The brown doll was so precious that Annette took it wherever she went. She slept with it, hauled it to boarding school with her, and kept it by her side through all of her family’s traveling and moving.
“My mother made it and she made it for me,” she said. “That’s what made it special.”
We were sitting in a hair salon, me in the chair of stylist Rhonda, when I asked the women in the room first about doll collecting and then about their doll memories. I have no recollections of having any special type of doll; I’m sure that I did, what little girl didn’t?
Across from me, Annette sat waiting for her turn in the chair. She has four dolls that she’s purchased over the years as part of a collection, she said. She’s particular about what kinds of dolls she buys, choosing only those that are unique, non-commercial and “look like black people.”
The first was a cloth doll she bought 20 years ago that reminded her of a similar doll she had as a child. Then, she told this wonderful story about the doll that her mother made in the 1960s when she was about 8 years old. Her mother, a preacher’s wife, was a sewer who made clothes for her children.
“She had brought some material home and I saw it. I asked, ‘Mom, what are you going to sew?’ She said, ‘I’m going to make you a doll.’ I didn’t quite understand. How could she make a doll out of cloth? She cut it out. She kept saying it’s going to look like you. … She stitched the eyes, mouth and nose. I had that doll probably until fifth grade. The arms fell off from sleeping with it. That poor doll was with me all the time.”
Annette doesn’t know what happened to her little friend and companion, but in making the doll, her mother was following a tradition steeped in African American culture. Black mothers had always made dolls for their daughters, Barbara Whiteman, a collector who founded the Philadelphia Doll Museum, had told me recently.
Black cloth dolls are considered folk art, and the first of them were made in the early part of the 19th century before the Civil War. The earliest were individually and expertly crafted, with expressive faces and fine dress. Later, the dolls became more common both in appearance and dress, and sewing machines replaced sewing by hand, according to a catalog accompanying a 2007 exhibit of black cloth dolls from the collection of Pat Hatch.
Unlike rag dolls, cloth dolls are normally firm and not floppy. Among the earliest were topsy-turvy dolls that had black and white faces on opposite ends of a shared body. I have a new version of that type of doll, with the black doll dressed as a servant with a kerchief.
Black cloth dolls also participated in the abolitionist movement in the 19th century. Black and white women made them to sell at bazaars sponsored by anti-slavery societies. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society used them to raise money for William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper “The Liberator.” A society in Salem crafted a boat filled with black cloth dolls with the inscription “We Are Free” for sale at its annual bazaar in 1841.
The Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, has several dolls that belonged to Bronson Alcott, the abolitionist father of writer Louisa Alcott May (of “Little Women” fame) that he likely purchased for his children at one of the Boston society’s bazaars, according to the exhibit catalog.
Harriet Jacobs, a slave who escaped North Carolina to head North, made three dolls for the children of the family who eventually bought her freedom in 1852, according to the exhibit catalog. She wrote about her life as a slave in the 1861 self-published book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.”
Hatch came across her first cloth doll in 1973, and her collection has ballooned into more than 150 that date from 1870 to 1930. The 2007 exhibit of her collection was titled “No Longer Hidden: An Exhibit of Black Cloth Dolls 1870-1930.”
All black cloth dolls were not sweetly made. Just as many were produced with stereotypical images of red lips and kerchiefs, like many other items that depicted African American women as such. Some of these were dolls with lithographed faces printed on cloth that could be sewn at home.
At the shop, Annette remembered another of her dolls that had the same name as hers, and she believed that it was an Annette Funicello doll. That doll, named for the famous Mousketeer who died in April, was made in 1961 by the Uneeda doll company.
After Annette’s story, I wanted to hear about the dolls of the other women in the shop. Rhonda, my hairstylist, was mulling the question and recalled a photo taken by her aunt on a Christmas morning in the late 1950s or 1960s when she was between 4 and 6 years old.
“My three cousins, they were boys and they had holsters, guns and cowboy hats. I was in the middle of them with a doll baby in my arms. It is a cute picture,” she said. “I was a doll baby girl. I always loved dolls. My aunt always got me tall dolls (that walked). My mom didn’t buy me white dolls. She didn’t play that. She was always conscious of our heritage.”
“I always had a baby doll of some kind. I was the doll baby queen.”
Cinzia, who owns the the shop with her husband LeRoi, didn’t have very many doll memories. She was a tomboy, she said, growing up in a neighborhood with more boys than girls and living in a home with two brothers. She climbed railroad trestles with the boys, played wall ball, collected soda bottles to sell, and climbed trees to pick “johnny smokers” – I’d never heard of these things that she described as two feet long with seeds – that they’d take home, light up with matches and pretend that they were smoking cigars.
Most of her dolls were hand-me-downs, but she remembered having a new Tressy doll whose hair grew out of an opening in the top of her head. The doll was made by American Character in the 1960s. “Barbie was out, but was too expensive,” Cinzia said.
While my hair was drying, Cinzia removed two dolls from a shelf in the shampoo room at the shop and brought them over to me. They were dressed in African-style garb and were similar to others I’d seen before. Made of found materials, they were given to her by a man from Ghana.
As we looked them over, she recalled an aphorism from her past: Grandma used to say that you can make something lovely out of other people’s scraps.
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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.
Read the other blog posts in this series:
Barbara Whiteman and the Philadelphia Doll Museum
