Last
week, Roald Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl, told the BBC that the
children’s author had written an early draft of “Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory” in which Charlie Bucket was black. Mrs. Dahl called
it “a shame” that his agent persuaded her husband to make Charlie white.
But what was in the draft, called “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”? Catherine
Keyser, an associate professor of English at the University of South
Carolina who has written about “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy,” spoke with
Maria Russo about that discarded version of the classic story.
Can you give a brief rundown of the plot of “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”?
The
setup is similar to “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”: There’s this
magical chocolate factory, and its owner, Willie Wonka, is being
inundated by children who want to visit it. So he decides instead of
letting hundreds of children in, he’ll give seven golden tickets. So
that’s more or less the same. There are two more children, and some of
the names are different: Augustus Gloop was Augustus Pottle. The names
are fantastic. There’s Veruca Salt, but also Marvin Prune and Miranda
Piker. And of course Charlie Bucket — who in this version is a black
boy, and is accompanied by his two doting parents.
All the others are white?
Yes.
So Charlie ends up in the Easter Room, where there are life-size candy
molds of creatures, and one of these life-size molds is shaped like a
chocolate boy. Charlie is fascinated by this. Wonka helps him into the
mold and gets distracted. The mold closes, and the chocolate pours over
his body and he is suffocating and nearly drowning in it. And it hardens
around him, which feels terrible. He’s trapped. He’s alive but can’t be
seen or heard. No one knows where he’s gone. Then he gets taken to
Wonka’s house to be the chocolate boy in Wonka’s son’s Easter basket.
Charlie
is waiting for the mold to be cracked open the next day, when the son
will get his Easter treat. That’s when burglars come into the house to
steal millions of dollars and jewelry. Charlie has witnessed this —
there are tiny eyeholes in the chocolate — but they never realized the
chocolate boy was alive. So he groans and alerts Wonka and his wife.
Wonka has a wife?
That’s
a huge change in the published version — Wonka is of course single in
that, and Charlie becomes his heir. In this original manuscript he does
not become his heir, because Wonka already has a son. So black Charlie
is not invited to be part of the family. The big reward is that Wonka
gives Charlie Bucket a store in the city center. He names it Charlie’s
Chocolate Shop. And the happy ever after is that now Charlie owns this
store, and his friends can eat whatever they want there.
Continue reading the main story
When you started your research, had anyone else ever written about “Charlie’s Chocolate Boy”?
No. It was mentioned by Dahl’s biographer, Donald Sturrock, and it was mentioned in Lucy Mangan’s popular book “Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.” But it had never been looked at in great textual detail.
Dahl
has a reputation of being very offensive at times when it comes to
race. How do you think this version would have changed the way we view
race in his books?
As
far as this version goes, I think it is a really powerful racial
allegory that might seem very surprising coming from Dahl. I think the
mold in the shape of a chocolate boy is a metaphor for racial
stereotype. In the early 20th century, chocolate marketing in both the
U.S. and England was very tied up in imperialist fantasies and in
connecting brown skin with brown chocolate. In one British ad for
chocolate, for example, you had a black figure holding a cocoa bean and
happily bestowing it on white children.
So
I think it’s neat that in this midcentury moment Dahl has this black
boy get stuck inside a mold that fits him perfectly — he emphasizes that
— everything about the mold fits Charlie, except once the chocolate
inside the mold hardens, it’s uncomfortable! So what better symbol of
what it’s like to be turned into a racial stereotype than a black boy
who gets stuck inside a life-size chocolate mold and can’t be seen or
heard through this chocolate coating.
So
you’re saying this draft was antiracist, but then in the published
book, the Oompa Loompas appeared, which made it into one of the most
racially stereotyping books of its era.
Right.
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is published in the U.S. in 1964,
amid the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and race riots in England.
Dahl should have been aware that the “happy slave” was not a permissible
stereotype. And yet in the original edition Oompa Loompas were a tribe
of African pygmies. I think this arc — from what I find to be a fairly
antiracist novel to the novel that has been rightly criticized for its
racist and imperialist politics — what it really shows is Dahl’s
ambivalence. I think we’re in the right cultural moment to understand
that. Like Claudia Rankine
has said, we need to understand how white people imagine race. And so I
think it’s really telling that Dahl seems to identify with this
vulnerable character. I mean, he himself was the son of Norwegian
immigrants, and was bullied at British boarding schools. I think Dahl
always felt like an outsider who was bullied into Britishness.
Yet he was someone often accused of anti-Semitic nastiness, and worse.
Yes!
I think that’s the power of racism — to make someone able to hold these
contradictory views at once. To both identify with the underdog and
seem to understand the pain of stereotype, but then be completely
flummoxed that anyone finds the Oompa Loompas offensive. He was
genuinely surprised and very annoyed. So I don’t mean for this to
whitewash Dahl’s racial politics. I just really love the vulnerability
and the potential in this first draft.
Why did he change the story and make Charlie white?
He
sent it to his literary agent and friend, Sheila St. Lawrence, and she
immediately wrote back: Please don’t make Charlie black.
The
depressing thing about all of this is that the whole message of
“Charlie’s Chocolate Boy” seems to be how painful it is for a black
person to be reduced to an object and treated with violence, and then
the Oompa Loompas are all objects. Wonka tests his candies on them as
though they were expendable.
It’s almost as if he transferred the original Charlie’s blackness onto the Oompa Loompas, to much worse effect.
That’s
the other thing about this book — it ends up being about the virtuous
white factory boy. Isn’t that where we’ve ended up now, as a society? We
hear so much about the virtuous white workers, and it often seems to be
taking black people out of the story. Charlie and the Oompa Loompas are
very similar, both starving. All the other children are bad consumers
because they eat without pleasure. So it’s really interesting to think
about the book’s trajectory — Charlie becomes white, and he ultimately
ascends in the Great Glass Elevator, the best metaphor for white privilege I’ve ever seen! And all the Oompa Loompas are back in the factory serving Wonka.
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