Addy and Me

I've read some articles recently about toys and feminism and dolls and the general downward spiral of our society since we children of the '80s once played and laughed in happy unison.  Specifically, American Girl Dolls have come up a few different times.

Not so shocking fact: I had an Addy doll.

Possibly shocking fact: my Addy doll opened my eyes to race in a way no other toy ever rivaled.

First, I should mention, most of my friends growing up were white.  (Well, they are still white.  We just are no longer growing up.  It just sounded like they were only white back then...) As such, at their houses, we played with white toys.  White Barbies, white dolls, white Little People etc.  I don't actually remember anyone else owning black toys.  And let's face it, in the '89-'95 era black and white were really the only options. They probably still are in most cases.

I, on the other hand, as a little girl had a variety.  We had two Ken dolls - one white with smooth plastic hair, and one black with a bumpy plastic afro.  Both, of course, were dreamy and deserving of my mini-skirt wearing brood of Barbies.  The girls were also about half black and half white.  The black girls would date Black Ken and the white girls would date White Ken.  But I never labeled it as such.  I probably didn't even think of it.  On some subconscious level I must've learned that's the way it works. (I've obviously since adjusted that view)

One year, however, the Pleasant Company catalogs that arrived quarterly at my home, addressed to me, with beautiful faces of sweet American girls and cute little babies, got the best of me.  I just HAD to have one.  I asked Santa.  I mentioned it often.  I talked about it with my friends at my private school where all the girls already had one (or two) or were asking for one for Christmas as well.

Santa gave in.

He brought me Addy.  After all, that's who I had asked for.  Of the five (?) dolls you could order then - a far cry from the any eye/hair/skin tone combo now available - she was the only non-white option.  I liked that she would look like me.  I wanted to dress like her.  I wanted to read her stories.

I loved my Addy doll.  She was the classiest of my doll collection by far, though that didn't stop me from having her date my Urkel doll whose glasses had conveniently broken and left him looking more like his alter ego Stefan. I got her tea set and her Christmas dress and she was popular and beautiful and I wanted to be her.  (Yeah, I still had years of therapy and self-esteem issues yet to work through back then).

It was the book that struck a cord though.  Every doll had the same series of books.  Meet So-and-So.  So-and-So learns a lesson.  Changes for So-and-So.  Etc.

In the first book, Addy is a slave.  Not a house slave either, though that wouldn't make a difference.  It's just one of those ways of softening an ugly American history. Addy Walker lives on a plantation before escaping North where she can learn and thrive and have adventures in the 1860s.

This fact, and particularly a scene in which she has to eat worms missed on a tobacco plant, made me ill.  I read it over and over again.  It didn't matter to me that it was fiction.  It was fiction meant to represent very real moments and people in the past, so I couldn't stop from connecting emotionally.  I cried for Addy Walker.  I cried for every black girl and black boy born into a life of slavery and captivity.  I cried for my own great-great-great grandparents  that had endured the same indecency.  I cried because I knew so little time separated my own life story from having similar heartaches.

Reading this little book was not my first time contemplating race.  I knew my parents had both been in high school when their towns finally gave in to integration mandates (10 years past Brown v Board). I'd been called the n-word when a kid was mad at me once. Still, it hadn't fully clicked before.  Now I was holding a toy doll, this mass of plastic and stuffing and unnecessarily coarse hair, and I saw a past I had narrowly escaped but that to which I would always be tied.

It's kinda weird, right, that I attached all this to just a doll?  I guess I was a little strange as a kid.  And if you know me, you probably know that I did play with my toys for far longer than is "cool" or "normal" and that my toys sort of took on identities of their own.

But weird kid or not, Addy's story made me reflect on my own identity.

I wonder what dolls/toys are doing that these days.  I hope inside all that pink and purple packaging, something is still stretching young girls' minds.  Tempting them to think deeper.  Broadening the ideas of what it means to be strong.

I also hope I have the right words to talk about race and identity with my boys when they're old enough to feel these emotions too, regardless of what random moment triggers them.