The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children's Literature, 1880-1939

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The Tar Baby

[Adapted to the Interest and Vocabulary of Primary Children].

This is a story to be read by children, not to them. Its chief practical purpose is to assist in the teaching of children to read. It has been prepared with a view to furnishing a content of such nature and character as to interest them in doing so, and framed in such language that will enable the youngest readers to master it without much difficulty. This story and about a dozen others taken from Joel Chandler Harris' collection have been worked over by Miss Blair and her second grade class for several months, with a view of determining the elements of essential interest to children, and of securing the story in the language which children use and therefore best understand.

Her method of production has been as follows: First, the story has been related to the class in form which her experience and sympathy dictated. Some days later, after the story, its form of presentation and language has somewhat "settled" in the children's minds, she permitted reproductions, in oral and pictorial form. Miss Blair has then made these reproductions the material for most
bla.1895.2009.003.jpg careful study as to elements of plot, salient points of interest, and especially the words and forms of expression used by the children. By this process the story was reconstructed. This form was then typewritten and several copies mimeographed, which were used as reading material in Miss Blair's class and in other primary classes. Notes were made upon the difficult words or ideas as shown by the class work, and these served as a basis for a later revision.

The pictures as given in this story have been prepared upon the same principle. The children's crude drawings have been preserved and studied. Those which appeared typical have been submitted to the artist, Mr. Pierre Boeringer, who has drawn these herewith given. In them he has endeavored to catch and preserve the child's idea, retouching merely the form.

There is therefore in this story, children's thought, and children's language expression. In thought it belongs to the myth literature of the African race, tracing its development through the Southern cotton fields. Its ideas and emotions were therefore furnished in the childhood of a race. The form of expression of these emotions and ideas as the method of reconstruction shows, has been furnished by the little people of our modern times.

Many teachers are now familiar with the "Golden Fleece," by Miss Louise Smythe, and the "Story of Washington," by Miss Jessie Smith, which aim to provide a similar class of reading matter, and which have been constructed on the same principle. Miss Blair's study differs in kind of emotion to wihch appeal is made. The former appeal to the children's emotion of admiration for the heroic. This story deals with the heroic in more primitive form and introduces an element which the Greek or Norse myth wholly lacks, the emotion of humor—children's humor. Here is a story which has proven humorous to generations of the human race in their primitive childhood period. Our modern children have placed it in a setting of their language and expression. Many of us feared, when Miss Blair first began the work of robbing the Uncle Remus stories of their delicious dialect in order to present it to children in form which they might read for themselves, that in stripping the content of its form, she was taking away all that made it interesting. The result proved the contrary. There is a power and a living force in the content of the stories regardless of the form. Of all the story material with which the little folk of Santa Rosa have been provided, there is nothing so popular with the lowest grades as the "Brer Rabbit Stories."