“I never was born … nobody never made me.” So says Topsy, a “little negro girl” whose brief but memorable appearance in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) began a long career as a symbol of automatism in American mass culture. Topsy is Augustine St. Clare’s “most recent purchase” for his slave estate in Louisiana. For St. Clare, Topsy is an amusing object lesson of racial difference that he uses to scandalize his cousin Miss Ophelia, a prim schoolmarm visiting from New England. To Ophelia, Topsy appears as “the blackest of her race,” a caricature that Stowe drew with tropes drawn straight from the minstrel show: “wooly hair,” a “heathenish” character, and animalistic gestures. For Stowe, however, Topsy was less an embodiment of natural racial difference than an artificial product of the slave system itself. Topsy is not a person but a thing. By severing the bond between parents and child, the slave market had reduced Black people to an abject state of natal alienation that abolitionists considered a moral scandal and that sociologist Orlando Patterson has likened to social death. When Ophelia quizzes Topsy about whether she knows her “Maker,” Topsy responds that she “never had no father or mother, nor nothin.” Because she was “raised by a speculator,” who “buys ’em up cheap,” Topsy can only answer Ophelia with a paradox. “I ’spect I grow’d,” she reasons. “Don’t think nobody never made me.”¹

The “little negro girl” who just “grow’d” was an instant sensation across the Anglo-Atlantic world. As Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a bestselling novel in the United States and Great Britain, showmen, actors, toymakers, and a host of other cultural impresarios turned Topsy into a ubiquitous sight in burgeoning consumer markets. But while Stowe presented Topsy as a vivid demonstration of slavery’s inhumanity, the proliferation of Topsy in mass culture remade Stowe’s abolitionist melodrama into a racist farce. On the blackface minstrel stage and in magazine and book illustrations, Topsy became a stock caricature that construed African American girls as a kind of living toy.² Topsy’s popularity in the mass consumer marketplace – especially as a plush rag doll – only grew in the fifty years that followed the abolition of slavery in the United States, as entrepreneurs capitalized on the racist reaction against Black freedom. By the turn of the century, Topsy was not only a toy for sale but a machine that made sales. To drum up business during the Easter shopping season, a trade journal for department store window dressers recommended adding a mechanical Topsy doll to storefront displays. “A cunning, comical little darkey girl,” the Topsy doll was both cheap ($6.50 each) and “catchy” due to her “[q]uick right and left eye movement, which runs for six hours with each winding.”³

This chapter examines how an abolitionist nightmare of slavery’s social death became a “catchy” display of artificial life. Topsy was conspicuous among the hundreds of racist playthings and mechanical spectacles that reanimated the figure of the Black slave in a variety of modern forms. In his study of blackface mechanical banks, literary theorist Bill Brown has explained the reappearance of the Black slave as an “uncanny” displacement of the social relations of capitalism: A specter of human commodification that haunted the formation of a mass consumer society where everything appeared up for sale.⁴ Topsy spoke to these anxieties and more; she came to symbolize the artificial world that had “grow’d” out of capitalism. Indeed, the very ubiquity of Topsy in everyday life made the character a handy metaphor for all manner of things that appeared to “grow” suddenly and massively without human agency and beyond social intervention. By the turn of the twentieth century, as literary historian Barbara Hochman shows, Topsy “ceased to be human at all” and instead was a nickname “applied indiscriminately to plants and trees, new towns, tiled roofs, musical instruments, the post office, the government of Chicago, the British Empire, modern battleships, and Thanksgiving Day.”⁵ Things that “jes grew” “like Topsy” included “the wild skyline of New York,” a Central Bank “colossus,” the “power” of the newly formed American Farm Bureau Federation, and the modern vogue for ragtime music.⁶

What was the difference between being born and being “grow’d”? The question was a critical one for Americans during the age of slave emancipation and their answers would rebound in the culture of automata into the twentieth century. According to the tenets of American liberalism, the difference between freedom and slavery was premised on an ironclad distinction between autonomy and automatism: Between being a self-possessed person and being a thing possessed by an alien force. Across the Anglo-Atlantic world, as cultural historians of technology have elaborated, the intensifying relation between people and machines was powerfully mediated through images of race and gender difference.⁷ Perhaps no mediation was more lucid than Stowe’s Topsy: the enslaved “little negro girl” a perfect opposite of the free white man. But, as historians of abolitionism and emancipation have stressed, the prospect of abolition made the liberal concept of freedom into an ideological problem.⁸ Not only would the emancipation and enfranchisement of millions of African Americans profoundly challenge the racial boundaries of freedom in the United States; the rhetoric of abolition belied heightening tensions between the social relations of industrial capitalism and the gender relations of the free Northern household. As capitalism began to take command of the nation’s political economy, Northerners saw the conceptual and material bases of white male independence erode as factory labor and market exchange appeared at once to emancipate women from the patriarchal bonds of the home while binding them to new forms of dependence. Proslavery writers did not hesitate to call attention to the social inequality bred in the Northern factory and city slum. But so too did Northern liberals and reformers see women loom operators and prostitutes as emblems of unfreedom in the supposedly free market society: women alienated from or alienating their capacity for sexual reproduction.⁹

Topsy shows how the problem of freedom intersected with the emerging problem of automation in American culture. In the social order of the Southern plantation economy, Black women and girls occupied the bottommost rung. As unfree workers and mothers, they were seen by slaveholders as mere vessels for economic production and biological reproduction, their “natural” labors valuable not only for picking cash crops but also for regenerating the captive labor force. Indeed, Black women would continue to play this symbolic role after abolition for white American consumers in the form of Aunt Jemima and other “mammy” caricatures.¹⁰ Topsy, however, points to the antislavery origins for the ideology of race and gender that would shape the modern culture of automata. For abolitionists, Topsy was not a productive mother but a motherless child, an alienated and alienating product of the trade in human commodities. It was this meaning that allowed Topsy to serve a different symbolic role in a burgeoning mass consumer society: a boundary marker between the autonomous and the automated, between free people who used machines and unfree people who were used by machines. As Topsy became a staple of media spectacles, toys, and demonstrations of the nation’s burgeoning technological capacity – up to and including Thomas Edison’s public electrocution of “Topsy” the elephant – so was the figure of an orphaned “little negro girl” recast as both victim and harbinger of technology run amok: neither “born” of natural processes nor “made” by human hands but “grow’d” out of alienating mechanical processes.

Of course, Topsy did not just “grow”; it took work to remake Topsy’s cultural value across time, space, and esthetic media – work undertaken largely by white and Black women. Stowe herself likely based her creation on handmade cloth dolls made by free and enslaved Black women that circulated in abolitionist homes and trade fairs. After abolition, Topsy became a product of and metaphor for new forms of factory and service work in the Northern consumer economy: “Topsy” was the name for machine-made dolls – often made with Southern cotton – and the shop girls who sold them in department stores. While Topsy may have clarified the difference between (white, male) autonomy and (Black, female) automation, in other words, it posed not only an analogy but a material relation between the unfree work of Black women in the Southern cotton economy and of white women in the Northern culture industries. Behind the fantasies of white bourgeois autonomy, as Edward Jones-Imhotep argues, lay the “ghosts” of the people who “needed to disappear for this definition of autonomy to work out in the messy world.”¹¹ By exorcising Topsy’s “ghosts,” this chapter foregrounds the social conflict over the role of women’s work – and of Black women’s work in particular – in making a culture of automata in the long wake of slave emancipation.

*

From the beginning, Stowe envisioned Topsy as a living doll. After introducing the character as “one of the blackest of her race,” Stowe draws the reader’s attention to Topsy’s “round shining eyes, glittering as glass beads,” “the black, glassy eyes glitter[ing] with a kind of wicked drollery,” “eyes twinkling as she spoke.” What first appears as “something odd and goblin-like about her appearance,” Stowe further specifies as something machine-like. When St. Clare, her master, orders Topsy to “give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing,” she obeys like “a dog” but also responds like a machine. Even for such an excessively melodramatic novel, the passage is remarkably unhinged:

Topsy turns on by her operator’s volition and turns off “suddenly” by returning to a state of perfect immobility; her spinning, clapping, knee-knocking, and summersaults follow a “fantastic sort of time”; she produces “odd” sounds that are both a natural expression “of her race” and as “unearthly as a steam whistle.” She is a “thing struck up,” her “cunning glances” revealing not quite a hidden humanity but rather the uncanniness of inhuman automation behind glass eyes.¹²

Literary historians have tended to read Topsy as a foil to little Eva, St. Clare’s daughter and symbol of white innocence, or the titular Uncle Tom, the saintly and martyred symbol of Black humanity. Performance studies scholars have traced Topsy to the blackface minstrel show; her “spinning,” her tumbling, and her “odd guttural sounds” were all in the “Jim Crow” line, as St. Clare puts it, as if confirming the blackface genealogy of Stowe’s own racial imagination.¹³ Yet Stowe’s depiction of Topsy as a “thing struck up” points to the ontological uncertainty at the core of the novel. Originally subtitled “The Man Who Was a Thing,” as Mark Seltzer reminds us, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel that continually likens people to things and things to people throughout the narrative.¹⁴ What made Topsy so “odd” as a figure of racial sentimentalism was that she was not a person violently reduced to a subservient thing but a thing that erupts into uncontrollable life. For Stowe and her abolitionist readers, the presentation of a “little negro girl” as a “wild” animate object registered at once their hatred of slavery and their anxieties toward the status of white women under capitalism – an ambivalence fully embodied in a familiar object of American material culture: the Black rag doll.

Before being a character in Stowe’s novel, “topsy” was an informal name given to ragdolls made by enslaved women out of “negro cloth.” Black dollmakers were among the millions of enslaved men and women who planted, harvested, ginned, and baled the billions of dollars’ worth of cotton grown in the US South from about the 1790s to 1865. Enslaved Black workers were thus at the center of a booming transatlantic cotton economy that connected Southern plantations to textile mills in New England and Britain and then to consumers across the United States and Europe. The fruits of their labor traveled across networks of people, things, and machines, a political economy that subjected the hands of slaves to the machine discipline of the cotton gin and those of industrial wage workers to the mechanized loom.¹⁵ Textile mills in Massachusetts turned slave-produced cotton into cloth, the cheapest and coarsest of which was sold back to Southern planters as “negro cloth” to clothe their enslaved workforce. The cloth provided slaves a bare minimum covering that allowed them to work in the fields and therefore enabled their enslavers to continue to reap value from their enslaved workforce; both a product of and a medium for enslaved labor, “negro cloth” appeared in the textile marketplace at once as an essential and degraded racialized fabric.¹⁶

Enslaved women likely saw cotton very differently. In charge of turning a meager allotment of cloth into rough work clothing for fellow slaves, as well as of mending and tailoring the expensive store-bought clothing of their masters, domestic slaves would have recognized “negro cloth” for the social relations of domination it was designed to sustain. Yet they also used that cloth for more creative acts of self-expression and communal survival, if not resistance. With the waste materials generated from mending and making clothing, enslaved women made rag dolls – often embellished with buttons and wooden limbs – for their master’s children as well as for the children of the slave community. Along with straightforward Black cloth dolls, perhaps the most famous dolls made by enslaved women were two-headed “topsy-turvy” dolls: conjoined Black and white figures separated by a reversible skirt allowing the Black doll to transform into a white doll and vice versa. For white planters, such dolls may have flattered their self-image as benevolent fathers of their interracial “familia,” as proslavery ideologue George Fitzhugh described the plantation household, even as they ran their fields as factories and considered their slaves to be human machines.¹⁷ But as historians of material culture argue, the topsy-turvy rag dolls held more complex meanings for the Black women who made them. The racially reversible doll – both Black and white, as if each giving birth to the other – reflected the contradictory rules of racial intimacy and inequality of the plantation household: By feeding, clothing, nursing, and bearing children for the plantation “familia,” enslaved cooks, seamstresses, and nurses were forced to uphold the racial hierarchies of the plantation household while constantly crossing the boundaries of race through acts of intimacy and care.¹⁸ Hence, topsy-turvy dolls were more than representations of race relations; they expressed the duality of Black women’s work within slavery’s capitalism: at once the most degraded member of the plantation household and the most essential for reproducing the social and biological relations of the whole plantation system.¹⁹

Black rag dolls took on new meaning when they began to circulate in abolitionist circles and the consumer markets of the Northeast. We do not know exactly how or when slave-made Black cloth dolls came north, or when they got the name “topsy.” Some versions of them were perhaps made by free women of color in New England and Mid-Atlantic States where slavery had only recently been abolished. (Pennsylvania “hex” dolls share a similar form.) Black cloth dolls may have been as much a feature of middle-class homes in the North, made by Black seamstresses and nannies for their white wards. They might also have been brought or made by fugitive slaves who escaped slavery – with support from free people of color and white abolitionists – across the Mason–Dixon line. Harriet Jacobs, who fled her enslavement in North Carolina and came to New York City in 1842, made three Black cloth dolls as a gift to the Willis family of Rochester, New York, who secured her freedom in 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe may have first seen such a doll at an antislavery bazaar in Boston, where Black cloth dolls were sold to raise funds for William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.²⁰ For abolitionists, white and Black, the Black cloth doll likely appealed not simply as a toy or even as a representation of Black identity but more particularly as a material demonstration of a key antislavery argument: Black women were not things but people who made things.

In the burgeoning consumer marketplace, Black cloth dolls lost their potentially antislavery meanings. Following the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, white entrepreneurs began to sell “Topsy” dolls in abolitionist bazaars not as demonstrations of Black women’s creativity but, as Teresa Goddu argues, as “thing[s] that could never be made fully human.”²¹ For white middle-class consumers, a material demonstration of Black women’s objecthood held particular value for the social relations of the Northern home. As early as 1831, publications such as Eliza Leslie’s American Girls Book printed general patterns that instructed young white middle-class girls to make Black cloth dolls for themselves, using inexpensive cloth and stuffing the dolls with rags or bran. It also taught children about the racial and gender relations of work in the bourgeois home. Out of white linen dolls “You may make a whole family … representing a mother and several children.” Leslie then added matter-of-factly: “A black one may then be added as a servant.” Rather than a symbol of Black humanity, in other words, the Black rag doll for “American girls” was an affirmation of Black subservience within the white home. Yet the doll did more than reflect the race relations of an idealized American family; it marked a critical difference between the work of an “added” Black doll and the agency of middle-class white girls who would have constructed it. Even as the American Girl’s Book stepped in to “occupy” the leisure time of white girlhood with “improving” pedagogical activities, “teach[ing] children expertness in cutting out and fixing, and neatness in sewing,” so did it register the rise of industrial capitalism that would challenge the gender relations of the bourgeois home and blur the ideological distinction between slavery and freedom.²²

Behind the racialized fantasy of domestic homespun – secured symbolically and materially by Black women’s service work – lay deeper fears about the effects of industrial capitalism upon the gender relations of the home and the constitution of the white American girl. Looking at the textile mills popping up on bucolic New England rivers, transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the differences between slavery and freedom – and among women, slaves, and machines – dissolve before his eyes: “So [mill owners] buy slaves where the women will permit it; where they will not, they make the wind, the tide, the waterfall, the steam, the cloud, the lightening, do the work, by every art & device their cunningest brain can achieve.”²³ Whereas Emerson saw women mill workers as interchangeable with things that could be either purchased on the market or made by “art & device” – slaves and machines – Stowe’s Topsy reaffirmed and heightened the racial difference between white girls who made dolls and “little negro girls” who were made.

Topsy’s meaning as a figure of inhuman automation becomes clear when compared to Stowe’s hero: the intelligent and light-skinned George Harris, a slave and mechanic who embodied the virtuous work ethic of a free laborer. Hired out by his master to a bagging factory, George proves his humanity by “invent[ing] a machine for the cleaning of the hemp” and therefore “displayed quite as much mechanical genius as Whitney’s cotton gin.” But George’s “mechanical genius” is precisely what makes him vulnerable in a slave system that prizes slaves not for their ability to wield machines but for their condition as machines. Jealous of his “intelligent chattel,” his master returns George to the drudgery of farm work. Rather than take higher compensation by continuing to rent George’s labor to a factory, the master seeks to enforce the labor relations of the plantation system: Slaves should not invent “machine[s] for saving work” because “They are all labor-saving machines themselves, every one of ‘em.” Although Stowe repeatedly insisted that the central violation of slavery was the turning of people into saleable things, she described George not simply as a “man [who] could not become a thing” but more particularly as a man who makes things – indeed a man who makes things (machines) that themselves make things (hemp bags).²⁴

Although the two characters do not cross paths in the novel, George is in many ways Topsy’s doppelgänger: not a living thing but a creative person. Stowe deployed the figure of George as a part of the novel’s larger rhetoric, which not only attacks Southern slavery but also defends Northern freedom. Hardly a pastoral refuge, slavery reduces people to machines; and hardly a dark satanic mill, the factory awakens “mechanical genius” and the independent striving of wage-earning laborers, whatever their race. Although Stowe’s book would amount to a full-throated defense of neither Northern industrial capitalism nor Black membership to the ranks of American labor, George’s reversal illustrated the proper relations between man and machine that free labor nurtured and slavery corrupted: He stood for the difference between slaves as human machines and machines as substitutes for slaves.

The difference mattered as much to the intended readers of the American Girl’s Book as to the white male artisans who flocked to the minstrel show. Whereas George expresses the power of his mind over the machine, Topsy is mindless. In Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), a supplementary volume that attested to the “truth of the work,” Stowe explained Topsy as a “character which may be found in the North as in the South,” a Black child “quick, active, subtle and ingenious” yet “devoid of principle and conscience,” the cause not of their race but of the slave system that “takes away every stimulant which God meant should operate healthfully on the human mind.”²⁵ But whereas Stowe neatly plots George’s emancipation as a passage from slave labor to free labor, she shows Topsy transform from the antic mindlessness of slavery not to the “mechanical genius” of the creative artisan but into an object of “governance.” After a few lessons with Ophelia, Topsy becomes “smart and energetic in all manual operations” and able to stand still “like a black statue, … with hands decently folded, now.”²⁶

With Topsy, Stowe turned the Black cloth doll inside out to reveal the social nightmares it contained. That Stowe could not imagine emancipation for Topsy – that she could only imagine a lifelike thing become thinglike person – recapitulated the contradictory meanings contained in the Black cloth doll: a material expression of Black creativity and care; and an alienated objectification of racial inferiority. Thus, Stowe’s Topsy foreshadowed the racial limits of liberal abolitionist thinking about slave emancipation (as a matter of governing – rather than enfranchising or empowering – formerly enslaved people) while casting the social relations of automation in American consumer capitalism as a problem of racial and gender discipline.

*

On the eve of the Civil War, Topsy condensed Northern anxieties toward Black autonomy and white automation into a single foil: Topsy an emblem at once of slavery’s social death and of capitalism’s artificial life. After watching a blackface performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the National Theatre in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1850s, the novelist Henry James recognized Topsy as a harbinger of a new age of machine-made modernity. Although James had been raised in a liberal Boston saturated with abolitionist political culture, he drew upon his memory of Topsy to mark the difference crucial to his literary art: the difference between artful mimetic representation and crude mechanical reproduction. In James’s scheme, Eva and Topsy were the two “opposed forces” of culture – an opposition between Matthew Arnold’s transcendent idea of culture and the debased popular culture of Barnum’s American Museum. In perceiving this contrast at the Tom show, James received one of his “earliest aesthetic seeds”: The “free play of mind” contrasted with the “crude scenic appeal,” and “the gravity, the tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, [with] the thing itself.” Whereas Eva’s performance stood for the marriage between “resembl[ance] or simulat[ion]” and genuine experience that made up “the thrill of aesthetic adventure,” “Topsy, the slave-girl,” played by white actor Caroline Howard in blackface, “bec[a]me for Anglo-Saxon millions the type of the absolute in the artless.”²⁷

That James could remember Howard’s Topsy so vividly as the epitome of commercial “artlessness” when writing his memoirs in 1903 suggests both how fully the liberal spirit of abolitionism had come to embrace the racist reaction against slave emancipation – and how central the emblems of racial slavery had become to Northern consumer culture.²⁸ James’s esthetic theory of racial and gender difference would be echoed by the leaders of consumer capitalism. Wherever a new technology of mechanical reproduction attempted to enter the mass consumer market, a new adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a new incarnation of Topsy were sure to follow. In 1888, to take one mundane instance, a magic-lantern slideshow presentation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made a custom slide for Topsy; the lifelike effects of the new form of visual representation were at once a demonstration of and enlivened by the slide’s rolling eyes.²⁹

As slideshow Topsies dazzled audiences and mechanical Topsies enticed consumers through department store windows, human Topsies stood behind sales counters as “shop girls,” a growing cohort of young women who were leaving the home and its structure of paternal dependence for new employment opportunities in the burgeoning urban consumer economy. While shop girls constituted a cheap and interchangeable labor pool for store managers, they also appeared disturbingly rootless, transitory, and independent – a social dilemma familiar to readers of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and of department store trade magazines. To describe their female employees, store managers likened young white shop girls to a familiar racialized symbol: “the salesforce [that] grows up like Topsy … neither born nor made.” Of course, the managers’ complaint did not mean to suggest that the salesforce should be emancipated. Worried that the department store system did not do enough to discipline their sales attendants, modern managers (not unlike Miss Ophelia) attempted to turn their employees into more effective agents of corporate will through intensive supervision and training programs.³⁰ For the store managers, “Topsy” served as a placeholder to name a form of labor at once wholly novel and uncannily familiar: an automated workforce that playwright Karel Čapek would later liken to a “robot,” a derivation from the Czech word for feudal serf. In Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), the robot was not a name for a mechanical man but rather a kind of artificial being, indistinguishable from a human being, which was designed for a life of forced labor. But whereas Čapek’s robots revolted against humanity, American department store managers used “Topsy” to describe the modernity of their feminized service workers and the systemic discipline required to govern them.³¹

While Topsy’s appearance in trade journals hearkened back to Stowe’s abolitionist novel, its meaning as an avatar of inhuman automatism was in turn reinforced by the Topsy dolls that would have been sold in the same department stores. In her chronicle of Black Dolls, collector and historian Myla Perkins shows how the circulation of “Topsy” cloth rag dolls as a mass-produced and heavily advertised consumer item kept pace with the growth of the toy industry from the 1880s to the 1930s. Whereas the prototypical Black rag dolls of the antebellum era had been handmade from refuse “negro cloth,” by the 1880s they had become a standard product for industrial toymakers in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. By using lithographic presses to print “Topsy” patterns on precut fabric, cloth doll manufacturers at once capitalized on the commercial success of Stowe’s novel and automated what had once been the handicraft of enslaved Black women and remained a vital part of everyday material culture in the South. Despite the uniformity of Topsy pattern – wiry black hair, brightly colored calico dress – numerous patents competed in the marketplace. Doll designers such as Cecilia M. Smith, Ida A. Gutsell, and Grace Dayton claimed patents and sold designs to manufacturers such as Arnold Print Works, Art Fabric Mills, and the Cocheco Manufacturing Company.³²

Topsy rag dolls, along with other dolls of “Negro” girls, capitalized on new trends in toy design and manufacturing. Dolls reflected the decentralized and highly competitive environment of a toy industry still in formation. A typical doll pattern may have been designed by an artist in Connecticut, manufactured by a print shop in Massachusetts, and distributed by a toy wholesaler in New York City. Printed in two pieces in color on cotton sheets for 12 to 20 cents per yard (two to eight dolls per yard), the doll’s final assembly was initially the responsibility of consumers, who sewed the pieces together and stuffed them with cotton or hair. But as doll design, printing, assembly, and distribution were consolidated more tightly into industrial processes, Topsy dolls entered the market pre-stuffed. Whereas in the antebellum era Black cloth dolls were sold as vessels for white girls to become creative homemakers and buttresses against industrialization, by the turn of the century they were a means to incorporate white girls into the capitalist economy as consumers of machine-made goods. And as mass-produced dolls became more generic, dollmakers promised ever more “natural” designs. In the patent for her Black “Alabama Indestructible Dolls,” shown at the St. Louis (1904) and Jamestown (1907) Expositions, designer Ella Smith described the machine process by which the doll’s face would be made to “conform to the contours of a human face.”³³

As Miriam Formanek-Brunell argues, the fantasy of bourgeois white girlhood rested upon ethnic and class divisions of industrial toy production. While toy manufacturers provided commissions to independent white women toy designers, they in turn relied on the labor of working-class women, most of whom were recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.³⁴ Importantly, the production process remained tied to the global trade in cotton. In a process “[e]ntrusted to a number of young women,” according to an article in Little Bouquet in June 1875, cloth dolls were filled with a mix of cotton and sawdust by hand, either in a workshop or in the home – cotton that was largely still grown in the US South and popularly racialized as a natural product of “Negro” labor.³⁵ By 1917, the process had become mechanized, expanded to a mass scale, and taken over by male machine operators. “The cloth for the bodies of the dolls comes to the factory in bales,” reported Playthings, a trade journal of the booming toy industry:

Missing in these accounts of automated cloth processing is the physical labor of the Black workers in the US South who still picked cotton by hand. No longer coarse “negro cloth” refashioned into handmade dolls, modern Black rag dolls were one among many products of an impersonal yet violent process of manufacture, finally stuffed with sawdust by a “sawdust-ramming machine.”³⁶

The violence of racial and gender domination intrinsic to industrial capitalism saturated the cultural meaning of Topsy and the fantasies of white male autonomy it enabled. If dolls were generally meant to mystify labor processes with a “human face,” the black faces marked the Topsy doll and the “indestructible” Alabama Doll as objects for violence. That white girls were invited to destroy and mangle their Black dolls was well documented by the new field of childhood psychology, a playtime ritual of anti-Black animosity recapitulated on a spectacular scale. In one of his more notorious public stunts, Thomas Edison enticed crowds to witness the death of “Topsy,” a circus elephant that had trampled its trainer and was condemned to public execution at Luna Park in Coney Island. Filmed and distributed by Edison – as much to promote the “dangers” of Tesla’s scheme for domestic electrification as the novelty of Edison’s motion picture machines – Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) was seen by Americans in nickelodeons nationwide. The electrocution of Topsy can be seen as a corollary to the incredible efforts Edison expended to create and manufacture a talking doll for commercial sale: an “Eve” whose façade of innocent whiteness masked the “heavy industry” required to make it.³⁷ By contrast, Topsy’s violent death was made not only palpable but attractive, as Jacqueline Goldsby suggests, because it made an unmistakable reference to anti-Black violence. White mobs lynched eighty-four Black citizens that year, each a spectacle of mass violence that entrepreneurs would exploit and reproduce in numerous forms of mass media: snapshots, postcards, cinema, and wax cylinder sound recordings. Whereas Topsy could serve as the symbolic victim of a corporate execution, the supposedly real sound of Black death helped make artificial devices come to life.³⁸

*

The appearance of the phonograph as a racialized technology of sonic reproduction was anticipated in Stowe’s original depiction of Topsy: A “thing struck up,” the phonograph animated and was animated by an “odd,” “unearthly” sound of racialized automation. Yet, in its capacity to figure the Black body not only as a victim and agent of automation, Topsy had a minor afterlife in the theory and practice of what Louis Chude-Sokei calls the “technopoetics” of Black modernism. In his preface to The Book of Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson drew on Stowe’s creation to describe the system of cultural production that made Black music a mass sensation. “Ragtime songs, like Topsy, ‘jes’ grew’.” For Johnson, as for Ishmael Reed in Mumbo Jumbo (1972), “Jes’ Grew” signified the Black cultural work that humanized and redeemed the artlessness of technological modernity in the long wake of abolition.³⁹

Topsy was refashioned most daringly by Josephine Baker. In Chocolate Dandies (1924), Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s musical set on a Southern plantation featuring a cast of 125 Black performers, Baker played an aggressively caricatured Raggedy Ann doll – in effect recovering the popular white “rag” doll’s Black antecedent. In his review of the show, poet e. e. cummings cribbed directly from Stowe to describe Baker’s performance as an “incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner.”⁴⁰ The role of an animate Black clown at the end of the chorus line launched Baker to notoriety and global celebrity. Her lascivious pose as a doll on the cusp of animation was the beginning of her metamorphosis into a “machine that is in disorder,” as critic Ann Cheng writes, “a machine whose movements have exceeded its prescribed routine.”⁴¹

Baker’s performance is a coda to Topsy’s career in the culture of automata, a final reclamation of the Black cloth doll by a Black worker at the heart of the mass culture industry. Yet it is also a preface to the emergence of the cyborg, a being that Donna Haraway has imagined, like Topsy, as the “illegitimate offspring” of “racist, male-dominant capitalism.”⁴² For Baker enacted a future that Stowe described but dared not dream: a Black woman as a machine–human hybrid who does not resolve but transcends the dichotomy of autonomy and automation – of being born and being grown.