The marvelous illustrations are by the great Reynold Ruffins! Here, for example, is Koi and the snake who will help him; the story is full of animal helpers:
If you look closely, you'll see a little "Rabbit Ears" logo in the upper right-hand corner, and that's because this book project coexists with the audio and video versions produced by Rabbit Ears Radio in the 1980s and 1990s, which produced over 50 folktale-inspired DVDs, CDs, and books with remarkable voice and musical talent; find out more at Wikipedia.
You can see all the multimedia options for Koi and the Kola Nuts at their website, and the video, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg (!) and music by Herbie Hancock (!), is available for streaming at Amazon.
You can browse the whole catalog at the Rabbit Ears site, and Amazon tells me that "customers also watched" Gleeson's Anansi, narrated by Denzel Washington with music by the English reggae band UB40; I'll have more to say about that tomorrow!
And for today's update, I want to say something about the remarkable Reynold Ruffins, who did the artwork; he was born in 1930, and died just last year, in 2021. Like his slightly older contemporary, Ashley Bryan (1923-2022), Ruffins attended Cooper Union and went on to illustrate more than 20 children's books, in additional to his extensive commercial graphic design work. You can find out more about Ruffins' life and career at Wikipedia.
Ruffins won a Coretta Scott King Award in 1997 for Running the Road to ABC by Denizé Lauture, which is just a click away at the Internet Archive. It's a picture book about Haitian children running the long way to school every day:
He also illustrated Robert San Souci's A Friend for King Amadou, which is a very sweet story about a king who goes out among the people, disguised as a poor man, to find out what they really think of him:
The style in those books resonates with the beautiful artwork for Koi and the Kola Nuts as you can see; Ruffins' work is very distinctive!
As I mentioned above, the author of this book, Brian Gleeson, is the author of other books in the Rabbit Ears series that you can find at the Internet Archive, including Anansi:
It features artwork by Steven Guarnaccia; here's Anansi at the end of the famous story of the "shaking hat" when greedy Anansi has concealed hot food under his hat and burned off all the hair on his head as a result:
Plus Gleeson is also the author of the Rabbit Ears version of The Tiger and the Brahmin.
This is a trickster story from India which also spread throughout Africa, with many different animals playing the role of the hungry tiger, the hapless brahmin, and the trickster jackal, along with African Diaspora versions of the story too, like the story where the trickster Terrapin rescues Brer Rabbit from Wolf: Brer Wolf under a Rock.
I'll admit that something that frustrates me about Gleeson's books is that he does not give indications about his sources; I'll never understand just why authors don't insist on the publisher letting them squeeze in a note somewhere, even if it's on the copyright page, about the source (s) they used for the story. In the case of Koi and the Kola Nuts, I'm fairly certain that the source has to be a story told in Verna Aardema's first anthology of African folktales, Tales from the Story Hat, which you can read about in this blog post. Aardema does cite her source: ""Based upon the story "Koi and His Heritage" found in a booklet entitled "Nemo and Other Stories" published by the National Fundamental Education Centre, Klay, Liberia, September, 1954." (I sure would love to get a look at that booklet someday! Stories about the tiny trickster antelope Nemo are some of my favorites!)
Aardema's book has illustrations by Elton Fax, an African American illustrator who collaborated with Aardema on several books; more about Elton Fax at Wikipedia. Here is one of his illustrations for Koi and the Kola Nuts in that book, showing the crocodile who will become one of Koi's animal helpers:
And here's the crocodile as imagined by Ruffins:
To finish up the week, I want to share one more version of the story of Koi and the kola nuts; it's a later publication by Verna Aardema, this time with illustrations by Joe Cepeda. It's not available at the Internet Archive (yet!), but if it does become available I will be sure to update this post. You can find cheaply priced used copies if you want to get a copy for yourself: Koi and the Kola Nuts: A Tale from Liberia by Verna Aardema. Even though the book is not available at the Archive, you can get another artist's take on Koi and the crocodile right there on the cover:
In the meantime, enjoy the version by Gleeson and Ruffins that is our book for this week... just a click away at the Internet Archive!
by Brian Gleeson
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