The Black History Museum

Memorabilia and its dilemmas
by Richard D North
19 June 2008

The Financial Times weekend magazine (June 14/15) ran a witty piece by New York writer Sam Apple.

It was a tale of refined feeling and embarrassment. Proud of his battery-driven plaything, a doll which dances and sings “I Got You” (”I Feel Good”), Sam and his wife found themselves putting it away when a black person visited their apartment. After all, as good white liberals, they didn’t want to offend. Then they wondered if there was greater offensiveness in hiding the thing away.

For a while, they hid James Brown in the basement along with the author’s other problematic doll, a model of a boxing rabbi. (This, as Brown is being promoted as an icon of black culture in the inaugural online show of the forthcoming National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.) Finally, Sam took the singer to work where there was cover in the form of an office doll of Bing Crosby.

All this is from the hands of a master of the ethnically subtle. Sam Apple has written a book, Schlepping Through the Alps, about an Austrian shepherd who sings yiddish songs in towns famous for their history of support for the Nazis. (It isn’t quite the point, but Lionel Blue tells a story of a non-Jewish scrapyard totter who taught his horse Yiddish so it wasn’t frightened of the little boys it met in pre-war Whitechapel, London.)

George Eleady-Cole tells us in his interviews that he has noticed that some people hide their black memorabilia when he’s around. And that’s true even if they’re selling and he’s buying. It can be easier if he has a white companion on buying trips.

We are attempting to get in touch with Sam Apple in the hopes that he will think TBHM is a good final resting place for James.