When my father-in-law Yanko died eight years ago, one of the things we pulled out of his house were a few dozen books Karen had read when she was a little girl. Most of these were from the Little Golden Books line published by Simon & Schuster in the '40s and '50s, but there were a few Rand McNally Elf titles mixed in. They were in remarkably good condition, and our first thought was that they might be worth something.
We ended up donating almost all of them. We kept a couple. One of which has been bothering me for years.
The Five Little Bears is a 1955 Elf title, written by Sterling North and illustrated by Jean Tamburine. It's about brown bear cubs who, having decided to be polar bears, whitewash themselve. They experience unintended consequences when they are corralled by a zookeeper and put in a cage with a mother polar bear, who dunks them in ice water which they do not enjoy and which rinses off the paint, revealing them as ordinary. Mother polar bear angrily cuffs them about; zookeeper realizes his mistake and rescues them. After a scolding and some ice cream they get sent home to their real mother.
The New York Times Book Review called it an "amusing fable for children of the picture-book age," but if were I to say this story makes me feel a little odd, you might understand. For what's the message here? Don't try to pretend you're white if you're black or brown?
One of the artifacts from my own childhood is the memory of my father singing "Stay In Your Own Backyard," a "pickaninny ballad" from 1899 written by Lyn Udall and Karl Kennett that includes the lines:
Now honey, yo' stay in yo' own backyard,
Doan mind what dem white chiles do;
What show yo' suppose dey's a gwine to gib
A black little coon like yo'?
So stay on dis side of de high boahd fence,
And honey doan cry so hard:
Go out an' a-play, jes as much as yo' please,
But stay in yo' own backyard.
Maybe you think I'm over-thinking this. It's just a made-up story about some mischievous little bears. OK. Here's what the little bears are named: Eenie, Meenie, Meinie, Mo, and Nig.
I did some research. The Five Little Bears was first published in 1935. Sterling North's family--he died in 1974--told me through a spokesperson that he got the inspiration from his visits to the zoo in Chicago, where he worked for the Daily News, alongside Carl Sandburg and John Gunther (who wrote Death Be Not Proud). My 1955 edition is at least the third printing of the book, and the first illustrated by Tamburine. (It's not especially rare; I found several copies available online, at reasonable prices.)
I asked children's literature blogger Book Aunt if she knew anything about The Five Little Bears. She was familiar with the 1935 edition, which had two-tone orange and black illustrations by Clarence Biers and Hazel Frazee. She guesses the full-color illustrations were commissioned because the old ones no longer seemed "sufficiently attractive" in the '50s.
Here's where it gets interesting. She found another copy of the book, also with a copyright date of 1955, also illustrated by Tamburine, but the bears' names had been changed to Skippy, Nippy, Yippy, Tip, and Joe. And the book title was changed to The Five Busy Bears.
"The cover is different from the previous Tamburine-illustrated one," she writes, "but as far as I can tell the inside illustrations were the same. Other similar copies said that they were the 1960 or the 1962 printing."
Like me, Book Aunt assumes that the names were changed because Rand McNally realized the diminutive of what we these days call the "n-word" was offensive.
Obviously, times change. My father knew about "Stay In Your Own Backyard" because it was featured in an Our Gang short he remembered from his childhood, the 1925 two-reeler Your Own Backyard. He would have seen this in a theater about 20 years after it was originally released, and his 9- or 10-year-old self might or might not have recognized it as a well-intentioned critique of Jim Crow.
In the short, Farina--the black member of the gang--is temporarily ostracized not because of his race but because he owns an obnoxious goat. By the end of the film, he's back in good standing.
All I know is that my father remembered the song. He might not have taken anything else from it.
Sterling North was apparently a prince of a man and a pretty influential book critic in his day. My friend Bill Jones, a world expert on the Classics Illustrated literary adaptations, tells me that North was infamous in comic book circles for a column he wrote for the Daily News in 1940 in which he argued comic books were "[b]adly drawn, badly written and badly printed--a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems" and that "[t]heir crude blacks and reds spoil the child's natural sense of color; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories."
A century ago, he was 11 years old, growing up in a small Wisconsin town, caring for a dog, a bird, a muskrat, and a woodchuck. And soon after his mother died, with his brother away fighting in Europe, he found an abandoned baby raccoon. He raised it and nearly 50 years later wrote a book about it called Rascal, that sold more than 2 million copies, that Disney made into a movie.
His boyhood home in Edgerton, Wis., is a museum. He was assuredly not a crude racist. Just a product of his time.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 11/13/2018