Race and Manners for Southern Girls and Boys: “The Miss Minerva” Books and Race Relations in a Southern Children's Series

In 1909 the Reilly and Lee Company of Chicago published Miss Minerva and William Green Hill, the only novel of Frances Boyd Calhoun. This book of a child's life in the post-bellum South quickly became a regional classic and went through 50 printings before lapsing from print in the 1950s. In 1976 the University of Tennessee Press published a facsimile edition of the first printing.Calhoun, who identified herself as "a Southerner of Southerners' (215), died the year her only book was published, seemingly preventing her publishers from capitalizing on the success of her work by extending it into a series, as happened to so many children's books at the turn of the century. But in 1918 Reilly and Lee turned to another Southern writer of commercial stories for children, Emma Speed Sampson, who initiated a series of novels for children using Calhoun's names and characters and setting. These were Southern stories for Southern boys and girls.In the next 21 years, Sampson wrote ten novels, usually incorporating Calhoun's "Miss Minerva" in the titles, creating one of the few series of novels for children which used Southern characters and settings. While Sampson followed the format of the popular children's series of the time, she had her creations encounter the wonders of the 20th century in the South. Billy Hill and his friends hear the new radio from Memphis, fly from Tennessee to Kentucky to foil a kidnapping plot and make their own motion picture in their Tennessee town. Sampson even added a Southern attraction not immediately available to other series by having her characters take a steam boat trip on the Mississippi.A series with characters from and settings in the South, the "Miss Minerva" books were also distinctive in using blacks as major figures, one of the few children series to do so. It is this unusual portrayal of Southern blacks in a children's series that gives us an opportunity to see how the subject of race was presented to children in the interwar period. With careful reading of these books we can see not only the accepted stereotypes of the time, but some indications of a modification of white racial rigidity.These suggestions of a more relaxed view of whites toward blacks may come from the experiences Emma Speed Sampson brought to her work. She was a mature woman of 50 when the first of her "Miss Minerva" books was published. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, In 1868, and was graduated from a local college. She then studied art in New York City and later in Paris. After a late marriage she lived in Richmond, Virginia, where she was active in a variety of progressive groups, including the Unitarian Church and the Virginia Woman's Party. After her husband's death she supported herself and two daughters with her commercial writing and various other efforts in communications. For nearly a decade she published a book a year, usually children's fiction (Who's in America 1922-23: 2701; Richmond (VA) News-Leader, May 8, 1947: 23).Sampson took the premise of her "Miss Minerva" and the white characters from Calhoun's original work. Essentially Calhoun's novel is a series of humorous sketches about the antics of a six-year-old orphan, Billy Hill, who comes from the plantation to live in town with his maiden aunt, Miss Minerva. The plot, such as there is, relates the way the warmth and love of the young boy soften this old maid until she can admit her love for him. Not only does she realize her love for Billy, but Miss Minerva even softens to point of marrying her perennial suitor, a Confederate veteran. Calhoun's plot is conventional. The interest comes from her description of child life in a small Tennessee town at the nun of the century, when things were quieter, easier and vanished.Emma Speed Sampson used Miss Minerva, her nephew, Billy Hill, her new husband, the Major, and Billy's friends to explore the artificial world common to children's series, only this time in a Southern setting. …