On the worst and
best sides to the caricatured cook.
Before she was
purchased and trademarked by Quaker Oats,
for whom she still graces syrup bottles and other products into this 21st
century moment, Aunt Jemima was brought to stereotypical life in minstrel songs
and shows. African American vaudeville
performer Billy Kersands apparently created the character in his 1875 song “Old Aunt Jemima,” and
by the end of the next decade she had been incorporated into multiple traveling
minstrel shows. The history
is a bit fuzzy, but apparently Chris Rutt, a newspaper editor and the
co-owner of the Pearl Milling Company, saw the character performed in one such
show in 1889—perhaps played by Pete
Baker, a white actor who performed Aunt Jemima in cross-dressed blackface—and
made her the icon for his company’s new pancake mix; when Pearl Milling was
sold to R.T. Davis Milling Company in 1890, Aunt Jemima went with it.
R.T. Davis was
apparently far more ambitious than Pearl Milling, and the company made Aunt
Jemima the centerpiece of its marketing plans: hiring
ex-slave Nancy Green to play the character full-time, and employing her to
operate a pancake cooking booth at the 1893
World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The move paid off, as the Aunt Jemima exhibit and
its “world’s largest flour barrel” became one of the exposition’s most
talked-about features, and the character and brand were launched into the position
of national fame that they still hold. Given the exposition’s striking lack of actual,
contemporary African Americans—a problem highlighted in the publication The
Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,
edited by Ida
B. Wells—this prominent role for Aunt Jemima was troubling to say the
least. As essayist and activist Anna
Julia Cooper argued in an
1893 speech, the character exemplified a longstanding and ongoing tradition
of national embrace and exploitation of such Southern myths of slavery and
race, one hugely detrimental to African Americans.
I wouldn’t
disagree with Cooper at all, and find the continued use and popularity of Aunt
Jemima to be equally troubling and in need of critique. Yet I would also argue
that our histories of the character need to engage more fully with the
life and work of Nancy Green, who played Jemima for more than 20 years and
became the first of
a number of African
American women who built successful careers out of such performances. The
same complex questions I raised in a
post on Hattie McDaniel could be asked of these women, who on the one hand
participated in the creation and dissemination of stereotypical caricatures,
and on the other achieved significant success and quite possibly paved the way
for future generations as a result. And for Green in particular, as an ex-slave
trying to find her way in the period that has been called the
nadir of post-war African American life, the opportunity to play Aunt
Jemima—a character created, again, by another successful post-bellum
African American performer—cannot be dismissed as purely or simply
exploitation. As with so many American stories and histories, then, there are
multiple sides to Aunt Jemima—and as with those pancakes she made famous, we
need to make sure to pay attention to both sides.
Next uncle/aunt
tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
Thoughts on this aunt? Other uncle/aunt connections you’d highlight?
I really enjoyed this post Ben! You do a good job giving us the history as well as the complexities of trying to decide if this representation of an African-American woman is bad or at least interesting. Just getting people to think about these representations in our daily lives is a good start.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, thanks! And I think remembering people like Nancy Green is also crucial, whatever we think of the character she performed.
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