In the summer of 1975, Cassandra Fay Smith noticed something strange: virtually all the actors at the colonial museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, were white. Smith, then a PhD candidate in American history, had already found a historical document stating that in the 18th century half of the town’s population was black. “There was this accurate representation down to the buttons on the clothing,” she recalls, “but they ignored 50 percent of the population.” When the subject of slavery did come up, the actors’ answers teetered on the edge of historical revisionism. “The people in costumes called blacks ‘servants,’ not ‘slaves,’ and they never said they came from Africa,” says Smith. When she questioned the omission, she was told that references to slavery made black visitors uncomfortable. But, says Smith, “I think I only saw one black couple there.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Smith had collected artifacts and documents on black history while working as a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution. One document was a contract that she deduced was a “funny kind of IOU” between a slave and a white man, allowing the slave to buy back his daughter in exchange for the daughter’s services, probably as a wet nurse. “The girl was the collateral on her own loan,” Smith says. Yet, despite such compelling fragments, slave history was not a subject that garnered much attention from her colleagues–in part because of the lack of “legitimate” documentation. “Every statement had to be footnoted from archives, which came from the white perspective up to the 1880s because they were the only ones who wrote things that anyone kept,” Smith says. “Most slaves were illiterate, and even if they dictated their narratives to someone, there was the question of ‘Did he or she really say that?’ So I kept running into stories that I could put together with guesstimates, but they weren’t good enough for historians.” She says the research papers she managed to get published landed in library collections not readily available to the general public.
But when she started looking for dolls to people her little rooms, Smith had to make do with an extremely limited selection. “All I found were maids and mammies. And grotesque mammies at that, with their lips poked out and the whites of their eyes popping out of their heads.” The only option was to make her own. She spent the next six months learning the craft of doll making, then began to search for porcelain doll parts. Finding faces with the right features was her biggest challenge. “It took me nearly a year to find people who would make porcelain parts in brown that weren’t just mammy parts or brown Barbies.”
Smith’s dolls are available all this month in the gift shop of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington; she’ll answer questions and offer demonstrations from 1 to 3 this Saturday and Sunday. Her dolls are also sold at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., and at Woman Made Gallery, 1900 S. Prairie. For more information, call 312-409-8182. –Pat Price
