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.

I flipped open the book to see more, and on the first inside page was what I had expected to see: Red-orange lips – not the pure red – on the faces of a menagerie of black children. The next page offered the full title of the book –”Turky Trott and the Black Santa” – along with an inscription from someone who had given the book as a Christmas gift in 1942 to a child named Tryon.

The idea of a book imagining a black Santa Claus in 1942 was a major achievement in itself, so I read on – and the stereotypes continued. The book by Kate Gambold Dyer and illustrated by Janet Robson held to the pattern of other books produced during this time by white writers. An illustration of Turky’s family showed an overweight mother with a polka-dot headscarf, with everyone speaking in dialect. Surprisingly, the children wore patched-up clothes that looked to have been cared for.

This was the second book with black children that I had come across in the last month. At another auction, I found five shabby copies of a book about a boy named Nicodemus, among a series written from 1932 to 1954 by Inez Hogan. The books were rife with stereotypes that made them almost unbearable to read.

In the Turky book, Dyer didn’t bother to give the mother a proper name. She was called Mammy Trott, and she had six children. An accident had taken the father away, according to the book, and I figured it meant that he had died.

Despite its issues, the book was interesting in both its title and the mother’s plain talk to her children about why they wouldn’t get gifts from a white Santa Claus, because those Santas don’t stop by their house. “There ain’t no black Santy,” she said.

Dyer painted them as a pleasant family on hard times on the day before Christmas. The children were disappointed, so Turky – whose name was actually Turquoise – in his wonderful voice sang a Christmas song to cheer them up. The mother came up with a simple game of window-shopping to take their minds off their empty stockings. As they headed downtown, Turky got separated from his family and ended up on an adventure that led to a generous benefactor who put him face to face with a black Santa Claus.

Since this was the time of Adolf Hitler, Dyer used the back flap of the book jacket to urge children to buy war savings stamps to help defeat this menace to society and allow Turky to continue to sing.

I could find little about the author or the book on the web. Dyer wrote at least one other book “The Green Sprig” in 1950, about a boy who had his hand in a major historical incident during the Revolutionary War. Turky was published by Platt & Munk, which seemed to be a major publisher of children’s books, including “The Little Engine that Could” in 1930. Some of its books were the retelling of folktales.

The book at auction was in good condition, and it looked to be a first edition. I wasn’t the only one who wanted it and was not able to get it for $5, as I had intended. Still, I got it for a good price, considering that it was retailing for upwards to $250 on the web.