Guest Author - Deborah Markus

As is the case with so many books I read to my ten-year-old son, I hadn't read Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory since I was a child myself. Usually when I reread books that had a significant place in my childhood, I simply slip back into being a child and enjoy the time trip. This time, though, I was definitely a grownup taking a walk around her old neighborhood.

I was impressed with how simply and effectively Dahl grabs the reader by introducing the main characters -- not with a description, but with a literal introduction. "This is Charlie. How d'you do?...He is pleased to meet you."

I remembered that Charlie's father worked in a factory, screwing the caps on tubes of toothpaste. As a child, I simply thought this was rather ridiculous; as an adult, I realized that Dahl was probably using the inherent silliness of such a job as a distancing device. If the family and their impoverished life were completely believable, the story would be bogged down by its own grimness.

One thing I'd forgotten -- which is odd, considering the book's title -- was how completely obsessed Charlie is with chocolate. It's what he wants more than anything in the world, but his family (being so miserably poor) can't afford to buy it. The adults -- parents and two sets of grandparents -- save up all year round for one bar of chocolate for Charlie's birthday, which they insist that he eat without sharing.

Charlie doesn't do what he no doubt longs to -- namely, cram the whole thing in great greedy chunks into his mouth. He doesn't even open the bar right away. He just looks at it, until he can't stand it any more. Then, he takes a tiny nibble -- just that much. He never even takes a full bite. And so he makes his chocolate last for over a month.

I wonder: is there a child alive who would be capable of that? If they were really, truly deprived of all sweets and treats all year, would they treat that annual gift like an object of worship?

Another surprise -- this time a matter of perspective, rather than forgetfulness -- was how vindictive Willy Wonka's attitude seems to me now. I always thought that the children who broke the rules were asking for what happened to them. But now, I'm a little alarmed at Wonka's glee as Augustus Gloop goes up the pipe, and his cheerful jokes about how terrible fudge made out of Gloop would taste. True, Augustus and most of his fellow tour-members behave badly; but they're children in a candy factory. And Wonka never feeds them the whole time they're there. Other than a blade of sugar grass apiece, he doesn't give them a single sample of the goods they're here to see created. That would test the patience of a saint. (He eventually offers Charlie and his grandfather a cup of chocolate apiece, but only because they're literally starving to death.)

What startled me most of all, however, was what I thought must be a serious lapse in my own memory. When my son and I got to the first description of the Oompa-Loompas, I read incredulously:

"The Oompa-Loompa bowed and smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. His skin was rosy-white, his long hair was golden-brown..."

Rosy-white skin? Long, golden-brown hair? I distinctly remembered the Oompa-Loompas being black.

The edition of the book I was reading my son was illustrated by Quentin Blake. The drawings from my childhood reading had been done, I learned after some hasty research, by a man named Joseph Schindelman.

I made a trip to the library to see if they had a copy of that earlier edition. They did, but the pictures weren't what I remembered. They matched the written description. I thought I must be losing my mind.

I did some more poking around, and also talked to the children's librarian at our local library. Several articles on the Internet and my conversation with this expert in children's literature confirmed that the Oompa-Loompas had indeed originally been black. Specifically, Dahl had described them as Pygmies from Kenya.

When the book was released in America, however, the offensiveness of this was pointed out to the author in no uncertain terms. Dahl agreed to a rewrite.

This is an improvement on more than one level. Wonka as effective plantation-owner is creepy, ominous, and depressing. But when the Oompa-Loompas are impossibly small (they are described as being no taller than Wonka's knee, and Wonka is not a tall man), with rosy skin and wheaten hair -- then their being paid in magical (cacao) beans and bursting into poetic song at a moment's notice makes the book more like a visit to the fairy-inhabited island in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Especially since, like the songs Ariel sings there, the Oompa-Loompas' songs are wildly inaccurate, always harping on some doom that never comes to pass.

In fact, Ariel's first song in The Tempest taunts a character by insisting that his father (who is alive and well) is drowned, and every bit of him has been changed "into something rich and strange." And the Oompa-Loompas' first song? It's all about how Augustus Gloop will be "altered" and "quite changed" into something rich and wonderful -- "a luscious bit of fudge."