Sometime before I turned four, Mother made my first doll: in the parlance of 1950, a pickaninny. She’s a foot tall with a nine-inch reach, constructed in almost Flat-Stanley dimension, her red-brown evenly loomed skin plumped up with just a bit of stuffing. She was once decked out in a bright red woven bolero, skirt, cap, and pair of socks; delicate white loomed panties, and eight black tufted yarn pigtails. She looks to her far right, exaggerated whites of her eyes framing black irises underneath startled eyebrows executed in embroidery. In the intervening seventy years, she’s lost one pigtail and her bolero, but remains remarkably youthful. She fits, in all ways, a scholar’s description of how mid-century America employed the word pickaninny: always African-American, always a child, considered cute and immune to pain. The happy-go-lucky watermelon-eating girl child of Aunt Jemima. The antithesis of a real African-American child.
When the country began debating—fighting over—Confederate monuments, she came alive–animated, provocative, full of questions.
You’ll notice that I’ve not used the doll’s name. I have no memory of giving her one. I have no memory either of playing with her. She looked and felt like no baby I’d known. I can’t remember that I let friends invite her to our doll tea parties. We couldn’t dress her in different outfits. But I prized her as an expression of my Mother’s caring. And, even for our household, unusual. She sat on the chest of drawers I shared with my sister, next to my beloved replica of a 1900 child’s oil lamp and the real one my Mother carried up the stairs in nighttime dark in her Iowa childhood.
She remains, as I think she was from the beginning, a deep anomaly, a statement rather than a toy: my Mother’s conscious effort at introducing integration into our home, however caught herself in the ambivalences, denials, strivings, pure and foggy prejudices of our time. The doll is also a concrete tribute to my Mother’s deep belief that homemade toys and clothes and food and gifts meant far more than store-purchased items.
Mother made the doll just four years before Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, required school integration. My home in McPherson, Kansas, was three hours away from the Brown family. Still integration seemed like a far-off big city issue in a WASP town. I recall no one at school or home talking about the plaintiff in the Supreme Court decision, Oliver Brown and his third-grade daughter Linda, or seeing their photo in the local paper. What I knew of African American and slave history was fashioned more from music—the Negro spirituals in our Church of the Brethren hymnal. And from Sunday evening church missionary slide shows—illustrations of doing good in the Lord’s name in Nigeria and once-in-a-while the borderlands of Texas. I absorbed pathos and condescending Christianity with its “story to tell to the nations.”
For me, integration and the principles on which it was based took a turn toward reality only later when an aunt, married to a southerner, served on her local school board. Then there were whispered conversations among the grown-ups in our kitchen, debating integration or providing a “nice brand new good school.” My folks acknowledged that we didn’t live in my aunt’s shoes.
My parents and I also lived not quite three hours from Osawatomie where, in 1856, abolitionist John Brown and a small band of followers fought a much larger contingent of pro-slavery Missourians determined to keep Kansas a slave state. When our high school junior class visited the Kansas Capitol, I had only a dim sense of John Brown—no relative to Oliver and Linda—setting the Civil War into irrevocable motion at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859. I’m pretty sure that my mind stirred both Browns and the color of African American skin into a confused soup. The implications of the 1850s and 1950s incidents in history only started solidifying when three high school moments coalesced: first, that look at John Steuart Curry’s image of a wild John Brown raising his gun against a tornado of slavery in the Topeka Capitol rotunda. Second, when the best teacher in high school—the debate coach—set me to listening to Stephen Vincent Benet’s “John Brown’s Body.” And finally when I read a torn-up library copy of “Gone With the Wind.” Then and only then, as best I troll my coming awake moments, did I start to consider the enormity of evil on which our lives—my secure, church-framed Kansas white life–was built.
Those flickers of consideration still had and have so far to grow, to sink in, to inform 70 years of living. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, I would listen to radio reports of cities burning. In 1967, I would visit Gettysburg and begin to absorb that deadly battle as real—the death of thousands–not a chimera of strategies and politics. I would go on to work summers for Gettysburg National Military Park. I’d start my masters in history with a major in the Civil War.
And in the years after 1970, I’d earn my living as a public historian and advocate for the power of physical places and objects to jar us out of our complacencies. And still and still – I am left today now looking at the statues of Robert E. Lee swinging through the night onto flatbeds and at my black doll, saved through these years, with utterly new eyes. Breathless at what the doll asks me now to consider.
I don’t hear her condemn my mother. Or father. She has no glib answers about statues. I hear only that my black doll child asks me to look across the years, at all the safety and ease of my life, and to slow down, look at the details, study the past with sharper questions and the present with still more intensity. To look more people in the eye and to be unflinching in a search for cause and consequence, for both human possibilities and human evil and all the realities in between. ©
