Innocence Betrayed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Deep Roots of White Supremacy

Acclaim for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at first shared headlines with his famous wife’s health crisis, but it quickly grew and set the stage for how American readers perceived the book. Whimsical, magical, and marvelous typify the words used to describe it. Aileen Pippett proclaimed in the New York Times that Dahl “has done it again, gloriously. Fertile in invention, rich in humor, acutely observant, he depicts fantastic characters who are recognizable as exaggerations of real types.” A “whimsical tale about the odd and funny things” that happen to five children in “Mr. Willy Wonka’s marvelous chocolate factory,” proclaimed another newspaper, which even described its illustrations as “amusing.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune seemed to go out of its way to ignore the racial element of the story, declaring the book to be a “charming story” about how a factory with “no workers” produced the world’s best chocolate. Even ten years after first publication, to the popular press the book remained a “wicked story about four children who go berserk in a chocolate factory.” In 1992, one biographer, at last, took note that the factory setting for Dahl’s book in fact had workers, Oompa-Loompas, a mythical black African pygmy tribe. Mark I. West admitted that the black pygmies did all the factory’s work and were only paid in chocolate, but didn’t draw the obvious analogy to slavery. Instead, West concluded, the black pygmies served the same purpose “as the chorus in classical Greek drama.”[11]

Magical, marvelous, and imaginative is the way virtually everyone understood Dahl’s book, which told a story about a poor child, Charlie Bucket who, through chance, received a ticket to a glowing future. No one can deny the genius of the book or its author. Looking at the whole of his children’s writings, one analyst even saw in them Dahl’s quest for his the father whom he lost as a child, a man who “made a world that was fair and wonderful.” What reviewers and readers around the world did not see, however, was how slavery underpinned the book and assumptions of white supremacy fortified it, even when presented with direct evidence. The power of a positive imagination, and what (white) readers desired to see, simply overwhelmed the obvious.[12]

In fact, the depiction of the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and Chocolate Factory was so brazen that it seemed as if Dahl had a copy of Thomas Clarkson’s 1829 description of slavery in the British West Indies by his side when he crafted the book. When Charlie and the four other golden ticket holders and their parents first spied the Oompa-Loompas they cried: “What are they doing? Where do they come from? Who are they? Aren’t they fantastic! No higher than my knee! Their skin is almost black!” Wonka tamped down speculation that he made them of chocolate. “They are real people! They are some of my workers!” He advised the group that the tiny black people had been “imported direct from Africa!” They belonged to “a tribe of tiny miniature pygmies known as Oompa-Loompas. I discovered them myself. I brought them over from Africa myself—the whole tribe of them, three thousand in all. I found them in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before.”[13]

Wonka explained that the tribe was starving, subsisting on green caterpillars but longing for cacao beans, “oh how they craved them.” He bargained with the tribe and promised that if they agreed to “live in my factory” they could have all the cacao beans they wanted: “I’ll even pay your wages in cacao beans if you wish!” So, the black pygmies traded their freedom for permanent enslavement and all the cacao beans they could eat. After the tribal leader agreed to stop eating green caterpillars and work for “beans,” Wonka “shipped them over here, every man, woman, and child in the Oompa-Loompa tribe. It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely.” Because Britain had outlawed the trade in 1807, informed readers would have understood that Wonka must have smuggled the slaves to England in packing cases, in conditions that sounded almost as horrific as the Middle Passage.[14]

Dahl’s description of the Oompa-Loompas parroted the portrayal of American slaves that despoiled generations of American history schoolbooks. He described them as happy; they sang all the time; they “love[d]  dancing and music. They [were]  always making up songs.” They even loved to joke. Arthur C. Peary and Gertrude A. Price’s two-volume American History (1914) grammar school text, helped explain the life of slaves by employing an image of gleeful “negroes” at their cabin’s door after a day’s work, enjoying getting “together for a rollicking time.” Students for a hundred years were inculcated with the notion that African American slaves lived in serene contentment and loved their masters. Their satisfied state and inherent inferiority could be viewed in such school books as Fremont P. Wirth’s The Development of America. A professor at Nashville’s famed Peabody College for Teachers, Wirth first published his textbook in 1937 and it remained in print until 1957. “Slaves at home, after the day’s work was over,” this book’s image boasted. “Negroes always have been fond of singing and dancing; and the banjo has been a favorite musical instrument with them.”[15]

Dahl’s description clearly exploited the demeaning ways whites conceived of the slave experience and treated the Oompa-Loompas as property, things to own. One of the lucky white children who gained admission to the factory, Veruca Salt, the girl who got everything she wanted, wanted an Oompa-Loompa. “I want an Oompa-Loompa right away!” Ok, her exasperated father said. “I’ll see you have one before the day is out.”[16]

Willy Wonka embraced the role of master, commanding the black pygmies just like slaves. He clicked his fingers three times and an Oompa-Loompa appeared and quivered at his loin. He “bowed and smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. His skin was almost pure black, and the top of his fuzzy head came just above the height of Mr. Wonka’s knee. He wore the usual deerskin slung over his shoulder.” A slave galley even made an appearance in the book, one powered by the pygmies who rowed on a river of chocolate. Just to further highlight the slave analogy, Dahl deviously introduced whips, “WHIPS—ALL SHAPES AND SIZES.” And why whips? Well, “For whipping cream, of course!” To rivet the idea that these black pygmies were Wonka’s property, to which he could do whatever he wanted, the Oompa-Loompas were subject to hair-growing medical experiments and product testing that turned the little pygmies into blueberries. Catherine Keyser is surely correct in her conclusion that Dahl seemed “unable to imagine a global-industrial utopia that [did]  not rely on slavery.”[17]

[11] Aileen Pippett, “Books for Young Readers,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1964; “Books for Boys and Girls: A Roald Dahl Story,” Springfield Union, Nov. 1, 1964; “Peekin at Books: Tale for all Readers Set in Chocolate Factory,” Times-Picayune, Oct. 25, 1964; Judy Flander, “The Recorded Voice Can Soothe a TV-Era Child,” Washington Evening Star  Sept. 9, 1975; West, Roald Dahl, 68–73.

[12] William Todd Schultz, “Finding Fate’s Father: Some Life History Influences on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Biography, 21 (Fall 1998), 479; Ann Hulbert, “Review of Roald Dahl: A Biography,” New York Times, May 1, 1994; Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times; The Facts Behind a Fantasist’s Unsettling Stories,” New York Times, April 26, 1994; Jon Burlingame, “Sing Along with Roald,” New York Times, July 10, 2005.

[13] Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 72–73. All references are to the 1964 edition.

[14] Ibid., 75–76.

[15] Arthur C. Perry and Gertrude A. Price, American History, (2 vols., New York, 1914), 135; drawing by Hanson Booth in Fremont P. Wirth, The Development of America (Boston, 1937), 352.

[16] Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 75–77.

[17] Ibid., 82–89, 92, 96–97, 105; Catherine Keyser, “Candy Boys and Chocolate Factories: Roald Dahl, Racialization, and Global Industry,” Modern Fiction Studies, 63 (Fall 2017), 419.