Sarah Hannah Gómez

I bought my first Holocaust memoir at a Scholastic Book Fair when I was seven. I simply saw an interesting title and picked it up. Nobody told me I couldn't. Nobody told me I shouldn't. Nobody gave me any indication of what it was about. I just read it, because I was a reader. I still have that book, and there is a single annotation in it on the title page: “Hannah Gomez hates Hitler!!!” It was the first time I learned about the Holocaust, but it was not difficult to understand the gravity or reality of it. It was clear that I had just read something that was essential knowledge for any citizen, and I wanted to note my position on the subject. I was also acutely aware that it was about Jewish people. As someone who was being raised a Jew, the Holocaust was especially important for me to understand. I don't recall my mother expressing surprise or concern that I was reading a book about such a serious topic when I hadn't learned multiplication yet. The same goes for slave narratives. Even though I was not raised by African American parents (I am biracial and adopted), there was never a time in my life that I was not aware that I was black. I always had access to books about slavery. It was made clear to me that even fictional narratives were based on painful truths, and there was an enduring heritage of prejudice and disenfranchisement that would affect my life anytime I left the house. What good would it do me to have no understanding of where it came from? You could say this is a heavy weight to place on a child's shoulders, but you have to start lifting weights if you ever want to lift heavier ones. I read Meet Addy (American Girl, 1993) and saw a nine-year-old child force-fed worms by a bored overseer. I read Nightjohn (Laurel Leaf, 1993) and watched a man have his fingers cut off for mentoring a girl who reminded me of me. I read Follow the Drinking Gourd and Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt (Dragonfly, 1988, 1995) and learned about secret codes to freedom. It was fascinating. It was distressing. It had weight. It mattered. It was real. Kids tend to assume that whatever they know is common knowledge to everyone else. My eighth grade “slave quilt” unit was remedial for me, but my wealthy, mainly white classmates seemed to find it quaint. Once I brought an anthology of African American literature to school for an assignment. A friend flipped it open to an old folk song called “Run Nigger Run” and burst out laughing. He tore the page out because he wanted to show it to everyone. It was a joke to him. And why not? Songs designed to send messages without arousing suspicion were common knowledge to me, but to him, it seemed to prove that black oppression is imaginary. His education about slavery was probably limited to fairy tales about Harriet Tubman and grade-wide quilting bees. He had probably never seen a drawing of someone who looked like him being whipped. He had probably heard somebody say “Your name is Toby, boy!” as a joke. So of course a song about staying ahead of the master's dog was silly. People whose cultural memory includes oppression, genocide, or disenfranchisement don't have the luxury of avoiding those topics with their children, because they have lasting effects into today. It doesn't lead to raising victims, but informed citizens. I understand small moments of joy on a page, like a slave receiving a Christmas present, because I can place those stories into a broad landscape and see them as the exception, not the norm. I knew what it would be like to be black today because I learned what it was like to be black yesterday through books that respected my identity and recognized my intellectual capacity even in elementary school. But apparently others didn't read those. A book telling kids a true story about the slave of the first president is a great idea, and the politics of being a house slave versus a field slave are interesting, and worth exploring. But from what I've seen of A Birthday Cake for George Washington, there is little nuance or context for readers to gain any understanding of the issue. To hand a child a book that exudes positivity at the exclusion of a bigger truth is dangerous. You have to earn hopeful stories about horrifying events, and you can only see what hope means if the horrors lurking nearby are visible. You don't get to skip to happily ever after. You don't get to show the sweet without the bitter.

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Sarah Hannah Gómez is a former school librarian and currently works as a freelance writer and editor, fitness instructor, and program manager at We Need Diverse Books. She lives in southern Arizona. Find her on twitter: @shgmclicious