At my most recent re-read of Addy’s stories, I noticed a detail in Addy Learns a Lesson that I hadn’t caught ever before. I want to bring your attention to it, because I think it’s important.
First: throw out your BeForever books. Get the first editions with the illustrations by Melodye Rosales, because they are luminous, expressive, and rich. They portray Addy as the sweet young girl she is, seeing as how they were modeled after Ms. Rosales’ own daughter Harmony.
In fact, do the same for you 1998 editions with the new illustrations by Dahl Taylor. They serve their purpose fine, but in some pictures I think Addy looks closer to 12 or 13 years old, and they’re a little less vibrant. But that’s a personal preference. They are inferior for another reason.
So in Addy Learns a Lesson, there’s a particular full-page illustration that shows Addy’s second day of school, when she first shares a desk with Harriet.
Let’s compare the two illustrations side-by-side. The 1993 edition (Rosales) is on the left; 1998 (Taylor) on the right.
While most of the changes mostly look minor (although changing the skin color of the students is an issue itself), there’s one detail that is very, very different. Look at the map on the wall behind the students. One’s a world map, and one’s a map of the United States.
Here’s why this matters: earlier in the book, there is a scene where Addy is describing the classroom as she enters it for the first time. There are rows of desk, there’s a stove, and “huge black squares filled with writing” which are obviously blackboards. We can figure that out.
But the next sentence is this:
On another wall there was a large piece of paper filled with colorful shapes. What’s that for? Addy wondered.
The narrative never actually explains what that shape-covered paper is. Did you try to guess what it is? Or did you forget it and move on? The wording is so ambiguous that you really need to see the illustration and piece together that she was looking at a map of the United States. Could anyone actually ever determine, without looking at the picture, that she’s referring to a map of the country? Addy has never seen a map of the US. Just like how it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read, this was an advantage for slaveholders. You can’t successfully escape slavery if you don’t know where you are, where you’re going, and which states are free states.
I can’t imagine why Dahl Taylor would have omitted the map of the states and used a world map instead. There’s really no point, except maybe he overlooked the meaning of the colored shapes entirely. And maybe this isn’t surprising: according to his page on the American Girl Wiki, some of his illustrations “made characters either lighter or darker than they were originally and some scenes less intense, changing several dynamics of the stories in images.”
It certainly does change a lot. I wish this detail, the map, had been preserved with the new illustration, because it adds such an interesting layer to the story by proving how incredibly smart and capable Addy and her mother are. They couldn’t have read a map during their journey even if they could have carried one. Still, they successfully followed an escape route entirely by remembering landmarks, paying attention to their surroundings, and knowing when to trust people. I’m so glad Melodye Rosales included that subtle detail.
(You can read more about why Ms. Rosales only illustrated the first three books in this article [here].)
