Author: O.Henry Magazine

Holiday celebrations in particular impart some fascinating perspectives. For Halloween, as was the practice of the day, the brothers fashion grotesque masks out of old sacks and scraps. Later, when Mother is asked why Santa arrived with their gifts a day early on Christmas Eve via a ’36 Ford Coupe rather than down the chimney, she replies, “Next year he may come in an airplane!”

While fully immersed in this project in 1938, Farrell came across a newly-released children’s storybook that was outwardly very much like Tobe in concept and execution. Illustrated with photographs, The Flop-Eared Hound by white author Ellis Credle relates the story of a Black Southern boy living in a ramshackle shack “underneath a honey-pod tree” with his sharecropping “Mammy” and “Pappy.” In the book, little Shadrack Meshack Abednego Jones, who answered to the nickname Boot-jack, forms a friendship with a mischievous, spotted stray pup. Despite the unfortunate monikers and problematic nomenclature, the publication was uncharacteristically respectful; every individual spoke perfect English, as opposed to the Black characters in, say, Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 book, Gone with the Wind, and the story concludes with a beaming Boot-jack, in his handsome sailor’s outfit, attending the circus, where a clown presents him with a Mickey Mouse balloon.

With a degree of apprehension that their efforts would be perceived as an imitation of The Flop-Eared Hound, Farrell immediately brought this to the attention of Couch. Couch took this under advisement.

After photography was completed, editor Alice T. Paine at UNC Press was placed in charge of guiding Tobe to completion alongside designer Andor Braun. “As you will see,” Paine wrote to Farrell in March 1939 after production wrapped up, “the type and spacing have been designed to make the book as easy reading for children as possible. This also differentiates it from The Flop-Eared Hound, which has a different type and spacing.”

Farrell offered several suggestions concerning what order the stories in Tobe should appear, almost all of which were heeded. The only reservation anyone involved had was concerning the book’s ending. “It is true the book really does not have a conclusion,” conceded Paine before its May 1939 publication, but, she reasoned, “there are worse things than stopping when you were through.”

The book was very well received by the press and libraries around the country. With an initial print run of 4,200 copies, reception was so enthusiastic, especially in the South, that UNC Press expressed a hope that the book might potentially sell 10,000 copies. That prompted the press to take out a prominent ad in Publisher’s Weekly and provide financial subsidies for booksellers wishing to advertise Tobe in newspapers.

By March 1941, Tobe had sold over 11,000 copies, earning Farrell a total of $83.97 in royalty payments. In June of that year, Farrell and Sharpe were contacted by a Greensboro law firm on behalf of Arthur Garner, who felt his family deserved a cut of the profits from the book they’d posed for and devoted so much time to.

Farrell’s reply came in the form of a letter to Mrs. Garner. “After two years,” he wrote, “the University Press has just barely paid the cost of publishing the book and has no returns for the many expenses connected with the editing and designing.” Pointing out their collective intention was never to make money but to create a book that nonwhite children could take pride in, he stated, “The feeling between white people and colored people all over America is better, without a doubt, because you and your children have been publicly presented as natural and normal parts of American society.”

Talk of a lawsuit faded, but, in a fit of anger that initially ensued, Farrell’s correspondence reads as less than charitable in his assessment of the Garners and African Americans in general, referring to Arthur in stereotypically demeaning terms such as “shiftless” and “unintelligent,” while grousing to Couch, “I’ll admit having a dark brown taste in my mouth today.”

In 1941, Sharpe approached New York City-based Grossett & Dunlap about the possibility of a sequel, Tobe at Eight. Based on the favorable publicity and relatively strong sales the initial book generated, the publishing firm accepted her offer, eagerly contacting Charles Farrell about beginning photography as soon as possible while the Garner kids were still the right age. Sharpe, however, never submitted a manuscript. By the summer of 1945, around 21,000 copies of Tobe were in circulation with an additional print run of 15,000 being prepped.

It’s true, Tobe didn’t significantly alter the landscape when it came to children’s literature. Author Jane Dabney Shackelford unabashedly used it as a template of sorts when she wrote her 1944 storybook, My Happy Days, featuring a suburban African American family.

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t until 1962 that another major children’s book revolving around a child of color would be released. A Caldecott Medal winner, The Snowy Day by white author Ezra Jack Keats depicts a Brooklyn boy’s delight in waking up to a wintery wonderland. It became a cross-cultural bestseller, in part because the text never mentions race — the kid just happens to be Black.

Despite measurable progress in civil rights during the 1960s, that pernicious minstrel show and Stepin Fetchit imagery was so ingrained in American culture that, when the first Black character was introduced in the comic strip Dennis the Menace in 1970, he was depicted with bug eyes and pigmentation so dark you couldn’t discern where the face ended and the hairline began. He grinned too broadly through thick, white lips. Indignation and protestations were immediate and forcefully expressed around the country. Newspaper editors, who should have known better when they saw the drawing to begin with, were strong-armed into publishing abject apologies. The clueless cartoonist himself couldn’t fathom what the controversy could possibly be all about.

On the brighter side, that was two full years after Charles Schulz introduced the world to the imminently respectable Franklin in Peanuts. It’s telling that Schulz threatened to end Peanuts, the most popular strip in America, which ended up earning him millions of dollars, if editors whited-out Franklin’s shading lines as many Southern papers were requesting to do. They feared that showing multiracial kids attending school together would inspire a subscriber freakout. It didn’t.

In 2019, UNC Press published Tobe: A Critical Edition: New Views on a Children’s Classic. Besides reprinting the book itself, there are exhaustive essays penned by Dr. Benjamin Filene covering, in great detail, every aspect of the book. It’s a deep dive into its history and cultural impact.

“It’s a timely topic in a certain way,” Dr. Filene tells me. “Even though the book is obviously old and dated in many respects, it raises questions about race and children’s representation that are very current. I think people are fascinated — I was, too — by the quasi-documentary aspect to it, which is unusual for a children’s book nowadays.” While the book was never intended to be a documentary, “and you certainly can’t just treat it straightforwardly as a documentary source, it’s an unusual resource that gives us a one of kind glimpse into the past.”

In his research leading up to a traveling exhibition, which coincided with Tobe’s 75th anniversary in 2014, Dr. Filene made contact with some of the former Garner children. “I think they were a little puzzled at first,” he recalls. “Why? Who was I? Was I tracking them down? But they remembered the book for sure and there was a lot of pride in being represented in a published book.” For the Garners, the book serves as a snapshot of one childhood summer and fall, but, also, Filene says, “a window into a very close-knit rural life that they had grown out of as they lived their adult life, a glimpse into daily life for an African American community that really is not that well documented in other respects or in other ways.”

Tobe himself, Charles Garner, returned to Goshen for the 75th-anniversary celebration. “He was pleased to remember it,” Dr. Filene says about reminiscing with Garner. “But he said explicitly that this book had not changed his life in any way and that was the main thing that he carried with him through his adult life.”

Active with the Hillsborough Historical Society, Stella Gentry Sharpe lived out her life as a schoolmarm before writing a 1947 short story titled “Tobe and the Coon” and an obscure children’s book, Tildy, which featured an African American theme and was published in 1965. She was 86 when she died in 1978.

Farrell’s anticipated collection of essays and images focused on coastal fishing communities, sensitively photographed and developed, was never completed. Judging from a multitude of vibrant, revelatory images (donated to the State Archives of North Carolina) from those four years spent exploring Cedar Island, Mann’s Harbor and other hard-scrabble seafood harvesting villages that were populated heavily by people of color, Farrell was a masterful chronicler of North Carolina enclaves that were going otherwise unobserved by the contemporary outside world.

A potentially iconic career was tragically cut short by an unspecified mental illness exacerbated by a so-called “ice pick lobotomy” (transorbital lobotomy). Performed on Farrell by a Greensboro doctor in 1948, it left him cognitively impaired and creatively neutered. (Sometimes performed with an actual ice pick, that procedure was employed frequently on women exhibiting an independent streak or men struggling with same sex attractions.) In 1977, Farrell passed away at Greensboro’s Friends Homes at the age of 83.

Lacking a prolific portfolio doesn’t diminish the inherent charm, artistry and insight Charles A. Farrell infused into his body of work. He held an unwavering commitment to capturing moments of verity with black-and-white clarity. His dedication can be traced back to an imaginary boy named Tobe, whose personality emerged vividly via the framing of an unassuming visionary. And it was all made possible by an unlikely publisher in the Deep South who was convinced that a more equitable world could be forged, albeit in some minute way, through unvarnished portraiture reflecting basic human dignity and universality.