Phyllis Nutkis

Occasionally, when I was a kid, my mother would mention a favorite toy she’d had as a child—her “Susie doll.” I never saw the doll—I assumed it had been lost decades ago—and didn’t take much interest. All I knew was that it had something to do with the real Susie, who I was told was my grandmother’s “maid.”

I never thought to ask questions about Susie. But after my mother died in 2006, my father gave me a box of items my mother had saved. Among the mementos was a rag doll, wearing a tattered, handmade dress, and missing both eyes. The doll’s fabric “skin” was brown. Suddenly, it struck me—this was the “Susie” doll.

I’d recently done some online genealogical research, and found, in the 1930 census listing for my grandparents’ household (when my mother was 7), a woman named Susie Williams—a 57-year-old “Negro” woman from Tennessee. Now, looking at the doll, I wonder about the real Susie. The census record lists her as married. Where was her husband? Did she have children? Did she prepare the meals (my grandmother rarely cooked) and then eat separately in the kitchen? Did she call them “Ma’am” and “Sir?”

My grandparents were politically progressive, champions of civil rights, but was Susie a beloved household member, or merely, as the census lists her, a “servant?” Holding my mother’s Susie doll, in these days of heightened awareness of how Black people have been marginalized, unseen, even murdered, I wish I’d thought to ask.