TOBE

by Billy Ingram

A little more than 85 years ago, Greensboro played a pivotal role in the creation of a groundbreaking children’s storybook for African-Americans, the first such undertaking uninfected with the egregiously vulgar characterizations and insulting stereotypes pervasive throughout every facet of American pop culture during the 1930s and well beyond. Especially when it came to depicting Black children. Even describing such depictions would prove offensive.

When Tobe was published by University of North Carolina Press in 1939, there hadn’t been many attempts in print to provide Black youth with identifiable role models, one notable exception being The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine edited by W.E.B. DeBois that was published from January of 1920 until December, 1921. There were no easily attainable appropriate storybooks for Black youngsters.

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, snapping photos to illustrate the stories herself. “A little book for the enjoyment of other children,” she described her passion project.

Over the next 2 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. “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 as seen through the eyes of 6-year old Tobe; wading in a brook, going to school, attending church, and helping with harvesting crops along with his 2 sets of twin siblings, 2 older sisters and brother, mother and father, 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.

Standard storytelling found in children’s fiction whether it be Curious George or Goodnight Moon.

Mrs. Sharpe’s 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 pushing 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; deferring when informed the hardcover was already in the hands of reviewers.

Couch was overall pleased with the narrative of Tobe but decided the requisite accompanying photography required someone with a more exacting technique. 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 had moved to Greensboro back in 1923 when he bought The Art Shop, relocating that camera and art supply business in 1930 to where Lincoln Financial’s downtown entrance is today. (Founded in 1899, The Art Shop is still thriving in their current location on West Market Street.) Farrell was also employed as Greensboro Daily News’ first professional staff photographer.

When asked by Couch in the spring of 1938 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, living as they were in the small African-American farming community of Goshen, about 10 minutes down Randelman Road 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 War Memorial Stadium against 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, the photographer would be compensated $3.00 per published print and 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 $2-3,000 (around $65,000 in today’s money) 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 a text and black-and-white photo format was highly unusual, possibly unprecedented. Photoshoots for Tobe began in June of 1938 and continued through October.

Farrell’s approach was meticulous, with each setup offering the publisher choices with 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 2 distinctly different radio console models with the parent’s focus alternating between the reading matter or knitting in their hands and that far-away gaze that came over folks while 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 ‘portrait mode’). This was achieved using a large format Graflex Speed Graphic, considered by many to be America’s first and last great camera, with 2 shutters and maximum exposure speed of 1/1000 of a 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, 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 vivid 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, seemingly unaware of the lens or of any potential for posterity. One somewhat complex storyline (for this genre anyway) had Tobe 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 early on Christmas Eve via a ’36 Ford coupe and not 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 out back, “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 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.

Farrell immediately brought this to the attention of Couch at UNC Press with a degree of apprehension that their efforts would be perceived as an imitation of The Flop-Eared Hound. 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 of 1939 when 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 appeared in, 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 editor Paine before publication in May of 1939 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, UNC Press expressed a hope that the book might potentially sell 10,000 copies, taking out a prominent ad in Publisher’s Weekly and providing financial subsidies for booksellers wishing to advertise Tobe in newspapers.

By March of 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 posed for and devoted so much time to.

Farrell’s reply came in the form of a letter to Mrs. Garner, “because I made the first arrangements with you,” he wrote. “After two years 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 create a book that non-white children could take pride in, “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 comes across in his correspondence 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, Stella Sharpe approached 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 never came through with that new manuscript. By 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 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 authorEzra Jack Keats depicted a Brooklyn boy’s delight waking up to a wintery wonderland. It became a cross cultural best-seller 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 / 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, pigmentation so dark you couldn’t discern where the face ended and the hairline began, while grinning 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 damn thing 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 fully 2 years after Charles Shultz introduced the world to the imminently respectable ‘Franklin’ in Peanuts. It’s telling that Schultz threatened to end Peanuts, the most popular strip in America earning him millions of dollars, if editors whited-out Franklin’s shading lines as many Southern papers were requesting to do, fearing that showing multi-racial kids attending school together would inspire a subscriber freak-out. It didn’t.

In 2019, University of North Carolina 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, a deep dive into its history and cultural impact.

“It's a timely topic in a certain way,” Dr. Filene told 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 of glimpse into the past.”

In his research leading up to a traveling exhibition coinciding 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 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 ‘Tobe and the Coon’ and an obscure children’s book with an African-American theme, Tildy, 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 4 years spent exploring Cedar Island, Mann’s Harbor, and other hard-scrabble seafood harvesting villages, populated heavily by people of color, reveal a masterful chronicler of North Carolina enclaves that were going unobserved by the outside world.

A potentially iconic career was tragically cut short by unspecified mental illness exacerbated by a so-called ‘icepick lobotomy’ (transorbital lobotomy) performed on Farrell by a Greensboro doctor in 1948, leaving him cognitively impaired and creatively neutered. (Sometimes performed with an actual icepick, that barbaric procedure was employed most often on women exhibiting an independent streak or men struggling with same sex attractions.) Farrell passed away at Friends Home in Greensboro in 1977 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, an unwavering commitment to capturing moments of verity with black-and-white clarity. A dedication that can be traced back to an imaginary boy named ‘Tobe’ whose personality unfurled via the framing of an unassuming visionary, made possible by an unlikely publisher in the Deep South convinced that a more equitable world could be forged, albeit in some minute way, through unvarnished portraiture reflecting basic human dignity and universality.

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