There’s a ton of research showing black girls need black dolls. We love black dolls and think every girl needs a doll that looks just like her. But Whitney Teal at xoJane says it wasn’t all it cracked up to be. In a heartfelt, brutally honest essay, she reveals she hated her Addy doll, the first black character in the American Girls series. Not only did she hate Addy, she was ashamed of her.
After waiting for a black girl to join the ranks of historical heroines–including a frontier girl–she finally arrived, and at first, Teal was elated:
The wait for a non-white American Girl ended when I was about 10. Pleasant Company introduced the Addy doll, to much fanfare. At first, I was elated. I told my mother that I had to have one and now there was no excuse, so I felt like the luckiest girl when I unwrapped my very own doll that Christmas. Most of my friends and cousins (all little black girls) had been denied dolls from this company, too, so I was the first in my circle to have an American Girl.
But no sooner did she unwrap Addy did she start to have her doubts:
Soon, though, I began to hate my Addy doll.
First off, she was a slave. Slavery scared me when I was a kid. Hell, to be honest, learning about it still scares me, hence why I refuse to see 12 Years a Slave. Addy’s books, as wonderfully written as they are, were sad and cold and dangerous. They weren’t filled with happy people suffering temporarily like Molly’s, or people with lives of comfort struggling with societal pressures that I only vaguely understood like Samantha’s.
Secondly, her clothes. Like, really? All of the miniature accessories that you’ll undeniably lose the next day are 85 percent of the reason any kid even wants an American Girl doll and I just couldn’t get with Addy’s. All the colors were muted, all the patterns were ugly. There was no sass or pomp or shine. There was no fun.
In short, she was depressing as hell. Putting Addy in an America where she was effectively denied the privilege of being a child made it impossible for her to embody all of the qualities for which early American Girls were known—free-spiritedness, a defiant personality and the courage to defy expectations. The penalty for girls with a strong personality in any of the other books may have been a stern look or a menial punishment. For Addy, historically and in the books, if she had been any of those things the penalty would have been far greater.
Instead, she was smart and brave. Addy was a strong black woman in the making and, even in elementary school, I had had enough of that sh–. On television, in movies, in books and now with my dolls, black girls were always having to overcome crazy amounts of adversity with a quick wit and an even temper. I hated Addy for the same reason I hated Jessi Ramsey from The Baby-Sitters Club—these fictitious black girls seemed to be models of perfection without the requisite vulnerability to make them human.
In the accompanying book series, Addy watched her brother and father sold to another plantation and ran with her mother to the free North in order to escape slavery. It’s certainly a lot less light-hearted than, say, the American Girl who heard about the Revolutionary War from a safe distance.
To make her reflect her own life, the young Teal put fun, bright clothes on Addy and tried to forget her story, her being a slave. While she wasn’t, and still isn’t Addy’s biggest fan, she know really understands why she’s important:
I feel traitorous for bashing Addy’s right to exist. Her story is important and little kids should know it. What other character could have dealt with that era of American history? Not a white doll. Yes, she was strong and brave, because she had to be, just like the many, many, many real-life black girls who survived enslavement.
…I am brave, like Addy, because the act of living in a hostile environment requires that. But, most of the time, I wish I didn’t have to be so strong and so brave and maybe Addy just reminds me of that.”
Though I only had Addy’s paper dolls–which admittedly came with better outfits than the plastic doll–I read her stories and I know where Teal is coming from. My parents were big on educating me about black history, so I knew a lot about the horrors of slavery, but I remember reading and rereading the scene where Addy accidentally misses some of the worms on the tobacco plants and the overseer forces her to eat them. I hated, and still hate, bugs of all kinds, so it seemed especially cruel to me. I remember thinking, “But she’s just a kid!” but that’s the problem. Addy didn’t get to just be a kid. Granted, once she got to Philadelphia, she got a chance to go to school and actually play with kids her own age without the threat of a master, but her experiences weren’t mine. If anything, as a girl in the suburbs, I think I identified more with Samantha, the doll living at the turn of the twentieth century.
It’s a tragic statement on black childhood that so often we can’t just be kids, even when we’re playing. With the exception of farm chores, the girls in the collection got to watch adults deal with the tough stuff from a safe vantage point. They didn’t hide from bounty hunters in trees. Luckily, Addy has now been joined by a free-born black doll, Cecile Ray, living in nineteenth century Louisiana. She has adorable clothes and as Teal writes, “Ten-year-old me would have loved her.”
