Once upon a Time in Aframerica: The "Peculiar" Significance of Fairies in the Brownies' Book

Remapping Black Childhood in The Brownies’ Book

“…9 Readers of The Brownies' Book were as likely to encounter a social scientific perspective in a given issue's photographs, frontispieces, games, and stories as they were in more explicit forms, such as the historical accounts of Black history and achievement that appear nearly every month. I do not mean to downplay the importance of other elements distinctive to the magazine, such as the canny significations of its Afrocentric folk tales and fairy tales (Kory 2001), or the "uplift photographic portraiture" (Capshaw 2021, p. 368) that populates "Little People of the Month"-though each of these, too, might be said to have a social scientific (and even geographic) dimension. But recognizing how strongly the incorporation of geography and the social sciences shapes the texture of The Brownies' Book, particularly in contrast to its competitors, adds depth to our sense of what critics have insightfully termed the magazine's "cross-written nature" (Oeur 2021, p. 337), its use of "multisemiotic" discourses (Young 2009, p. 18), and its "productively hybrid" admixture of texts (Capshaw 2021, p. 371).…”

“…"In the elementary school it came only in the matter of geography when the races of the world were pictured: Indians, Negroes and Chinese, by their most uncivilized and bizarre representatives; the whites by some kindly and distinguished-looking philanthropist" (Du Bois 1940, p. 101). 6 See Sinnette (1965); Kory (2001) for excellent accounts of St. Nicholas's "unself-conscious Eurocentrism" (Kory 2001, p. 93) and its "hostile environment" of "gross" racial "caricature" (Sinnette 1965, pp. 134-35).…”

“…134-35). Kory (2001) notes that "throughout St. Nicholas, various distancing strategies-linguistic, geographic, temporal-insulate its readers from confrontations with contemporary African Americans, even fictional ones," and that "the underlying racism of St. Nicholas became more, not less, pronounced as it entered the 1920s" (p. 94). 7 Neither Forman nor Teall was in any sense an internationalist like Du Bois.…”

“…Indeed, the very name of their enterprise-The Brownies' Book-in part signifies on the work of one of the best-known contributors to St. Nicholas: Palmer Cox, whose stories and illustrations of elflike "brownies" had begun appearing in that magazine in the early 1880s. See (Kory 2001). 9 There is not space to provide a full accounting of these different approaches here, but a comparison of the tables of contents for the January 1920 issues of The Brownies' Book and St. Nicholas will suggest just how little social scientific material the latter magazine tended to include, as well as how infrequently it was integrated into other materials.…”

“…It is tempting to see The Brownies' Book's "Geography Stories" as a deliberate response to the "Plantation Stories" that commonly appeared in St. Nicholas before 1920. As Kory (2001) notes, not only do these plantation tales foreground "an extreme regional specificity," they also allow the editors to "elide the 'Great Migration' from the South to the North that took place after World War I" thereby "avoid[ing] any discussion" of contemporary race relations (pp. 94-95).…”