I’m a gardener at heart. You should see my fuchsia and white peonies in the spring, and my phlox varieties in the summer. I don’t plant with seeds. It’s just something I never got into,…
Vintage seed packets as art
Posted in Art
Tag: auction
Every now and then, I find packed among a $2 lot of glassware some interesting souvenir or collector’s plates. The ones inscribed with lovely scenes that are meant for display, not for food. I’ve picked up plates of…
Black Americana shelf sitter
Posted in Crafts
I was on my way to look over some vintage items in the cases at one of my favorite auction houses recently when one of the auctioneers stopped me. We have a nice old African…
On the hunt for fine china
Posted in Kitchen
My friend Fatimah is starting a catering business, so I’m helping her to find exquisite dinnerware at auction prices. That won’t be hard because lovely dinnerware come up for auction pretty often. Most of the…
Black soldiers and World War II
Posted in Photos
The group of photos were on a back table at the auction house against a wall, almost hidden among much taller items. They were black and whites of African American soldiers. Several showed 10 soldiers…
Alden House and the 1955 auction
Posted in Home
A couple months ago, I was about to leave an exhibit of Massachusetts furniture at Winterthur Museum when I came across a copy of a 1955 article from the Boston Herald. It was hanging on a wall,…
Fela, spirits and African masks
Posted in Music
I spotted it from across the room. An African mask, chalk-white, elongated face, hanging on a wall at one of my favorite auction houses on Sunday. I had seen several like it the day before,…
Blacks, broom-making and Berea College
Posted in Home
The auctioneer was holding up a straw broom, describing to us auction-goers its history and other qualities. My mind was wandering until he said it was made by students at Berea College. A black college…
Black faces on Old Maid cards
Posted in Uncategorized
At an auction recently, I came across a deck of Old Maid cards, 45 in a box. This was the second time in the last six months or so that I’d found a deck of the…
My black hair’s not kinky, it’s curly
Posted in Style
“Your hair has a lot of tiny curls,” the reporter said to me. Her name was Rosemary and she was a white colleague at the paper where I worked in Tampa, Fla., some years ago.…