ARNA BONTEMPS AND JACK CONROY: THE FAST SOONER HOUND

THREE YEARS BEFORE SLAPPY HOOPER and two years before their landmark They Seek a City, Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy had their biggest commercial success: The Fast Sooner Hound (1942). A footnote to Bontemps's role in the Harlem Renaissance, or a footnote to worker-writer Jack Conroy's WPA work as a collector of folktales, The Fast Sooner Hound is perhaps most interesting as a footnote to children's book illustration. It boasts art by Virginia Lee Burton, the author and artist of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) and the Caldecott medalist The Little House (1942).

Burton had illustrated Bontemps's 1937 children's novel Sad-Faced Boy, her first work as a book illustrator, released in the same year as her first picture book Choo-Choo: The Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away. The work on Sad-Face Boy had been a rush job, but it had satisfied Bontemps so well that he requested Burton to be the illustrator of his picture book with Conroy. Burton found working on other people's texts too constricting. She conceived each page layout as one cohesive design and in her own work, she would tailor the length of the text to meet the visual requirements. She agreed to illustrate The Fast Sooner Hound but was then appalled by the amount of text on each page. Burton's struggle to compose each page is evident in the final work with more spot illustrations than in any of her own books and blocks of text limiting the flow of her more ambitious pages. In the end The Fast Sooner Hound proved to be the last book Burton illustrated that she did not write or adapt (making Bontemps the author of both Burton's first and last book as an illustrator).

LIKE SLAPPY HOOPER, The Fast Sooner Hound is an American tall tale either gathered or composed by Jack Conroy as part of the WPA project. The hero this time is a railroad man referred to as "the Boomer," a term applied to railroad workers who worked for many different railroad lines. The Boomer and his dog Sooner ("'He'd sooner run than eat'") stroll into a Roadmaster's office to see if they can find work. The Roadmaster says that there is work for a fireman such as the Boomer, but he'd have to leave Sooner behind.

"'He ain't ever spent a night or a day or even an hour away from me. He'd cry fit to break his heart...so loud you couldn't hear yourself think...'

The Roadmaster said, 'It's against the rules of the rules of the railroad to allow a passenger in the cab...That's Rule Number One on this road, and it's never been broken yet. What's more, it never will be broken as long as I'm Roadmaster....'

'He don't have to ride in the cab. He just runs alongside the train...'

'Oh, come now,' said the Roadmaster. 'The dog isn't born that can outrun one of our freight trains.'"

And so begins a series of bets.

First the Boomer's put on a freight train. Sooner runs alongside. And Sooner wins.

Then a passenger train. Sooner runs alongside.
And Sooner wins.

Then a "Limited." Sooner runs alongside. And Sooner wins.

"By that time people who lived along the railroad tracks were getting interested in the races." And seeing Sooner win again and again, people began to think "he made the trains seem slow." "If you shipped a yearling calf to market on one of them, he'd be a grown-up beef by the time he got there."

The Roadmaster can't let the bad publicity damage his railway, so he makes a final bet. The Boomer will be on the Cannon Ball and the Roadmaster will go along for the ride. If Sooner can beat the Cannon Ball, he can sit in the cab and the Roadmaster will walk back.

"The train pulled out of the station like a streak of lighting. It took three men to see the Canon Ball pass on that run: one to say, 'There she comes,' one to say, 'Here she is,' and another to say, 'There she goes.'"

"The Boomer...didn't mind giving the dog a good run. He worked so hard he wore the hinges off the fire door. He wore the shovel down to a nub. He sweated so hard his socks got soaking wet in his shoes."

As the train nears the end of its run, Sooner is nowhere to be seen and the Roadmaster thinks he's won his bet. But then a crowd at the station belies his victory. Sooner is already there chasing a rabbit. The Roadmaster is livid, but he keeps to his word. "'P-p-put him in the cab,' he sputtered," and he walks home.

TO READ THE FAST SOONER HOUND in its entirety, see my Flickr set here. Background information on Virginia Lee Burton came from Virginia Lee Burton: A Life In Art by Barbara Elleman. Elleman wrote an excellent short treatment of Burton's life for School Library Journal on the sixtieth anniversary of The Little House, which can be read here.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

ARNA BONTEMPS AND JACK CONROY: SLAPPY HOOPER

IN 1932, ARNA BONTEMPS AND LANGSTON HUGHES collaborated on the children's novel Popo and Fifina. Several years after that book, Bontemps began to collaborate with the novelist Jack Conroy on several text-heavy picture books. Their 1946 collaboration, Slappy Hooper: The Wonderful Sign Painter, was illustrated by Ursula Koering. Koering went on to illustrate the children's book The First Book of Negroes (1952) written by Langston Hughes. It would seem that Hughes perhaps chose to work with the illustrator that had so beautifully illustrated his friend's book six years prior. But Koering had already illustrated several books for the Franklin Watts First Book series before the Hughes book was published and was likely assigned by the publisher. This happy coincidence has more of the flavor of a "chance meeting" à la Rachel Cohen (who discusses Langston Hughes at great length in her brilliant book) than a deliberate choice. Koering just happened to work with both authors of Popo and Fifina, and she brought to each very different illustrative styles.

Bontemps, Conroy: Slappy Hooper (1946)

 Hughes: The First Book of Negroes (1952)

THE WRITERS OF SLAPPY HOOPER met in the 1930s at the Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration. Jack Conroy (1898-1990) was the first worker-writer (a practitioner of socialist realism) in the United States. He grew up in a coal mining camp in Missouri during the early years of unionization, and went to work in the railroad shops nearby at age thirteen. His initial success as a writer came when H. L. Mencken published his work in the American Mercury. Conroy later returned the favor to many young writers as the founder and editor-in-chief of the socialist literary magazine The Anvil where he published Langston Hughes (another chance meeting!), Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, and Erskine Caldwell.

With Arna Bontemps, the African-American novelist and poet who had played a major role in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Conroy conducted hundreds of interviews that resulted in They Seek a City (1945), a comprehensive study on African-American migration and settlement. It was during this work that they turned their attention to a series of three children's picture books based on folktales that Conroy had collected (or composed) for another WPA project. The second of those picture books was Slappy Hooper: The Wonderful Sign Painter.

MIKE FLINT, a wholesome all-American kid, becomes aware of Slappy Hooper, "the world's biggest, bestest and fastest sign painter" when Hooper paints a billboard of a loaf of bread for his town's bakery. Mike is surprisingly passionate about quality sign painting, something that sets him apart from most.

"'Folks don't appreciate a man like Slappy nowadays. Times have changed. They got so blamed many new inventions like smoke-writing from airplanes and painting signs from a stencil that people don't pay no mind to sign painters that do their work right from the muscle.'"

When Mike next goes to look at Slappy's loaf of bread, he's dismayed to find that it's gone--the whole billboard gone. It turns out that the sign was so realistic that birds started killing themselves against it trying to eat the bread. Slappy has quit painting he's so upset about it.

Mike sets out to find him. As he races about town, he thinks he spots Slappy high in a bosun's chair, painting letters on a smokestack. It turns out it's another painter, painting from stencils with an assistant on the ground. The assistant is amazed that Mike could ever mistake his boss for Slappy.

"'I see you don't know much about Slappy. Anything Slappy wants on the ground he lassos with his special long and tough rawhide lariat and pulls it up to where he's working. And he can let hisself up and down in his bosun's chair as fast as a monkey can skin up a cocoanut tree.'"

The assistant suggests Mike try looking for Slappy on a bench in the town's square. While heading over to the square, Mike runs into another person searching for Slappy. This man comes from Wyoming and is out to apologize to Slappy for tar and feathering him out of town. The sign that got Slappy that treatment was an election poster that was so realistic that an opponent in the election shot at the billboard scaring away the town's only milk cow, and it's hard to come by a good milk cow.

At last Mike finds the dejected Slappy in the town square. When he expresses his admiration for the sign painter, Slappy opens up a bit about his career. He used to be the best sky painter out there, painting big advertisements on the clouds.

Now he figures he'll have to give up sign painting, maybe get by painting signs for small shops, just as long as he "can stay off public works" by which "he meant a big factory or some place where he would have to punch a time clock."

Mike says his own father is a fan of Slappy's and might employ him at his shop the Jim Dandy Hot Blast Stove and Range Co. Mike's father does just that and Slappy paints a billboard of a piping hot stove. The trouble starts almost immediately when flocks of bums come by to warm themselves at the realistic painting. To drive off the bums, the shop's manager asks Slappy to paint the stove hotter so that it will be too hot to sit near. Slappy follows those instructions, but soon people are complaining that the paint on the cars parked by the sign is starting to blister.

Next thing they know, a nearby house catches on fire. The fire department arrives and puts out the flames, but that's the end of Slappy in Mike's hometown. Before he ventures off into the sunset, he hands Mike a paint brush that Mike promises to keep in his "'collection--a kind of museum of important things.'"

TO READ ALL OF SLAPPY HOOPER and enjoy the rest of Koering's phenomenal illustrations, see my Flickr set here.

Background material on Jack Conroy came from Douglas Wixson's introduction to a 2000 edition of Conroy's second novel A World to Win (1935).

Coming soon: Ursula Koering

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.