Author Archives: Andrea Immel

The Progress of Sugar: Illustrating the Production of a Luxury Commodity in a Slave Economy

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Nowdays the word “progress”  usually means “growth, development, usually to a better state or condition; improvement,”  rather than  “advancement through a process, a sequence of events, a period of time, etc.”   In early nineteenth-century British children’s books, “progress” also can refer to a sub-genre of illustrated non-fiction that explains the necessary steps to make something useful from a kind of raw material–for example, the progress of wheat, the progress of bread, etc.  When the product was sugar, the subject was politically charged, because it was impossible to describe how sugar cane was grown, harvested, and processed without reference to the underlying economy of human trafficking.

Amelia Opie’s “The Black Man’s Lament ” has two speakers, the British abolitionist poet who exposes the white man’s crime by allowing a black enslaved man to describe the how his people suffer so “civilized” people can enjoy sugar with their tea.  The poet’s tribute to the sight of a sugar-cane field in bloom is quickly forgotten as the enslaved man takes the reader through the process step by step.   The second step is the breaking up of families through forcible removal of people from their native lands.   The third step is packing their bodies like bales of cotton into a frigate’s hold.  The sixth step is selling the unlucky survivors of the ocean voyage to white planters, looking for more workers in the sugar cane fields.  Steps seven through fourteen show the sequence of jobs that must be performed until the mature canes can be harvested.  The last steps show how the sugar cane is made into sugar crystals, which can be packed in barrels for shipping to England.

Amelia Opie, The Black Man’s Lament: or How to Make Sugar. London: Harvey and Darton, 1826), p. 6. (Cotsen 15245)

Amelia Opie, “The Black Man’s Lament,” p. 8. Two planters inspecting a man for possible purchase. Notice the drivers with whips in the far right and background. (Cotsen 15245)

Opie, “The Black Man’s Lament,” p. 16. This is the only scene in the fields where the overseer is not watching the black man like a hawk. (Cotsen 15245)

The Rev. Isaac Taylor’s Scenes in Africa, one in a series to remedy British children’s ignorance of cultural geography, is not a progress poem,  but its more ambivalent representation of slave trading contrasts with Opie’s more coherent one. Taylor’s volume about Africa consists of eighty-four short descriptive sections with illustrations on engraved plates.  Section 24 “A son going to sell his Father and Mother into Slavery” begins with this surprising statement: “We must just take a peep at the miseries of these people on account of the prevalence of the slave-trade; we might trace the cause deeper, to an immoderate love of brandy.”   Sections 34 to 36 describe how petty chiefs will stoop to making false criminal judgments, waging war, and setting huts in adjoining villages on fire to procure bodies to exchange for iron, fabric and brandy.  Near the end of the volume, Taylor retells the episode from the travels of James Bruce where he met the queens of Sennar and was repulsed by the way the fat women were dressed and adorned (or in his view deformed) with the huge rings in their ears and lips.  Taylor may be able to express humanity for black people in general because Europeans or their own people prey upon them, but finds the reported behavior and appearance of individual groups disgusting.

A son dragging his parents off to sell for brandy in Rev. Isaac Taylor Senior, Scenes in Africa, 2nd ed. London: J. Harris and Son, 1821. engraving 24. (Cotsen 2898)

Rev. Isaac Taylor Senior, Scenes in Africa, 2nd. ed. engraving number 35. (Cotsen 2898). This is almost certainly copied from one of the famous large engravings of the hold of a slave ship; however this one is so small that it was not possible to show the outlines of the people’s bodies in any detail.

The queens of Sennar in Rev. Isaac Taylor Senior, Scenes in Africa, 2nd ed., engraving 72. (Cotsen 2898)

Cuffy the Negro’s Doggerel Description of the Progress of Sugar extends the process by adding the steps that take place after the sugar crosses the Atlantic, unloaded in England, and further processed.   One pair of illustrations compare and contrast workers in the West Indies and the other in Great Britain.  On the plantation, two barefoot, bare-chested black men tend the great copper vats under the overseer’s supervision.  In the middle distance, one adds lime to thicken the boiling sugar cane syrup, while the other in the foreground ladles the now ropy liquid onto a plate to harden.  The second illustration  shows a sugar baker, neatly dressed in a hat, shirt, apron over knee breeches, stockings and shoes.  According to Cuffy the narrator, the sugar baker is spooning blood and some other adulterant to whiten the sugar loaves hardening in the molds.  Equally compelling is  the portrait of  Cuffy at the head of the doggerel poem imploring little readers to think of the “poor Negro” whose labor tending the sugar cane in the fields results in luscious pies, puddings, sweetmeats, cakes, and lollypops.  The wood engraved depiction of the black man shivering in the cold contains details that are not easy to interpret.  Cuffy is holding a red Phrygian hat and wearing torn striped trousers–garments associated with the sans culottes of the French Revolution.  Was the artist of this wood engraving covertly expressing support for the West Indian slave rebellions during in the early 1800s?

Cuffy the Negro’s Doggerel Description of the Progress of Sugar. London: E. Wallis, ca. 1823. p. 11. (Cotsen 26162)

Cuffy the Negro’s Doggerel Description of the Progress of Sugar, leaf 15. (Cotsen 26162)

Cuffy the Negro’s Doggerel Description of the Progress of Sugar, leaf 2. (Cotsen 26162)

This interpretation of the image seems untenable at first, but the short story “Clarissa Dormer, or the Advantages of Good Instruction” (1806) depicts such an uprising as justifiable, but avoidable if white people take seriously their duty to enslaved peoples. This view strikes us as condescending now, but to express it then in a story for rather young children was radical, even extraordinary.   Clarissa Dormer is the daughter of native West Indian planters, who are described as “black enough to be esteemed descendants of those unhappy beings whom perfidy or avarice brought into the hands of Europeans, nor yet so fair as to pass for natives of our temperate climes.”   To give Clarissa every possible advantage, her parents hire an English governess  to educate her.  The chief obstacle to Miss Melville’s program of enlightened instruction is Mrs. Dormer, an ignorant, showy woman, who is remarkably cruel to the enslaved peoples working in her household and on the plantation.  So cruel that when the “ill-used” Dormer slaves rise up one night, their mistress is brutally murdered along with the overseen and whipper-in.  Miss Melville and Clarissa, who has learned humanity from her in spite of her mother’s atrocious example, are spared by those DISCRIMINATING SLAVES” who…deemed them worthy of their clemency at a time when they came to execute vengeance on an individual under the same roof.”

Mrs. Dormer orders the slave Dinah, who, Clarissa falsely accused of lying, to be beaten until hunks of flesh come off her back. Miss Melville tries to stop her, but without success. Clarissa Dormer; or The Advantages of a Good Education. London: J. Harris, 1806. plate 2. (Cotsen 26219)

Dinah pleads for the lives of Miss Melville and Clarissa the night the slaves rebel. Clarissa Dormer, plate 3. (Cotsen 26129)

These four works demonstrate what rich sources children’s books can be in documenting early nineteenth-century attitudes about the institution of slavery.

 

Tweaking The Emperor’s New Clothes and other Classics for Today

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Probably the most common way of putting a new spin on an old favorite is to situate it in a different time and place, which gives the writer, artist, or author-illustrator the freedom to imagine richly detailed settings.  When done with skill and imagination, the retelling pays tribute to the original and the recreator.  However, this trio of picture books play with the texts in more radical ways, because the plots have been restructured to highlight themes of collaboration, cooperation, and collusion.

Alison Jackson, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie, illustrated by Judith Byron Schachner. New York: Dutton Children’s Books, 1997. (Cotsen 87615)

Alison Jackson turns the old accumulative rhyme “I Know an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,” into a tribute to Thanksgiving gluttony.   An grandmotherly lady shows up on the doorstep of a young family’s house bearing a pie.   As soon as she  crosses the threshold, she wolfs down the pie and has to wash it down with a gallon jug of cider.  This dubious  accomplishment  impresses the two children so much that they  want to see what else she will eat. They try to restrain her when she lunges for the turkey platter, but would they be smiling if they weren’t secretly hoping she’ll go for it?  Can she get the entire uncarved bird down her gullet and survive?  She does.  The children hesitate momentarily when the old lady–now monstrously bloated with pie, cider, salad, squash, turkey, and a stock pot–menaces the dessert, a ten-layer cake.  But there is no stopping her and afterwards the baby and cat loll on the old lady’s huge, pillowy body, while the little girl tries to retrieve her skinny feet from under the dress.  The parody of the rhyme wouldn’t be anywhere as funny if Schachner (better known as the creator of Skippy Jon Jones) hadn’t created this subtext about the children egging on the old lady, which isn’t suggested in the text.   Giving the greedy old lady an audience does make this retelling a little grosser and more subversive than the original.

Margie Palatino, Lousy Rotten Stinkin’ Grapes, illustrated by Barry Moser. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, c. 2009. (Cotsen 151965)

Lousy Rotten Stinkin’ Grapes, written by Margie Palatino and illustrated by Barry Moser, presents the fable of the fox and the grapes as a disastrous team effort.  When the fox discovers he can’t jump high enough to get the luscious fruit, he seizes the day when his acquaintance the bear lumbers along and allows himself to be roped into the fox’s plan.  Still unable to reach the fruit when balanced on the bear’s snout, the fox tries to make what ought to be a sure fire concept work by dragging in more collaborators with half his brains.The tottering pile-up could be out of the Grimms’ “The Bremen Town Musicians,” but the higher it gets, the farther it is to the ground.  Having lost face in front of his helpers, the fox stalks off saying he didn’t want the “lousy rotten stinkin’ grapes” anyway.   The supposedly slow-witted team members gather the grapes without any difficulty and the would-be captain’s absence doesn’t seem to decrease their enjoyment of the fruit.  A case could be made that Palatino has improved on Aesop by making fall of the cocksure fox more dramatic than it is when he has no witnesses.

The reinterpreted plots in the first two picture books do not change the outcome of either story.  YIng Chang Compestine’s revamping of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” turns a perfect story on its head and claims this is the real version–always a risky move.

The emperor of China is a nine-year-old boy Ming Da controlled by three dishonest ministers who are enriching themselves at the kingdom’s expense.  Hungry, ragged children in the street, whom he cannot feed and dress, remind the little emperor how powerless he is.  While inspecting fabrics at the tailor’s shop for a New Year’s gown, the boy thinks of a plan to outwit the bad ministers that just might work if the tailors will help him execute it.  The emperor invites his ministers to the tailor’s shop to admire his new magical robes, whose splendor can only be seen by the honest.  The robe is nothing more than a painted burlap sack, but the ministers lavish praise upon the quality of the silk and the beauty of the embroidery rather than admit they don’t see anything of the kind.   The emperor invites the ministers to have such garments made for themselves.

Ying Chang Compestine, The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes, illustrated by David Roberts. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2017. Promised gift.

Behind a screen in the tailor’s, Ming Da spies on the ministers when they return to inspect the finished robes.  Of course, each of the burlap robes is imperfect, so the ministers, determined to outshine each other, supply the tailors with more jewels, gold, and rice to ensure the receipt of the finest garment that can be had.  The tailors hand off the treasure to the little emperor, who purchases cloth and rice so that the poor people can be clothed and fed.

At the New Year’s parade, the ministers in their burlap finery march behind the emperor, puzzled by the lack of response from the crowds in the street.  The spectators  break into raucous laughter as soon as when the children expose the deception by shrieking that the ministers are clothed in itchy rice sacks instead of gorgeous silks.

Humiliated at  having been tricked, the ministers flee the country and the little emperor replaces them with honest men.   During the rest of Ming Da’s reign, everyone is happy because no one goes hungry or naked.   The story concludes like this: “The emperor marched through the town to save his country.  I don’t know how people ended up with the old folktale about two sly tailors fooling a vain emperor.”   There are several possible morals–that the powerful few will rule justly with the interests of the many at heart, or even the mighty need the humble to achieve social justice.  Perhaps the author rewrote Andersen like this so children would have faith in the rectitude of authority.  But I miss the puncturing of human vanity with the light and deadly touch.

The British illustrator David Roberts, who spent time as a milliner and fashion illustrator in Hong Kong, has done research to give this story a distinct Chinese flavor. The characters’ attire, crisp outlines, and caricatured faces recall animated Chinese films from the second half of the twentieth century. This aesthetic borrows and remixes visual elements from various Chinese art traditions, including ancient architecture and Peking Opera make-up and stage design.

Animated Chinese film Monkey King Wreaks Havoc in Heaven, first aired in 1964.

The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes presents an anachronistic ancient China, which can often be spotted in picture books illustrated by cultural outsiders. The green robes and official winged-flap headwear of the three evil ministers signal that they are from the Ming dynasty or earlier. However, the Manchu braided hairstyle worn by the emperor, the tailors, and the children betrays the Qing dynasty. The confusion between these two consecutive dynasties is especially evident in a picture of the little emperor, who is wearing a Qing braid and a green robe and hat that are more likely Ming. Children’s literature critics have repeatedly lamented the peril of cultural misrepresentation, suggesting that publishers seek feedback from cultural insiders during the editing process. Just like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” a fairy tale set in an imagined China, this rebellious retelling of Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” takes place in a distant China that never was.

(Minjie Chen contributed to the essay.)