Dolls

 

I was of the era before Barbie dolls.

Maybe that’s why I have always loved dolls. Maybe it’s the fantasy. Maybe it’s the innocence. Maybe it’s just the love.

I still have all of my favorite dolls – the Madame Alexander that looks like Mamie Eisenhower, the Ginny doll with sparkly cowgirl outfit and guns, my last baby doll with her starched christening gown and the little Dutch girl with wooden shoes.

There are in the glass front secretary in the hall where my daughter and I sometimes take them out and love them a little before they go back to their glass-enclosed life.

But there is one doll that I did not keep. I wish I still had it. There is a name for this kind of rag doll but I don’t remember what it is. One side has a little white girl with pigtails and pinafore. When you lift her skirt and turn it inside out, there is another doll – a little black girl with curly knotted hair and pinafore. My mother called her the Pickaninny. And she said the other one was me.

Back then, I only knew one black person. She came to our house and cleaned it on Saturdays. I really liked Lena. She always had time for me but there were things I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why she lived on the other side of town and when my mother picked her up she always sat in the back seat. I didn’t understand why she would not sit at the table with me when it was lunchtime and we made egg salad sandwiches. I didn’t understand why when we went to The Pines Theater to see The Ten Commandments that they sat upstairs in the balcony and we sat downstairs.

I think about that time now and am shocked at the reality that never invaded my childhood existence. And I wonder, what type of dolls did Lena’s daughter have. And did she have the rag doll that I had. And what did her mother call the little white girl.