So back in the Black Mother Goose post I mentioned briefly being interested what other ways an author might have translated traditional (mostly British English) nursery rhymes for a 20th century Black American audience. You might wonder, after all, what a kid in 1980 New York would care about Doctor Foster going to Gloucester. Why not rewrite that as “Doctor Carver went to Harvard” (the fact that George Washington Carver went to Iowa State University notwithstanding).

Well, it wasn’t in Elizabeth Murphy Oliver’s goals to modernize these poems but a few years later, a good number of traditional fairy and folktales were given that treatment by Fred Crump Jr.

There isn’t a lot of biographical information on Fred Crump Jr. online, the most thorough can be found in a post at cartoonist D. J. Koffman’s blog here. Many of the comments in reply to that post share fond memories of a person who was clearly a dedicated teacher and artist. Crump illustrated over forty books, a great majority of which are the retold fairy tales. They’re rare, but not impossible to come by. The two in my collection were purchased from a bookstore in Michigan but you’ll see them often enough on ebay (though the rarer titles start running up in price).

You can tell just by the covers that Crump’s illustration style is very much in the newspaper comic strip tradition. The linework is consistent and clear, the composition is kind of two-dimensional, the hand-written text is cartoony, and the text is set in clean, white boxes. Those descriptions might sound like the work is overly simplistic and although I certainly don’t take for granted how challenging making clearly readable illustrations is, I’ll admit I haven’t really spent a lot of time really looking at the illustrations in Red and Jamako. That changed a few days ago when I saw this post on Laguna Vintage’s Instagram.

This is an illustration from Crump’s Hansel and Gretel retelling and it made me look at his work in a whole new way. I was absolutely engrossed by this illustration. I love the shimmering fairy dust, I love the art nouveau design on the fairy’s wings, I love the face on the tree and the sleeping owl. It feels more Walt Disney and less Jim Davis. I can imagine a kid being OBSESSED with this story.

Honestly, that story is such a gift to kids. I want to go back in time and see a little guy covering his eyes at the scary witch in the window the first time his mom read him this book. I’m thankful this Laguna Vintage repost crossed my feed, I’m all in on Crump now.

I found another blog with an early Fred Crump Jr. book, Marigold and the Dragon. In these illustrations you can see that Crump started out with much more of a comic strip look. Vintage Kids Books My Kid Loves likened Crump’s work of that era to Mad Magazine’s Don Martin and I think that’s pretty apt.

I’d love to get both editions of Marigold and the Dragon to see how Crump redid the story and art, but like I said, the rarer titles are a bit harder to come across.

In terms of story, the text reminds me, in the best of ways, of the stories you could have read to you when you called the “Storytime” number from the Yellow Pages (I don’t know if anyone else remembers this, but back in the day latchkey kids could call a phone number and have a prerecorded story read to them). Again, I’m hinting at the fact that the stories are predominantly “clear and concise” and again, as I was with the illustrations, I’m probably wrong to leave it at that. There are certain details, word choices beyond replacing European names with African ones, that give these books what I think must be a Fred Crump flavor—the peddler in Jamako and the Beanstalk is described as “raggedy” and the beanstalk grows in “loopity swoops”. All in all, it really charming and I’m looking forward to spending more time with these books.

Following yesterday’s book haul, I was going to post an overview of the books I picked up but I realized I have unfinished business. You see, six, seven or ten years ago (I forget which), at the same book sale, I came across this Mother Goose collection.

I’m a sucker for old books but this one really grabbed my attention. It was the kind of book I always figured must have existed, but I had never seen. There was a time, actually, back when I was a fresh-faced youth, that I thought I might try this kind of a book, nursery rhymes retold with a multicultural cast of characters (I’d like to say I was wise enough to know cultural appropriation wasn’t a good thing, but in reality it was just another thing on the back-back-back burner). Here, though, at long last was the book I imagined.

So, usually in these situations I’ll look at the work and measure how well I think it achieved its goals and wonder what I, as the author and/or illustrator, would have done differently, but in this case I became obsessed with the book’s history. I found out the author, Elizabeth Murphy Oliver, and the illustrator, Thomas A. Stockett, were editor and editorial cartoonist (respectively) for the Baltimore Afro-American, which, according to Wikipedia, is the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the US (established in 1892). I also learned that the first edition of this book was illustrated by Aaron Sopher, who, as you can probably tell from the first edition’s cover, wasn’t Black.

Why would I guess he’s not Black? In list form:

• generic/anonymous characters: a lot of the figures have their faces obscured, even the ones facing forward (the girl jumping rope is looking over her shoulder, the boy playing guitar has no face)
• stereotypes: the braids on the littlest babies feel kind of racist and the polka dotted dresses over bloomers feels like a costume from the Antebellum South
• more stereotypes: I read a kind of desperation or neglect in the kids grabbing at mama’s dress. There’s an air of poverty about the whole illustration.
• exoticism/fetishism: the “old woman who lives in the shoe” looks so tired as to be emaciated, but there’s some kind of special attention going on in how her face is drawn

Sopher’s work is more than competent. The composition is sophisticated and successful and his colors work really well. His figural gesture drawing is very strong even in the more subtle characters (look at the two kids walking nonchalantly under the clothesline), and yet it feels more like an editorial cartoon than the illustration Stockett would do. These details in Stockett’s work are much more sympathetic.

Of note:

• there’s a girl in the window reading
• there’s a girl with glasses feeding a cat
• the babies appear well fed, two even have bottles
• clothes have patches, but the characters don’t seem so desperately poor
• the “old woman” has Black hair

I wonder what discussions lead to the creation of the second edition? I mean, I can imagine, but I wonder how it went down. The question of who gets to tell whose stories has gotten more attention in our modern, more enlightened times, but I think the question of who gets to draw whose stories is still being figured out. It’s always been of interest to me that even at the height of the George Floyd protests/BLM movement, when Amanda Gorman’s poem CHANGE SINGS was set to picture book, her words were matched with illustrations by a white man. I wonder, with curiosity, not judgement or condemnation, what went into that decision.

Anyway, BLACK MOTHER GOOSE BOOK sparked in me an interest in Black stories produced outside of traditional publishing and I started keeping an eye out for these (usually) self-published books. I didn’t collect a huge number of them because a) someone else is probably a better curator of this history than I am and b) I soon realized there are a lot of interesting Black stories being produced outside (and within!) traditional publishing today. I’m going to spend the rest of this month sharing these. Happy BHM!