[ID 1: The cultural effort to objectify and later reobjectify African Americans found rich potential in doll play and doll literature, because all stories about sentient dolls reorganize the boundary between human and thing. As Lois Kuznetsk observes, sentient dolls in literature “embody human anxieties about what it means to be ‘real’ — an independent subject or self rather than object or other. Around the time of the American Civil War, books about sentient dolls increased in popularity, and dolls in these books discuss their racial status, their duties to their owners, and even their relationship when enslaved people of African descent. The doll narrator of Julia Charlotte Maitland’s The Doll and Her Friends (published in 1852, the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin) describes dolls as “a race of mere dependents; some might even call us slaves.” The narrator pointedly informs the reader, however, that she is “not a negro doll, with wide mouth and woolly hair. In this children’s book and many others, dollness itself is a racial category that denotes servitude. White-authored dolls in literature asserted their race’s natural servitude exactly as abolition and later Emancipation challenged the belief that African Americans were constitutionally enslaveable.

ID 2: This dialogue’s connection between the ownership of sentient dolls and the ownership of human beings is unusual only in its explicitness. From the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth, ideas and anxieties about racial slavery flowed as a steady, ominous undercurrent through much doll literature and through the physical properties of specific dolls. Dolls, as signs of childhood and property of many children, create propinquity between the idea of childhood and the racial project of determining who is a person and who is a thing; thus dolls tuck racial politics beneath a cloak of innocence. end ID]

[ID: They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery. end ID]