Why Does No One Look Like Me?
Why Does No One Look Like Me?
How Tobe, the first book respectfully published for Black children, came to be
By Billy Ingram
A little more than 85 years ago, Greensboro played a pivotal role in the creation of a groundbreaking children’s storybook written expressly for African Americans. In an era during the 1930s when insulting stereotypes and vulgar characterizations pervaded almost every facet of American pop culture, Tobe was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1939.
Up until then, there were few publications that provided Black youth with identifiable role models, with one notable exception: The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois that was published from January 1920 through December 1921. Black youngsters simply didn’t have any storybooks depicting Black characters.
The impetus for Tobe came after a white Chapel Hill elementary schoolteacher, Stella Gentry Sharpe, was asked by one of her Black students, “Why does no one in my books look like me?” In 1936, she set out to write a children’s book geared toward African American kids. Basing the text on the experiences of a young boy and his family who were farming on land rented from her husband, Sharpe snapped photos to illustrate the stories herself. “A little book for the enjoyment of other children” is how she described her project.
Over the next two years or so, Sharpe dropped in on her subjects, the McCauley family, almost daily. “The children knew I was writing a book about the games we were playing and the things we were doing,” she wrote about the experience. “But I don’t think they realized it was going to be a real book.” The name Tobe she conjured up, but otherwise Sharpe used the actual first names of the McCauley kids in her script.
The finished manuscript presents a series of relatable tales about day-to-day life on a farm, seen through the eyes of 6-year-old Tobe. The reader sees him wading in a brook, going to school, attending church and helping with harvesting crops, along with his two sets of twin siblings, two older sisters and a brother. Also featured in the book are his mother and father, plus a cat named Tom, Boss the dog, a pet goat, baby chicks and his extended family’s horses and assorted livestock.
A representative storyline:
Riding In a Tire:
Big Boy, Little Boy, and I are too big to ride in a tire.
William says that it makes him dizzy, but Rufus likes to ride in a tire.
He gets in the tire and we roll it in a smooth place.
If we go over bumps, it hurts his head.
Rufus says, “Everything stands on its head when I ride in a tire!”
I wish I could ride in a tire. I want to see trees and houses standing on their heads.
Sharpe used standard storytelling found in children’s fiction, whether it be Curious George or Goodnight Moon.
Her book was quickly acquired in 1936 by W. T. Couch, director of University of North Carolina Press, whose 14-year tenure had not been without controversy. He’d been known to push through publications expressing “unorthodox” views about the South related to race, religion and economics. In 1927, he edited a book of folk sketches with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Green (The Lost Colony) that read in part, “as the white man fails the negro fails and as the negro rises the white man rises.” That phrase sparked an emergency meeting of the University’s board of directors to consider recalling the book for reprinting with a less contentious intro. The board changed its mind when informed the hardcover was already in the hands of reviewers.
Couch was pleased with the narrative of Tobe, but decided the accompanying photography wasn’t up to the press’s standards. In 1938, he approached photographer Charles A. Farrell, a Piedmont resident he recently signed for a volume devoted to North Carolina coastal fishermen.
Farrell and his wife, Anne, had moved to Greensboro back in 1923, buying The Art Shop, which, then a camera and art supply business, he relocated in 1930 to where Lincoln Financial’s downtown entrance is today. (Founded in 1899, The Art Shop is still thriving in its current location on West Market Street.) Farrell was also employed as Greensboro Daily News’ first professional photographer.
When, in the spring of 1938, Couch asked Farrell to lens images for, “a supplementary reader for negro and white schools,” it occurred to Farrell that a family he was familiar with, Arthur and Priscilla Garner and their offspring, would make ideal subjects for Tobe. After all, they lived in the small African American farming community of Goshen, about 10 minutes down Randleman Road, just outside of (then) Greensboro city limits. Goshen was renowned in The Gate City for being home to the Red Wings, an all-Black semipro baseball team who slugged it out Monday nights at World War Memorial Stadium, facing Negro Major League franchises when they were cruising through town.
After sample photos of the Garner family and their surroundings were submitted for approval, the publisher agreed wholeheartedly with Farrell’s choice. With a proposed retail price of $1.00 (about $22 in today’s money), the photographer would be compensated $3.00 per published print plus 2% of the wholesale price for each book, with another 8% going to the author. In private, Couch confided to Farrell that he was willing “against the advice of his board of directors” to risk the loss of $2,000–3,000 (around $65,000 in today’s currency) to mount this project, as a social experiment, if necessary, “and as a gesture toward interracial good feeling.”
This was a leap in more ways than one. Juvenile storybooks had been predominantly — if not exclusively — illustrated with colorful graphics, so its format of text paired with black-and-white photos was highly unusual, possibly unprecedented. Photoshoots for Tobe began in June 1938 and continued through that October.
Farrell’s approach was meticulous, with each setup offering the publisher choices featuring subtle variations in stance and demeanor. For instance, unpublished images of the mother and father reading in front of a radio, a familiar tableau in 1930s advertisements and magazine covers, demonstrates how the photographer positioned his subjects in various ways in front of two distinctly different radio consoles. The parents’ focus alternated between holding reading material or knitting in their hands while their faces held far-away gazes, the kind that came over folks listening to The Shadow or The Jack Benny Program.
With most of the happenings in Tobe taking place outdoors, it was crucial for Farrell to have his foreground subjects sharply focused with a background in recess, a method known as the bokeh effect (aka your phone camera’s “portrait mode”). This was achieved using a large format Graflex Speed Graphic. Considered by many to be America’s first and last great camera, it had two shutters and a maximum exposure speed of 1/1,000 second. Capable of rendering greater detail than 35mm film, that same apparatus was employed to snap the flag being raised at Iwo Jima in 1945 and Irving Klaw’s pinup pics of Bettie Page a decade later.
For Tobe, Farrell introduced through his photos a typical middle-class, agrarian existence — by post-Depression era standards, anyway — portraying a Black family whose lifestyle was comparable to white farmers; albeit a parity confined within the boundaries of these images.
Told through unencumbered stagings in varying shades of grey, Farrell’s vicarious aperture provides readers with an unwritten understanding of what real kids got up to in that era. No artifice, ego or self-consciousness is evident on the faces of these common folk, fully engaged in innocent pursuits and seemingly unaware of the lens or of any potential for posterity. One somewhat complex storyline (for this genre anyway) had the title character standing up to a bully, portrayed by one of the neighbor kids:
I put the tin box in my pocket
Then I went to the mail box.
The big boy was there.
He came near me.
Then I took the lid off my tin box.
I said, “Please don’t make me throw this pepper. It is not good for the eyes.”
He put his hands over his eyes.
Then he ran as fast as he could.
He ran and ran.
I do not know how far he went, but he never came back.
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.