I read several articles about the history of Black dolls when I was preparing my AG spam, and one of the consistent things that kept coming up was what a game-changer Addy was. There were only a few Black Barbies at Toys-R-Us, and Black baby dolls were pretty rare. Addy was finally a popular, easily-available, and high-quality doll that Black girls could have who looked like them.
And White girls bought her, too! I had an Addy! I a lot of ways, Addy was my first real intro to Black history.
Addy has earned a lot of flak for being “the slave doll,” but honestly, anyone who reads her books knows that she is so much more than that. She starts her story enslaved and makes a harrowing journey to freedom, and then learns how to live free. She goes to school, learns to read, and then teaches her mother how to read. She celebrates the end of the war and is able to reunite her family. She offers a counter-narrative to the 12 Years a Slave-style hopeless trauma porn that often comes with slavery stories, how brave Black people brought themselves to freedom and built a community for themselves. Addy helped this little White girl learn that Black lives matter and that Black history is important.
Living in Florida and seeing Ron DeSantis do everything he fucking can to censor Black history (if you don’t know about it, please take this moment to learn about the Rosewood Massacre), I’m really, really, really glad I had Addy and her books to be my entry way to Black history. It may have started with slavery, but it sure as hell didn’t end with slavery.
ANYWAY. Here’s a pretty great article about how Addy came about.
As far as her fashion goes, it’s all pretty accurate! I love that finally an American Girl has her hair up!
In the book, Addy receives her dress from a woman running a safe house during her escape from slavery. Even thought it’s relatively plain, it’s much, much, much nicer than anything Addy has worn before, and it really hits home how much better her life is going to be now that she’s free.
Fun lil fact: in the 90s the gourd was made from an actual gourd (I had the actual gourd!), which had a little cork stopper in it, but a crop failure (and Canadian import laws) changed it to plastic.
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