Aunt Sarah’s African American dolls

For a long time, Sarah Robinson hid her dolls, kept them a secret from most folks who knew her. She piled them up on a bed in a bedroom in her home and never ever let most people gaze upon them.

She was worried that they would think it strange for a grown woman to be enamored with a toy that beckoned to childhood, not womanhood. And besides, she was the wife of a revered minister, so this hobby was perhaps not the right one for someone in her position.

So she bought her African American dolls in private, eventually amassing a collection of more than 100 of them. She never thought of them as a collection; they were all her babies and she named each one of them. As a child, she’d had a doll only once, as she recalled, and it was destroyed in a rain shower. She was devastated and never got over that yearning for another doll.

“A doll was a cherished possession for me,” she said.

Today, her dolls are no longer hidden in a back room. Walk through her front door and you’ll see dolls sitting atop her piano and on the stool, dolls standing in front of the piano, dolls on her sofa, dolls on her chairs. On a table, she has situated a doll house that partly hides a doll about three feet tall named Jennifer dressed in a fancy Southern costume.

In the back bedroom, an avalanche of dolls fills a bed from head to foot in tight neat rows – all the children that she and her husband never had. The dolls, she said, “are like my children.”

Practically all of Aunt Sarah’s dolls are African American – some were made by now-defunct black-owned companies – but she has foreign black dolls and a white doll that her nephew brought back from Germany. It’s no secret any longer that Aunt Sarah collects dolls.

She shouldn’t have been queasy about her collecting those long years ago. She was among what was likely a large group of women who collected, many of them just as quietly and privately as her – buying and loving dolls for the pleasure of it.

A retired school teacher, Aunt Sarah has been collecting dolls for 50 years, choosing ones that “looked like little black boys and girls.”

“It was very difficult to find black dolls and that’s what I wanted, black dolls,” she said. “… I’d seen black dolls that looked like pickaninnies. And I didn’t want that kind of doll. I wanted a real black doll like black people.”

Over the years, she bought her dolls on the Home Shopping Network, from mall shops, catalogs and through seasonal doll sales. She remembered a black company in Jacksonville that made dolls and she became “a very good customer.” Her favorite doll-maker today is Lee Middleton, whose diverse dolls resemble real children.

The toughest doll to find, she said, were black boy dolls, but she managed to buy several, including a beautiful sleeping Lee Middleton doll, eyes closed, so soft and limpy and cuddly that it felt eerily like a real baby.

Aunt Sarah is in her 90s, and she says she’s bought her last doll. These days, she’s giving them away to relatives and friends.

Here are some of her dolls and the stories behind them:

How she began collecting

When I was grown and married, a little girl came to my home and left her doll and I kept her doll for years until she was grown and married and had a baby. I called her about picking up the doll again and again, and one day she told me you may have the doll, and that was a joy for me. I kept the doll and I began adding to my collection one at a time and this is the result of long years of doll collecting.

The first purchased doll in her new collection

When I married I wanted six babies. I never had children. That doll filled a spot in my heart for the longing to have a baby. It seemed like she was looking at me with all the love that a little girl would have.

Something about twins

My mother had twin sisters Linnie and Minnie, and that was the loveliest thing to know that I had twin aunts. And for some reason I just began to like twins. And through my life, every time I’d see twins I always wanted to know their names and things about them. … I just love talking to twins. I have about four sets of twins in my doll collection.

The violinist that reminded her of a child in her class who could sing

This doll is a precious doll. I liked the way she was dressed and I liked the way she looked normal, beautiful black face doll who has a personality. … She poses so beautifully well. You can shape her any way you want to and she is dressed like we like to dress our dolls. And of course she is a musician. She plays the violin. I had to take the violin out of her hand because all the children would come and they wanted to play with the violin. She is so special to me because she is normally beautiful and talented.

A boy doll named Ricardo

We were traveling and I saw this big sign on a building that said “Dolls.” And I said, “Stop. Stop. Turn Around! Let’s go see the dolls.” And my husband carried us in there and we saw all of these dolls and I picked out this one big boy doll. And when I saw the price I knew my husband wasn’t going for that. The doll was near $300. And I looked at all the dolls and wished I could have had this little boy, and I could not. We had our niece with us, she was 6 years old, Tiffany. And I left my husband in the store with Tiffany and I had given up on purchasing the doll and after a while Tiffany came out jumping up, shouting, “Aunt Sarah, Aunt Sarah, he’s buying it.” I say, What? “He’s getting the boy doll.” And you know my heart jumped for joy. This is the result of that trip. This is my doll. This is Ricardo.

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If you know someone who collects African American dolls, please let me know. I’d love to write about them and their collection. If you have any doll memories, please share those, too.