Title: Doll-baby Author: Laura Lane McNeal
Published: July 3, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 337
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:When Ibby Bell’s father dies unexpectedly in the summer of 1964, her mother unceremoniously deposits Ibby with her eccentric grandmother Fannie and throws in her father’s urn for good measure. Fannie’s New Orleans house is like no place Ibby has ever been—and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum—is like no one she has ever met. Fortunately, Fannie’s black cook, Queenie, and her smart-mouthed daughter, Dollbaby, take it upon themselves to initiate Ibby into the ways of the South, both its grand traditions and its darkest secrets.
For Fannie’s own family history is fraught with tragedy, hidden behind the closed rooms in her ornate Uptown mansion. It will take Ibby’s arrival to begin to unlock the mysteries there. And it will take Queenie and Dollbaby’s hard-won wisdom to show Ibby that family can sometimes be found in the least expected places.
Sometimes you can really tell when history has been sanitized and written too optimistically. Dollbaby takes place between 1964 and 1972, in the American south, featuring a cast of both white and black characters. Any realistic portrayal of this setting and period would be practically obligated to prominently portray race-related tension and struggle. Yet Laura Lane McNeal’s story is unerringly ho-hum, and any racist difficulties are quickly overcome or swept under the rug. Though Dollbaby is mostly well-written and has good intentions, the end result is a rose-tinted view of New Orleans during the Civil Rights era which didn’t ring true.
Though the book’s title would suggest otherwise, the protagonist of the book is Ibby Bell, a young white girl who at twelve years old is abandoned by her mother in New Orleans with her paternal grandmother. Other characters like Grandma Fannie and her servants, Queenie and Dollbaby, are mostly peripheral and two-dimensional—though it’s a bit of a stretch to call Ibby a fully developed character. Though these people are interesting, McNeal’s characterization is hardly complex or nuanced. I really never got to know anyone in this book, even though we saw Ibby grow up from an abandoned preteen to a wealthy college student.
Ibby, like the reader, experiences the world of Dollbaby for the first time, as a newcomer to New Orleans and her grandmother’s household. Fannie is a wealthy Southern woman in her early fifties with a large house and two full-time black employees: Queenie and her daughter, Dollbaby. This seems like it could be the beginning of novel fairly similar to The Help, but Fannie Bell is surprisingly progressive (probably unbelievably so). Queenie and Dollbaby are “family”—they boss Fannie around more than she bosses them, Fannie buys them a new house, pays for Dollbaby’s daughter to go to college, pays for Dollbaby’s brother’s funeral, pulls weight with the police department when family members get in trouble. In short, Fannie makes no distinction between black and white at all. And don’t get me wrong, this is admirable in Fannie, and modern readers will find her likable—but is it likely that a southern woman who came of age during segregation and Jim Crow, who was doubtless raised by racist parents, could be so completely unlike the rest of her peers? It would be extraordinary if she were, and probably a story in and of itself. But Dollbaby just takes Fannie’s egalitarian mindset in a stride and makes no big deal out of it, even though it’s completely opposite of the norm for the times.
Other things, besides the “family” that Ibby finds herself in, seemed unreal to me. In the beginning of the book, Dollbaby attends a sit-in, but it’s made to look like a routine, unremarkable occurrence. Another character is a Black Panther, but he’s kept hush-hush until he’s summarily murdered and pushed out of the story. Yet another character was accused by an underage white girl of rape, but the charges were dropped and never came to trial. The world of Dollbaby seemed to be remarkably free of racism or conflict. Any problems were easily done away with, and McNeal’s dry, straightforward prose gave no emotion to events that should have been dramatic. The false rape accusation was introduced in the beginning of one chapter, and by the end of that same chapter, it had been completely taken care of, never to be mentioned again. There were few (if any) mentions of any other issues happening around the nation. McNeal featured a scene where President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then never touched the topic again, as if it were all over and done with. Peripheral racism existed in the book, but the main characters never seemed touched or harmed by its effects.
Dollbaby is very optimistic; it’s clean and safe. Laura Lane McNeal stays far away from the more unsavory aspects of being African American in the 1960’s, and in doing so she really compromised her story. I didn’t buy into this book at all. It was far too easy and clean-cut. A lot of people in the South today aren’t as open-minded as Fannie Bell, and with no explanation as to how she came to be that way, it felt like a glossy, sanitized revision of history that was very feel-good but hardly true to life. If we pretend that history didn’t happen, then Dollbaby is an enjoyable, well-written story—but we don’t pretend that, and so I don’t believe this book is particularly honest or authentic.
