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The Story of Little Black Sambo and The Story of Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Source

University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature

Baldwin Call #

Baldwin Call #23h23190

Description

This disturbing adaptation reduces Sambo and his mother to grotesque caricatures of Black people. Illustrator John R. Neill did not alter Bannerman’s original text, but he visually represents Little Black Sambo as animalistic and savage. This Sambo has exaggerated, bright red lips and large white eyes, features that evoke minstrelsy imagery. When he isn’t dressed in his “grand” clothes, he wears what appears to be a grass skirt or a tattered loincloth, reinforcing his unflattering portrayal as an uncivilized African. Bizarrely, Neill also draws Sambo with curled, elf-like shoes, contributing to the boy’s dehumanization.

The book’s final illustration features Black Mumbo, drawn here as a barefoot, gap-toothed, red-lipped Mammy figure. African American studies scholar Kimberly Wallace-Sanders notes that the Mammy caricature derives from antebellum fiction and the slave plantation. Typically rendered as an obese, black-skinned, middle-aged woman who wears an apron and a headscarf, the Mammy is a “jolly presence” that was used to justify slavery. As a result, Neill’s representation of Black Mumbo as a Mammy figure perpetuates harmful misrepresentations of Black women as happy domestic slaves.

Creator

Helen Bannerman

Contributor(s) 

Illustrated by John R. Neill

Publisher 

Reilly & Britton Co

Publication Date

1908

Format 

56 pages; colored illustrations; 18 cm.
Volume 2 of The Children’s Red Books series

Language

English

 

Posted in Baldwin Editions