Reckoning with the Cabbage Patch

 Ok, let’s see. We left off my narration of our winter break road trip with me complaining about my lack of vegetables. Never fear, friends, because vegetables were on the horizon for me. IN THE FORM OF CABBAGES.

Because we went somewhere I have ALWAYS WANTED TO GO

BABYLAND GENERAL HOSPITAL!!!!!!

YOU GUYS. IT WAS BEYOND MY WILDEST DREAMS OF CREEPY.

LOOK AT THIS PLACE!

Did you know that Andy Warhol painted a portrait of my exact first Cabbage Patch kid (Ursula Carmel)? ME EITHER!!

Minnie loved that she could just pluck dolls straight out of the cabbage patch, and she had a hard time narrowing it down

Dorothy, we realized midway through the visit, wanted to pluck a doll from the (really kind of gross, actually) plush cabbage hole, too, and we felt bad for missing this at first.

The rest of us just sort of walked around gaping. It was just… I can’t even describe.

The employees have to wear scrubs, and they restock the merch by wheeling swaddled dolls in little hospital bassinets to the empty cabbage holes. After you buy your doll, you visit the adoption office where you name the doll and promise to parent her well. IT WAS SO WEIRD (although that solemn little ceremony was very similar to the Build-a Bear rigmarole).

We did not see “mother cabbage” become 10 leaves dilated (ARE YOU KIDDING ME) and yell PUSH to help her deliver a $260 hand-sculpted baby, but we did see a baby “born” earlier that day in the nursery. (The dolls Dorothy and Minnie chose were still a giant rip-off, but were not one-of-a-kind $260 babies). 

THIS essay is a pretty thoughtful discussion of BabyLand and description of the birth process (have you ever even heard of that publication? I have not, but it is pretty perfect for this area of the country, yes?), but I have other concerns.

BabyLand is in a plantation, for one thing, and the boys and I immediately thought about what Clint Smith would say. Adding immaculate conception babies, purity culture doctrine re: birth and mothering, and 80s childhood nostalgia to that particular form of disaster tourism is hard to reckon with. 

Also! We drove on the original Trail of Tears route (marked with much signage) to get to BabyLand. All of us were stunned by this— the solemnity of the route, the horrible history it invoked. We imagined families forced to travel this route, leaving their breathtakingly lovely mountain homeland. We thought of families separated today at our border, the families who will be threatened by new deportation policies, the neat way social studies textbooks explain things like manifest destiny and westward expansion and how irrevocably messy these ideas are. There we were: seven white people in a car on their way to the beach, excited to stop at a campy roadside attraction confronted in a dreamy, rolling, bucolic landscape with the very ugliest parts of American ideology.

 The Georgia mountains were beautiful, but they were also dotted with plantations— some museums and some just… being lived in, former slave quarters and all. We drove on empty roads up and down mountains, and I kept dropping my brother a pin on Maps, just in case. Really, though, we thought about how easy it was for us to travel this way, how safe we felt, knowing that even if our car had trouble and we had to ask someone for help, we could pass as one of them, become as consubstantial as we needed to be. 

It was horrifyingly simple for us to compartmentalize, too— to put a mental fence around images of the Cherokee people who walked the route we drove, the enslaved people who labored on the sprawling farms we passed and revel in the campy horror of the cabbage patch.  I was a 6-year-old kid whose grandma stood in line outside a Des Moines Kmart to score a doll so rare my kindergarten friends didn’t even think she was real at first smiling at other former 6-year-old kids who were there with their (let’s face it, guys) grandkids fulfilling vintage dreams, and I was so happy to be that kid for a few minutes.

When the yawning woman in pink scrubs sitting in the adoption office asked Dorothy and Minnie if they would love their dolls and always be kind to them, I wondered if everyone was as bothered by the idea of adoption here at the plantation on the Trail of Tears as I was. I thought of the very worst parts of assimilation and missionary culture when I looked at these little cabbage babies, plucked from their wild patch and marked with the name of their white creator. (Yes— they still say Xavier Roberts on the butt, and they still smell like baby powder).

I wanted a campy romp in the cabbage patch— which I got. I was just bopping around in my usual cis, white, middle-class, middle-aged lady bubble when I planned the stop, and I didn’t think about where BabyLand is and what traveling the route to visit it would mean. And that, my friends, is an excellent depiction of privilege and how it is always working to shape your life and your experiences. 

I am not sure where to go from here in terms of vacation narrative or in terms of vacation. I mean, we love to vacation in the Deep South. What does this mean? Should we not go to problematic places? I think that’s not the only right answer, but I also think we have to be more careful with our vacation patronage and the economies we invest in (discursive ones and, like, monetary ones, too). How can we be better tourists/stewards of history/examples for our children? Heavy questions to take to the beach, to be sure.