1930: HITTY, HER FIRST HUNDRED YEARS by Rachel Field with illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop
The antique shop is very still now.
"You know, you're the one who decided to read all of these."
-Stacy Ginocchio
Guys, this book isn't good, I don't know what else you want me to say. Not that it's an enormous moral affront or anything, but it is, for lack of a better term, obsolete. Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, the Newbery medalist from 1930, is the memoir of a doll, a doll that, since her creation from a block of mountain-ash wood, has possessed sentience and the ability to write.
Is it strange? Yes, very much. Hitty (a nickname for “Mehitable”?) travels the world from her humble beginnings in a small home in Maine, through adventures on a whaling ship, missionary travels to India, museum exhibitions, meeting Charles Dickens, a brief gig as a pincushion, and finally a new home in an antique toy store, where she begins her story before flashing back, a narrative structure that would eventually inspire the “Dewey Cox has to think about his whole LIFE before he plays!” gag from Walk Hard.
Also, some parts of the book actually are a moral affront.
In the first twenty pages of Hitty, we get some hints that we have a rough go ahead of us, as Hitty’s original owners drop her in the woods (later recovering her) so they can dash away and avoid running into a group of scary “Injuns” on the road. From there, Field backs off of the Injuns a little bit and chronicles Hitty’s first family, the Prebles, leaving on an eleven-month whaling voyage, as the patriarch finally gets the chance to captain his own ship. But things go south when the ship wrecks and the Prebles and some of their crewmates wash up on a desert island, where the only people around are, you guessed it, terrifying natives:
“‘Think the chances are they’ll be friendly, Bill?’ the Captain was asking. ‘You’ve had more experience with natives than any of the rest of us.’ Bill looked serious and stared off to sea thoughtfully. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘these savages are one thing when they come alongside your vessel an’ try to trade you coconuts for knives and beads and calico, but they’re another when they outnumber you ten to one an’ you haven’t got any gimcracks to humor ‘em with, so I’m not for takin’ chances ‘way off here where they might be cannibals like as not!’”
Awesome, terrific, it gets way worse, because the natives do eventually confront the Prebles and are, indeed, pretty hostile, and the only thing that has a chance of placating them is the ultimate gimcrack (?) herself:
“Like children they [referring to indigenous people who were adults with a fully established society] easily tired of what had caught their attention, so next it was Phoebe [the girl who owns Hitty] about whom they began to crowd. This happened during a moment when she had let go her mother’s hand. She had kept me pressed close to her during all this, and the biggest native with the most rings and beads on now caught sight of me between her fingers. He made a queer grunting noise to the rest and they all crowded about, pointing and gesticulating. I could feel Phoebe’s heart thumping under me, but she did not flinch, not even when the big man, who must have been their Chief, since all the rest followed his slightest gesture, reached out and touched me with one enormous brown finger. He turned to the others with another grunt. Then he came back and held out his hand to her. It was plain enough what he wanted.”
Okay, okay, pretty bad, they’re going to steal the doll, at least it doesn’t get worse from here, unless Phoebe were to reach out for the doll again and-
“Whether or not the gesture that Phoebe had made had anything to do with it, I shall never know. Her hands looked as if they were raised in prayer when she reached them out to me. At any rate, the natives seemed even more impressed by me and began making further grunts and motions…At another grunt from [the chief] all the natives bowed their heads before me and went through more strange gesturings - and so I was carried away to become a heathen idol.”
This, of course, leads to the seventh chapter of the book, titled “In Which I Learn the Ways of Gods, Natives, and Monkeys”. Look, I said up front this was not a good book. In my notes for this part I've literally just written the page number and "oh my god", which I suppose in retrospect was a decent pun1.
That's probably rock bottom for the book, but not the only problem area. Hitty’s travels take her to India shortly after, and she finds herself with a new owner [all sic]:
“Presently, in the dim light I saw the turbaned Hindoo who had taken me out of the gutter appear with another turbaned figure. Together they crouched on the floor nearby and from under his robes the Hindoo produces a native flute or flageolet…stouter dolls than I might have qualified at being pressed into service by a Hindoo snake-charmer.”
Don’t worry, though, Hitty is eventually rescued from the, uh, filthy Hindoo by a group of white missionaries coming through India who are relieved that their daughter will have another white toy to play with:
“‘It makes me homesick just to look at her honest American face…I mean to dress her just the way I used to when I was a little girl,’ [the missionary] went on, ‘so Thankful [my daughter] will get used to something besides robes and turbans before she goes back…I wonder how that dirty old snake-charmer ever got his hands on her.’”
Like I said, I don’t know what you guys want me to say. In fairness to Lathrop, I will say that Hitty is not all outdated racism and colonialism: Hitty, as a character, can be very funny at times, as she has an outsized sense of propriety and delicacy for a doll that is clearly - and mostly effectively - played for comedy. She even becomes an abolitionist during her stay in a Quaker household, after she hears the parents reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the family every night. Still, this book is old, and it doesn’t work anymore. I would never, in a million years, ever read my children anything that could ever be construed as being anywhere near this dated and uncomfortable. However,
One of my favorite children’s book series of all time is John R. Erickson’s Hank The Cowdog. Erickson is a cowboy and Harvard Divinity School dropout who wrote goofy short stories narrated by two not-especially-bright dogs he used to work with on his ranch. He sold some of them to cowboy magazines, but could never sell them in to any major publishers, so he started his own publishing company, Maverick Books, as a side gig from ranching. He printed his own stories, which he soon found himself selling out of the back of his pickup after getting swarmed by cowboys who wanted to hear more about Hank and Drover. When he started getting letters addressed to Hank at his home, he figured he had enough to turn the stories into a self-published series of chapter books, which he did, and now there are 76 of them which have collectively sold almost nine million copies and have been translated into half a dozen languages. Erickson has also recorded all of them for audiobooks, in which he voice-acts all of the characters and writes and performs the original songs himself. It is those audiobooks that I grew up listening to on long car rides to visit my grandparents.
The Hank The Cowdog books are hilarious. I have five on my shelf right now2. I am currently reading one to my youngest daughter at bedtime. Everyone should read these books, and everyone should hear Erickson read all of them. I have not listened to the updated podcast miniseries in which Jesse Plemmons (!) voices Drover and Kirsten Dunst (!!) voices Sally May and Matthew McConaughey (!!!) voices Hank, but I’ll just assume that everyone should listen to those as well. The character of Hank, in his unshakeable sense of confidence and duty as self-proclaimed Head of Ranch Security, combined with the fact that he’s actually a huge idiot, is one of the all-time greatest characters in children’s literature - possibly the greatest animal character, period - is the center of dozens of wonderful and hilarious adventures about so-called “mysteries” on the Ochiltree County ranch that usually come out to “Hank’s sidekick Drover screwed something up” or “Pete the barncat is up to some trouble again”.
But when I started reading the books to my children, my wife - who had not heard any of these stories before, like some sort of Philistine - started to wonder if the Hank The Cowdog series was capital-P Problematic. Specifically, she had questions about the coyotes.
The coyotes - always pronounced with just two syllables, “kai-yotes” - live a little beyond the boundaries of the ranch, are usually represented by the two ne’er-do-wells-slash-aspiring-jazz-musicians Rip and Snort, and maybe, just maybe, are a not-very-good stand-in for, uh, indigenous Americans. They might not be, and I sure hope they aren’t. Personally, I like to think of them as some sort of stand-in for neanderthals, you know, like the simpler distant ancestors of dogs like Hank. But it’s a little difficult to defend that interpretation when the coyote tribe’s chief, in the very first installment of the series, talks like this:
“Yes, berry good you stay. Make outlaw, make warrior. Stay, not leave. Old coyote tradition, adopt brave dog, make brother. Together we kill many chicken, eat cat every day, howl at moon, oh boy.”
And Rip and Snort, the two coyote bruisers, also speak in this broken English and spend most of their time getting drunk and singing the coyote anthem, “Me Just A Worthless Coyote”, which sounds like this:
To be clear, this is as bad as it gets, which is still not super-great, and also not anywhere near the worst thing I’ve read for this series or even for this specific essay. Although in a 1985 episode of CBS Storybreak that adapted a Hank book as a standalone 30-minute episode, CBS did change the coyote dialogue to non-broken English for some reason, so it’s possible that my wife was not the first person to feel uncomfortable with this. This blogger of “American Indians in Children’s Literature” also felt this way before my wife discovered the books, although there is surprisingly little else on this particular controversy; no other indigenous writers or academics who have tackled this topic were easy to find, and given how popular the book series was/is, I thought I would find more on this.
But we are talking about minor characters in a book series about a talking dog. The coyotes don’t appear in every Hank The Cowdog book - although they appear in plenty - and I do take a little bit of comfort knowing that there are plenty of these stories I can read to my daughters where I won’t have to sit down beforehand and explain why some of this hasn’t aged well. But I can introduce them to the stories that I loved first, and also explain to them why they mean so much to me, and why I associate them with seeing my family, and why it’s important that I can share of that with them too. And then, if they really push me, I can also explain that there are so many - so, so many - children’s books that are way worse than Hank The Cowdog. And they will ask me “how do you know that? Have you read them?” And I will have to say “yes, I’ve literally read every single one of them.” And they will ask me “why?” And I will say “I honestly don’t remember.”
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1995 medalist, Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech.
Like, better than "Newburied".
Including the best one, entry #9, Hank The Cowdog And The Case Of The Halloween Ghost, which includes the incredible opening lines “It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog. Slim’s house was cold and also a terrible mess, and I haven’t even gotten to the part about the ghost yet. There’s a reason for that. A guy can’t get his entire story into the first paragraph, no matter how hard he tries.”