about the world through woodcut pictures of everyday objects, ideas, and events—or to teach them through pictures. His Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World) is often called the first picture book. Barton's Pictus Orbis Sambo is a publishing history of Bannerman's book and a catalogue of Little Black Sambo books published during the twentieth century. (The original book never went out of print.)

Barton is a collector of Sambo books and memorabilia and a previous owner of a children's antiquarian bookshop in California, and her mission, as expressed in Pictus Orbis Sambo, is to salvage Bannerman's story—as folktale—and restore it to the canon. But this may be a mission impossible, for several reasons, not the least of which is the question of genre. Is Little Black Sambo a picture book, as the editors of Anthology of Children's Literature indicate, a picture storybook, or illustrated story, as Barton identifies it in her introduction, or a folktale, as she later asserts?

Bannerman's story, in its original format, is clearly a picture...

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