black enough stories of being young and black in america

They’re now sold on the internet as collector’s items, but they are largely unknown in popular culture. Which end is up, and which end is down? Who am I? Whatever meaning the dolls had, by mid-century, they had fallen out of fashion. But the name Topsy-Turvy also suggests disruptive questions. They may also have reinforced binary notions of racial identity and the One-Drop Rule.

Why would my grandmother, a Black woman, make such a thing? Grandma had died more than twenty years before, and, holding this strange doll in my hands, I had the sense that this was her last word on race. I remembered that toys like these were called Topsy-Turvy dolls and vaguely associated them with offensive Jim Crow cartoons and minstrel shows. The two figures were joined at the torso, and the exaggerated contrast between their features gave the second doll a blackface quality. I flipped it over to reveal another girl, this one with very dark brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. It was a girl with light pink skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, wearing a long floral dress with a lace collar and a pink bow. I recognized it as Grandma’s work, but it had a design I’d never seen before. I opened it to find a collection of hand-sewn dolls and animal puppets, just a dozen or so of the thousands I knew my grandmother had made when she was a volunteer at Children’s Hospital over the years.Īmong the clowns, frogs, and bunnies was one doll that had clearly been sewn with greater care and detail than the others. Several heavy boxes contained papers and photographs belonging to my grandparents, but there was one surprisingly light box. The packing tape easily lifted away, no longer sticking to the cardboard, and wine glasses and dishes emerged from pages of the Washington Post from the 1970s. I started with a group of boxes that looked like the oldest ones in the attic.

We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. “It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it.

Black enough stories of being young and black in america