It's All Fun and Games

I found it very interesting that games would be made regarding such a serious matter as slavery was in Uncle Tom's Cabin. I suppose there was an appeal, for those who read and learned from the novel, to have their children partake in its lessons as well. The link I've listed below takes you to a Milton Bradley game that included a mat and multiple buildings and characters that children could place together in order to set up a town or village. The interesting thing is that in one version (listed as the Other Play Village in this link) there are no designations on the mat as to where the different buildings and people should go, but on the one I've listed, their places are already predetermined. I find it very odd that a game derived from an anti-slavery novel would be produced with prejudicial places already mapped out as to where each individual belongs in society. As it says on the site, if you follow the prearranged mat, you basically set up a plantation, fully equipped with the white slaveholder's large home and the slave's lowly quarters.

I like the idea of appealing to children to understand the wrongs in society and slavery by having them set up the village according to their own imaginations and beliefs (imagine what little Eva could have built), but I hate the idea of having predetermined places laid out on the mat. That prearranged village seems to represent everything that Harriet Beecher Stowe was attempting to rid our society of by writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. I suppose it is a good foreshadowing of all the obstacles that African Americans would face in society even after the dissolution of slavery. They may not have belonged to another man, but another man still told them where to sit, where to eat, and which schools, buses, and bathrooms they could use.


http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/tomituds/playvillage2.html