Along the Way - Barny's corn cakes.

Today we bring you another report on the schoolbooks of Rosemary the Namer. She's the little girl that owned these books, and she it was who really really liked making up names for the people in the illustrations.

Just a lazy afternoon giving your dolly a good hard shake while riding the bus.

Today's chapter is about "indians", which is kind of like getting lost on the way to New York, winding up in Nevada, and thereafter referring to the people you met there as "Yorkies". It only took a couple of hundred years for that habit to die out.

Anyway, there's some stuff about corn cakes, and our patronizing view of indigenous peoples, which is par for the course in 1948. if you want, you can just skip ahead to pages 60 and 61, where Rosemary the namer does some good work.

The girls can make rattles too? This was subversive stuff in '48, and probably got this book burned in some states.

When presented with a two-page spread of anonymous kids, Rosemary the Namer's pen cannot lie still. She goes through all the standard apostles' names, which is about average for a little Catholic girl (safe assumption) growing up in Chicago. But did she name them left to right or right to left? I want to believe she started on the left, naming Barny the Indian first, and only then resorting to the more predictable names. Hooray for Barny the indian. You just know he was the comedy relief Indian who was always knocking over the corn meal and falling off his horse. Ol' Barny never caught a break... until he opened his own Casino.