Race and Dr Doolittle

Writing about race brings a bit of a knot in my gut and I’m not sure why. I grew up during the 1960s and 70s in Brooklyn NY, a hotbed for racial tensions but somehow I was mostly removed from it. My neighborhood was one of mostly White Irish, Italian and Jewish working class families that began to integrate when I was around nine or ten years of age.  I actually only  vaguely remember the White families who lived on either side of us. The two Black families, one whose house was attached to ours and one on the other side of us were among the first minorities to move into the neighborhood and lived there since I was about nine years old. The Weeks family became good friends with my parents as both families were active in our parish. They were from “the Islands,” a sort of generic term that I never thought to question for greater definition. I do recall thinking that it was odd that so many people kept moving in with the family then out to their own homes. It was part of their culture to help new families coming to the States to get settled by giving them a place to live for many months, often a year or more before they found their own footing. I knew some of the other neighbors grumbled about that, too many of them living in one house, or something to that effect.

On the other side of us was the Jones family. That had a young boy a few years younger than I but he never played with us or rarely did at any rate. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses and I recall thinking how different that was for the neighborhood.   Almost everyone I knew was Catholic and most of us went to the same church and school. The other families were mostly Jewish. And there seemed to be a less than positive connotation about Jehovah’s…they were seen more as a bother coming about and knocking on doors although relatively harmless. I don’t think I actually thought of them as Christians! Despite all that, my parents seemed to like the Jones family and they always chatted a few minutes whenever they saw each other. The Jones kept to themselves which was odd for our block as pretty much everyone played together and knew each other fairly well.

 Despite growing up in the big city of  Brooklyn, I really grew up in a just small neighborhood. Looking back I now believe that race was sort of always in the subconscious of the neighborhood.  I don’t really recall the tipping point, that point-in-time when my neighborhood was mostly comprised of minorities and White people were the statistical minority.  I do recall that leaving the neighborhood was something my parents began to fight about with my mother wanting to get out and my father wanting to stay. My father wanted to fight “white flight” but by the time I was in eighth grade my mother saw the writing on the wall: that fight was lost. We stayed too long I think. Somewhere along the way East Flatbush was no longer my neighborhood. I resented that loss. It belonged to people I didn't know, some of whom spoke a language I didn't understand.

One of the first books in which I encountered issue of race was The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle (Hugh Lofting, 1923). In this the first book of Dr Doolittle’s travels, the good Doc has returned to London from Africa and many of his African animal friends were missing him.  I recall I was starting to really enjoy the book when I was stopped in my reading tracks: nigger, the word jumped off the page. It was a dangerous word and one my parents did not tolerate. Polynesia (the parrot) was catching Dr Doolittle up on the events in Africa. Her update includes a reference to ignorant niggers. I wasn’t sure what to do. If I told my parents they would most likely not allow me to finish reading the book. I wanted to keep reading, so I said nothing. But the book continued to challenge my value system.

The book shares Dr Doolittle’s thoughts about the peoples he encountered throughout his travels. He thinks of Africans as heathens, ignorant and backward; he holds the same opinions of Native Americans. In its original version it is a decidedly racist book.

While Polynesia was able to fly to London from Africa to be reunited with her friend the Doc, Chee Chee, the monkey, had no such option available to him. Chee Chee pines away the hours missing his friend while sitting by a pier and watching African travelers board ships bound for England. At one point he sees a little girl board one of the ships. According Chee Chee that girl looked just like his cousin…the little African girl looked like a monkey. Wow! Again I was stunned.
To get to England Chee Chee proceeds to dress like a little girl and easily walks aboard a ship bound for England. No one notices that this is a monkey and not a little girl!  I remember being incredulous and thinking that this was just wrong, how could a book be so mean, so wrong. Books were sacred in my house, they were treasures but I knew this book was actually dangerous. It was the first time I realized the power that books had.

But I kept reading

In another situation Dr Doolittle concocts a potion to turn his Black friend Bumpo into a white man to get the friend out of jail…the implications of that deserve an essay all their own. I later learned that in the next book Bumpo, still White from the potion, goes on to marry a woman he thinks is White. It turns out the woman is not White but an Albino. When Doolittle’s potion wears off the wife learns that Bumpo is actually Black. Both spouses thought they married “up” in the world (the implication of the book) only to find themselves married to someone of their own race.  Unfortunately, given the racism and bigotry throughout this series, I don’t think the author was trying to be ironic but rather sarcastic. (I didn’t read any other books in that series, nor did I ever tell my parents).

I was reading this book sometime during the late 1960’s, during the height of civil rights movement.  While my Brooklyn neighborhood was mostly White at the time, it was beginning to change. And that change was buzzing in the air. White Flight and Housing Busters were phrases I heard though don’t recall fully understanding them until I was a quite a bit older. I do remember someone coming to the house and asking my father if he would be interested in selling the house before those people took over the neighborhood.  Housing Busters would lowball housing prices by playing to the fears of the racist indicating that if the White family didn’t sell now, they would lose a ton of money when the neighborhood “turned.”  The same people would then turn around and sell the house to a Black family at huge increases over the selling price. My father slammed the door on this guy’s face but then opened the door and followed him till make sure he left the block. Getting rid of this guy didn’t keep my neighbors from selling out and heading to the suburbs.

East Flatbush, the neighborhood I grew up in, was established as a step up for first generation Jewish and Italian immigrants. Many of the families that established East Flatbush were the children of immigrant families from Brownsville or East New York tenements. They were able to flee the poverty conditions of their parents because the American dream was  real in their lives. They could leave apartment life and purchase their own modest home. I, like a several of my friends on the block had at least one grandparent who spoke Italian. It is easy to be open minded when issues of race are not in your own back yard, but in fact, the race of those literally in my back yard at the time was indeed changing. The simple Christian song with the refrain “Red, Yellow, Black or White, we’re all precious in His sight…” was sort of an anthem in my grade school, especially during my earliest school years. But again it was an easy anthem because the minority population was quite small when I was about eight or nine and we did so passionately believe we all could simply just get along.  

The Dr Doolittle series now available to children has been rewritten and is a sweet children’s story. But it is sad to realize that this iconic children’s book in its orginal racist form influenced the lives of countless children for more than 50 years before it was redacted.

more in another post...