As a
child, I thought "
Little Black Sambo" was a great story -- mean old
tigers taking a kid's
clothes to wear,
little kid outwitting
villains, blah blah blah... and the tigers turning into
butter at the end was a big
plus for me. Even now, I consider it one of the better pieces of
fantasy imagery:
fierce tigers racing around a tree, faster and faster, turning into a
blur, and eventually melting into butter, which the
valiant young
hero and his
family use to make
pancakes.
But now the story is recognized as a
racist tale, and it's rarely told anymore. I understand why, now that I'm an adult. I think it's too bad to lose out on the
vivid imagery of the tigers turning into butter, but it's a minor issue, compared to the
racism of the story.
There used to be a pancake
restaurant called
Sambo's. They served an extremely
delicious topping called "
tiger butter" with their pancakes. When I was a kid, my parents would take us kids down there for a special
treat, and we'd eat pancakes with tiger butter 'til we'd just about bust. But like the story, the restaurant died off, too. Again, I understand why -- "Sambo" became an anti-black
racial epithet, despite the story originally being set in
India, and something like that is hard for a modern restaurant to live down. Nevertheless, sometimes I wish I had something like that great butter for my pancakes...