Playing House and Other Memories by Alison Weber

My dolls ate dinner and had their hair washed regularly;
 Rode in a real stroller, and wore handmade clothes.
Sitting in school, I daydreamed about them.
And at home, made those dreams come true:
Turning our front porch into our home.   My babies
Took naps  and had real birthday cakes I baked in a toy oven
heated with an interior light bulb -- tiny cakes from
boxed mixes sold just for such occasions!

They had the nicest clothes, even felt hats
And capes and patent leather shoes in white and black.
I had red leather shoes, but they weren’t available in
Doll sizes.  

 My friends had doll babies too and all our dolls played together.
Sometimes my friends would get angry about nothing,
Take their dolls and go home, but they’d be back the next day.

And how we would DRESS UP!  My best friend’s mother was a
Chorus girl in a nightclub and had an attic full of gowns she let
Us wear, with layers of stiff petticoats underneath!

 When our dolls were down for naps, we rode bikes
or roller skated in the alleys.  If all the neighborhood kids
were out,  especially the boys, we played hide n’ seek or dodge ball.
If it was just girls, we jumped rope or threw rubber balls
Against the bricked side of a neighbor's house.   The neighbor
was the first black woman I knew.   She let us come in her yard,
and under the overhang of her screened in porch she had a bench set
up for potting plants.  When we were over, she let us turn the bench into
our perfume-making station,  where we crushed rose petals and stirred
them into small amounts of water and bottled the rose perfume.

We sometimes walked to Grant Circle and climbed  Maple trees.
I actually really did not like climbing trees, so when I fell out of one and got pretty scraped
up, the pressure to be a tree climber ended, fortunately.   I bore my scrapes and scratches
valiantly, but more importantly, I was never forced to climb another tree!
 Not only that, but my mother never found out which was great because I was pretty sure I
would have been in big trouble if she'd known I was climbing the trees in the first place.

 The best thing, though, was “Blackie!”  Blackie was a big black crow
That Marie Drissel’s brother, Roger,  had caught and tamed.  Blackie was
MY  friend.  When I left my house in the morning to walk to school, I would
Yell, “Blackie, Blackie!”   Blackie would fly to me, and sit on my arm or shoulder
For a block or so.    He was semi-famous and even had his picture in the
Washington Post newspaper!

Being a kid, growing up in the 1950’s was truly awesome!   Pick Temple, Romper Room,
Comic books, Nancy Drew stories, never being scared to walk by myself to the movies or
swimming  pool, take a bus downtown, be friends with everyone on your block.

 While I was in elementary school, INTEGRATION occured,  and that was cool too – until I
found out my mother was a racist.  She never visited in North Carolina that I can recall and
when she'd lived there as a child it was in town not out in the country.  In town the races were undoubtedly separated.  My mother was probably about 12 when the family moved to Washington, DC, and hated North Carolina because it was "so hot down there" she said.  It was a horrible day when I brought a black girl from my class home to play and found out how much my mother hated black people, and is a separate story to to be shared.

Fortunately, my grandparents lived in D.C. with my mother and I. Granny (Charlee Rankin Killian) and Grandad (Andrew Vance Killian) both grew up in rural North Carolina outside Charlotte.  Their families ate what they grew and cotton-farmed with mule-driven plows.  Dirt-farming, I suppose you’d say.  The Rankins had “blackies” who lived on the farm.  They didn't  actually "have" them, they just were there living at the far end of the property.   They helped out, and the Rankins helped them in return.  So, anyway,  my grandparents were not racist whatsoever.  I only visited the farm in North Carolina in the summer.  I think because of my grandmother, in particular, growing up with this communal relationship on the farm, and her coaxing me to realize, "People's just people!" that I quickly made friends with all the crinolin-dressed little girls and white-collared little black boys that showed up for the first day of school at the beginning of my 4th or 5th grade year.
Anyway, all these are my favorite memories – better than Christmases or other holiday memories even.

Oh, might as well tell everything:  There was part of spending the summer weeks in North Carolina I was not fond of at all!  I was made to take a bath every afternoon.  This involved sitting in a large, but not actually large enough, galvanized round tub ON THE SIDE PORCH of the house -- Naked!