Leo Dillon drew black children as their true selves

I missed the news more than a week ago that illustrator Leo Dillon had died. A friend mentioned it to me a few days ago, and for a minute I had a mental block of who he was.

I went through my collection of children’s books and there were three books that he and wife Diane had illustrated for writer Virginia Hamilton. Then I remembered him and his work: The beautiful and hopeful black people on the jacket cover of “The People Who Could Fly” and “Many Thousands Gone,” who even in tattered clothes showed dignity of spirit. The menagerie of humans and animals culled from African American folktales on the cover of “Her Stories.” I had “Aida” once, but I loved the book so much that I gave it to a friend’s young daughter.

Leo Dillon was one of the good guys. He and his wife were instrumental in drawing images of black children in ways that they had never been shown before by early mainstream writers and illustrators.

“In our work,” Diane Dillon said in one interview on the web, “we set out to show all people as beautiful and reflect who they are, so that any child could look at a book and feel proud that he exists in the world.”

The Dillons illustrated their first book in 1970 about a Native American family, and have done about 50 children books in all. Their collaboration included what they called a “third artist,” which appeared to be an amalgam of their two selves: One would make the first sketches, then hand it off to the other and then back to the other to make refinements. One in tune with the other.

They got their first prestigious Caldecott Award in 1976 for the book “Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears,” making him the first African American to win the award. A year later, they received a second such award for “Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions,” making them the first husband-wife team to win two years in a row.

Leo Dillon was born in Brooklyn in 1933, and I was curious about the kinds of children’s books he may have read as a child. He’s from the period when white writers wrote about and drew black children in horrid depictions. Was he influenced by those books to paint a different picture? I read several interviews by Dillon, but none asked that question.

But both he and his wife were apparently conscious of what was out there. “We are interracial, and we decided early in our career that we wanted to represent all races and to show people that were rarely seen in children’s books at that time,” Diane Dillon said in an interview on the scholastic.com website.

Early children books with black characters and written by white writers were full of stereotypes, typically in the facial features ascribed to the children and the introduction of a watermelon at every turn. Inez Hogan’s Nicodemus books fell into that category, along with a book she illustrated called “Epaminondas and His Auntie” by Sarah Cone Bryant, with the little black boy drawn as lazy and foolish. It was one of the most offensive.

Nicodemus was a small child weighed down with degrading imagery in stories that were actually innocent and sweet. His antics were the stuff of any child his age, but Hogan made him different by disparaging his language and his looks. I had never heard of her or her books until a few months ago when a handful of them came up at auction.

At another auction recently, a book of stories by Elizabeth Gordon and illustrated by Clara Powers Wilson caught my eye. Published in 1937, the book had a cover illustration that appeared kind-hearted: a little black boy sitting at a table with a matronly white woman serving him pancakes. The title, though, told the story: “Watermelon Pete and Other Stories,” and the first paragraph set the tone. Pete was described as a “little darky.”

The book was first published in 1914, and that cover illustration, as expected, showed Pete with watermelons.

Meanwhile, black writers were bucking the notion that black children were mere subjects of ridicule. As early as the 1920s, W.E.B. DuBois was producing a positive magazine for black children, and Carter G. Woodson was enlisting black writers and artists for his publishing company with the same aim. A decade later, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and many others were doing the same.

“Faced too often by the segregation and scorn of a surrounding white world,” Hughes wrote in 1932, “American’s Negro children are in pressing need of books that will give them back their own souls.”

By the 1960s, the industry was headed in the right direction, and the Dillons were among the pioneers. As I looked through their books in my collection, I could enjoy the stories and not cringe at the illustrations as I did with the Hogan books. The African American children they drew looked like children I know.

The folktale “A Wolf and Little Daughter” told the story of a cute little black girl who outwitted a wolf. “Papa John’s Tall Tale” showed a normal-looking black boy riding a horse. “Little Eight John” was a story about a mean little boy who got his comeuppance. Ordinary children doing ordinary things.

And for that, I thank you, Leo Dillon.