Ginger Dawson is an iconic woman for more reasons than her aesthetic, though her blunt bangs, her from-a-bottle-henna-red hair and her penchant for black and/or retro clothes aligns her more readily to the equally iconic Punk designer Vivienne Westwood than to the “genteel” antiques mall proprietress she, ahem, once was.
Ginger’s Duck Creek Antique Mall, a business she bought after vending there for years, was a mainstay in my weekend meanderings. Duck Creek was a destination — brass in pocket or not — because the art, the books, the clothes, the Negrobilia, the vendors’ flights of fancy — served me as inspiration.
Whether or not I bought anything, I’d go home after a Duck Creek trek and reconsider my own space, moving furniture, re-hanging art, weeding out books, giving away jewelry — just trying to get closer to the contentment I’d been immersed in for sometimes hours skulking the aisle ways and sometimes stalking the same mammy cookie jar or old African artifact for years on end.
I had the layout of that store, its vendors, their wares and whom specialized in what — Mid-Century Modern, kitsch, old toys, 19th-century advertisements, West African masks, modern art — memorized as well as the layout of my own apartment.
See, Duck Creek was a small town, its aisles like streets lined not with trees and driveways, but with obsessions and specialties.
The store/town had its friendly neighbors (all the employees who greeted me by name and the ones who also vended who threw me extra discounts because they respected my work) and its uppity ones (the alleged Hyde Park housewives with the steely stares, wondering what blew my kind into their territory).
And then there were the reunions of friends we hadn’t seen in ages who had the same lazy weekend ideas to take a run through Duck Creek to see what struck them as fancy, as needed, as a gilded surprise, as a family addition.
And shopping and spending there was not merely retail therapy, though it was largely that for my partner and I. We could impulse-spend in Duck Creek like most women do at TJ Maxx, Macy’s, Nordstrom.
Once my partner zeroed in on a vendor with good prices on vintage dresses, shoes and jewelry, Duck Creek replaced for her the molds of mainstream retail with one-of-a-kind stuff I sometimes don’t understand, but respect for the way it stirs a chemical response in her the same way I am excited by the sight of a pickaninny’s shit-eating grin on an old shoe-shine box.
Spending money at an all-independent outlet like Duck Creek Antique Mall meant I was supporting not only the lives and livelihoods of independent spirits, but that I was investing in the strange obsessions of folks who got up every morning to ferret out something that not only they loved, but that they thought someone like me might also love and need or want.
This was a fair exchange of obsessive lust.
Because to “go antiquing,” as the old heads say, is to set out on a weird stay-cation adventure looking for someone else’s ideas to somehow fold into your own; to match ideas, to slap five and then to deconstruct that original idea, remaking it your own until it becomes so entrenched in your own life that you can no longer recall when it was adopted or how it came to live in your personal landscape.
There is great meaning and soulfulness behind the acquisition of old stuff.
This is not merely hoarding or collecting or buying or just getting.
This can be life-altering, educational, disappointing.
I have sat for hours, sometimes bleary-eyed, staring at the wonders inside and the reasons behind stuff I’ve brought home from Duck Creek.
The history inherent in some of the old advertisements using embarrassingly exaggerated images of blacks — big, red lips, bucked eyes, tattered clothing — does not anger me. It enlightens me, and I always told myself “I must liberate this before it falls back into the wrong hands.”
I have a rectangular, black-and-white (now sepia-toned) late 19th-century photograph of a Canadian minstrel troop decked out in their blackface finest.
What in the world was going on with our neighbors to the North?
On my kitchen mantle there is a crude, one-off head of a black man, his nappy head worn just so on one side, his eyes frozen in terror, his big red lips ajar.
Turns out, the hole expertly dug and smoothed out of one side of his head once held kitchen matches, and the smoothed-down patch of his Afro was where the barber shop owner (?) or the maid (?) struck matches for the fire or for the stove.
I paid an insane amount of money for this little black curiosity, but I had never before seen the image in a book and I have yet to see it anywhere again.
I have an assemblage of old black people framed in large, oval frames under glass from an era when blacks sitting for photographic portraits that got framed under glass spelled middle-class standings.
Maybe the woman who reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston was a teacher; perhaps the little boy in a high chair who I tell visitors is my father was actually the son of a dentist; or the man in the three-piece suit kicked it with Langston Hughes in Harlem.
Some of my friends who were also Duck Creek regulars complained about the price points, but I’d still see them there or admire something in their homes they’d tell me they scored at Duck Creek.
Price is relative to something that fills your soul with longing until you acquire it. Price is irrelevant when the value of the thing cannot be measured by the lustful.
This has all been a lamentation.
Duck Creek Antique Mall closed Aug. 31 after protracted talks of fair rent prices and then a buying price between Ginger and the building’s owner broke down.
All those vendors are now scattered to other antique malls, flea markets or gone for good.
Ginger, always a chameleon whom I first met 20 years ago when she ran God Save the Queen on Vine Street before it was hip to be on Vine Street, has the luxury of going home to her garden to catch her breath and to regroup and figure out her next self.
I, for one, will miss the place, the people, the inspiration it elicited in me and the ways Duck Creek folks treated us all the same, regardless of ZIP codes or tastes.
It was antiques as equal opportunity, gone forever but in my home.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2015.