At Birmingham, Alabama, I was presented to a very charming young widow who had been left rather rich, a well-educated lady of leisure, who lived well and dressed well, and was possessed of a recognizable American _chic_. I met her in town, and then in response to an invitation called on her at her house. She was certainly a Negro beauty, and I have no doubt was highly desired in marriage. There was a clear five thousand a year besides her charms, and it was impossible not to feel some of the glamour of that fact— The belle of the season is wasting an hour upon you. _Mmmmmm_ she cooed to everything I said. She was shy as a pedestal without its statue; her eyes burned, and I could not help feeling all the atmosphere of “romance.” If she had been a shade lighter in complexion any white man might have fallen in love with her. Her children—or was it the children of one of her black servants?—were playing with a family of real Negro dolls, not “nigger dolls,” the stove black, red-lipped nigger of the nursery, but colored dolls, _after Nature_. This was very charming, and I should have liked to see a baby woolly head at the swelling bosom of my beautiful acquaintance. She would have made a delightful study for a black Madonna. To have their own dolls is one of the new racial triumphs of the colored people in America. Formerly they had to put up with the pink and white darlings with yellow hair and pale blue eyes, those reflections of German babies, which have hitherto held the market of dolls. It has taken the Negroes half a century of freedom before it occurred to them that the doll, being the promise of baby-to-be, it was not entirely good for morals, and for black racial pride, that their little girls should love white dollies. Perhaps it was mooted first as a business proposition. It might be a paying enterprise to manufacture real colored folk’s dolls, brown dolls, mulatto dolls, near white dolls, black and kinky ones, sad or pretty ones. The year 1920 sees a lively doll industry in progress. It is believed that in time the white dolly will become a rarity in the Negro home. Whence children may learn a lesson: Your pet doll would not perhaps be another girl’s pet doll. It was also at Southern Brum that, calling on Reverend Williams, I happened upon this singular conversation: “Now, isn’t it absurd for us to have white angels?” “You surely would not like them black?” “We give Sunday-school cards to our children with white angels on them. It’s _wrong_.” “Black angels would be ugly.” “No more ugly than white.” I thought the whiteness of the angels was as the whiteness of white light which contained all color. That, however, was lost on the reverend, who happened to be a realist. “Christ himself was not white. He would have had to travel in a Jim Crow car,” said he. “But put it to yourself: isn’t it absurd for us to be taught that the good are all white, and that sin itself is black?”