Its face was the porcelain image of a real human baby. “Creepy,” my auction buddy Janet said when I pointed it out to her. And that word described it aptly and succinctly. I had a hard time looking into the face of this “creature,” which was exactly how it felt to me. The bunny looked like someone’s science-lab project gone awry – a mixture of human and animal genes that produced a being that was neither.

Up-close, the baby-faced bunny looks innocent.

It was not the cute babies of the famous “put a baby in an unusual outfit” photographer Anne Geddes. She has baby-faced stuffed rabbits, squirrels, bears, bees and more, but hers are sweet – not scary – because most of them have human-like hands not furry paws.

This bunny gave me the creeps as it sat there on a shelf at the auction house, but it was fitting for Halloween. As much as it made me shudder, I’m sure that some young trick-or-treater would find this baby-faced rabbit adorable.

I kept trying to remember if I had seen anything like it in any of the hundreds of horror or sci-fi movies I’ve seen and loved. I could only think of Frankenstein’s monster.

The bunny-faced white rabbit.

I do remember that the first time I saw the 1968 movie “The Night of the Living Dead,” I was certain that I glimpsed a dog with a human face. The next time I saw it, though, the dog’s face was actually normal. Maybe I got the image scrambled in my head because I watched the movie both hiding my eyes from its images and peeking to see what was actually happening on the TV screen.

I wondered who came up with the baby-faced bunny, since it seemed so unnatural. Maybe the person had in mind a baby wrapped in a bunny outfit to keep warm or wearing a bunny costume. That was not the first explanation that came into my mind when I first saw it, but maybe I could stretch my imagination to embrace it. Nah.

I checked the bunny to see if there was a maker’s tag, but all I could find was a label noting that the face was porcelain and that the bunny was ”Made in China.”

This is what toy bunnies should look like.

The bunny was one of several stuffed animal at the auction (there were some cloth dolls, too). About a foot away was a true stuffed toy: A white bear that looked liked he was supposed to look. At an auction a week ago, I came across lots of stuffed rabbits that were true to their pedigree.

It was not the only eerie thing that crossed my path over the last week. And this one wasn’t at auction: One of the pumpkins my neighbor had set out in the walkway between our homes was nibbled around the top in an uneven rectangular path. We can only assume that the squirrels did it.

The squirrels seemed to have done their own carving of my neighbor's pumpkin.

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Between these two images was a poem, titled “Virginia,” that began:

“The roses nowhere bloom so white
As in Virginia;

The sunshine nowhere shines so bright
As in Virginia;

The birds sing nowhere quite so sweet
And nowhere hearts so lightly beat.

For Heaven and Earth both seem to meet
Down in Virginia”     

The sentimental poem showed some writer’s love for his home state, but there was no name attached to it. Curious, I wondered if this was the Virginia state poem. So, I Googled and found that the state does not have a poem. (Neither does my state of Pennsylvania.)

Was it the state song? No, again. Virginia has an emeritus state song, but no official song. The emeritus song is “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” by James Bland, an African American composer of minstrel songs. It had been the official state song from 1940 to 1997.

The lyrics, which romanticize slavery, didn’t sit well with some African Americans in the state, and I can understand that after reading them. Bland was born of free parents in Flushing, NY, in 1854. So could he have been satirizing white Southerner’s nostalgia for the “good old days” when he wrote the lyrics in 1878?

Here’s the first verse:

Carry me back to old Virginny,

There’s where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,

There’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

There’s where the old darkey’s heart am long’d to go,

There’s where I labor’d so hard for old massa,

Day after day in the field of yellow corn,

No place on earth do I love more sincerely

Than old Virginny, the state where I was born.

Bland wrote the song as he sat on the banks of the James River with a friend he was visiting in Tidewater, VA. In his lifetime, Bland, a self-taught banjo player who attended Howard University, wrote about 700 songs and made his living in black minstrel shows. He also wrote ”Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” adopted by the Philadelphia Mummers as the unofficial theme song of their parade.

Bland went to London in 1881 and spent 20 years performing there before returning to the United States, broke. He died in Philadelphia – where he had lived for awhile when he was young –  in1911 and is buried here. His grave had been unmarked for years until a group of people found it and erected a marker.

Listen to Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers (1937) sing the song and the Dixieland Crackers play (2008) it. The song actually has a good beat, but those lyrics …

Since I found that the “poem” was not the state song, I kept looking. I found a reference to it in the 1904 Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia. In an address, the president at the time said he thought of the three verses after college musicians serenaded him outside his home one night with the song of his home state of North Carolina. He suggested that the poem be put to music for a Virginia state song.

I believe I finally found the author: Harry (or Charles as I also found him listed) Curran Wilbur. According to the book “Memories of Virginia (1907),” the poem was written by the newspaperman for his wife, who was from Virginia. The verses are switched in the book, however: the first verse is the last verse on my postcard. The writer said it was first published in the Wheeling (I assume it’s West Virginia) newspaper in 1903.

I also found the poem on postcards a little different from mine, and even quoted as a condolence after the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007.

If anyone else has information about this poem, please let me know.

You never know where research – and history – will take you. Meanwhile, continue to join me on the ride.

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Imagine my horror when I came across sets of pages torn from an 1890 book on Pennsylvania birds. There were about 10-15 packs of pages neatly sealed in plastic, about 40 pages in each stack. Most of them had numbers on the outside of the packs, which I assume were inventory numbers of the dealer who owned them. There were also packs stripped from books about British and Irish mansions.

A dealer – or someone else – had apparently taken the Pennsylvania prints from the book “The Report on the Birds of Pennsylvania” by B.H. Warren. The book was published in 1890. I would consider it a book unworthy of being torn apart for its plates. I know what the dealer had in mind: Sell the individual images and make more money rather than selling the complete book. Maybe, maybe not. 

Dealers know they have a huge market in bird lovers. They are among the largest group of hobbyists in the country. Even back-yard bird watchers would enjoy having these prints framed and hanging on their walls.

The images themselves were lovely, and the colors striking. Each page identified the birds and the plate number from the book. The pages were in very good condition.

The author, Benjamin Harris Warren, was the ornithologist for the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture, working out of West Chester, Pa., according to the introduction to the book. I could find out little else about him. The report was commissioned by the state, the book said.

The book contained 100 color plates, some of which were copied from the small edition of J.J. Audubon’s “Birds of America” to save on costs, according to Warren’s introduction. He wrote that most were from his own collection.

 Click here to view the plates and here to see the book in its entirety. Several websites mentioned Warren’s reproductions, adding that they were chromolithographs of the naturalist/orinthologist/painter’s octavo images.

Today, the state has a records committee that keeps a listing of its birds and encourages people to report rare species. There’s also a tip list for documenting them.

The asking price for a complete Warren book is pretty mixed. Booksellers on the site alibris.com had it going for $50 to $300. These included reproductions, 2d editions, with and without all the plates, with and without the dust jacket. The Philadelphia Print Shop was selling it for $325 on its website. On eBay, there were no takers for the book at auction prices of $95 to $299.99. Neither was anyone interested in 17 plates at $35.

Tearing apart a book makes me shiver. What a waste.

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I didn’t remember any stories about my grandmother’s hats or where she bought them or how many she had, so I pulled out my old photo albums to see her wearing them. I came across one photo of her sitting in my uncle’s car after church wearing a white hat, and in the background was one of my aunts in a bigger white hat with a bow in back. I also found two photos of my mother headed to church in hats, one a burgundy chapeau that matched her outfit.

The best photo I found was a 1969 black-and-white Kodak snapshot of my grandmother and another aunt headed out to church, my grandmother’s hat sitting lightly on her head, my aunt’s hat festooned with flowers like a crown. My grandmother also had her white gloves in her hands and her pocketbook on her arm.

The thought of my grandmother and her hats evolved from a trip to one of my favorite auction houses this week. I kept bumping into all manner of hats. Inside the auction house. Outside the auction house. Some still in their fancy department store boxes. Others lying atop each other on tables. A fur hat in a box with a mink (or faux) collar (3 pelts with head, paws and feet). A bejeweled one with white pearls on a stand.

The hats on the auction tables were not my grandmother’s hats, or likely any black woman’s hats. These were too small, too insignificant. They didn’t make much of a statement. These were white women’s hats.

Black women wear their hats big. And elaborate. My grandmother never went over the top with hers, but she would never wear a little number that you could barely see. What would be the point? Dorothy Height, the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women who died a week ago, understood that. Her hats were her trademark and she wore them everywhere.

That was the custom for women of that generation (my grandmother was born around the turn of the 20^th century). Today, many of these ladies still do, and a couple years ago, a book called “Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats” celebrated their hat culture. Now, comedian and actor Damon Wayans has written a novel about a woman who joins the Red Hats, similar to a national social group of women over the age of 50 called the Red Hat Society.

As we celebrate Mother’s Day this week, we bloggers at weareblackwomen.com are sharing some aspect of the “mothers” in our lives. They may not be our birth mothers but are women who are just as special.

For me, it was Big Mama and her hats. I called my mother to rattle her brain about those hats. She didn’t remember much, so she called two of her sisters who didn’t remember any specifics about the hats but knew their mother wore them religiously to church. One mentioned that she may have bought them from a department store called Dannenberg in Macon, GA.

As for me, I’ve never been much of a hat person, except for baseball caps or straw hats, the ones with wide brims to keep the sun out of my eyes. I picked up a couple of straw hats at auction a year ago and just love them. This light-colored straw on the left is my favorites.

Here are photos of some of the other hats at auction. To get the best view, click on individual photos rather than viewing them through PicLens.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

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Advertising needle packs. Needle cases. Needle threaders. Darning eggs. Tatting shuttles. Threads by the dozens. Sewing machines. Hosiery mending kits. Sewing mending kits. Pin cushions.

I’ve sewn in the past, making some of my own clothes and accumulating piles and piles of fabric that I’d eventually get to, buying loads of threads and stocking up on the tools that go with the endeavor. It is an endeavor, much more than a hobby because it can become an obsession.

I did it because I enjoyed it, but early on, sewing was what women did to clothe their families. I’m always coming across small sewing items – especially needle cases, needle packs and mending kits – handed out to women by companies advertising all kinds of services and products. Many of the ones I find tucked away in box lots are really rather pretty, and sometimes, I’ve had the hardest time figuring out what they were.

What’s a tatting shuttle? Had never heard of it. Or a darning egg? Can you cook it?

So, for the next two days, I’ve decided to rustle up some of these items from auctions. I’m starting with the needle cases and mending kits. Mine are pretty basic, but I found some beautiful old ones on the web. Take a look at these ivory Inuit needle cases, made by men for their wives, according to the website of the Canadian Museum of Civilization.  

According to Collectors Weekly, sewers have kept their needles in ornamental cases for centuries. In the Victorian years, they were decorative cases made of sterling silver, bone, pewter, wood and other materials. People kept pins in small boxes until the 15^th century, according to the site, until pin cushions became popular in the 1800s. One site said mourning pin cushions with black-headed straight pins were very popular at one point. I’ve never come across one of those.

Needles themselves go back even further, and are said to be more than 25,000 years old. The first were hand-made out of bone, likely made to sew animal hides together. By the 20^th century, the process for making them took a few more steps.

The needle cases I found at auction were more 20^th-century – made of wood, plastic, and gold-plated and silver-plated metal. I even came across a plastic one in  dark military green with lettering indicating that it may have belonged to a serviceman. Another had the inscription “Lydia Pinkham Vegetable Compound.”

Curious, I Googled her name. Lydia Pinkham was a 19^th century seller and marketer of herbs for what was called “female complaints,” and did quite well with the product. She was born into an abolitionist and anti-slavery family in Lynn, MA, who counted abolitionist Frederick Douglass as their friend and neighbor. She later joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society in her hometown.

Here are some of the needle cases and mending kits from my auctions, many of which still had needles inside:

Egg-shaped case with the inscription “Handy Darner and Needle Case.” Needles of various sizes can be placed inside, with numbers outside denoting the sizes. Turn the top piece to the number and a needle came out through the hole. There are directions for using it on the back.

Turned-wood pencil-like case. I really didn’t know what this was, but finally figured it out after twisting it apart.

Wooden cylinder case. This one (above) is very basic. It has large needles still in it.

Calvert Extra advertising sewing case. Companies apparently handed out lots of sewing paraphernalia to women. This one has a thimble and needles in it.

Gold-plated case with brush and scoop. This appeared to be a very modern mending kit with threads, needles, a safety pin and straight pins.

Two silver-plated cylinder cases. One was Lydia Pinkham’s.

Two colored plastic cases. One was for an employment agency in New York, the other a green mending kit for a hosiery shop in Philadelphia. These were mending kits with threads and needles.

Brass sunflower pin cushion. Use the lower round box for needles, threads and more. I also came across Asian-inspired and nautical-inspired pin cushions.

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The Graflex came to mind a few weeks ago when it was mentioned in a news obit about Philadelphia photographer Jack T. Franklin. For more than 60 years, Franklin had aimed his camera at local and national celebrities, sorority and fraternity events, black soldiers during World War II and most importantly, the civil rights movement in Philadelphia.

He died three weeks before the passing last week of photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured black life in Harlem during the same period. The two men were born three years apart during the early part of the 20^th century.

DeCarava was the most famous of the two, and was renowned for his black & white shadowy images. Most people outside Philadelphia may have never heard of Franklin, but he was a fixture at local events in his trademark black beret.

In Franklin’s obit, a woman remembered seeing him walking in their North Philadelphia neighborhood when she was a child (he rode the subway to assignments). “He used to walk through the streets with his Rolleiflex and Graflex cameras,” the woman told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter.

That statement piqued my interest. I wanted to learn more about Franklin and the cameras he used to tell his stories. And when I heard that DeCarava had died, I wondered the same about him.

I’m familiar with both the Rolleiflex and Graflex cameras. Both are as beautiful as they come. While I never bought a Graflex, I did manage to out-bid someone on a Rolleicord, one of the least expensive in the Rolleiflex series. This one was a Rolleicord Ia, produced between 1937 and 1938.

The Rolleiflex is a German camera that was first produced in 1929 and the first to use roll film. It’s a Twin Lens Reflex Camera (TLR), meaning it has viewing and taking lens mounted on the front. The creators came up with the idea during World War I. They wanted a practical camera to use on the battlefield. Production didn’t come until years later.

Famed photographers Diane Arbus and Ernst Haas both used a Rolleiflex.  

The Graflex Speed Graphic was the camera of choice for early newspapermen. I’ve seen many an old movie with white male reporters, some half-sitting on desks, others in chairs, a Graflex plate camera in hand, waiting for a morsel from the local mayor or police chief. The most famous photograph taken by a Graflex was the World War II image of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, photographed by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal.

Franklin took more than 400,000 photos, which are now housed at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. His news shots of historical events may be the most significant. He covered the 1963 March on Washington, and he was there in 1965 for the Selma to Montgomery protest march, photographing Dr. King and his wife Coretta, along with others.

Franklin got his first camera at age 11 in 1933 when he was given a Brownie camera.  

“The way I treat photography is different from how other people treat it,” Franklin said in a 2006 interview with the Philadelphia Tribune. “…. The idea is to photograph what they’re doing. The atmosphere of the surroundings is very important because that’s telling you what year, so when you see a picture you can say, ‘Oh that was taken in the ’30s.’ That’s the purpose of photography: the main reason is to identify.”

All I could find out about DeCarava’s camera was that he used a 35mm camera. He purchased the first one in 1946 to photograph images he wanted to paint. He soon ditched the paint and kept the camera. One account of his life noted that his mother had used a Brownie Box camera to photograph friends and neighbors.

I can only speculate what type of 35mm camera he used, but here are some types that were available around that time. Most were rangefinder cameras (they focus with a mechanism that measures distances).

Maybe he used a Leica, which was very popular.  DeCarava’s style of black and white dimly lit photos have been likened to those of Henri Cartier Bresson, who used a Leica 35mm rangefinder camera with a 50mm lens. Bresson described the small hand-held camera as a “big passionate kiss, or then again like a shot from a gun or the couch of a psychoanalyst.”

Life magazine photographer Robert Capa used a Leica for his famous war photos. German filmmaker, photographer and Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl also used a Leica.

DeCarava’s other choices of rangefinders: Argus Model A that sold for under $10. Argus Model C3, affectionately (or unaffectionately), called the Brick because of its shape and size. I love the look of the C3; it’s a mighty camera. It’s not likely the camera he used. Too heavy.  DeCarava told a Washington Post reporter in 1986 why he chose photos over paintings:

“I didn’t know what I wanted to paint, but photography told me right away,” he said. “I was very shy, scared to death of people, and somehow the camera gave me a license, a way of relating to people.”

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 Unfortunately, they were in stereotypical poses, which shouldn’t have been surprising. The cards were made by Whitman Publishing Co., and although neither deck had a date on it, they appeared to be from the 1940s or 1950s.

The first deck I found was all white characters with caricatured names and poses, but not caricatures themselves. The two black figures in the most recent deck were named Agonizing Sue, a woman in a pink dress with pink lips. The worst was Jazzbo Jackson, a man in a green suit, red-rose corsage and some missing teeth. Very demeaning.

Seeing these cards got me to wondering about what other derogatory figures were in the Old Maid decks. What images did game-makers like Whitman, Parker Brothers, Milton Bradley and Russell use to show black people as ignorant and that people now sell as “Black Americana” collectibles? (Did you know that Old Maid was derived from a drinking game where the loser bought the next round of drinks. I didn’t.)

The term “Black Americana” feels like a misnomer to me. It seems to make what’s ugly sound palatable, as if it’s okay to sell this stuff on Ebay and other sites because, you know, it’s part of American history, no matter what it represents. I have no problem with selling the positive images as collectibles, but I cringe at most of what I see online and at auction.  

I searched Ebay and other “collectibles for sale” sites for Old Maid Black Americana cards. Here’s what I found:

Old Maid Improved Couples Round The World. One pair of cards showed a man and woman in Victorian clothing dancing the Virginia Reel (a folk dance that I had never heard of, and know now that it’s the dance I’ve seen in movies about the colonial period). He had big lips, she was overweight and another man sat on the floor playing the banjo.  

Old Maid Jolly Game. Someone from Singapore was selling this Parker Brothers game on Ebay. The description mentioned that there was a black couple among the cards. There were no photos to see, so I’m not sure if they were the same as the Improved Couples cards.

Old Maid with Little Black Sambo cards. Two companies – E.E. Fairchild Corp. and All-Fair, both out of New York state – manufactured decks with this figure. The All-Fair card was circa 1932. Interestingly, the drawings were complimentary.

Old Maid with a black boy and black girl (circa 1940). The girl, Honey Pie, had pigtails. The boy, Seedy Sambo, was eating a watermelon. Take away the watermelon and they would’ve been cute. From Whitman.

Old Maid with Melon Moe (another little boy with a watermelon!) and Lily White, a little girl playing with a doll. From Russell Mfg. Co.

Old Maid with Mose Snow, Mandy Lou and Smoky Sue. The Ebay description indicated they were Black Americana. The photo was blurry so I couldn’t tell. From Milton Bradley.

My findings didn’t stop there. I also came across similar games in other countries. A few sites talked about a Dutch game called Zwarte Piet (or Black Peter), named after a Christmas character. In the Netherlands and some other countries, Zwarte Piet was St. Nicholas’ (or Sinterklaas) helper, who – depending on what you read – either passed out candy to children or was mean to them if they’d been bad.

My Google search turned up many people in the Netherlands donning blackfaceto celebrate the pair’s arrival in early December. Some accounts said Black Peter was a chimney sweep and the blackness was from soot, not a reference to Africans or Moors. Who knows? Blackface is still out of place in 2009. 

An Old-Maid-like game in Germany is called Schwarzer Peter or Black Peter. France’s version is Le Vieux Garcon (translated Old Boy, who is the Jack of Spades).

Black characters started showing up on game cards with the creation of a game by a Massachusetts woman named Anne W. Abbott for the company of W. and S.B. Ives. The card game was called Dr. Busby, manufactured in 1843, its black characters shown with dignity. By 1905, the caricatures were awful.

In an essay reprinted on the website of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Michigan, Denis Mercier wrote that the early black figures in Dr. Busby were non-derogatory. He went on to say in his essay, “From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games,” that the popular Old Maid game offered a ”veritable encyclopedia of derogatory stereotypes.” He also mentioned other games that were even worse.

My research turned up card games based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, produced by the Ives company in 1852. They weren’t the only one: Another game based on the book was called “Uncle Tom & Little Eva.”

This research was an eye-opener for me. I’ve seen stereotypical toys in books and at auctions, the mammy cookie jars and post cards, but I’d never thought about card games. We couldn’t catch a break, could we?

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The person who owned these items apparently did it all. I found lots of supplies – knitting needles, crocheting needles, vintage needles, threads, cross stitch kits, scissors (one gold plated that looks like a stork). These items were musty so she (I’m assuming it was a she) must have put them away years ago. I’m assuming that she passed on and her family decided that these were among the things they did not want.

This unnamed woman also left two newspaper pages with articles about women’s clothing,  embroidery patterns for a scarf and lamp-shade design, along with an article on tatting lace (which I had never heard of before. In fact, I found some tatting shuttles among the items. I had to research to figure out what they were). The articles are from 1919, and include frocks and lingerie blouses.

Whenever I see women in these early newspapers, it  makes me wonder about black women like my grandmother who was in her early 20s at the time and raising a family. I’m sure women who look like her were sewing, making quilts and mending clothes for their families, but they never saw themselves in the newspaper. How did they do “it”?

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Time and again, I do come across some early ones that are very complimentary of black people, the ones that show us as we are, not as caricatures for someone else’s enjoyment.

I have several sheet music covers that I’ve framed, and they work well as art. Some have torn edges but the graphics are in good shape.

At a recent auction, I was outbidded on a collection of sheet music with covers of black people. That happens, and you wait for the next auction.

In the meantime, I’ll embrace the photo of Louis Armstrong that I got at an auction. The black and white 20 x 16 photo shows Armstrong and his band from the late 1920s.

The photo is signed: To Sonny, From Louis. I can’t tell if the signature was written on this enlarged photo or if it’s on the original. It looks like a fresh signature to me. Printed on the original photo is: Daguerre Chicago.

In the top left are the words: Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Exclusive Okeh Record Artists.  It was the first recording band he put together using his own name, and they made music for Okeh during the mid-1920s. The musicians in my photo are not identified, but my research shows them to be (from left to right) Armstrong at the piano with his cornet, Johnny St. Cyr with banjo, Johnny Dodds with clarinet (partially hidden under saxophone), Kid Ory with trombone, and Armstrong’s wife Lil Hardin-Armstrong, who played piano.

They recorded together from 1925-1927. In 1927, Armstrong organized the Hot Seven, using some of the same musicians. In 1928, he replaced all members of the Hot Five except himself, according to Wikipedia.

The recordings of the Hot Five are considered some of the best in jazz history. Read a 2007 NPR profile of Armstrong and listen to some selections of his music.

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