Objectify
When my daughter was four, I bought her a doll dressed to symbolize an African child. She did not cherish it as I did. She could not see the seedling's root I so desperately needed to plant. I tried to get her to love that black-cloth-doll with the bright multi-colored dress, but no book or movie had featured this doll. And she was too young to grasp the meaning of her mixed lineage.
She reluctantly dragged the doll around with us as we ran errands. I beamed at the badge I had attached to my towheaded, green-eyed babe. My child that had left all of our African and Indian blood in my womb, now absently held hands with an African rag doll. This was all lost on a four-year-old who loved talking bunnies, not dolls that made colorful statements.
I had recently performed a psychology test on her that I had read about done by Mamie and Kenneth Clark. Children of both black and white races were tested with black and white dolls. The kids were given a choice to play with either a black or white doll. The majority of the children chose the white doll. I did as Mamie and Kenneth Clark did in 1939 to see how segregation induced inferiority complexes. Except I used my own child in 1995 after she was exposed to the movie Pocahontas against my wishes.
I used my sisters molasses colored Raggedy-Ann and Andy dolls against a milky Raggedy-Ann doll my four-year-old received at birth. My daughter chose the milk colored doll. I found Barbies and performed the same test, and again she choose the peach colored doll over the cocoa colored Barbie.
I decided then that a new doll was needed. The doll was purchased along with a Djembe and a steel drum for her to experiment with. All were cast to the side 15 minutes after we were home. The doll eventually became captive to a shelf and my parenting action was forgotten. When my daughter was 17, I cleaned out our storage unit and decided after years I didn't need to know what I wasn't missing. I saw the little African doll's dress peaking out of a box. I decided the doll had never been cherished and needed to find a new little girl to love. So off she went to the Goodwill.
When my daughter turned 19, she came looking for that black cloth doll in the multi-colored- dress and head scarf covering frizzy onyx yarn braids, but it was too late. I had assumed she had no connection to a doll that was left on a shelf for years then swept into a box for several more, but I was wrong.
So now I work on a wall hanging of an African woman with tawny colored eyes and a multi-colored head scarf covering tight leather braids. In my mind it is a version of the doll as a grown up, that will one day hang on my daughter's wall, watching when I can not.
