Sometimes a Doll is Only a Doll:

Raggedy Ann and Andy Compete in the Non-Racist Category

The good news: you can still buy these dolls on Amazon. They still have their “I Love You” candy hearts stitched across their chests.

The Johnny Gruelle books too. At least four of them, but you’ll find over twenty on Goodreads. These delighted me, especially the “Cookieland” one where the dolls eat all the sweets my mother wouldn’t allow. They’re always foraging for food, those dolls—in an early episode, they spoon up jam from the jar and Raggedy Ann gets it all over her mouth. But by the end of the story she learns a lesson: it’s nice to request things that don’t belong to you, not just raid the larder. Marcella, the child mother of Raggedy, imparts this message with a tea party in which she models the behavior she prefers, passing tea and cakes to her dolls. Whom she also cuddles as if she were nursing them.

That alone should be enough to debunk the notion of internalized racism in the hands, faces, and relatively indestructible (made of cotton!) features of these dolls, but it hasn’t been. Yes, golliwog dolls seem close cousins. Yes, minstrel shows too. I’d go so far as to say the racism of these—oh, and of the Oz scarecrow too, another ancestor—has been greatly exaggerated.

The bad news: Robin Bernstein, in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Civil Rights to Slavery, (2012) argues that racism exists where you’d never expect to find it—in a rag doll, for instance—and that “Raggedy Ann, a widely recognized stuffed doll of the American childhood experience, is one such unexpected preserve of racism.”

Which begs the question of what we’re calling racism. Not just the image of the cleaning lady, Dinah:

Dinah barely comes up, and frankly this isn’t a racist image. It’s a fairly realistic portrait of an African-American woman working as a domestic—one of the few lines of work open to African-American women in the early part of the twentieth century. Something a mom might point out. Work clothes, including apron and a do-rag or turban to contain the steam and sweat make sense. She only comes into the story because Marcella, Raggedy’s child mother, tosses the doll in the laundry hamper and Dinah washes her with the other clothes in boiling water and is here seen putting her through the ringer—that contraption everyone used before washers and spin cycles were invented. Marcella weeps over a flattened Raggedy Ann, but Dinah reassures her the doll will be just fine after she dries on the line in the sun. And she is—missing one of her shoe button eyes, but, this being a children’s book, it magically reappears in the next chapter. The point always being the same: injuries get cured and nobody dies. Happy endings remain inevitable. Just because that was seldom the case in real life; the real Marcella died in 1915 at thirteen of an infection following her smallpox vaccination.

Bernstein goes into considerable detail about the doll’s relationship to topsy-turvy dolls, those Southern ones with a white doll on one side and a black one on the other. Flip the skirt to choose your doll.

I can admire Bernstein’s scholarship—it leads to inventive conclusions—without agreeing with her.

“The topsy-turvy doll can never fully show both its black and white ends: for one to be visible, the other must be hidden beneath the doll’s skirts. The black and white dolls are joined at their nonexistent crotches, which instead become the beginning of the other dolls. Each doll, then, is in a way giving birth to even as it smothers the other; each doll emerges from the nonexistent genitals of the other.”

Tell that to a baby. I still have a photo of myself on my first birthday gleefully flipping the skirt on one of those dolls. To make one doll appear and disappear and reappear—to hide and then reveal oneself—is the very first game of the child. I loved that doll. I played with it so much that one of the heads fell off. Which one? Does it matter? Did I chew it off or did it get stuck under a chair?

Raggedy Ann’s name comes  from two James Whitcomb Riley poems, “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie,” the better known one, from which we get the cartoon and the musical.   Johnny Gruelle thought her up in 1915, Riley being a friend and neighbor. He “espoused racial egalitarianism” and “advocated race-blindness,” Bernstein acknowledges. Then comes a “but,” and the “but” is where she loses me: “but he loaded Raggedy Ann, as both a doll and a character in three dozen children’s books, with blackface imagery. Gruelle styled Raggedy Ann after the minstrelized role of the Scarecrow, as performed by the blackface star Fred Stone.”

Bernstein seems to see this as a contradiction, or as reason to assume the dolls are “really” racist. There’s more: “Dolls provide especially effective safe houses for racial ideology because dolls are emblems of childhood that attach, through play, to the bodies of living children.”

Nope. To a child, dolls are dolls. Bernstein, however, elaborates the notion that feeling pain is associated with being white and with the dangerous notion that black people feel no pain. Raggedy Ann’s floppy build implicates her in many situations that would cause pain to a real child, but she never feels it, and for Bernstein, that’s more evidence she’s actually black. But to a child, an invulnerable creature is admirable. Dolls never scream when you pinch them. That can be reassuring to a child.

Because I don’t think, as a child, that I ever thought of Barbie as feeling pain. My dolls were mine—I did what I wanted with them. It never occurred to me to think of them as enduring pain. Not my (white) baby doll that drank a bottle. She got thrown across the room and never complained.

Bernstein associates the white dolls with angelic superiority, while the “pickaninny” dolls were an “abominable denigration” of African Americans. Not necessarily. That term is used every day in Jamaican patois.  And in other parts of the world.  Bernstein, however, argues: “I show how Raggedy Ann—as a 1915 doll, 1918 children’s book, and 1923 theatrical performance—repackaged blackface minstrelsy and the pickanninized Topsy to imagine slavery as racially innocent fun.”  

Tell that to the child playing with the doll.

I’m not denying the many antecedents of Raggedy Ann, including the golly or golliwog dolls, whose style is obviously similar, and minstrel shows. But also cake walk; as ragtime historian Terry Waldo states, the dance became about "Blacks imitating whites who were imitating Blacks who were imitating whites."

The minstrel show wasn’t just about whites imitating blacks, either—for Al Jolson, it was about expressing similarities between anti-Semitism and American racism. Cakewalks began as parodies of European white formal dancing by enslaved African-Americans. Each group made fun of the other, and their styles intermingled.

What goes unnoticed in assertions about racism in either Raggedy Ann or golly dolls is the reactions of individual children—which have little, if anything, to do with race or racism. Because the doll has features similar to or borrowed from a gollywog doll doesn’t mean it denigrates African-Americans. All we can assume is that Johnny Gruelle, the doll’s creator, admired some features of popular culture, including minstrel shows, and incorporated these into his doll.

The individual Raggedy Ann and Andy stories don’t make much of an appearance in theorizing about racism. They’re episodic—even picaresque—with the dolls and their friends and enemies getting into one scrape after another. Raggedy Ann gets dumped in paint or at the top of a tree in a bird’s nest (Just like Hitty) but is invariably none the worse for wear. Adventures the modern mom might consider “traumatic” are overcome with team effort and optimism. Meanwhile, the dolls wish for and drink ice-cream soda waters and eat cookies, and if a goblin comes along to huff and puff and break the door down, a snitzdoodle fends him off, and the two become friends in the end. Some gentle moral lightly dusts every chapter—bullying isn’t nice, being friendly is more fun anyway, candy and cookies are delicious, friends understand looks aren’t everything. The books trumpet the notion that dolls and other magical creatures of very different origins can all get along and—dare I say it?—be allies against whatever monster appears, though by the end of the book the monster is usually transformed into a friend.  Whatever the stylistic origins, the Raggedy Ann stories are tales of tolerance—and a lot of fun, too. Eight-year-olds can read them alone—the modern child may need to get used to the intensely descriptive style, but it would be good for her to do so.