To lessen black children's feelings of inferiority to white America, DuBois generally depicted the physical appearance of African Americans as pleasing and attractive. However, by focusing so closely on looks, he created a new kind of self-consciousness--one evidenced in children's letters and contributions. Many readers identified themselves largely by the shades of their skin. Fourteen-year-old James Alpheus Butler (1: 215), for example, writes, "I am a colored boy, brownskinned and proud of it." Alice Martin laments:

In the geography lesson, when we read about the different people who live in the
world, all the pictures are pretty, nice-looking men and women, except the
Africans. They always look so ugly. I don't mean to make fun of them, for I am
not pretty myself; but I know not all colored people look like me. I see lots of
ugly white people, too; but not all white people look like them, and they are not
the ones they put in the geography (1: 178).

Elizabeth Harris also interjects a physical concern into her letter, asking "If I should write a good piece, would you put it in? I am twelve years old, but most folks think I am younger because I am so short. But you don't have to be tall to write, do you?"(1: 111). Her anxiety, though not color-related, indicates an assumed connection between one's physical traits and one's ability to achieve. Similarly, in "Not Wanted," 15-year-old contributor Grace White pens a story about an orphan who feels unloved and unwanted solely because of her appearance. Grace starts her story with this simple explanation:

Patsy McCullen would be ten her next birthday and ever since she could remember, she had never been wanted….Beautiful women in furs came into the Faculty Room to ask for a little girl to keep, and Mrs. Trumble always brought in pretty little girls, with fluffy curls and big brown eyes (1: 115).

The child blames her "skinny arms and legs, large mouth, and--freckles!" for this unfortunate lot in life. She eventually finds a loving mother, despite the freckles, but the fact that a Brownies' Book reader placed such a premium on appearances, suggests an internalization of DuBois' compulsive focus on the physical.

Truly, stories like "Impossible Kathleen" reflect a reality of African American life at least during the twenties, if not longer: the insistent pairing of self-worth with the shade of skin. In 1929 Wallace Thurman published the wildly popular and highly contentious The Blacker the Berry, a heart-wrenching story of a dark-skinned girl's maturation into womanhood and her desperate attempts to align herself with the more "congenial," or light-skinned, members of her race. Thurman's title refers to the Southern adage "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice," which was loaded with ambiguity. As Lee Taylor Hazlip notes in an introduction, "For some the saying had to do with attaching pride rather than stigma to dark skins; for others, it suggested a sexual connotation" (12). Wallace offers an equally ambivalent interpretation of his title. Emma Lou, the central character, was born into a pale-skinned, "blue vein" family of African Americans, but she doesn't inherit their light color. In the opening chapter the narrator clearly articulates Emma Lou's position, claiming, "The tragedy of her life was that she was too black" (23).

Throughout the novel, Emma Lou blames her unhappiness, sordid sexual affairs, and lack of true friendships on her color--not blackness but excessive blackness--and makes numerous attempts to lighten her skin with bleach, lemon juice, and arsenic wafers and to camouflage it with heavy layers of rouge and powder. However, Emma Lou, herself, partakes in intra-race elitism, refusing to befriend a Southern girl she finds beneath her or to date a well-intentioned man because his dark color would do little to further her own social aspirations. In the end, after years of misery and failed attempts to start over first in Los Angeles and then in Harlem, Emma Lou realizes that she has allowed her color consciousness to poorly influence her life decisions:

What she needed to do now was to accept her black skin as being real and unchangeable, to realize that certain things were, had been, and would be, and with this in mind begin life anew, always fighting not so much for acceptance by other people, but for acceptance of herself by herself. In the future she would be eminently selfish. If people came into her life--well and good. If they didn't--she would live anyway, seeking to find herself and achieving meanwhile economic and mental independence (217).

Thus, while Wallace advocates an acceptance of self, he does so at the expense of social connections. Emma Lou can be deeply black and happy, if she isolates herself from the world. Moreover, though her resolution suggests a joyful turn, the reader can only predict such results. The final scene shows Emma Lou packing her bags, but not yet leaving much less securing happiness.

The popularity of Thurman's 1929 book suggests an accurate depiction of race consciousness, for a number of readers seem to have sympathized with Emma Lou's plight. In addition because Thurman himself lived in Los Angeles and Harlem before writing The Blacker the Berry, his plotline also implies a long-brewing situation among African Americans. However, it is a situation that the pan-Africanist DuBois should have been countering, not furthering, in his writing for children.