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 Debbie Olson

BLACK CHILDREN IN
HOLLYWOOD CINEMA
CAST IN SHADOW
Black Children in Hollywood Cinema
 Debbie Olson

Black Children in
Hollywood Cinema
Cast in Shadow
Debbie Olson
Department of English
Missouri Valley College
Marshall, Missouri, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-48272-9    ISBN 978-3-319-48273-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962192

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Parts of Chapter 2 were originally published in Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters:
Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors © 2015 Edited by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Sean Moreland
by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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tional affiliations.

Cover image: The secession bubble. “It must burst” / J.H. Bufford’s Lith., Boston
Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Pecola
 Acknowledgments

Just like it takes a village to raise a child, so too did it take a village of
friends, family, and colleagues to help raise this project from idea to a real-
ity. Special thanks go to Dr. Stacy Takacs, Oklahoma State University, who
provided unwavering support, particularly in the face of unexpected chal-
lenges, and without whom this project would not have been possible. My
deepest gratitude to Dr. Demetria Shabazz, University of Massachusetts
Amherst, for her help and encouragement, and for staying the course. I
want to thank my friends and colleagues Lyn Megow, Eastern Washington
University, and Dr. Scott Krzych, Colorado College, for their support
and patience as I sought their advice during moments of doubt. My fam-
ily were a bedrock of support, my sons Rick and Justin, and particularly
thanks to my husband, Curt, who spent many lonely days while I closeted
myself in my office writing. And finally, I’d like to thank the late Dr. Peter
C. Rollins, who gave me the confidence, as a budding scholar, to strike out
on my own. I will keep the Legacy, Dear Pedro de Lake.

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Establishing the Discourse of the Child 13

3 African American Girls in Hollywood Cinema 63

4 Boys in Black and the Urban Ghetto Child 121

5 Soldier Bo(d)y: The Transnational Circulation of

the African (American) Savage Child Image 159

6 The Black Child Star 189

Erratum to: Black Children in Hollywood Cinema E1

Bibliography 209

Index 223

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Lewis Hine: girl in cotton factory. Courtesy Library of

Congress, National Child Labor Commission 6
Fig. 2.1 Slave auction, Martinique, 1826, image reference NWO308,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division 24
Fig. 2.2 Internal slave trade, c. 1830, image reference NWO336,
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division 25
Fig. 2.3 “Age of Innocence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds 1785 or 1788 28
Fig. 2.4 Plantation owners visiting slave quarters, c. 1700s. Harpers
Weekly, 1876 August 19, p. 677 29
Fig. 2.5 N.K. Fairbank Co. “Why Doesn’t Your Mama Wash You with
Fairy Soap?” Accessed 15 July 2015, http://siris-archives.si.edu/
ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!245130!031
Fig. 2.6 Pygmy natives posing with European, c. 1921 38
Fig. 2.7 Masai warriors, c. 1906. Original images from Collier’s New
Encyclopedia, Volume 1 (1921), opposite page 58, panel B 39
Fig. 2.8 Gator bait images from “Caricatures of African Americans:
The Pickaninny,” Authentichistory.org, http://www.
authentichistory.com/diversity/african/3-coon/7-
alligator/, accessed 15 July 201541
Fig. 2.9 The Blackboard Jungle. Directed by Richard Brooks.
Los Angeles: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1955. frame grab 46
Fig. 2.10 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab 47
Fig. 2.11 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab 48
Fig. 2.12 The Blackboard Jungle, frame grab 49
Fig. 2.13 Duke Custis (Hampton Clampton) in The Cool World; directed
by Shirley Clarke. Wiseman Film Productions, 1963. frame

xi
xii List of Figures

grab (The film is not available on DVD, but can be viewed

here: accessed 15 July 2015, http://vdownload.eu/watch/
13039405-the-cool-world-1963-by-shirley-clarke.html)51
Fig. 3.1 Popular representation of Saartjie Baartman, Dec 31, 1809,
Library of Congress, accessed July 15, 2015, http://www.
loc.gov/pictures/item/2007680266/64
Fig. 3.2 Busta Rhymes “Twerkit,” frame grab, accessed 15 July 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j47MYli8pj469
Fig. 3.3 Precious. Directed by Lee Daniels. Los Angeles: Lionsgate,
2009, frame grab 80
Fig. 3.4 Billy Thomas as “Buckwheat.” The Little Rascals, “Bear
Facts.” Hal Roach Studios, 1938, frame grab 87
Fig. 3.5 Quvenzhané Wallis as “Hushpuppy.” Beasts of the
Southern Wild. Directed by Behn Zeitlin. Cinereach, 2012,
frame grab 88
Fig. 3.6 “Beast it.” Beasts of the Southern Wild, frame grab 91
Fig. 3.7 Butter. Directed by John Field Smith. Los Angeles: Michael
de Luca Productions, 2011. frame grab 100
Fig. 3.8 Butter, frame grab 102
Fig. 3.9 Butter, frame grab 103
Fig. 3.10 The official poster for the film and the Blu-ray cover 105
Fig. 3.11 Butter, frame grab 108
Fig. 3.12 Twitter, frame grab 109
Fig. 3.13 Annie collection poster, Target.com 110
Fig. 3.14 Annie clothing line, Target.com 111
Fig. 4.1 Jordan Brown mug shot age 11, yearbook picture, and Brown
at football practice (Jordan Brown, “Boy Who Killed Dad’s
Pregnant Fiancée, Moving to Dad’s House,” Huffington Post,
1 December 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/
12/01/jordan-brown-killing-kenzie-brown_n_2223585.html;
Caitlin Keeting, “Six Years After Being Charged with Murder
at age 11, Jordan Brown May Get New Trial,” People, 6 March
2015. http://www.people.com/article/jordan-brown-murder-
hearing-trial; Andrea Canning and Maggie Burbank, “Jordan
Brown Murder Case takes Emotional Toll,” abcnews.com, 28
April 2010. Accessed 5 August 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/
Nightline/jordan-­brown-­murder-case-12-year-adult/
story?id=10288704)124
Fig. 4.2 Left:Lionel Tate, age 12 mug shot, center and right: age 13
at trial (Antonia Monacelli, “Murderous Children: 12 year old
Lionel Tate killed a 6 year old girl,” accessed 25 July 2015,
http://antonia-monacelli.hubpages.com/hub/Murderous-
 List of Figures  xiii

Children-Lionel-Tate; “When Life Means Life,” St. Petersburg

Times Online, 3 June 2001, http://www.sptimes.com/News/
060301/photos/truelifegallery/pages/tl-tate.htm; “Enough
Blame to Go Around,” CBSnews.com, 9 March 2001, http://
www.cbsnews.com/news/enough-blame-to-go-around/)125
Fig. 4.3 “Child’s Play, Deadly Play,” A&E, 1993, frame grab 130
Fig. 4.4 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Directed by Melvin
Van Peebles. Los Angeles: Yeah, Inc., 1971, frame grab 133
Fig. 4.5 The Grapes of Wrath. Directed by John Ford. Los Angeles:
Twentieth Century Fox, 1940. Opening shot, frame grab 141
Fig. 4.6 Fresh. Directed by Boaz Yakin. Los Angeles: Lumière
Pictures, 1994. Opening shot, frame grab 142
Fig. 4.7 Rosie’s feet. Fresh, frame grab 145
Fig. 5.1 Save the Children (left), Unicef (center), Partners for Care
(right) (“Save the Children,” accessed 19 July 2015,
savethechildren.org; “UNICEF,” accessed 19 July 2015,
unicef.org; “Partners for Care,” accessed 19 July 2015,
partnersforcare.org)161
Fig. 5.2 Lord of War. Directed by Andrew Niccol. Los Angeles:
Lions Gate Films, 2005. Opening “life of a bullet” scene,
frame grab 166
Fig. 5.3 Blood Diamond. Directed by Edward Zwick. Los Angeles:
Warner Bros., 2006. Childsoldier, frame grab 179
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“A magnificent blonde child—how much joy, and above all how much
hope! There is no comparison with a magnificent black child; literally,
such a thing is unwonted.”
–Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask

On 23 March 2012, the much-anticipated film version of Suzanne Collins’

popular young adult novel Hunger Games was released in American the-
aters. As of 14 November 2014, the film had earned over $600 mil-
lion worldwide (boxofficemojo.com). David Daniel with CNN reported
that Hunger Games had the third largest opening day in US box office
history.1 Along with the normal hype that accompanies the release of a
Hollywood blockbuster came a very vocal backlash among some of the
Hunger Games fan base. According to Dodai Stewart, writing for Jezebel.
com, a blog on Hunger Games (http://hungergamestweets.tumblr.
com/) revealed a growing and disturbing racist reaction to the casting of
black actors in key roles in the film. Much of the racist commentary origi-
nated as single-­line tweets on the social website Twitter, but quickly went
viral across the Internet when a fan of the Hunger Games books began
compiling screenshots of the racist Twitter comments using the blogging
platform Tumblr.2 Some of the Twitter comments are as follows:

“why does Rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie”
(Maggie Mcdonnell, @maggie_mcd11)

© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Olson, Black Children in Hollywood Cinema,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_1
2 D. OLSON

“cinna and rue werent supposed to be black/why did the producer make all
the good characters black smh” (Mari)
“EWW rue is black?? I’m not watching” (Joe Longley, @joe_longley)
“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as
sad” (#ihatemyself, Jashper Paras, @jashperparas)
“nah, I just pictured darker skin, didn’t’ really take it all the way to black”
(Jordan Wright, @JBanks56)
“rue is black?!?! Whaa?!” (@MAD_1113)
“Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde
innocent girl you picture” (Alana, @sw4q)3

One common thread running through these remarks is the surprise that
a black girl would play an “innocent child,” despite the fact that the
author’s description in the novel specifically described Rue as having
“dark brown skin.” Maria Tatar in “Little, Blonde, Innocent, and Dead,”
observes that the criticism of the film by fans was not directed at the
“sacred prohibition against the onscreen killing of children” that com-
prises the film’s plot, but rather was because those children themselves
violated the expected ethnicity of the sympathetic character or the hero.
Tatar observes how, culturally, it is the deaths of blonde girls that most
often capture media attention; there is rarely a national media blitz for
missing young black girls (or boys, for that matter).4 Tatar suggests that
such attitudes about who is innocent and who is not, who should be the
hero or the savior, can be traced back to the literary depictions of two
young girls: Little Eva, the golden-­haired, angelic child, and Topsy, the
orphaned and abused slave child, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852
novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, standard reading in most American literature
survey classes. As Tatar describes:

In a spacious bedroom decorated with white muslin curtains, an alabaster

desk, and marble vases, the dying Little Eva, pale and pious, distributes locks
of her golden-brown hair along with nuggets of Christian wisdom. Her
blondeness is linked with beauty and fairness, in all its semantic nuances …
‘There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of soci-
ety. The fair high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiri-
tual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle,
cringing, yet acute neighbor’ … Stowe was most likely seeking to extend
the protective energies generated by beauty to an innocent victim of social
injustice, and indeed Topsy, against all odds, survives, and has the chance to
be ‘an angel forever.’ ‘Just as much as if you were white,’ Eva reassures her,
using a phrase that makes alarm bells go off in our heads.5
 INTRODUCTION 3

Tatar quotes Stowe’s juxtaposition of the two children only in part; the
rest of that passage from Stowe continues: “There stood the representa-
tives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, edu-
cation, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!”6 Though these descriptions of the
two races are over 100 years old, they are still repeated daily in the ways
that visual media articulate, to use Stuart Hall’s notion, children from the
Global North and the Global South.
The descriptions of the two girls from Stowe share some rhetorical sim-
ilarities with the tweets about the Hunger Games’ black characters. The
dehumanizing use of the phrase “some black girl” in the tweet by Alana
suggests an assumption of the homogeneousness of all black girls—that
they lack an individual identity, humanity, or visibility (“some” black girl,
any black girl—they are all the same). Many of the tweets contain an ele-
ment of surprise that black children could be cast in the role of a sympa-
thetic character, much like Stowe’s Eva casts Topsy as an angel but only “as
if [she] were white.” Such comments reveal long-standing beliefs in white-
ness as angelic where children are concerned. Anna Holmes explains that
these tweets demonstrate “microcosms of the way in which the humanity
of minorities is often denied and thwarted, and they underscore how infu-
riatingly conditional empathy can be.”7 As disturbing as these social media
comments are, they do illuminate some interesting notions about the way
Western societies, and the US in particular, view children.
What this discussion of race in Hunger Games does is highlight the
glaring absence of children of color in the discourse of childhood. This
absence of black children from notions of childhood is clearly expressed in
the absence of black children within American mainstream cinema, which
is not too surprising given Hollywood’s history of racist exclusion. Yet
at this moment in history, with an African American president and with
prominent, popular black directors like Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, there
are still beliefs about children and the condition of “childness” that mar-
ginalize African American children; indeed, such beliefs often elide black
children from the landscape of childhood itself. While the term “childish”
refers to specific actions or behaviors that mimic cultural notions of the
way children behave, “childness” refers to the essence of being a child
or of being perceived as having the characteristics of a child (mentally,
emotionally, or physically). The viewer reaction to the black characters in
Hunger Games raises a number of important questions about how we, as
a culture, imagine children and childhood, and whom we do not imagine
as children.
4 D. OLSON

This study will explore cultural conceptions of the child and flesh out
the connections between historical imagery and beliefs about Africans
and the cinematic absence of black children from the contemporary
Hollywood film. The condition of childhood is perpetually constructed
and reconstructed within popular imagery from a predominantly Western
model, leaving little room for the representation of other modes of real or
imagined childhoods. Within the discourse of children’s studies and film
scholarship in relation to the conception of “the child,” there is often little
to no distinction among children by race—the “child” is most often dis-
cussed as a universal entity, as the embodiment of all things not adult, not
(sexually) corrupt. As Sean Moreland and Markus P.J. Bohlmann explain,
the symbolic nature of “the child” serves as “the locus both of all that is
most esteemed in our humanity, and all that is most inhuman about us.”8
Although there are works that examine the African American child in rela-
tion to socio-economic or gender influences, those studies tend to isolate
black children from the “norm” of childhood because of the effects of
adverse economic conditions or assumptions about gender that are based
on specious cultural beliefs about race. Discussions about children of color
among scholars often take place within contexts such as crime, drugs,
urbanization, poverty, or lack of education that tend to reinforce histori-
cally stereotypical beliefs about African Americans. For instance, Carter
Godwin Woodson’s 1933 classic The Mis-Education of the Negro, the infa-
mous 1965 Moynihan Report, Janet E. Hale’s Black Children: Their Roots,
Culture, and Learning Styles, Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and
Pedro A. Noquera’s City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the
Promise of Public Education frame the black child within the “problem” of
their [lack of] education (or inability to be educated).9 There is a veritable
cornucopia of studies on African American juvenile crime with the most
recent, and disturbing, trend the “school-to-prison pipeline” discussed in
Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt’s The School-to-­
Prison Pipeline: Structuring Legal Reform.10
Black children are also often located within historical “problems,” such
as slavery or youth violence discussed in such works as Wilma King’s sig-
nificant study African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from
Slavery to Civil Rights (2005) or Anna Mae Duane’s Suffering Childhood
in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim.11
While King’s study is one of the first to expose experiences of black
­childhood within the historical contexts of (and the problems of) slavery,
Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, Duane’s study locates black
 INTRODUCTION 5

children within the problem frame of “victimhood.” Duane convincingly

argues that the “vulnerable and victimized child emerged as an essential
element in structuring ‘natural’ ways of thinking and feeling about the
often violent process of nation-making.”12 Popular discourses about chil-
dren also used the victimized white child to structure a “natural way of
thinking” that limited the notion of childhood and innocence to white
children via the exclusion of black children. Duane’s argument finds that
the “malice underlying the infantilization of blackness” worked to equate
black childhood with notions of adulthood and sexual knowledge, con-
ceptions that continue today within the discourses of childhood and visual
representations of the black child.13
In contrast, when white children are interpreted within historical matri-
ces, they are presented not as marginal or as a social problem, but rather as
contributing members to significant and (arguably) positive social change.
For example, Vivian A. Zelizer’s work Pricing the Priceless Child and
Karen Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-­
Century American Culture both use the universal term “child” (i.e., white)
to refer to the changing nature of (white middle-class) childhood and
how that change had historical significance to American culture broadly.14
Though both texts give cursory mention of African American children,
neither text includes African American families within the broad cultural
shifts in attitudes towards children or changing childhood conditions. For
instance, Zelizer argues that the “productive value of children disappeared
with the rise of industrial capitalism” and that changes in families during
the industrial era also contributed to the changing nature of childhood.
Zelizer names white, middle-class children as the focus of this change, and
in many ways she is correct—the rhetoric of the early twentieth-century
reform movement for child labor focused solely on the plight of poor,
white children in factories, fueled in part by the visual evidence made
famous by photographer Lewis W. Hine (Fig. 1.1).
Hine’s numerous photographs showing small, ragged white children in
coal mines or factories fueled the growing outrage over unregulated child
labor. According to Shelley Sallee, in her astute study The Whiteness of Child
Labor Reform in the New South, black children who labored served the his-
torical need to sacralize the white child from every economic background:
“The emphasis on the whiteness of the South’s child laborers gave rise to
a white transregional Progressive culture willing to ignore the plight of
African Americans in the name of progress in the South.”15 But black chil-
dren who labored, who participated fully in the rising industrial revolution,
6 D. OLSON

Fig. 1.1 Lewis Hine: girl in cotton factory. Courtesy Library of Congress,
National Child Labor Commission

were not considered a positive part of the changing discourse of childhood.

For example, Sallee shows that reformers used black children’s desire for
education as a “threat” to white supremacy, thereby shifting the discussion
from a “disempowering charge of sentimentalism into [a] powerful rhetoric
of racial politics.”16 Black children were effectively excluded from the early
twentieth-century sentimentalization of children and used as a threat to
white “innocence.”
There is very little discourse that considers race as a factor in popular
representations of children. This study is designed to fill a void in chil-
dren’s studies and film scholarship by investigating the Western model
of childhood and what part race may play in the construction of the idea
of the child and childhood, and, ultimately, how black childhood is por-
trayed in cinema. What preexisting ideas about children and childhood
did those viewers of The Hunger Games have that elicited such racist reac-
tions? Why does the image of the black child seem to negate empathy and
compassion, indeed, sometimes prompting ire or fear? How (and where)
do images of black childhood fit (or not) in the Western model of the
child? How is black childhood constructed, particularly within Hollywood
 INTRODUCTION 7

films, and are such constructions influenced by a transnational flow of

historically racist imagery? In this age of globalization, images of children
from all around the world are readily available and viewed, yet the visual
depiction of childhood in Hollywood cinema continues to embrace the
white child as the representative of childhood as such. The transnational
nature of image dissemination in the global age would seem to suggest
a more diverse field of childhoods within dominant Hollywood cinema
is warranted, yet this has not materialized. I will interrogate the ways in
which Hollywood cinema perpetuates the exclusion of black children from
popular discourses of childhood with the aim of understanding how such
absence continues to shape cultural beliefs about children and childhood.
There is little scholarly recognition of the historical trajectory of American
representation of black children, nor is there discussion of the connec-
tion between historical images of African children, and their residue upon
current trends in depictions of black American children. This study seeks
to discover if there is a relationship between the image of the African
child within popular media and the social construction of the black child
and black childhood in the USA. And, if so, what are the mechanisms
that inform such a relationship? This study will interrogate the tension
between the historical fear of blackness in US society, in its various forms,
and images of black children in popular media, particularly cinema. It is
the negotiation with those child images that I argue is central to the cul-
tural construction of childhood, and black childhood, today.
After establishing the history of black erasure, I will examine a few nota-
ble counter-examples and ask how does the image of the black child affirm
or subvert popular notions of childhood in contemporary US society? For
instance, do prevalent black “gangsta” images help inform cultural notions
about black children? Does the historical image of the African child inform
notions about the African American child? Or is the historical image of
the African child, and by association the African American child, so effec-
tively “epidermalized,” in our culture, to use Charles Johnson’s term, that
she is just never viewed as a child?17 And finally, how has the black child
been represented in, or excluded from, contemporary Hollywood cinema?
Significantly, how are historical images of black children tied to modern
cinematic images of black children? My argument here parallels Toni
Morrison’s discourse of the “Africanist presence” in Playing in the Dark,
in which she argues: “Just as the formation of the nation necessitated
coded language and purposeful restriction to deal with racial disingenu-
ousness … so too did literature, whose founding characteristic extend into
8 D. OLSON

the twentieth century [film], reproduce the necessity for codes and restric-
tion. Through significant and understood omissions [my emphasis], heav-
ily nuanced conflicts … one can see that the real or fabricated Africanist
presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness.”18 In similar ways, the
black child in Hollywood cinema functions as the “Africanist presence”
that normalizes white middle-class childhood.
My methodology consists of textual and discourse analysis through
the lenses of children’s studies, cultural studies, critical race theory, and
postcolonial theory. My inquiry is informed by such theorists as Stuart
Hall, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Franz Fanon and Toni Morrison.
This analysis locates itself at significant junctures where these scholarly
approaches intersect—in the interstice between cultural notions about
children and childhood and their visual representation in cinema. I will
draw on both cultural studies and theories about transnational cultural
flows as tools to unlock the discursive conditions that inform social mean-
ings about children and childhood as they are presented in Hollywood
cinema. I will look at historical conceptions of childhood within scholarly
discourse, the child character in popular film, and what space the black
child (both African and African American) occupies within that ideal. In
that way, I will show how the cinematic absence of the black child contin-
ues the discourse of racial exclusion while at the same time contextualizing
white childhood as the norm. I will then present case studies that inter-
rogate how Hollywood visually defines those spaces for the black child;
for instance, what interpretive fracture is visible in the Hunger Games fans’
racist articulations about who is worthy of innocence, even in death? I will
further argue that the transnational circulation of the black child image
informs, constructs, and mediates popular conceptions of black childhood
in contemporary Hollywood cinema and beyond.
I have specifically chosen Hollywood-produced or -distributed films
that had national and international showings. One of the challenges of this
project has been to find Hollywood films that star black children! What
I found was a very limited body of films that star black children; the idea
that I can “choose” from a range of films is non-existent. This absence
of films featuring black children protagonists is a significant comment on
the ways Hollywood envisions both childhood and the black child. So, I
am looking at “all” the recent Hollywood films that star black children.
Most of the films I look at have received Academy Award nominations,
with the exception of Butter and After Earth. One of the reasons for these
 INTRODUCTION 9

film choices (as opposed to the wide variety of independent films starring
black children) is that they were widely seen and as such, these films reveal
consistent racial discourses that position black children as “Other” and
lesser-than-white children for the general population, thereby functioning
as conduits for reaffirming notions about childhood and race. The films in
this volume are representative of the way the Hollywood industry regu-
larly characterizes black children. Chapter 2 will examine the historical
discourses of both “the child” and black children within popular culture,
while Chapter 3 takes a close look at the way black girls are portrayed in
Hollywood cinema. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the cinematic portrayal of
black boys, and Chapter 6, the conclusion, reflects on the star power of
Jaden Smith, currently the most famous black child actor in the world.

Notes
1. David Daniel, “Hunger Games sets Box Office Records,” CNN,
26 March 2012. http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/25/showbiz/
hunger-­games-­box-office/index.html
2. Anna Holmes, “White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in
Hunger Games,” The New Yorker, 30 March 2012. http://www.
newyorker.com/books/page-turner/white-until-proven-black-
imagining-race-in-hunger-games
3. Dodai Stewart, “Racist Hunger Games Fans are Very Disappointed,”
Jezebel.com, 26 March 2012. http://jezebel.com/5896408/
racist-hunger-games-fans-dont-care-how-much-money-the-
movie-­­made
4. In recent years, the website Peas in Their Pods has made a point of
highlighting, via social media, missing children of color. Their
efforts have raised awareness of missing children of color that the
regular media tend to ignore. http://www.peasintheirpods.com
5. Maria Tatar, “Little, Blonde, Innocent, and Dead,” The New Yorker,
11 April 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
little-blonde-innocent-and-dead
6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1851–52 (New York:
Bantam, 1981), 244.
7. Anna Holmes, “White Until Proven Black”.
8. Sean Moreland and Markus Bohlmann, Holy Terrors: Essays on
Monstrous Children in Cinema (New York: McFarland, 2015), 7.
10 D. OLSON

9. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933

(New York: Seven Treasures Publications, 2010); Janet E. Hale,
Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles (Salt
Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, 1982); Jonathan
Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Broadway Paperbacks,
1991); and Pedro A. Noquera, City Schools and the American
Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education (New York:
Teacher’s College Press, 2003). See also Jawanza Kunjufu,
Developing Positive Self-Image and Discipline in Black Children
(New York: African American Images, 1984) and Countering the
Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys (New York: African American
Images, 1985); Michael Porter, Kill Them Before They Grow:
Misdiagnosis of African American Boys in the Classroom (New York:
African American Images, 1998); Baruti K. Kafele, Motivating
Black Males to Achieve in School and in Life (Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Development, 2009).
10. See also Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image
in the White Mind: Media and Race in America (Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Dennis Rome, Black Demons:
The Media’s Depiction of the African American Male Criminal
Stereotype (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2009); Monique
W. Morris, “Race, Gender, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline:
Expanding the Discussion to Black Girls,” accessed 10 July 2015,
http://www.otlcampaign.org/sites/default/files/resources/
Morris-Race-Gender-and-the-School-to-Prison-Pipeline.pdf;
Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino
Boys (New York: NYU Press, 2011).
11. Wilma King, African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives
from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Anna Mae Duane, Suffering Childhood in Early America:
Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2011).
12. Duane, Suffering Childhood, 3.
13. Duane, Suffering Childhood, 159.
14. Vivian A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994) and Karen Sánchez-Eppler,
­Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
 INTRODUCTION 11

15. Shelley Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor in the New South
(Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 10. See also
Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young
People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009).
16. Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor, 82.
17. Charles Johnson, “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Michigan
Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (1993): 603. Johnson describes enter-
ing into a bar full of white people in Manhattan (NY), and much
like Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the black body seen through
colonial white eyes (White Skin, Black Mask), Johnson experiences
an exteriority of his blackness through those white eyes—“But, as
black, seen as stained body, as physicality, basically opaque to oth-
ers … my world is epidermalized, collapsed into the … stained
casement of my skin” (603).
18. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5.
 CHAPTER 2

Establishing the Discourse of the Child

To find any critical mention of the African or African American child within
the scholarship about children can be a daunting task. In The History of
Childhood, Lloyd deMause observes among historians and psychoanalysts a
lack of focus on the history of childhood as an important area of study. As
he states, historians have been so busy with the more public “noisy sand-
box of history” that they have completely missed what is “going on in the
homes around the playground.”1 The same can be said about the ways
scholars look at children as an object of study—scholars are so busy with the
“noisy sand-box” of Euro-American childhood that any other childhoods
are drowned out, pushed to the margins, or out of the box all together.
Since deMause’s astute observation there have been a few notable histories
of childhood, beginning with Philippe Ariès’ groundbreaking Centuries of
Childhood. And yet, while their value to the study of children and child-
hood is not in question, they do share common perspectives: these stud-
ies set the foundation for a discourse—both popular and scholarly—that
constructs white children in the West as “the” signifier for all childhoods.
A discourse analysis must first look at the ways children and childhood
are discussed or visually depicted culturally and then examine the power
relationships that inform such conversations.2 How Americans talk about
and think about children and childhood “combine[s] social relevance and

The updated original online version for this chapter can be found at
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2

© The Author(s) 2017 13

D. Olson, Black Children in Hollywood Cinema,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48273-6_2
14 D. OLSON

textual specificity”3 in ways that inform broader discursive practices. Such

practices—like Hollywood films—highlight the ways in which “social rela-
tions are exercised and social identities are manifested … [and] ­constructed
(reproduced, contested, restructured) in discourse.”4 The early discourse
about children and childhood, for example, gives evidence to some naive
assumptions about how representation relates to reality. While early stud-
ies were groundbreaking in their recognition of childhood as a separate
condition from adulthood, their methodology often relied on assumptions
that a visual representation was reality. Early discourse about children and
childhood lacked attention to how texts—visual and written—construct
and shape, rather than reflect, reality. Popular discourses about children
and childhood had, and still have, very real effects on social policies, rela-
tions, and conditions for children. And popular discourse regularly omits
black children from the dialogue about childhood, which, I argue, results
in the persistent visual presentation of the black child as a non-child.
Ariès’ examination of childhood, published in France in 1960, was the
first study to focus solely on children and childhood from a historical per-
spective. Centuries marked a point of interest in the study of, and rhetoric
about, children and childhood and is considered the first comprehensive
study of children and childhood in an academic context. Ariès’ study is
divided into three sections—the idea of the child, school, and the family—
and draws on renaissance art and a bevy of personal letters and notes from
which he makes broad assertions. Ariès concludes, mistakenly, that the
notion of childhood did not exist until around the thirteenth century. He
based much of his conclusions on the lack of images of children from select
paintings leading up to the thirteenth century. He also, somewhat naively,
assumed that a visual depiction in a painting represented the way life really
was for the people pictured. According to Adrian Wilson, Ariès’ broad
conclusions are based on very little, or dubious, textual evidence as well as
select artistic works. Wilson argues Ariès’ work is neither situated within
social, political, or economic contexts, nor explained in relation to other
historical moments. He also points out the vagueness of Ariès’ timeline as
developments in the child and family tend to change within his text.5
Ariès’ Centuries encompasses a wide historical range: from the Middle
Ages up through the early 1960s. But his study is very narrow in its geo-
politics: European childhood represents all childhood. Most tellingly, the
first chapter begins with a comparison of the European child who “knows
his age” to those children in the “African bush” who, Ariès argues, con-
sider age “quite an obscure notion, something which is not so important
that one can forget it.”6 Ariès is quite obviously paraphrasing from Dudley
 ESTABLISHING THE DISCOURSE OF THE CHILD 15

Kidd’s 1906 study of “Kafir” children, Savage Childhoods, in which Kidd

observes that the “Kafirs” have no “method of identifying the year” and
so cannot remember a child’s specific birthday. For Kidd, as for Ariès, this
omission of what is a standard Western rite of childhood—the celebration
of a child’s birthday—is a singular loss of what childhood stands for: “All
those perennial and brooding fancies that centre round the next birthday,
which play a large part in the lives of European children, are unknown to
the Kafirs, who are thus deprived at a single stroke one of the supreme
and aching joys of childhood. The loss is absolute and unredeemable.”7
Kidd’s use of the offensive word “Kafir” (from the Arabic Kafir meaning
“non-believer,” and is used as a derogatory term that refers to Africans in
much the same way the word “nigger” is used as a racial slur to refer to
black people in the Americas) establishes a disconnect between the African
child—as subject—and “normal” European children. Though Ariès con-
tinues to discuss how knowing one’s age is a part of “technical civiliza-
tion,” such a distinction between European and African children about
knowledge deemed of value to the West sets a tone of dismissal for African
children who are marginalized from the outset by a standard of childhood
that first Kidd, then Ariès defines as the norm.
In Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian explains that those in power
often disparage the Other through temporal references that establish a
“civilized West as the pinnacle of universal human progress.”8 Labels like
“savage,” “primitive,” or “undeveloped” set up “temporal structures” that
situate those peoples and cultures in the past, whereas the “developed,”
“civilized,” and “modern” West is framed within the here and now, setting
up a hierarchy in which only Western-style knowledge is valued.9 There is
rarely any discussion about what kinds of knowledge African children do
have, but the inference by both Kidd and Ariès is that they do not have
any knowledge of value. In the last sentence of Ariès’ book, he closes as
he began—with an acknowledgment of children who are not in the white
middle class—that is, as dismissive of race as his opening: “The concept of
the family … and perhaps elsewhere the concept of race, appear as manifesta-
tions of the same intolerance towards variety, the same insistence on uni-
formity” (my emphasis). For Ariès, “variety” means segregation—people
keeping to their own “kind”—and then those groups create the “variety”
Ariès refers to. Ariès espouses a pluralist view here and bemoans a modern
society that he believes seeks to eliminate what he considers the “high
contrast” and beneficial separation of groups (by class and race) a “juxta-
position of inequalities, hitherto something perfectly natural,”10 in favor
of a family structure he contends forces conformity to standards of social
16 D. OLSON

sameness. For Ariès, black families are not the same as white families and
should not be treated as the same. Ariès’ notion about family is problem-
atic in that he suggests a community is better, made stronger through the
otherness of some groups. As Roland Barthes describes in his discussion
about the naturalizing function of myth, the “difference between human
morphologies is asserted, exoticism is consistently stressed … [and yet]
from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced.”11 Ariès’ use
of the term “race” preceded by the vague “perhaps” appears here as an
afterthought; yet, writing in 1960s France, which saw the beginning of the
end for France’s colonial hold over Africa, would seem to suggest in Ariès
a consciousness that race may be a factor within conditions of childhood,
but that European childhood and parental attitudes are the natural norm
and the only ones worthy of examination.
Ariès is considered the founder of the Western model of discourse
about childhood—white, middle- or upper-class, bourgeois values, inher-
ent innocence, idealized, loved, protected. His singular approach to
the history of the child and family has established a prevailing discourse
that tends to align all childhoods with white middle-class Western child-
hoods. Even today’s UNESCO proclamation of a “right to childhood”
is based on the white Western notion of what a childhood should be.12
Ariès’ conscious dismissal of any other parental attitudes or childhoods
has established a base from which later discourses about childhood would
emerge. Indeed, I would suggest Ariès’ dismissal of race, and African bush
children, is representative of colonial-based discourses, which worked to
erase African history as a whole.13 Throughout Centuries, Ariès laments
the loss of social, economic, and racial differences that, in his view, repre-
sent a freedom of sorts as “children mingled with adults in everyday life,”
albeit within their socially prescribed positions, which for Ariès is a type
of freedom.14
Ariès’ study of childhood is also limited to the conditions of the upper
class, which reflects his own economic condition: a bias that has become
a persistent feature of discourses about children and childhood. On occa-
sion he makes reference to the lower classes, but only to suppose those
parents must also feel the same way towards their children but with differ-
ent, less desirable, results. For instance, regarding “coddling,” Ariès states
that for the upper classes coddling gave parents much pleasure as they
enjoyed the “antics” of their youngsters, but for the lower classes, Ariès
states that “the children of the poor are particularly ill-mannered because
‘they just do as they please, their parents paying no attention to them,
 ESTABLISHING THE DISCOURSE OF THE CHILD 17

even treat[ing] them in an idolatrous manner.’”15 It is this assumption that

“all” parents feel the same way toward their children—the same white,
Western way—that demonstrates the historical connection between pater-
nal colonial attitudes towards other races, as well as to the European poor,
and the discourses about childhood that have followed. It was common
during colonialism to equate those in the lower classes with the “savage”
populations of the colonies (American Indians, Africans, Native South
Americans, etc.). Irish immigrants during the 1800s were portrayed as
savage and were regularly depicted as monkeys; for instance, in the John
Leach cartoons for Punch magazine.16 Both groups, the colonized and
the poor, were considered in need of “parenting” to raise them from their
“savage” existence. Ariès’ early dismissal of bush children and his later
indifferent mention of race underscores his pluralistic ideas about child-
hood, resulting in a discourse that has consistently ignored or marginal-
ized other childhoods.
Within the growing scholarship about childhood, Ariès’ Centuries of
Childhood is significant to the discussion of the role race plays in child-
hood studies because it establishes a pattern of discourse about childhood
that examines the child through a homogenous lens. What arises from
his early study of, and discourse about, childhood has become the study
of white western European childhood presented as THE history of all
childhoods. In contrast to Ariès, Lloyd deMause’s 1974 The History of
Childhood approaches childhood through the lens of psychoanalysis, or,
more specifically, his own “psychogenic theory of history.”17 DeMause’s
disheartening and painful history is very much different than Ariès’ wistful
idealization of the child; yet its discourse is similarly raced in that white
European and US childhoods stand for “all” childhoods. For deMause,
childhood is a time filled with terror, infanticide, physical abuse, pedo-
philia, and incest. DeMause’s study is not a broad history in the traditional
sense or in the style of Ariès, but instead has a singular discourse that is
followed across a broad historical path. It is a labyrinthine descent into an
underworld filled with every imaginable torture (physical or mental) that
an adult can inflict upon a child, residing just below the cultural-­norm
surface.
In his review of The History of Childhood, Julius A. Elias states that
deMause focuses solely on accounts of “starving and battered” children
and the horrors children suffered at adult hands, leaving no “provision
for anyone to have been nice to children,” despite “a good deal of evi-
dence to the contrary.”18 Elias finds that deMause characterizes instances
18 D. OLSON

of ­“horrifying” practices of child abuse as widespread when such prac-

tices, though they did (and still do) exist, were not the majority and do
not equal the totality of childhood’s history, nor are they representative
of most childhood experiences. As with Ariès, deMause’s discourse of
childhood is rooted squarely in the upper classes with scattered cursory
glances at the middle or lower classes, and no mention of racial differ-
ences. DeMause’s study seems to position childhood at the “juncture of
the ‘body and the ‘population,’” which, as Michel Foucault explains, is a
“crucial target of a power organized around the management of life,” so
much so that childhood, and threats to the notion of innocent childhood,
became a “theme of political operations, economic interventions … and
ideological campaigns for raising standards of morality and responsibility.”
Those in power, the dominant classes, used notions of white, middle-/
upper-class childhood as a marker for a “society’s strength, revealing both
its political energy and its biological vigor.”19 And that societal “strength”
lies only in whiteness. So for deMause, these acts are tortures specifically
because they happen to white middle- and upper-class children.
But what is quite missing in deMause’s discourse of the child, surpris-
ingly as he appears to be enamored of children’s suffering, is the physi-
cal and mental suffering of black children in America (during slavery
and Jim Crow). DeMause’s History of Childhood contains one chapter
pointedly dedicated to white American childhood (as opposed to the rest
of the book’s focus on European childhood), entitled “Anglo-American
Child Rearing” and written by Joseph E. Illick, suggests two interest-
ing hypotheses: (1) a recognition that there are other US childhoods
because Illick felt the need to specify “Anglo” children from other chil-
dren, and (2) this recognition qua negation functions as an “I know you
exist but you do not exist here” position. Such a position, viewed within
the historical context of the ongoing civil rights movement throughout
the early seventies when The History of Childhood was written, suggests
Illick’s—and deMause’s—awareness of the black childhood that they
effectively dismiss with the word Anglo. Such a dismissal within deM-
ause’s and Illick’s overall context of systematic abuse renders invisible the
horrors visited upon African slave children, black children during the Jim
Crow era, and more pointedly, black children during the civil rights era
within which deMause and Illick write. The exclusion of black children
as equal victims of abuse creates the impression that black child abuse is
so common that it does not need to be described, that it “goes without
saying,” or more disturbingly, that such abuse is only “abuse” when it
 ESTABLISHING THE DISCOURSE OF THE CHILD 19

happens to white children. Such absence of, indeed, negation of black

children from early discourses of American childhood demonstrates a
cultural process of exclusion of the black child from its own history; they
just do not exist within the context of childhood as a socially discursive
category.
The exclusion of blackness from dominant discourses is nothing new.
As colonial theorists Frantz Fanon has pointed out, the West’s literature
and imagery are “put together by white men for little white men … [and]
Savages are always symbolized by Negros or Indians.”20 Fanon argues that
the way whites talk about and represent blacks creates the notion of a
“blackness” within the white mind, a theme Toni Morrison echoes 25
years later in Playing in the Dark, Morrison’s treatise on literary images
of blackness: “The pervasive use of black images and people in expressive
prose … [and] the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie in their usage”21
undergirds the naturalization of the stereotypes that whites believe about
blacks. The same can be said for the way whites create “childhood” in
their own image. So the exclusion of black children within the discourse
about childhood raises some interesting questions about how we perceive
children and who we perceive as a child.
There have been other notable broad histories of the child and child-
hood, such as Colin Heywood’s A History of Childhood: Children and
Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (2001), and Hugh
Cunningham’s Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500
(2005), but most such broad histories have also been located in Western,
predominantly white cultures, continuing the homogenous discourse
about childhood framed with a historical context. Cunningham begins his
study by stating, rightly, that “we need to distinguish between children as
human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas.”22 This is an impor-
tant shift in the discourse of childhood because it moves away from the
earlier assumptions that all childhoods are the same. Cunningham’s astute
observation recognizes that the idea of “the child” is fluid, not static or
singular. Yet, Cunningham locates his study solely in Europe and North
America where he argues that the “patterns of change” experienced by
children in these locations were comparable across both gender and social
class. For Cunningham, these uniformities in experience among children
in the global north are enough to justify the claim that such experiences
encompass all children, despite his earlier awareness that childhood itself
is a “shifting set of ideas.” Neither study acknowledges the different racial
groups that were prominent within European or American societies during
20 D. OLSON

the historical periods Cunningham explores. There is no mention of the

childhood experiences of African Berbers, the Romani, or Arab peoples
that were (and still are) a prominent part of European population. Race
is not considered within these historical discourses about children. Such
deliberate omission of any non-white childhoods has informed and natu-
ralized attitudes about the uniformity of the child experience within stud-
ies of and about children and childhood as a uniquely white experience.
It is the narrow discourse within these studies that reinforces, through
omission, a racial preference for white children as the standard-bearer for
all childhood.
One particularly noteworthy break from previous discourses about the
history of childhood can be found in Peter Stearns’ 2006 Childhood in
World History. As the title suggests, Stearns presents a more comprehen-
sive view of childhood that does not locate it solely in the West and out-
lines some of the problems with the earlier approaches. Stearns explains
that the acknowledgement of a condition called “childhood” is a constant
throughout history and cultures, but how cultures approach dealing with
conditions of childhood varies widely. Stearns insightfully observes “the
history of childhood forces a confrontation between what is ‘natural’ in
the experience of children, and what is constructed by specific historical
forces.”23 Stearns argues that approaches to and ideas about childhood,
particularly the “purpose of childhood,” have transformed during global
cultural shifts: from hunter/gatherer societies to agricultural, from agricul-
tural to industrial, and from industrial to late capitalist consumer society.
Even for those societies still struggling to industrialize, the “imitation of
industrial patterns, like mass schooling” changed the way adults thought
about children and childhood.24 Stearns’ text traces global patterns of
historic change that he argues altered adult views of childhood and, in
turn, conditions of childhood. His study is an important step in recog-
nizing childhood experiences that are not white, bourgeois, American
or European. While invaluable in articulating different cultural forms of
childhood and their corresponding historical moments, Stearns’ history
is somewhat limited by being overly broad. Childhood recognizes the his-
torical processes that lead to different cultural attitudes towards children
across the globe, but the nature of such a broad study necessitates glid-
ing over cultural specificities. And though there are a few scholars today
that interrogate the conditions of other childhoods, such as Wilma King’s
significant work on childhood during American slavery, to date no such
history exists that combines Stearns’ patterns of global societal shifts with
Another random document with
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 So the Wind-Child did as her father had asked her. She stood at
the edge of the cave. She stretched out her arm and the wind
quieted. Then the Wind-Child forgot to obey her father. The sun
came out, and she saw many bright shells lying on the sand. The
waves had washed them up during the storm. She left the mountain,
and ran along the beach gathering shells.
As soon as the Wind-Child had picked up one shell, she dropped it
to go on farther in search of one that was larger. On and on she
went, always looking for a shell that was brighter. She suddenly
found that she had gone a long way from home. She could not see
the wigwam. She found herself, where the magic trail of the shells
had led her, in a deep, dark forest. It was a frightful place, and the
trees shut the Wind-Child in on all sides.
 They seemed glad to see the Wind-Child.
The forest was settled by a strange race of grizzly people. They
were dark, rough in their ways, and wore shaggy fur clothing. Their
wigwams were made of the trunks of trees. They had great fires in
the open places of the woods about which they sat. They seemed
glad to see the Wind-Child. The mothers crowded around her, and
the children brought her nuts. They gave her a fur cloak and one of
the best wigwams in which to live. When the Wind-Child begged to
go home to her father, these grizzly people of the forest gave her
sweets to eat. They let her taste of the thick, sweet maple syrup that
they cooked in their kettles. They gave her wild honey that the bees
had left the season before in the hollow trees. After eating these, the
Wind-Child forgot all about her home, and lived with and learned the
ways of these forest people. Years and years passed and she was
still among them, grown as wild and savage as they themselves
were.
The Great Spirit looked for his daughter season after season all
over the earth, and still he could not find her. His mountain was
deserted. His voice could be heard calling her in every wind that
blew. Great drought and famine came upon the land because he
neglected the earth. It was a time of great suffering. But one day he
came upon the grizzly people. They were moving their camp from
one part of the forest to another. In their midst was the Wind-Child,
looking almost like one of them. She knew her father, though, and
ran to him, begging to go home with him. He took her in his arms,
but he turned in anger toward her captors.
As the Great Spirit gazed in anger upon the grizzly people they
drew their fur cloaks over their heads. They dropped down to the
ground at his feet to beg for mercy. The Great Spirit left the forest.
As he did so these wild people of the woods found that they could
not rise to their feet again. They were not able to draw their fur
cloaks from their heads. They went about on all fours, covered from
head to foot with shaggy fur. They could not speak, but could only
growl.
 They were the first bears, and there have been bears ever since in
place of the strange savages who captured the Wind-Child.
The Great Spirit took the Wind-Child to the top of the mountain
and they lived there always. On her return the rain fell and the sun
shone, and there was plenty in the earth again. But the bear tribe
prowled the earth, hunted by the Indians, because of the Wind-
Child’s curiosity.
 WHY THE BEAR
HAS A STUMPY TAIL.

Once upon a time, in the far away days, when the beasts walked
the land, and talked like real people, the bear had a long, beautiful,
bushy tail, as fine as the tail of any other creature, and you may be
sure he was very proud of it.
One winter day the bear was out traveling, and whom should he
meet but Brother Fox, hastening along with a string of fish dangling
down his back.
“Ah,” said Bruin, “stop a bit, friend; where did you find such fat
fish?”
Now, very likely Brother Fox had helped himself to the fish from
some one’s larder, but he never told the bear; not he.
“It is a secret, about these fish,” he said to Bruin; “come close, and
I will tell you.”
So Bruin went close to Brother Fox, and Brother Fox said:
“You must go to the river where the ice is thick, make a hole in the
ice, sit down with your tail in the hole, and wait for the fish to bite.
When your tail smarts, pull it out, quickly. That is the way to fish.”
“Oh, is it?” said Bruin. “Well, if you say it is so, it must be true,
Brother Fox,” and he walked toward the river swinging his tail as he
went, and Brother Fox hid behind a tree to laugh up his sleeve, and
watch.
Well, poor old Bruin got a stick, and made a hole in the ice. Then
he sat down with his long, beautiful, bushy tail in the water and
waited, and, oh, it was very cold indeed.
He waited, and waited, and then his tail began to smart. He gave a
quick pull to bring up the fish, and, alas, the ice had frozen fast
again.
Off came the bear’s beautiful, long, bushy tail, and he never was
able to put it on again.
And that is why the bear has a short, stumpy tail, because he tried
to fish, as Brother Fox told him to, through the ice.
 WHY THE BEAR
SLEEPS ALL
WINTER.

Once upon a time, little Brother Rabbit lived, quite sober and
industrious, in the woods, and just close by lived a big, brown Bear.
Now little Brother Rabbit never troubled his neighbors in those
days, nor meddled with their housekeeping, nor played any tricks the
way he does now. In the fall, he gathered his acorns, and his pig
nuts, and his rabbit tobacco. On a frosty morning, he would set out
with Brother Fox for the farmer’s; and while Brother Fox looked after
the chicken yards, little Brother Rabbit picked cabbage, and pulled
turnips, and gathered carrots and parsnips for his cellar. When the
winter came, he never failed to share his store with a wandering field
mouse, or a traveling chipmunk.
Now, in those days, old Bear was not content to do his own
housekeeping, and doze in the sun, and gather wild honey in the
summer, and dig for field mice in the winter. He was full of mischief,
and was always playing tricks. Of all the beasts of the wood, the one
he loved best to trouble was sober little Brother Rabbit.
Just as soon as Brother Rabbit moved to a new tree stump, and
filled his bins with vegetables, and his pantry with salad, along came
old Bear and carried off all his stores.
Just as soon as Brother Rabbit filled his house with dry, warm
leaves for a bed, creepy, creepy, crawly, along came old Bear, and
tried to squeeze himself into the bed, too, and of course he was too
big.
 At last, Brother Rabbit could stand it no longer, and he went to all
his friends in the wood to ask their advice.
The first one he met was Brother Frog, sitting on the edge of the
pond, and sticking his feet in the nice, cool mud.
“What shall I do, Brother Frog?” asked Brother Rabbit; “Brother
Bear will not leave me alone.”
“Let us ask Brother Squirrel,” said Brother Frog.
So the two went to Brother Squirrel, cracking nuts in the hickory
tree.
“What shall we do, Brother Squirrel?” asked Brother Frog; “Brother
Bear will not leave Brother Rabbit alone.”
“Let us ask Brother Mole,” said Brother Squirrel, dropping his nuts.
So the three went to where Brother Mole was digging the cellar for
a new house, and they said:
“What shall we do, Brother Mole? Brother Bear will not leave
Brother Rabbit alone.”
“Let us ask Brother Fox,” said Brother Mole.
So Brother Mole, and Brother Squirrel, and Brother Frog, and
Brother Rabbit went to where Brother Fox was combing his brush
behind a bush, and they said to him:
“What shall we do, Brother Fox? Brother Bear will not leave
Brother Rabbit alone.”
“Let us go to Brother Bear,” said Brother Fox.
So they all went along with little Brother Rabbit, and they hunted
and hunted for old Bear, but they could not find him. They hunted
and hunted some more, and they peeped in a hollow tree. There lay
old Bear, fast asleep.
“Hush,” said Brother Fox.
Then he whispered to Brother Frog, “Bring a little mud.”
And he whispered to Brother Squirrel, “Bring some leaves.”
 And he whispered to Brother Mole, “Bring some dirt, little brother.”
And to Brother Rabbit he said, “Stand ready to do what I tell you.”
So Brother Frog brought mud, Brother Squirrel brought leaves,
Brother Mole brought dirt, and Brother Rabbit stood ready.
Then Brother Fox said to Brother Rabbit, “Stop up the ends of
Brother Bear’s log.”
So Brother Rabbit took the mud and the leaves and the dirt, and
he stopped up the ends of the log. Then he hammered hard with his
two back feet, which are good for hammering. And they all went
home, for they thought that old Bear would never, never get out of
the log.
Well, old Bear slept and slept, but after a while he awoke, and he
opened one eye. He saw no sunshine, so he thought it was still
night, and he went to sleep again.
After another while, he awoke again, but he heard the rain and
sleet beating outside, and it was very warm and dry inside.
“What a very long night,” said old Bear, and he curled up his paws,
and he went to sleep again.
This time, he just slept, and slept, until it began to be very warm
inside the log, and he heard in his dreams the footsteps of birds
outside.
Then he awoke, and he stretched himself, and he shook himself.
He rubbed his eyes with his paws, and he poked away the mud, and
the leaves, and the dirt, and he went outside.
But was he not surprised?
It had been a frosty night when he had gone to sleep, and now the
woods were green. Old Bear had slept all winter.
“That was a fine, long sleep,” said old Bear, as he set out for little
Brother Rabbit’s house to see if he had anything good for breakfast;
“I shall sleep again, next fall.”
 So every summer, old Bear plays tricks on little Brother Rabbit, but
when the fall comes, he creeps away to a warm, dark place to sleep
until spring.
And so have his grandchildren, and his great-grandchildren ever
since.
 Transcriber’s Notes
pg 25 Changed: “The rice is too salt,”
to: “The rice is too salty,”
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