I hadn’t thought of the book about a little boy named Turky until I got a letter recently from a reader who fondly remembered reading it as a child.
“Turky Trott and the Black Santa” was apparently a favorite of many children because from time to time, I get emails from adults-once-children after they stumbled across a blog post I wrote about the book almost 10 years ago. I picked up the book at auction because of its very attractive cover. The little African American boy proudly singing on the cover bore none of the denigrating stereotypes and caricatures of Black children in books and other media that I routinely found at auction.
The cover image may have been different, but the images and contrived dialect persisted inside. The book was in black and white with bright red-orange coloring on the lips of the African American characters and an overweight mother saddled with the name Mammy (as if she couldn’t be an Elizabeth or Margaret!). One reader, a librarian, stated in an email that she pulled the book from her library because it was offensive.
The story itself, though, is sweet – about a mother who tells her children there is no Black Santa, and a son with a beautiful voice who gets lost from the family on their way to window-shop for Christmas gifts they can’t afford and then embarks on a plane flight to another city where he meets a Black Santa who gives him gifts for his family.
For 1942, this story about an African American boy seems fantastical, and I wondered how author Kate Gambold Dyer came to write it. I could not find an answer to that question, but I learned that Dyer was a writer of juvenile and adult fiction. “Turky” was her first book. She was a former elementary school teacher who lived in Indianapolis and wrote stories for the local newspaper. She also sold short stories to church and children’s magazines.
Dyer was a member of the Story-a-Month Club whose members encouraged her to write and the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana who pushed her to write a book. She wrote two other books. Dyer died in 1979 at age 99. The illustrator of “Turky” was an artist named Janet Robson (Kennedy), who also made collectible figurines for Goebel-Hummel.
“Turky Trott” caught the attention of the U.S. Treasury Department, which praised Dyer for the book’s patriotic message. On the dust-jacket flap in the back is an appeal to children to join Turky in buying war savings stamps to help defeat Hitler. I guess the publishers didn’t see the irony of Turky buying stamps to help a government that Jim-Crowed him and his family and was the main cause of their poverty.
One reader stated that when she read the book, she was a little white girl living in a tarpaper house in a family just as poor at Turky’s and she could identify with him. I got the same type of response from a book I bought at auction titled “Parasols is for Ladies,” about three little Black girls who wanted to buy umbrellas but couldn’t afford them. Another sweet but bothersome book.
As we celebrate the holidays, I’d like to share my blog post about Turky’s adventure:
A Christmas book about a Black boy named Turky
As soon as I saw it, I was impressed with the drawing of the little black boy on the book’s dust jacket. He was decently dressed in an outfit that put him in the early 20th century – during a time when black children were illustrated as caricatures of their true selves.
But this little boy was not drawn with the customary tattered clothes and red lips. He was in a natural setting singing solo at a microphone with a white male producer in a booth behind him and two white men playing a violin and bass in front of him.
What gives? I wondered. Read the rest of the story here.
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