Why did author want to meet connie
Answers
Answered by
4
Waves of nostalgia wash upon my emotional shores when people start talking about the shuttered bookstores of the past. They wax poetically about Borders, their indie neighborhood bookstores, or other regional favorites. My mind conjures up memories of Media Play, the Midwestern-headquartered chain known for its kitschy, catchy commercial jingles. There was one nearby, just 10 minutes away in a shopping center near my childhood home.
When I reminisce upon the many evenings and afternoons I’d spent at Media Play with my mother and my sisters, I think of one thing almost immediately: meeting author Connie Porter. She was never known for publishing books that swept the industry for middle grade readers like myself back then. Connie was, instead, the black woman author charged with bringing southern black girl, Addy Walker, of the American Girl Dolls collection to life, beyond the plastic molding of her doll form. And that she did.
I saw a lot of myself in Porter’s interpretation of Addy Walker.
I grew up in the South and most of my childhood was spent in road trips across the southeastern region of the United States— Chattanooga, Tennessee; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Orlando, Florida. Because of my Southern roots and the legacy Jim Crow racism of the past left behind, slavery and its hold on Southern states was a known unknown to me. I knew what slavery was like and the context of enslaved Africans being ripped from their homelands and torn apart from their families intellectually. We learned about it all throughout our years of schooling after all. I also knew it was disgraceful and it brought most African Americans unspeakable pain to think about and talk about. Especially those who were older than I as I grew up, our elders, who could pinpoint back only a few generations that their family members were not free citizens of this country.
I saw a lot of myself in Porter’s interpretation of Addy Walker, a quick-witted, sensitive, brave, intelligent girl who cared deeply about her family. Reading the American Girls series of six Addy books made the black American experience of the past that I had only heard secondhand more real to me, presenting the realities of slavery in an emotional context that I could understand at 9 years old. Here was this little black girl — just like me — who was navigating the ills of slavery in everyday life, yearning to be reunited with the family members who had been sold away early into the first book of the series. Book after book in Addy's series illustrated the ills of an institution designed to denigrate and break black people. Connie Porter’s words allowed me to have a vivid connection to a fictional character and a deeper understanding of slavery and exactly how it affected families, children, siblings, mothers and fathers.
If the books weren’t enough for me to grow a kinship to her, owning the actual Addy doll brought it home further. I loved her clothes most of all, taking great pleasure in dressing my doll in her cinnamon pink dress with white stripes and straw bonnet, her green Christmas dress, and a blue two-piece outfit she wore in "Addy Learns a Lesson" when she started attending school as a free girl in Philadelphia. But the most fun was playing with Addy’s hair, hair that was coarse, thick, and of a similar texture to mine. I sat her at the doll-sized school desk and imagined she was learning to read, a privilege and luxury many black people back then didn’t have access to and something Addy herself was excited to learn. I sat her at the oak table in her Christmas dress and imagined her reunited with her family: Poppa, her brother Sam, baby sister Esther, Auntie Lula, and Uncle Solomon, instead of the distant, empty wondering that plagued her. Addy, and Connie Porter by proxy, became a dear friend of mine.
Hope this help you
Plz mark as brainlest
When I reminisce upon the many evenings and afternoons I’d spent at Media Play with my mother and my sisters, I think of one thing almost immediately: meeting author Connie Porter. She was never known for publishing books that swept the industry for middle grade readers like myself back then. Connie was, instead, the black woman author charged with bringing southern black girl, Addy Walker, of the American Girl Dolls collection to life, beyond the plastic molding of her doll form. And that she did.
I saw a lot of myself in Porter’s interpretation of Addy Walker.
I grew up in the South and most of my childhood was spent in road trips across the southeastern region of the United States— Chattanooga, Tennessee; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Orlando, Florida. Because of my Southern roots and the legacy Jim Crow racism of the past left behind, slavery and its hold on Southern states was a known unknown to me. I knew what slavery was like and the context of enslaved Africans being ripped from their homelands and torn apart from their families intellectually. We learned about it all throughout our years of schooling after all. I also knew it was disgraceful and it brought most African Americans unspeakable pain to think about and talk about. Especially those who were older than I as I grew up, our elders, who could pinpoint back only a few generations that their family members were not free citizens of this country.
I saw a lot of myself in Porter’s interpretation of Addy Walker, a quick-witted, sensitive, brave, intelligent girl who cared deeply about her family. Reading the American Girls series of six Addy books made the black American experience of the past that I had only heard secondhand more real to me, presenting the realities of slavery in an emotional context that I could understand at 9 years old. Here was this little black girl — just like me — who was navigating the ills of slavery in everyday life, yearning to be reunited with the family members who had been sold away early into the first book of the series. Book after book in Addy's series illustrated the ills of an institution designed to denigrate and break black people. Connie Porter’s words allowed me to have a vivid connection to a fictional character and a deeper understanding of slavery and exactly how it affected families, children, siblings, mothers and fathers.
If the books weren’t enough for me to grow a kinship to her, owning the actual Addy doll brought it home further. I loved her clothes most of all, taking great pleasure in dressing my doll in her cinnamon pink dress with white stripes and straw bonnet, her green Christmas dress, and a blue two-piece outfit she wore in "Addy Learns a Lesson" when she started attending school as a free girl in Philadelphia. But the most fun was playing with Addy’s hair, hair that was coarse, thick, and of a similar texture to mine. I sat her at the doll-sized school desk and imagined she was learning to read, a privilege and luxury many black people back then didn’t have access to and something Addy herself was excited to learn. I sat her at the oak table in her Christmas dress and imagined her reunited with her family: Poppa, her brother Sam, baby sister Esther, Auntie Lula, and Uncle Solomon, instead of the distant, empty wondering that plagued her. Addy, and Connie Porter by proxy, became a dear friend of mine.
Hope this help you
Plz mark as brainlest
Similar questions