Stanislaus posted in the Pit thread about a letter from a slave that perfectly shatters any claim that there was much of a chance that a slave was happy with his or her situation:
What a load of exculpatory bollocks. As if slaves didn’t know they were slaves. Here’s a letter (original here ) from an actual former slave (not a made up person in Sage Rat’s head) to his old master who has recently offered him a position. Jourdon Anderson seems to have a pretty clear idea of what being a slave meant for him and his family and how much better he is out of it. He also has a fine line in stiletto-sharp sarcasm:
I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance…
Jourdon Anderson.
No, but sure - if you’d asked Mr Anderson on a random day how his day was, he would have said “Good”. Of course he would. If it was a day he wasn’t watching Matilda and Catherine being raped, for instance. Or being shot at by his “master”. Or had forgotten that he was being treated like cattle or cheated out of a lifetime’s earnings. “Oh sure,” he’d say. “Today was a good day”.
Black people are just as capable of doing dumb shit on matters of race (see: Dash, Stacey). I’m sure the people working on this book had good intentions, but if it was as bad as Freudian Slit said, then it deserves its lumps. They were too close to the project and needed someone to take a step back and say, “You know…this is some fucked up shit.”
Freudian_Slit:
I’ve read the book (I work for a review publication, so I’ve been aware of this book for a while now), and I agree it’s very bad. Though the author, illustrator, and editor are women of color, I found it pretty sickening. I don’t dispute that you can depict a slave as having a moment of happiness. A lot of people brought that up when A Fine Dessert, another picture book, was under debate. But Birthday Cake made it appear that ultimately Hercules and his daughter Delia and the other slaves didn’t have it so bad. There are spreads of Hercules wearing fine clothes and getting to go to the theater–you don’t really get any sense of the horrors of slavery here at all.
We see pictures of the slaves down below, cheerfully dancing and skipping about while we see the feet of white folks upstairs. The book ends with Hercules telling Washington it was an honor and a privilege to bake the cake. There’s a real Upstairs/Downstairs vibe to it that’s very disturbing, given that Hercules had no choice. And it’s offensive and just plain inaccurate to suggest that slaves just lived to please their masters, that their lives revolved around those of white people.
The author’s note is pretty bad, too. It leads with Washington for a couple paragraphs before getting into Hercules. By the time you get to the end, you read some pretty disturbing things that feel buried: Washington often moved his slaves around to get around laws (for instance if a slave lived in Philadelphia for six months he/she was automatically free, so Washington would move his slaves around to prevent this). Hercules escaped a year later, on/around Washington’s birthday, leaving his daughter, Delia, the narrator of the story, behind. Also, that cute little Delia was not freed upon Washington’s death, b/c she belonged to Martha Washington, who didn’t free her slaves in her will.
I do think it’s possible to write a book, even a picture book, about slavery without sugarcoating it. Lorenzo Pace’s Jalani and the Lock, Carole Boston Weatherford’s Freedom in Congo Square, and Don Tate’s Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton and The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch are great examples of picture books that do just that. Freedom in Congo Square focuses on a moment of joy for slaves (those in New Orleans were at one point allowed time off in Congo Square on Sundays). Unlike the slaves depicted in George Washington, their joy/happiness isn’t about making making life easier for their white masters.
For those arguing that it’s just one book, I’d make the point that for a lot of folks, it’s part of one larger tradition in which slavery isn’t seen as all that bad. We’ve seen folks on this very board saying that it’s an exaggeration to say that slavery was horrible all the time and that slaves got to go home to a nice house and garden at the end of the day. I don’t know that we need another book reinforcing that narrative.
Thanks for the thorough description; I’ve seen so little from people who’ve seen it.
Fair enough. I though my post was explicitly avoiding personal comments; the bit that followed “I can’t even” was “respond without going to the Pit,” which I kind of thought was implied. But I think it’s clear I’m not responding to that post here in any other way.
For those curious about the book, there’s a description here . The images are a bit small, but you can get a sense of what they’re like.
I had totally forgotten Washington’s background and his hundreds of slaves. As a side note, I read Oney Judge’s bio as she was a female slave who escaped during his second term, and of Martha Washington’s , “I just can’t understand why she would leave!” viewpoint. And accounts that Oney overheard Martha saying she was going to give Oney to Martha’s granddaughter for her wedding gift (You get a slave ,you get a slave!) , and that was her breaking point.
All Things Considered ran a second story on the book, last night:
An interesting point was made by an interviewee:
The earlier ATC report on the book ran on January 18:
An excerpt:
Over at The Root , contributing editor Demetria Lucas D’Oyley dismissed those explanations. The book, she says, conveniently leaves out that Hercules escaped from Mount Vernon.
“Slaving, literally, over a hot 18th century stove to bake a cake for a man who has you and your child in bondage ain’t happiness or pride,” D’Oyley writes. “It’s duty. It’s survival. It’s busy work to pass the time while you’re plotting your escape.”
This excellent recent article sheds an interesting light on the history of black cookery in America, and the narrative of the cheery, obedient black cook. It seems as if the book subscribes firmly to this view.
Another example is 1937’s Emma Jane’s Souvenir Cook Book and Old Virginia Recipes, compiled by Blanche Elbert Moncure. It’s supposedly the voice of the unfortunately named servant Emma Jane Jackson Beauregard Jefferson Davis Lincoln Christian, who gives folksy advice in a thick dialect for a young white bride, putting herself down in the process. For example, she offers this defense for the offensively named “Fool-Nigger-Proof” Cake. “As I had said, menny a time, I ain’t no fancy cake maker, but here is a re-ceet dat ‘Ole Miss’ taught me. She called it one-two-three-four cake. I told her effen I made a suc-cess of de makin’ of it I would name it ‘De Fool-Nigger-Proof Cake’—so dat’s what it’s been to me, ever since.”
Here’s a link to the book itself, The Jemima Code .