I met Aunt Sarah some years ago when I lived in Florida, and drove with her niece and my good friend Yvonne to Jacksonville to visit her and Uncle Stafford.
Aunt Sarah was a sweet woman, a loving companion to Uncle Stafford, a United Methodist Church minister with a keen wit who was quick with a joke and loved aiming them at you. Aunt Sarah let him have his fun – she was a patient woman, a former grade-school teacher – and I instantly fell in love with both of them.
They were devoted to each other for the 74 years they were married. Uncle Stafford (S. Robinson Jr.) was the first to pass; he died three years ago at age 99. Yvonne called late last week to tell me the sad news that Aunt Sarah had died. She turned 100 years old on March 18, the same month of my birth.
“I’m 99 and in line for Kingdom time,” she said at her birthday party one day before the big day.
The couple never had children of their own, but had tons of nieces, nephews and other extended family like me who adored them. Aunt Sarah collected black dolls – amassing 200 of them over 50 years – and those were her children. She gave them names and their own life stories.
She loved them so dearly that she did not want to leave them alone when she passed. So, several years ago she began gifting them one by one to those of us whom she knew would take care of them as she had.
I love older African American dolls because so few were made. Aunt Sarah had a composition doll that looked to have some age on her historically, and that’s the one I chose. She sits on a sofa in my den among other black dolls I have picked up at auction – cherished as Aunt Sarah would want her to be.
A few years ago, I visited Aunt Sarah again with Yvonne, this time so we could interview her about her dolls. She told stories about each of them, holding some of them in her lap as she talked about them, how they came to her and what they meant to her. Yvonne has been so inspired by her aunt and her dolls that she has written a children’s book aptly titled “Aunt Sarah’s Dolls,” (available on amazon.com).
Here’s an excerpt from a blog post I wrote about Aunt Sarah and her dolls after that visit:
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.”
