The Combahee River Collective in 1974. Left to right bottom: Demita Frazier and Helen Stewart. Left to right top: Margo Okazawa-Rey, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Chirlane McCray, and Mercedes Tompkins. Photo courtesy of Margo Okazawa-Rey.

By Ra Malika Imhotep

For the latest installment for our Special Blog Issue, “50 Years of Combahee”, scholar Ra Malika Imhotep examines the politics of Black lesbian socialist feminist kinship and play with Black dolls.

The soft Black feminine figure dons hair likely made of acrylic yarn, its deliberate fluff of blackness punctuated by two red bows. Her cloth flesh is a warm brown that brings her into relation with the flesh and blood women that surround her. She is wearing what appears to be a blouse in red gingham print with sleeves that poof and gather at the wrist. Over this blouse she wears what appears to be a white smock dress. A lighter brown hand holds her tight.

Described above is the soft Black plaything held by Margo Okazawa-Ray, in what is perhaps the most publicly circulated image of the Combahee River Collective.The image was taken early in the Collective’s history, which has indelibly marked the terrain of contemporary Black feminist theory and practice. While Okazawa-Ray holds this Black, cloth-fleshed doll in her right hand, her left hand rests on the shoulder of Demita Frazier (who I think is resting both hands on her knees, with a slight bend, to make sure all their faces are seen). Okazawa-Ray’s shoulder is held by Barbara Smith who appears to reach past her sister Beverly to rest her left hand on the shoulder of Chirlane McCray, while Beverly embraces Mercedes Thompson who presses her fingers into the shoulder of Helen Stewart.

This is a stunning web of Black lesbian socialist feminist kinship. To my eye, the unnamed Black cloth-fleshed doll is the image’s punctum — what French cultural theorist Roland Barthes describes as “ a sting, speck, cut, little hold…an accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Barthes, Camera Lúcida, 27).

My focused attention on the doll is informed by my own lineage of Southern women who kept dolls on their beds (as I do now). I am born of a child of the earliest wave of The Great Migration, Brooklyn-born D. Makeda Johnson who returned to Georgia, the land of her ancestors, as a social entrepreneur. Through an initiative called Positive Images Enterprises, my mother launched the Queen Makeda Doll Collection. Through her practice as a cultural worker, my mother crafted dolls that were not only black in color but adorned in African cloth representing the socio-political aesthetic of Black cultural nationalism shaping much of West Atlanta. In some ways this effort to craft “positive images” through the figure of the Black doll was a corrective to representative limitations of the “raggedy ann” style dolls like the one in the image, but in both figurations we can consider the deliberately Black doll as something of cultural importance.

Collage of the Black doll that Margo Okazawa-Rey was holding in the original photo with members of the Combahee River Collective.

“My provocation is to take CRC’s shared experience of being classified as “smart-ugly,” and the social and psychological harm that hailing may have caused, as an invitation to imagine how a minor figure, such as a small Black cloth-fleshed doll, becomes essential to their personal-political efforts. Perhaps this soft Black plaything is an object of collective comfort and levity. ”

In the little hold of the Black cloth-fleshed doll embraced tightly by Okazawa-Ray and intentionally featured in this record of communion, I wonder: Who brought the doll to the gathering? Did it belong to whoever’s home and/or community space they gathered in? What was its purpose (in the space, to the person, to the group)? When was it decided that she was important enuf to include in the portrait? How much laughter, comfort, levity might she have brought to this collective of organizers who spent much of their time together conspiring against the devastating disregard of Black women murdered throughout Boston, Massachusetts in the early-mid 70s?

There are enough living members to simply ask and get an answer, but on the occasion of this 50 year commemoration of the path breaking collective efforts of the CRC, I am choosing to follow the paths of critical fabulation, histories of racialized play, and a bit of archival family history to imagine this figure’s significance and how it might reveal an understated connection between the Collective’s “feelings of craziness” (footnote 1) and hailing as “smart-ugly” with subtle practices of play and self-soothing long practiced by Black women and girls.

As described in “A Black Feminist Statement,” the CRC’s processes of consciousness-raising “in many ways [went] beyond white women’s revelation.” Central to this was the cultural resonance of “Black language” through which they conceptualized through testimony that “..[their] intellectual interests had been attacked by [their] peers, particularly Black males. [They] discovered that all of [them], because [they] were “smart” had also been considered “ugly,” i.e., “smart-ugly.” This explicit or implicit hailing as undesirable “crystallized the way in which most of [them] had been forced to develop [their] intellects at great cost to [their] ‘social’ lives.”

My provocation is to take CRC’s shared experience of being classified as “smart-ugly,” and the social and psychological harm that hailing may have caused, as an invitation to imagine how a minor figure, such as a small Black cloth-fleshed doll, becomes essential to their personal-political efforts. Perhaps this soft Black plaything is an object of collective comfort and levity. This is a comfort not only for the grown Black lesbian organizers engaged in the principled struggle and fellowship that radical and revolutionary Black feminisms necessitate, but also to their younger selves who sat inside them around those tables, walked with them at those rallies, and danced with them at those parties as they mourned and raged and loved against the machine.

Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s 1947 “doll studies” showed early on that objects of comfort and play, such as dolls, carry and convey psychological implications in the life-worlds of Black children—gesturing towards how they view themselves in relation to the white other (most often engaged in the form of a toy during the time of de jure and de facto segregation). As articulated by my mother in a 1990 profile in The Atlanta Daily World, it was hard to find dolls that “matched the [black] child’s needs…” in the commercial landscape of children’s toys. She was “tired of seeing [Black youth] playing with dolls that did not look like them nor reflect their rich heritage as a people.”

While the doll held in communion by the CRC is not an explicit representation of my mother’s avowed Afrocentric spiritual-political commitments, it does, in my reading, share a spiritual resonance in its potential to offer care and comfort to the Black psyche.

There is a long history of cloth dolls that includes the labor of enslaved women and later domestic workers on plantations handcrafting dolls for children, their own pleasure, and as a kind of currency. Even beyond the material of cloth, which was often hard to spare, some Black dolls were made from sweet grass, cornhusks, repurposed crop sacks, like those of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Even the controversial enslaved American Girl doll “Addy Walker” held her own cloth doll named “Ida Bean.” As described in an article published by Smithsonian Magazine, Addy’s Ida represented the 19th century practices of play through which “children rehearsed their future domestic roles, imagined new lives and learned the basics of the era’s racial politics.” Perhaps the most notable example of this are the Topsy-Turvy dolls created by enslaved Black women in the south and now popularly sold in tourist markets throughout the Caribbean.

“Can we read this Black doll as another Black queer(d) figure in this web of Black lesbian feminist kinship? Can we imagine that the Collective’s assertion that “Black women are inherently valuable,” may also extend a place of value for soft Black playthings, for objects of comfort and practices of self-soothing, in our conceptions of what it means to make “a leap into revolutionary action”?”

As interrogated by Robin Bernstein in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), these Topsy-Turvy dolls often dramatized the worst of American racial hierarchy. Sometimes with explicit reference to the characters Topsy and Eva from Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Topsy side of the doll with its Black cloth-flesh and rough tufts of hair often “adorned” with tattered red ribbons or a mammy-esque headwrap, was the literal underside of the white cloth-flesh and more finally dressed “Eva” side of the doll. Attached at the waist, each side of the doll was concealed, at turns, by the other’s skirt. Bernstein goes on to describe the ways the Black cloth-flesh often suffered harsher play than its white cloth-fleshed twin.

Returning to the image of the Combahee River Collective and the Black cloth-fleshed minor figure they deliberately bring into the frame, I read their embrace of the maligned Black cloth-flesh as an act of restoration for both the women and the doll. In Okazawa-Rays’ hand the Black cloth-fleshed figure may signify Topsy or another historically derided figure of the Black child, but she is beloved. She does not rehearse the drudgery of domestic labor or even signify the kind of motherly instincts often ingrained in the play associated with being socialized as a girl in a markedly hetero-normative world.

Can we read this Black doll as another Black queer(d) figure in this web of Black lesbian feminist kinship? Can we imagine that the Collective’s assertion that “Black women are inherently valuable,” may also extend a place of value for soft Black playthings, for objects of comfort and practices of self-soothing, in our conceptions of what it means to make “a leap into revolutionary action”?

Footnote 1

As described by Mosley and Bailey, Black folks relation to the term “crazy” belays a true to life recognition that life within what we might now call an anti-black world order, is indeed crazy-making, in that it destabilizes one’s sense of self. DuBoisian “double-conscious” is an earlier articulation of this kind of Black madness distinctly associated with the ways one’s view of one’s own Black self opposes the view of the “white cis heterosexual patriarchal capitalist” world on the other side of the veil.

Works Cited

Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qgj4w

Flanders, A. (1990, Nov 08). Local designer says dolls reflect positive images. Atlanta Daily World (1932-) Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/local-designer-says-dolls-reflect-positive-images/docview/491711408/se-2

McGreevy, N. (2022, February 16). Black dolls tell a story of play-and resistance-in America. Smithsonian.com. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/african-american-history-black-dolls-toys-180979530/

About the author: Ra/Malika Imhotep, ph.d., is a Black feminist cultural worker + educator from West Atlanta. the intellectual + creative work of Ra/Malika Imhotep tends to the relationships between queer embodiment, Black femininity, vernacular arts, & the performance of labor. Ra/Malika is co-convener of an embodied spiritual-political education project called The Church of Black Feminist Thought, a member of The Black Aesthetic & the proud child of D. Makeda Johnson and Akbar Imhotep.

To have and to hold: Communion, kinship, and the personal-political necessity of soft Black playthings