I love museums. Perhaps because I’m nosy. I was the child who sat quietly with a book in her lap while the other kids went outside to play. I discovered that if I didn’t draw the attention of the grownups, I could mine their conversation for clues about the world. I learned so many things this way; listening to the voices of the adults as they debated and joked about things with which I had no experience.
In a similar way, I recognized childhood as I walked through the exhibit, “Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff” at The National Museum of Toys and Miniatures. I imagined the conversations of the original owners of those dolls and wondered if they might have spent some hours of their childhood as I had mine. Of course, since many of the dolls were made in the 19th and early 20th century, here in America, it is reasonable to assume that there are many ways in which the childhood of their owners differed from mine. I was born free. It is probable that either they or their parents were not.
I visited this exhibit a few times over the course of its residence at the Toy Museum, first as a member of Dr. Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s graduate level multi-genre course, and then later, on my own. With each visit, I kept Dr. McCauley’s words in mind which were simply to respond to what I was seeing.
As I walked through for the third visit, I walked with my dad, who I’d asked to bring his camera. I watched him as he looked through the viewfinder, made adjustments and then suddenly, “click”, I heard the sound of the shutter releasing. His arms moved the camera from in front of his face to below his chin as he compared the image captured by his eyes to the one captured on the camera’s screen.
He brought the camera to his face again and gave the collar on the lens a twirl. Back and forth, slowly. Then, another click. Another comparison. I walked up beside him to see if I could see what he was seeing. Before us stood a dandy of a handmade doll about 12 inches tall and dressed in a white linen suit that had yellowed with time. It’s face held no smile but neither did it scowl. There was no expression to speak of, just a face frozen in time.
“What strikes me is that though we see the dolls, we can’t really see them because we can’t touch them. Once they are touched they become a friend or a neighbor. Or, someone that you don’t like,” my dad remarks as we observe the dandy doll together. We continued through the displays and he discussed the different fabrics and materials used to craft each doll. He wondered how much access and availability impacted the ingenuity of the doll-makers. Ingenuity: the meeting of access and imagination.
Maybe that’s the genius of a doll, especially one made my human hands. It reveals to us the little that we actually need to imagine a world where humans take care of one another. If we can imagine it, can we create it?
The poets included in this folio all ask us to broaden our imaginations. To think about what it means to be on display. To interrogate our perceptions of childhood and how we as adults assign value to child play. To take a look at what is around us and wonder how to make it useful.
Alex Tretbar, in his poem “Time and Materials” responds to the curated aspects of the exhibit and how our perceptions of race and gender are revealed. In writing about his work, he notes, “the hauntingly small amount of available information regarding the creators and origins of the dolls… and the gendered notions of play in children.”
Miranda Reinberg thinks about love and art and craft and what is displayed in a thing made. “The care that went into making and loving those dolls was very obvious,” she writes and she explores these feelings in her poem, “at the museum”.
Amanda Trout “pays homage to the rich connection between African-American culture and science fiction” in her piece, “The Red Eye Effect”. Inspired by a particular doll with a photograph for a face, I finished reading her work and asked myself, “what does it mean to see things as they are?”
All of the poets address the intersection of time, material and understanding in varied and interesting ways. We all entered the exhibit from points of difference and yet members of one class, all viewing the displays through different eyes but with the same assignment in mind. In a way this folio isn’t much different from the American project. Different people coming together with the same assignment in mind. Even if we interpret the assignment in different ways the result, when taken together can emit a multi-faceted beauty worthy of preservation.