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 mere mention of the story sends people into a
frenzy. I understand why, now that I'm an adult. But I still think it's too bad. I still think it's a nice story.
There used to be this great 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, thinking about tigers stealing
Sambo's
pants and
shoes and
umbrella, and about Sambo
tricking the tigers, and about Sambo getting all that
delicious tiger butter. 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...