A storybook about a black boy named Nicodemus

The first thing that caught my eye as I saw the small stack of tattered books on the auction table was the bright yellow color of the book jacket. Then I spotted the red lips of the black children and old man in the center, and I knew that wasn’t good.

With the red lips, I could date the book to a time when black children were not shown as cute little kids but as caricatures to be ridiculed. I knew that this book would be no different, but I picked it up anyway because I had not seen one like it before.

It was titled “Nicodemus and His Gran’ Pappy (1936),” and the illustration was a little black boy sitting next to his grandfather who was holding a little girl on his knee. In the hands of a black illustrator, it would’ve been a loving picture of a black man and his progeny.

The book was one of five, and they all were ratty: the spines were loose, papers were torn, edges were stripped. I discovered later that one – “Nicodemus and Petunia” – was half a book. These books were said to be immensely popular in their day, and the child who owned these must have read them over and over and over again.

I flipped open the cover of the Gran’ Pappy book, and saw that it had been given to a girl named Mary Lou from Mommy. The child had gotten two others from people named Preston and Mildred at Christmas time 1944.

An inscription on the inside page gave me another good indication of what to expect in the dialogue of the book. Nicodemus and the other black characters spoke in dialect – or the way author Inez Hogan assumed they talked. “Go meddlin’ roun’ whar you don’ blong an’ … you is boun’ to git into trouble.”

Hogan produced some 60 children’s books, including more than a dozen featuring Nicodemus (I found titles for 13 books on the web) from 1932 to 1954. The first with the black child as protagonist was “Nicodemus and His Little Sister.”

Born in Washington, DC, in 1895, Hogan saw herself as an artist but couldn’t seem to make a living at it except as a school art teacher. She attended art classes on the side, and took time out to study and paint in Paris from 1917 to 1919, also traveling throughout Europe. When she returned, she was back teaching art until a friend told her about an assignment to write and illustrate a children’s book.

She loved it so much that she gave up teaching and her determination to become a fine artist, and spent the next 50 or so years writing about Nicodemus, along with other books. Her stories of the child and his family were considered among the best books for children. And the publisher, E.P. Dutton, wasn’t shy about letting readers know what reviewers thought of them. Each book included newspaper-review blurbs:

“Has all the lasting qualities of the famous ‘Little Black Sambo,'” the Jacksonville Times-Union said of “Nicodemus and His Little Sister.” “Like all Nicodemus books this latest one is kindly, and childlike, and has a lively humor and much action in both text and drawing,” the New York Times said of “Nicodemus and His New Shoes.” “The pictures are grand. The pickaninny in particular is altogether delightful,” wrote the New Haven Journal-Courier.

Black children were up against a wall with many of the books by white writers like Hogan. Her Nicodemus books – like many others from the 1930s to 1950s – were rancid with stereotypes. They were written in dialect spoken by black children with “heavy lips, bulging eyes, night black skin and woolly hair,” as author Anita Silvey put it in “Children’s Books and their Creators” in 1995.

The books were right up there with Helen Bannerman’s “Little Black Sambo,” first printed in 1899. When the U.S. copyright ended, others published their own versions that went after black children with a vengeance. Nearly a century later, Julius Lester re-created the character and re-worked the Sambo story in “Sam and the Tigers (1996),” beautifully illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.

While the white authors accepted the norm in writing about black children, black writers weren’t exactly sitting back and watching. They were trying to implode the stereotypes and replace them with positive images that black children could identify with.

In 1920, W.E.B. DuBois started a magazine called “Brownies Book” for black children. Unfortunately, it only lasted for one year. Around the same time, Carter G. Woodson founded Associated Publishers, and he enlisted artists like Lois Mailou Jones (who first worked with him in the 1930s) to illustrate books written by black schoolteachers.

Langston Hughes wrote a book of poetry for children called “The Dream Keeper,” published the same year as the first Nicodemus book. He also wrote several books in the “First Books” series that focused on black achievement, and collaborated with Arna Bontemps on “Popo and Fifina” in 1932. Bontemps also wrote “You can’t Pet a Possum (1934)” and “Sad Faced Boy (1937).” Eva Knox Evans’ “Araminta (1935)” was about a black girl visiting her grandparents in the country, which apparently was part of a series.

Countee Cullen, a lion of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote about his pet cat in “My Lives and How I Lost Them” in 1941. It was a joy to learn that Cullen wrote children books.

In 1939, Stella Genry Sharpe produced a ground-breaking book called “Tobe: A Six-Year Old Farmer,” with photographs by Charles Anderson Farrell, a North Carolina newspaper photographer who had his own studio. Sharpe put the book together after a little boy questioned why he didn’t see people who looked like him in books.

At auction a couple years ago, I came across some documents from 1941 belonging to a Cheyney University student who had written a  paper with bibliography on “Books About the Negro for Children and Young People of High School Age” for the Society of Friends’ Committee on Race Relations. She cited “Tobe” as one of the books that treated them favorably.

I bought the Nicodemus books at auction, although I usually stay away from anything with stereotypes. But I thought I’d keep these around so I won’t forget.