How thoughtlessly

          I took it, this cast-

iron Aunt Jemima

 

doll hauled from the trunk

          of my white

friend’s car. Another

 

of T’s, her Jamaican

          husband’s, mementos

he collected

 

as a joke. Not unlike

          those figurines

I recall a college friend once

 

exhibited, who’d bought

          Aunt Jemima spoons,

shirts, piggy

 

banks, left his apartment strewn

          with Uncle

Remus albums scavenged

 

from thrift shops: some

          terrible gag

he’d invite friends over

 

to witness: we’d sit

          and try not to look,

or to look and laugh

 

with the same

          irony he’d cultivated,

though of course

 

it couldn’t be the same. He

          was Black and we

were not and didn’t

 

each of us still have

          some cupboard sticky

with the drippings from these

 

crystallized red caps, a box

          of Uncle Ben’s

growing rancid

 

in the pantry?

          My friend, I don’t think,

enjoyed his figurines so much

 

as our discomfort, the fact

          he could see us for the first time

see the image the way he’d had to,

 

which is not the same as feeling

          his own anger reflected

back in us. He liked instead to parse,

 

I think, the inbuilt limit where

          his and our histories

finally split apart. Of course,

 

none of us thought the collection

          that funny to begin with,

but none of us would say it, how tired

 

we found the game:

          our laughter less

a reckoning with shame

 

than an indulgence

          he thought he’d granted us,

that he insisted he perform

 

for and with us.

          But at whose expense?

Did I mention my friend

 

was half-white? Light-

          skinned, raised by a white

and single mother, his collection perhaps

 

an imagined test for being

          Black: something

he couldn’t parse turned to this

 

self-hating shorthand he could display

          and thus control for those

both too like him

 

and nothing like himself?

          I had, in my own closet,

a pair of Japanese dolls

 

gifted me by my white

          grandmother who’d bought them

from a Chinatown gift shop

 

after my mother said, She

          should have something that looks

like herself, and so here

 

they were: twin geishas

          with real hair, moveable feet,

scrap-silk obis. How Po Po grimaced

 

when I unwrapped them, she

           who refused even to eat

in Japanese restaurants: now

 

she’d be sewing tiny yukatas

          for a half-

white granddaughter

 

every Christmas. I kept the dolls

          far past childhood as my own kind

of joke, as if I’d also not loved

 

the cloud-spun hair, the gilt

          kimonos, and now I wonder

if my friend’s figurines

 

were chosen only

          for disdain,

not some tenderness

 

remaining for the soft

         cheek, the glowing

eyes more penetrating

 

if blanker than a mother’s, perhaps

         more familiar

than a mother’s, because

 

they watched him

          at the breakfast table

in every white friend’s

 

house, his only ally

          and witness, uncanny

reflection of an already

 

uncanny self.

          I kept my own dolls

on a shelf, hid them

 

when friends brought theirs

          over, the blondes

with their pink cars, houses,

 

their multiple husbands.

          But I kept my dolls’

faces clean, wiped away

 

the dirt stains from their feet,

          the only thing

about them that could move,

 

because they were meant to dance,

          my white grandmother

told me. I have no idea

 

where these dolls are now;

          I never added

to their collection the way

 

my friend did, the way

          T did, who died of leukemia

and never found his collection

 

painful perhaps because

          he never saw himself

as American. They were a token

 

of our racism; he’d absented himself

          from the equation,

while his white wife,

 

who despised them, learned

          to tolerate them because

she loved him. Was it worse

 

that T and my friend

          made a joke of it,

pretending

 

they could stand so outside

          these images that,

in displaying them,

 

they’d appear exceptional

          in their self-control:

the collections became a show

 

of ownership itself? And why

          take one myself

if I had no reason to memorialize him

 

in such a fashion:

          not thoughtless,

exactly, my impulse

 

to reach for it, this memento

          of endless negation,

fun-house mirror

 

in which I can stare

          and see myself reflected

back through time: distorted, yes, but some

 

crucial part of me still recognizable,

           if grotesque

to others? My Japanese dolls

 

were common replicas,

          I learned, having seen them

at the house

 

of a friend whose grandfather

          fought in the Pacific

Theater. He’d brought them home

 

for his wife; now they languished

          on a shelf in dusty

shrouds, souvenirs of a country

 

he bombed but never saw,

          and now preferred to display

in a glass-backed case.

 

My friend in college

           quit school early, joined a band

that became, in the 90’s,

 

briefly famous, got rich,

          left town, never contacted

any one of us again.

 

It wasn’t for him

          as it wasn’t for T

I selected this doll, gone now

 

into the back of a closet

          where it will remain

until I find some like-

 

minded person

          never to display it,

because I cannot,

 

would not ever display it,

          nor can I sell it, not trusting

who else would want it:

 

in truth, I am owned now

          by this doll, it chose me

once I chose to take it:

 

I cannot release it

          to anyone else’s

version of history. Who else will love

 

the doll the way it demands

          to be loved,

the way I have learned to love

 

myself in it, which is to say

          how I’ve learned

to accept my appearance

 

in it, which is to say

          I am not laughing here.

I took it. I am the joke.