Definition of "pickaninny"
(colloquial, now offensive, ethnic slur) A black child.
Quotations
A small white donkey glimmered into sight, and behind it a milk cart, rattling its cans, and behind that ran a small and ragged piccaninny, a child of perhaps seven years, whose teeth were rattling so loudly they sounded like falling pebbles even across the width of the garden.
1952, Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, Panther, published 1974, page 134