The author’s copy of The Invisible Princess by Faith Ringgold. Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

My mom got my sister and me The Invisible Princess from Target, which used to have good Black children’s books. Before writing this essay, I’d forgotten most of the story—a children’s fairy tale from 1998, written and illustrated by the artist Faith Ringgold—but I could still see certain images. I remember, in particular, staring at a picture of a blind child standing in a flat field, looking up at a girl in a red dress. The first girl is Patience, the blind daughter of an evil slave master, Captain Pepper; the second is the Invisible Princess. They both have empty expressions, but Patience’s mouth hangs open as she gestures up toward the spectral princess in red. I remember this arresting feeling of being able to see her blindness. The cotton flowers around them look like molars. 

The Invisible Princess is the daughter of two slaves, Mama and Papa Love, who live on Captain Pepper’s plantation. Mama and Papa Love didn’t want to have a child because they feared she would be sold. But the Great Lady of Peace told them that their child would be a princess and bring peace and freedom to the plantation. After she was born, the Prince of Night—a former slave who escaped a slave boat by turning day to night—made her invisible to keep her safe from being a slave. Mama and Papa Love have not seen her since. 

Unlike in other children’s books, where the evil people look scary and make mean faces, the characters’ expressions in The Invisible Princess don’t vary much throughout the book. The most evil character, Captain Pepper, and the kindest one, the Great Lady of Peace, wear the same soft smile. The Invisible Princess looks similar to the other characters too, even though she is described as the most beautiful princess in the world. The only difference is her halo. If little kids looked at Ringgold’s renderings of the characters and were asked who is good, who is bad, who is beautiful, and who is ugly, they would probably give different answers. Some might say the most beautiful character is the slave master’s daughter. 

Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

In our story, you learn there is a Village of Visible and an Invisible Village of Peace, Freedom, and Love. The Invisible Village is perfect. There is peace, freedom, and love. Everyone lives together in harmony. In the Village of Visible, there is slavery and pain. But for all the rigid lines the text draws between them, those worlds exist together in Ringgold’s images, which are harmonic and flat. The foreground and the background blur together; the pattern of the cotton field blends into the prints of the Invisible Princess’s and Patience’s dresses, which blend into each other too. Ringgold’s collapsed, affective paintings say what they mean, but they don’t tell you what to think. The images evoke both good and evil without spelling out the distinction; that sort of knowing is felt, not revealed. Even as a kid, I understood it. It was scary. 

Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

One of the most harmonic pictures in the book depicts the plantation. Ringgold tells us that the plantation is beautiful: “All the white people wore splendidly tailored clothes, ate fine foods, and lived in beautiful houses,” she writes. But that beauty is available only to white people: “They sent their children to school while the slave children worked all day in the cotton field and were forbidden to read or write.” The plantation exists because of the pain slaves endure; it is beautiful because of what makes it ugly. The contrast is inherent to the plantation, and to the eerie harmony of the painting’s composition. 

Just as Ringgold doesn’t show us physicalized evil and pain, she doesn’t show us where the slaves live. She references their broken-down shacks only in contrast to the plantation house. As a kid, I was curious about how bad the slave shacks must have been, especially knowing how beautiful and creepy the plantation was. When my parents took me to visit a plantation in New Orleans, I was less interested in seeing the masters’ pretty rooms and furniture than I was in the slaves’ houses. When we got to the slave quarters, I was surprised that they were empty. 

Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

My parents also took me to the Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati as a kid. I remember that museum viscerally because it had a simulation where you pretended to be a runaway slave. I got caught. My sister got caught too, but I remember she got a little closer to escaping north. My mistake was that I’d trusted a house marked safe for slaves. She’d slept in the woods. When I went home, I had nightmares about the simulation. But my parents refused to assure me that slavery would never happen again. Like Ringgold’s paintings, they wouldn’t give me the conclusion I needed in order to sleep. 

At the end of the book, everyone lives happily ever after in the Invisible Village. As an adult, it’s strikingly obvious that, in order to live in harmony, they all have to kill themselves. The slaves and Patience learn that, to become invisible, they must first get stung by bees, then eat honey cakes—at which point, the Prince of Night tells them: “I will spread my great black cloak over the day and make it into the blackest night. And all the slaves of the Village of Visible will disappear.” Only then can they break through the heavens and arrive at the Invisible Village of Peace, Freedom, and Love. 

Courtesy of Kenyatta Tatum Futterman.

After all his slaves and Patience go missing, Captain Pepper roams the empty cotton fields searching for his daughter—who, Ringgold notes, is happier than she ever was in her previous life in the Village of Visible. The Great Lady of Peace finds Captain Pepper and tells him he can go to the Invisible Village too, but he will no longer be a slave master. He eats the honey cake and ascends. On the second-to-last page of The Invisible Princess, the characters’ soft smiles are slightly wider. 

I went back to the Underground Railroad museum as an adult. The simulation seemed old and fake and unscary. They have a different exhibit, though. One that my parents didn’t let me see when I was a kid. It is a reconstruction of a barn that held slaves before auction. It is made of the original wood. The inside is empty. 

Asha Futterman is an actor and poet. Her book Song of Gray won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “Study of Children” appears in our new Fall issue.