In chapter eleven of Hugh Lofting’s 1920 classic, The Story of Dr. Dolittle, the book’s most controversial character enters. Prince Bumpo, an African prince who wants to be white, insists Dr. Dolittle bleach his face; unfortunately, the prince loves a woman who only kisses white guys.
All of this is happening around 1839.
As none of the critics eager to zero in on the book’s racism mention, Dolittle only agrees to bleach the prince’s skin because he’s in a tight spot. Imprisoned by the prince’s father, King Jolliginki, he’s afraid he’ll never get home again—and he won’t, without the prince’s help. King Jolliginki is enraged at European colonizers and wants revenge. Never mind that Dolittle is just a nice guy who talks to animals and who’s only ended up in Africa to cure monkeys of a plague. The last thing the good doctor wants is to colonize anybody. He’s just there as a Veterinarian-without-borders.
The good doctor, as those who damn the book as “racist” fail to notice, has no desire to alter the prince’s skin. In fact, he’s completely against the idea, as he says, repeatedly. “Well, I suppose it might be possible,” he begins. Muttering to himself that the effects of the bleach will wear off in a few days, he tries to cut a deal with the prince: “supposing I made your hair a nice blonde color—would not that do instead to make you happy?” It wouldn’t. Dr. Dolittle continues to hem and haw. He says it’s “very hard” to change the color of a prince’s skin. He wants assurance, when the prince won’t back down, that he need only change the face—not the whole body. The prince wants blue eyes too, but acknowledges this must be hard to do, and Dolittle immediately agrees, making one last effort to warn the prince off the procedure: “You have a strong skin—yes?”
The doctor sounds like a tired plastic surgeon trying to talk a miserably married middle-aged woman out of surgery to correct crow’s feet. And—without actually saying so, to prevent her from indulging in the delusion that smoother skin will somehow make her husband more romantic.
Dr. Dolittle is concerned about side effects of chemicals on the prince’s skin, as well he might be. When he finally gives in and supplies the bleach, readers are made to understand how unhealthy such a mixture is. The prince plunges his face (eyes open!) into the bowl and a “strong smell filled the prison, like the smell of brown paper burning.”
The whole skin thing starts with Dolittle’s talking parrot, Polynesia, who wants to get him—and the other animals—out of the dungeon into which they’ve been thrown. She urges him to lighten the prince’s skin and be quick about it. The good doctor is anything but enthusiastic: “You speak as though he were a dress to be re-dyed. It’s not so simple. ‘Shall the leopard change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin,’ you know?”
That’s a mouthful. He’s the one saying changing one’s identity isn’t such a hot idea, apart from the potential side effects of bleach on skin. Polynesia remains adamant, and is to be credited with The Most Racist Lines: “I don’t know anything about that,” said Polynesia impatiently. “But you must turn this coon white. Think of a way—think hard. You’ve got plenty of medicines left in the bag. He’ll do anything for you if you change his color. It is your only chance to get out of prison.”
“Coon?” The parrot actually says that? Yes, unfortunately, she does. But if you think that word and her attitude is going to infect your child with racist or colonialist notions, think again. She’s a parrot. What do parrots do? They repeat what they’ve heard. Yes, nineteenth-century Britain swam in racism and colonialism. But parents, you whose mommy read you this back in the sixties or seventies or eighties: think hard. Did you become a racist after absorbing Prince Bumpo’s wish to be white in order to marry Sleeping Beauty? Or did you just think the poor guy was lacking in basic self confidence or dating techniques? I’m betting you didn’t think the prince was dumb because of his skin color. He was dumb because of his silly ideas.
One might point out the nature of parrots and double down on the obvious (to me) fact that Dr. Dolittle doesn’t like Polynesia’s idea. Or her attitude. But he understands and respects her pragmatism. There’s really no way for anyone to get out of prison unless the prince agrees to let them out—which he won’t do unless he gets his white skin. He’s the one in power. It’s sad that he finds himself unattractive, if he does—we only know of his foolish belief that he can make someone love him if he just turns into a completely different person. Who hasn’t tried that? If only Dear Abby or Ann Landers or Miss Manners or Dear Sugar had been available to say, “Forget her! There are plenty of other fish in the sea!”
Well, plot point, then there wouldn’t have been a story. But the moral isn’t what the so-called anti-racists and anti-colonialists think it is. Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle clearly believes the prince is nice but misguided in wanting to alter his identity and his skin. Dolittle is regretful, and hopes to send the prince a box of chocolates, apparently as a sort of consolation prize if the bleach wears off.
Kindly notice everything Dr. Dolittle is not saying. He’s not saying, “Of course you want to be white! Being white is better! Yes, I’ll get cracking and turn you into a white man, and thanks for coming to me, since I am the world’s expert.” And by the way, Prince Bumpo offers Dr. Dolittle half his kingdom too, and Dolittle has no interest. He’s no Beverly Hills plastic surgeon racking up a fortune. He just wants to get home.
If Dolittle were promoting his skills as a skin-whitener, I’d say, “Don’t read this book to your kids.” What he seems to me to be saying is that people can be very foolish and vain and silly. When I wear high heels and my toes are pinched, I grit my teeth and admit, “vanity over sanity!”
Yes, I’m vain enough to think I look extra pretty in heels. But changing your skin color (Yoo-hoo, Michael Jackson!) is a whole ‘nother level of vanity. If the pop star had only read The Story of Dr. Dolittle (I like to think) he’d have abstained from all those bleachings of his skin and rhinoplasty. Truth is stranger than fiction—when I think of what became of that talented, adorable child, who absolutely lost his identity with procedures straight out of Hugh Lofting’s imagination—I could cry.
Dr. Dolittle is the real anti-racist, Polynesia the foil, the straight man (or straight parrot). His message is clearer against the backdrop of her bigotry. Contrast really works: she’s saying “coon” and he’s saying, “No, no! You are an individual human being. Love who and what you are!” He’s got a veneer of racism—thinks the prince’s eyes are better as “a manly gray” than “mud-colored.” But you might consider that a minor slip compared to everything else he says, especially considering his limited range of vision as a Victorian man. Ten minutes of conversation with him today would elicit a different feeling; he is nothing if not a sympathetic, humanitarian person.
Remember the porter scene in Macbeth, of which Thomas De Quincey wrote so eloquently? De Quincey’s answering an age-old question: why is it that right after the gruesome knifing of King Duncan, Shakespeare puts a purely slapstick scene, in which an old doorman (or porter) is too drunk to get up to open the door to the folks who will soon discover that their king has been murdered?
It's the contrast that makes us feel the tragedy—you need that hilariously foul-mouthed old drunk dude there in order to feel the full horror of the king murdered in his bed by friends whom he trusted. De Quincey writes: “the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.”
In the dialogue between Dr. Dolittle and Polynesia the parrot, it’s his humanitarianism—not her mindless repetition of the age’s racism—that tells the story.