SAME STORY, NEW ATTITUDE

By Belinda Luscombe

Few children's books evoke such strong emotions as The Story of Little Black Sambo. Its crude, derogatory drawings and racist character names are patently offensive, making it one of the best known relics--practically an icon--of a deplorable era. But Sambo himself is spunky and resourceful, and his story is charming enough that many adults remember it fondly. Now two publishers are trying to resurrect Sambo, preserving the good while jettisoning the bad in new versions of the mortifying old book.

That two retellings are coming out at once is, according to all concerned, quite coincidental. Both new volumes were created by respected figures in children's literature, men in their 50s who were read Sambo when they were young but who'd kept it out of the hands of their offspring. "As a child, I liked the little boy and the story but I felt very bad about how he was depicted," says Julius Lester, an African-American writer who, along with illustrator Jerry Pinkney, also black, has reconfigured the book as Sam and The Tigers (Dial). "The original is a little masterpiece," argues illustrator Fred Marcellino, who's white. "Its good qualities really outweigh its racist elements." Marcellino has called his reworking The Story of Little Babaji (HarperCollins).

The new books take somewhat opposite approaches to the story of a boy who tricks tigers into sparing his life in return for his new clothes, and then steals them back when the tigers' vanity gets the better of them. Lester and Pinkney, who also reinterpreted the Uncle Remus books, have filled out the original narrative, setting the story in a fantasyland where every human is called Sam and animals talk (the tigers sound like up-to-the-minute hep cats, saying "Ain't I fine?" instead of "Now I'm the grandest tiger in the jungle!"). Lester and Pinkney also give the story--originally written in 1899 by a Scottish woman and set in India but with minstrel-like black characters--a specifically African-American slant. Marcellino's approach is the more conservationist. He has left the original's simple text as it was, merely replacing the characters' names with Indian ones and adding sweetly spare new illustrations.

Although the book is not available in most libraries, HarperCollins still sells 20,000 copies a year of the original. But the tale's reputation is such that the publishers of the new volumes were at first reluctant to resuscitate it. "There will be some people who think this is capitalizing on something evil," says Steven Herb, head of the Education Library at Pennsylvania State University. But the authors say people's initial horror is soon overcome. "At first people's mouths drop open," says Lester. "They say, 'Have you lost your mind?' But after they read the new version, they love it." Perhaps even Sambo deserves a second chance.

--By Belinda Luscombe