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Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002 (review)

2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2006.0006

1553-1201

Lois Rauch Gibson,

Architecture, Design, and Social History

Reviewed by: Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 Lois Rauch Gibson (bio) Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002. By Michelle H. Martin . New York and London: Routledge, 2004. The first time I approached Michelle Martin's Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children's Picture Books, 1845–2002, I treated it as a reference book. I read the table of contents, looked up authors and books that interested me, and skimmed. The second time, I began with the introduction and read the book straight through, chapter by chapter. Both approaches were satisfying; the text is lucid, readable, and informative. Students and professional researchers will find the book logical and easy to use, essential qualities in a reference source. The bibliography of primary and secondary sources, though selective rather than exhaustive, indicates thorough grounding in the subject. Martin is knowledgeable and authoritative. As Martin indicates in her introduction, her individual chapters have been written from different perspectives, and this is evident in their different tones and approaches. The first three chapters take a historical approach. The next two chapters look at the professionals in the field of African-American picture books: chapter four discusses Coretta Scott King Award winners and their impact; chapter five examines, through interviews and intergenerational comparisons, influential families such as the Pinckneys and Dillons, who are producing second-generation authors and artists. Martin also includes two generations of Hudsons, publishers of Just Us Books, in this chapter. The last section of the book is the most diverse, including three critical articles, all employing different "critical lenses" to exemplify the "kinds of analytical academic work" (xxi) being done today, plus a chapter called "'Why Are We Reading This Stuff?': A Pedagogy of Teaching African-American Children's Picture Books." Yet each chapter is interesting enough on its own and also connects easily to Martin's unifying theme: African American children's literature is now experiencing a "Golden Age," comparable to what Martin calls the late-nineteenth century's Golden Age of "mainstream Anglo children's literature" (xi). Though the book's subtitle suggests an historical approach, Martin does not move chronologically from earliest to most recent African-American picture books, even in her first section, "History of African-American Children's Picture Books." Instead, each chapter in this section looks at milestones within a particular genre or era. For example, the first chapter, "'Hey, Who's the Kid with the Green Umbrella?'" addresses Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo and Heinrich Hoffman's Black-a-moor [End Page 344] (from "The Story of the Inky Boys" in Struwwelpeter) in all their incarnations. Martin offers a fascinating comparison between the two and an excellent common-sense analysis of various versions of each, beginning with Hoffman's 1845 text and Bannerman's 1899 one, and ending with Julius Lester's and Fred Marcellino's 1996 versions of Bannerman's text. This is my favorite chapter. Though Bannerman has been condemned and defended many times over the past century, Martin's juxtaposition of Bannerman to Hoffmann brings a welcome freshness to the Bannerman debate. Martin argues convincingly that Hoffman's Black-a-moor is a stereotype, lacking in "personhood" (14) or humanity, while Sambo is an individual child, perhaps the "forerunner for Peter in The Snowy Day (1960)" by Ezra Jack Keats (16), another controversial book by a white author. Martin and others, however, hail The Snowy Day as a landmark book for black children seeking characters like themselves. Unlike Hoffman and Bannerman, Keats created a child some critics felt was not black enough, but Martin defends the book and cites it as an example of why she includes books by white and biracial authors. She has chosen to be as inclusive as possible. One wonders if Martin would approve of Christopher Bing's richly illustrated version of Bannerman's text (Handprint Books, 2003), in which he portrays Sambo as an African child in India. Bing and his publisher Christopher Franceschelli confront the "complex history and dark shadows" of the story, as Franceschelli explains in a long endnote. Both Martin and Bing comment on the longevity and popularity of...