Now this doll was nearly life-sized, blue-eyed and blond-haired. She perched delicately on a varnished oak stand, wearing a tailored outfit with her lips just barely parted. She had captivated the interest of at least a dozen anxious eBay bidders, but she wasn’t necessarily the doll that interested me the most.
What caught my eye was a two-headed reversible doll, commonly known as the Topsy-Turvy doll. The doll sports a head at either end of its body. When held vertically, a full skirted-dress falls to conceal the doll’s alternate identity. To switch dolls, one simply flips it over to reveal the other side.
The Topsy-Turvy design dates back to before the American Civil War, when many of these dolls were actually mixed race – white on one side, black on the other. Often they featured a well-turned mistress of the house, backed by a raggedly dressed black servant. According to expert collector Jamila Jones, some of these dolls were sold with the slogan, “Turn me up and turn me back, first I'm white, and then I'm black.” (Siek, 2003).
While some historians believe that the dolls were cleverly concealed toys for slave children who may not have been allowed to play with black dolls (which were illegal during apartheid), others like Jones believe that they were given to white children to serve as maids to the other dolls. Either way, they reflected the striking contrasts between the two roles and the disparities in the treatment each received.
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, a professor with Emory University, points out that the apartheid ban on black dolls signaled the political and moral potency of the doll in its time. She asks, “Why would you ban a doll if it wasn’t so powerful?”, suggesting that the oppositional characters helped children to learn their own roles in society (Siek, 2003).
Wallace-Sanders is also exploring the possibility that the Topsy-Turvy dolls were actually made by black mammies to represent the two categories of children they cared for: the sons and daughters of their masters, versus their own flesh and blood. Interestingly, after the Civil War, the design of the doll shifted somewhat and the dual identity became that of a white child and its black mammy caretaker, indicating that some conceptual difference had taken place in the minds of its creators.
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