Name: Hazelle’s Marionettes, Topsy
Made by and When: Hazelle’s Marionettes, 1950
Material: Hard plastic face, hands, feet; wood and cloth body and legs
Marks: (Head) Hazelle’s / AIRPLANE CONTROL / MARIONETTES / PAT. NO. 2,113,839 / MADE IN KANSAS CITY, MO. (On airplane control stick) T.M.REG. U.S. PAT. OFF
Height: 12-1/2 inches
Hair, Eyes, Mouth: Black curly hair, painted black eyes, closed smiling mouth with red lip color
Clothes: Sewn-on red, white, and blue paisley-print dress, painted-on black shoes
Other: Topsy #808 of Hazelle’s Marionettes is a character in Hazelle’s play, Topsy and Sambo Join Teto’s Circus. “Teto was a clown and the most popular of Hazelle’s marionettes” (My Auction Finds). An ad insert accompanying the packaged doll describes Topsy as “A cute, curly haired colored girl who will dance almost any jig in her bright print dress.” In the ad, Topsy’s companion, Sambo, is described as, “Curly haired colored boy, yellow shirt, blue and white checked overalls.” The ad lists Hazelle’s other marionette characters. See the gallery images.
Note that the racial identifier, “colored” was formerly and commonly used during the latter U.S. Jim Crow era to describe Americans of African descent, which was then and is now widely considered derogatory. Naming black girl dolls Topsy after a character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (published in 1852) became commonplace well into the 1960s. Likewise, in America, Sambo was often used to name black male dolls after the 1899 publication of The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman (even though the original character in Bannerman’s book was of South Asian descent.) As late as the 1970s, racial stereotypes often influenced black doll naming practices in the U.S.
Gallery
African American Museum.
“Puppets are more than toys,” Hazelle observed. “They are widely used in teaching, in audio visual education in the primary grades, and in speech classes. Puppets inspire children, educators say, inspire them to create with action.”—Hazelle Rollins Hedges (Hazelle Rollins History)
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