When slavery is discussed, especially in the context of black female slaves, much of the weight is placed upon what was taken from us: our freedom, our language, our bodies. Women were beaten and also raped, and there is nothing that we could do about it. In grade school, there might be mention of how slaves resisted, either through overt rebellion or more subtle methods such as messing with the master’s food, working slowly, or faking illness, but these acts are drowned out by the vast, detailed history of how dehumanized we were.
I first learned that I was the descendant of black people who were enslaved when I was around eight or nine years old. My mother and I were sitting in my room when she told me that our ancestors were white people’s property and that they were endlessly beaten regardless of whether they performed their duties. We had been brought over here from Africa and forced to work on plantations. Boom. That was it. The common narrative of slavery, the practice of oral storytelling in black households, revolves around two actions: the beatings and the rapes. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard from my family and school teachers about slaves having their bodies torn apart by paddy rollers’ dogs, or being stripped and staked to the ground so that they could be beaten within an inch of their lives, or having screws jammed into their skin as torture. When my mother told me about slavery, she said, “The masters raped the black women and that’s why you’re so light now. It’s in our blood.” As my eyes gazed over my light skin and then the rich brown skin of my mother and sister, I began to look at myself as a mistake. Although my parents loved each other when they’d conceived me, at the base level, I existed because of a violation that took place hundreds of years ago. I wasn’t only a product of love but also rape, and as such, I imagined myself as a mutation, an embodiment of corruption.
I understand why this particular approach to black American history is prevalent. Those rapes, that kind of oppressive violence, have warped society. What better way to make clear to another black female about what racism can do to her on an individual level than by telling her that not even her body is her own? Forget about the macrolevel injustices like the school-to-prison pipeline and job discrimination. The rapes get the point across quicker and cleaner, like a blade slicing through a sheet of paper. The whitewashing of atrocities suffered by black people in this country is a regular pastime. In 2010, the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum, treating slavery as a “side issue” of the Civil War, omitting mention of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws.3 That same year Virginia governor Robert McDonnell declared April Confederate History Month; within the proclamation, he did not cite slavery, saying that he wanted to focus on issues that were more significant.4 Many historians believe that most slave narratives about life before emancipation focused on victimization because the abolitionist movement demanded the horrors of slavery be emphasized.5 If you examine movies about slavery, like 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, or Amistad, very rarely—if at all—will you see slaves laughing with one another.
In early 2016, Scholastic published a children’s book titled A Birthday Cake for George Washington, a story narrated by Delia, the daughter of George Washington’s chef Hercules. The book is accompanied by cartoon-style pictures of slaves laughing and smiling. Of course this led to outrage. Kiera Parrott, reviews director of School Library Journal, called the book “highly problematic,” for the smiling slaves stood in stark contrast to the “reality of slave life.” Besides a Change.org petition, the book received one hundred one-star ratings on Amazon.com. As a result, Scholastic pulled the book from the shelves, less than two weeks after its release. What got lost in the narrative was that the author, Ramin Ganeshram, is Trinidadian and Iranian-American. The illustrator, Vanessa Brantley-Newton, and editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, are both black women. A Fine Dessert, a book on a similar theme, was written and illustrated by two white women back in 2014, and it was not pulled. I can speak from firsthand experience about the overwhelming whiteness of the publishing industry and how that might have allowed such a book like this to be published, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how complex the issues of authorship surrounding this book are. We mustn’t forget that Phyllis Wheatley, the first published black female poet, wrote an ode to George Washington—a man who declared that all men were created equal, yet began owning slaves at eleven and occupied office while hundreds of enslaved black people cooked his food and worked his fields. If a black woman wrote a poem venerating Washington, or illustrated or edited a book arguing that life as a slave had moments of happiness, does that mean that she is a “race traitor”? A more moderate argument is that since the author, although a woman of color, is not a black woman, the slave narrative was not hers to exploit. But what about the illustrator and editor? Evidently, they saw merit in the project. Perhaps A Birthday Cake was misguided and misleading; perhaps it wasn’t. But what the book did was raise a question as to what constitutes an accurate and honest depiction of slavery. Should we conclude that slaves never laughed? Is it dishonest to say that they never did?
I’m interested not only in what A Birthday Cake for George Washington was, but also what it could have been. To erase the wit and comedy of slaves, their ability to laugh, is almost as serious a crime as erasing the abuses they suffered: both strip them of their humanity. Laughter has always been a remedy for black people. When he was interviewed for the New York Times by Philip Galanes, alongside Lupita Nyong’o, comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah explained that humor is “the reason doctors use laughing gas. It’s your body protecting you. You laugh until you cry. People understand that once you step into a comic space, there is complete honesty—without judgment.” Even enslaved, Africans maintained elements of their folkloric culture, which uses humor as a conduit for anger or rage. It was its own form of violence against the oppressor.
An entirely new world is revealed when we consider this other side of our ancestors, a side that black children especially need to see. I never thought that slaves could laugh. How could they muster up a giggle, or cackle from the root of their belly, if they were constantly being whipped? When would they find the time to smile after a long day’s work and perhaps an even longer evening of entertaining masters and their guests?