My grandmother’s work created a complex legacy for her heirs. Uncle Jimmy is the exception. Most of her grandchildren, like me, had no idea Grandma was once an Aunt Jemima. My mom and her sister, who remember the period all too well, are not so much embarrassed by her work as by the caricature she represented. It stings. They remember the boycott threats and the NAACP’s open letters calling for an end to the degrading trademarked image. Mom and Aunt Doris can recall a time when blacks were called “hankerchief heads”—on par with “Uncle Tom”—and they understand that the insult could have easily been hurled at their own mother. And they turned the other cheek when people did say disparaging things about Ione Brown’s line of work.
Uncle Jimmy says Grandma was aware of the backbiting but didn’t talk much about it. Once when a neighbor quipped about her work, Grandma Ione told the woman she didn’t have time to discuss the matter but would be happy to do so if the woman would join her later at the soup kitchen where she volunteered. That shut the woman up regarding Grandma’s stint as Aunt Jemima.
My children see the friendly black woman on the pancake box smiling at them and have no idea of the tortured history behind that smile. The Aunt Jemima they’re growing up with is a far cry from the woman whose provenance and speech are rooted in slavery. Aunt Jemima has had a series of highly publicized makeovers. First the do-rag was dropped, in favor of a plaid headband; now she has no headdress whatsoever. Today Aunt Jemima looks like a member of the local church council. She’s got a perm with soft, gray-flecked curls, and she wears pearl earrings and a dainty lace Peter Pan collar right out of a Laura Ashley catalog. The bug-eyed smile is gone, replaced instead by a loving grin. Aunt Jemima demammified.
But demammified is not the same as destigmatized. In the mid-nineties my oldest sister, Marguerite, was in the hospital recovering from a heart ailment that would eventually take her life. She and my mother were chitchatting and watching television when the doctor approached on his rounds. Until then he’d earned high marks from our family for his sense of humor and his sensitivity in breaking bad news. But that afternoon he crossed a line. While gazing at his chart he told my sister, “You look like the lady on the pancake box.” My mother said she was so wounded by his remark that she wanted to cuss him out, but instead she composed herself, hoping that her calm might alleviate my sister’s humiliation.
The doctor’s comment illustrates the quandary for Quaker Oats. It can modernize Aunt Jemima all it wants, but she will still drag her baggage around. Even as my mother did her best to forget the doctor’s insult, Quaker Oats was struggling to relaunch its brand. Aunt Jemima got her perm and pearl earrings in 1989. By 1994, ad executives were trying to figure out how to make her come alive without conjuring up antebellum imagery. With the new catchphrase “Alive and Cookin’,” the company was considering using a celebrity spokesperson to enhance the brand—one, however, not required to portray Aunt Jemima. “Due to the heritage and admitted baggage of the equity, the spokesperson for Aunt Jemima should be a strong independent African American woman, well-liked and respected,” wrote brand manager Louise Wolf in a 1993 memo.4
The company had hired a large New York ad agency, Jordan, Case, McGrath & Taylor. It also sought outside consulting from the late Caroline Jones, who at the time ran the nation’s premier African American ad agency. Decidedly against employing a spokesperson, Jones suggested that the company was oblivious to the world around them. “White people may have long forgotten the slaves of old, but no Black person can,” Jones wrote.
All the same, Bruce Guidotti, an executive vice president for JCMT’s Client Services Division, argued for a celebrity like Tina Turner, Robert Guillaume of Benson fame, or Gladys Knight. He wrote: “Aunt Jemima is a person (not an institution), Aunt Jemima is a food expert, a friend who can help me make [a] breakfast offering that I am absolutely certain will please me and my family. If we don’t in the context of our campaign supply a personality as the vehicle for this message, it leaves open to interpretation who and what this person is like.… The worst is that they will supply their own interpretation, and if that is anachronistic and negative, we’re in trouble.”
Later, another JCMT adman, Peter Mitchell, suggested that the company go on the offensive. In a memo to Quaker Oats, he wrote, “There are some African Americans (both ‘opinion leaders’ as well as everyday folks) who resent the Aunt Jemima trademark and really don’t want to see it advertised no matter what the campaign line is. We simply can’t be held hostage by these people, but need to take steps to help ensure they keep their feelings to themselves.”
The tender feelings of black consultants aside, the company hired Gladys Knight for a series of commercials in which her grandchildren swooned over delicious Aunt Jemima pancakes. She and the company received blistering reviews, but sales, including those captured from black consumers, continued to rise.
The internal Quaker Oats debate is well documented in “Aunt Jemima Is Alive and Cookin’: An Advertiser’s Dilemma of Competing Collective Memories,” a scholarly paper written by Judy Foster Davis of Eastern Michigan University. Its most fascinating aspect is the tension concerning the word alive in the catchphrase “Alive and Cookin’.” When Caroline Jones was asked to quietly collect views from black opinion makers, nearly everyone she spoke to zeroed in on that word. “My goodness, I hope not” was the consensus, she said. But that is precisely the point Quaker Oats was trying to make. The company wanted to capitalize on the food expert who is also a friend, but a friend represented by a happy slave who’d refused to give up her secret recipe to all those southern belles who used to flit around her kitchen. Quaker Oats wanted to have its cake and eat it too.
When the Gladys Knight ad campaign was launched in 1994, the catchphrase was changed from “Alive and Cookin’ ” to “Now You’re Cooking.” I imagine a conference room full of well-dressed black and white ad executives, everyone leaning back and uttering a sigh of relief once they’ve settled on a race-neutral line to sell a race-imbued product. Recently, in response to my query, Quaker Oats detailed what it wants us all to know: “The Aunt Jemima brand has been around for more than 115 years and continues to stand for warmth, nourishment and trust—qualities you’ll find in loving moms from diverse backgrounds who care for and want the very best for their families. The Aunt Jemima brand continues to stand for great taste and the tradition of helping moms provide a wholesome breakfast for the whole family.” The company had no interest in talking about what else the Aunt Jemima brand might stand for.
Nonetheless, Americans both black and white continue to hold on to the Aunt Jemima image. For white Americans in particular, she is a trope for their complex feelings of love and guilt toward black servants and slaves. Blacks continue to see her as a constant reminder never to let down their lest-we-forget guard. Some black Americans, including the celebrities Bill Cosby and Whoopi Goldberg, obsessively collect mammy memorabilia. My own mother, who had long held conflicted feelings about Grandma Ione’s work, kept an Aunt Jemima cookie jar on her kitchen counter and an old slave advertisement on the wall. “We need to be more like the Jews,” she says. “Instead of trying to forget, we need to never forget so we can draw strength from that which we have overcome.”
In Natchez, Mississippi, on Highway 61, you can grab lunch inside a thirty-three-foot-tall building designed to look like a giant Aunt Jemima. The restaurant sits inside her wide pink hoopskirt. Above there used to be a massive, bosomy concrete woman holding a tray. She had wide pink lips, a red bandanna, and horseshoes for earrings. Like the Aunt Jemima on the pancake box, she, too, has gotten a makeover: her skin is now lighter, she’s slimmed down a bit, and her chest is smaller. She even appears to be wearing eye shadow and blush. The restaurant is called Mammy’s Cupboard, and its current owner, Linda Moore, says there is no reason to take offense at the building or its name.
“At one point,” Moore notes, “Mammy was a slave. You could say there is not a lot of honor in that. But she was also the person
who nurtured families and raised children. There is honor in everything you do and [for those who] have young people in their care. You have a crying child. Who are they going to run to? Nine times out of ten, they are going to run to their mammy. I am not trying to gloss this up. A lot of people have had maids and housekeepers and helpers who have shown them more love and given them more wisdom than any member of their real-life family. I want people to look at her [the building] and see that. Not some ugly stereotype.”
“Sometimes,” Moore adds, “I don’t understand why black folks don’t claim her, because she was theirs first. She’s still theirs, isn’t she?”
As I listen to Linda Moore I’m reminded of something I heard from Horace Huntley at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. I asked him what he thought of the symbol of Aunt Jemima today and he got surprisingly emotional: “You know, it’s obviously looked upon as a caricature, but I’ve really never looked at it that way because she looks like my grandmother. However, it’s like discussions you may have—you might have a joke in the family about a black person that you would tell.… If a white person’s there, we would not tell the joke … but if they are not present, we can have a grand time.”
He went on: “I guess that’s the double consciousness that W.E.B. DuBois talks about. How Aunt Jemima looks like Grandmama, and she was the most intelligent person that I have ever known who walked the face of the earth, although she couldn’t read or write, but now if this white person sees her, then I’m perceiving what their vision is of that individual. And I love her, and I think they’re saying that this demeans. That’s my perception. They are looking at her as demeaning black women, totally, where I’m looking at it as being with endearment.… We’ve allowed someone else to control who we are. And even who we perceive that we are.”
Sometimes it seems as if the ghost of Aunt Jemima lives at my local Target; she pops up in the strangest ways when I’m there, whether I’m fighting with my children about whether or not we should buy Aunt Jemima pancake mix or fielding questions from others with their own Aunt Jemima dilemmas. Long before I knew about my grandmother, I was heading toward the baking aisle at Target one day when I heard a redheaded kid ask his mother, “Mommy, who is Aunt Jemima?” I made the mistake of glancing in his mother’s direction. The pert blonde raised her eyebrows as if to invite me to answer her son. I arched my own eyebrows in alarm. I walked away determined not to go there with a stranger.
Now if the kid were to ask me the question, I would say, “Aunt Jemima was my grandmother” and let him and his mother ponder that. I respect Grandma Ione for having taken a job, despite being haunted by stigma, and having used it to lift her family up. We judge Aunt Jemima and ourselves by what we see reflected in the mirror of her history.
4
The Garden
GRADUALLY, ALL BUT ONE OF our neighbors’ homes were purchased by or rented to other black families. The whites bolted for the suburbs or other all-white enclaves in the Twin Cities. Many suffered significant losses in their rush to sell. Those who could find no buyer rented their homes, having gotten used to the idea of being landlords to black tenants. That’s how integration came to the 4800 block of Oakland Avenue. Despite a chilly reception at first, our family developed deep and meaningful friendships with the white families farther down the block who had decided to stay, and with others who would later move to our little rainbow community.
Perhaps because they had started this real estate revolt, my parents made sure that the white families who didn’t move would never have legitimate complaints about their black neighbors. The Norris family led by example. Not only was the snow always shoveled; cars were sparkling clean, and children were well mannered and well dressed. “You never know who’s watching,” Mom would say. So even if we were playing with dolls in the basement or heading out to weed the garden, we always looked put together. Hair pressed. Clothes ironed. Shoes spit-polished. Mud wiped instantly from our tennis shoes. We didn’t just emulate the all-American white families in the Coca-Cola commercials—we tried to top them.
If you had run into Belvin and Betty Norris during one of our vacations, you might have thought you’d bumped into the king and queen of the black bourgeoisie. My parents were not pretenders to a lifestyle above their station. In their own little way they saw themselves as sartorial activists doing their part to chip away at stereotypes about Black America. “Don’t you know we have to undo what Hollywood does?” Dad would say. “They leave folks thinking that we’re all pimps or poor or dim in the head. Well, when people see us, and see people who have pride in how they carry themselves, people who work every day and take care of their families, then maybe they will think twice about all that mess they see on TV.”
Mom and Dad were obsessive about looking clean and stylish and sophisticated because they lived in a society that perpetuated the notion that black people, in the main, were none of those things. Yes, Belvin and Betty wore uniforms or simple, sensible clothing when they marched off to work at the post office. But before taking to the road, they’d reach into the other side of the closet. They didn’t own a lot of clothes, but when they bought “civilian wear,” they bought quality. Dad favored belted, safari-style jackets or dark blazers with gold buttons, a look he augmented with ribbed turtlenecks and jauntily tied paisley ascots. For a time he went through a links phase, wearing the brightly colored golf cardigans favored by such singers as Perry Como and Andy Williams.
Mom was always a half step ahead of what passed for chic in South Minneapolis. If she could see it, she could sew it. And so she sported looks first shown in movies or on television shows, long before they wound up on local racks. By the time Twin Cities fashionistas embraced gaucho pants or the return of the peplum jacket, Mom had already moved on to something else. “Always look for the line,” she’d say. “Imagine the silhouette. Does it enhance your figure or take away from it?” The women in our family tend to be narrow-shouldered and broad through the beam. When the salesladies would say things like “Follow me, we have wonderful shifts that work for pear-shaped women,” Mom would quip to me, “I wonder if she has something for women shaped more like a Chianti bottle.” Mom liked nipped waists, beautiful fabric, well-tailored slacks.
Both Mom and Dad loved “glad rags,” and vacation gave them a chance to strut their stuff. I didn’t understand why, and I still chuckle when I view home movies of us dressed to the nines at the zoo or an amusement park or touring the Canadian Rockies, while other tourists are, for the most part, in athletic gear. My father would never dream of showing up at Disney World in cutoff shorts and tire-soled sandals. When I begged and pleaded to wear my favorite Britannia bell-bottom jeans strategically torn at the knee and frayed at the hem, he stood at the door, arms crossed, calmly shaking his head from side to side. “Ain’t gonna happen, Mickey,” he’d say. “Dress like you’re going somewhere.”
He would often wait in the foyer in his Easter-egg-colored Munsingwear shirt with the little penguin on the pocket and his carefully creased pants, prepared to lead his family out of the house as if headed to somebody’s fashion shoot. Mom’s handbag would match her shoes, and would be stylishly in sync with the scarf she always carried to tie around her head, her neck, or the handle of her purse, like a sepia-toned Babe Paley. When we walked through a hotel lobby, Dad would doff his cap at other guests padding around in flip-flops and Hush Puppies. I would hear them whispering and sense them staring at us as we passed.
My parents spoke loudly in other ways. My father, for instance, let his flowers do the talking. He was a passionate gardener. I don’t quite know where he got his green thumb, because his parents were not yard people. Back in Alabama, my father’s father, Belvin senior, was a hunter who always had two or three hound dogs. My grandparents’ wood-frame bungalow sat on raised cinder blocks; the hounds slept under the house. They ate about as well as people, and they tore up the yard with little or no consequence. I don’t remember many bushes or flowers in the front yard, but the few p
lants in the backyard produced food for the table: beans, tomatoes, peppers, collards, polk salad, peaches, and figs. So it is hard for me to imagine when or how my father became fluent in the language of roses. Maybe he just picked it up along the way or inherited some plants from the previous owner of our house in Minnesota.
Year after year, my father and mother worked to transform our yard into a Victorian oasis adorned with roses, peonies, bleeding hearts, and black-eyed Susans, all carefully arranged inside a white picket fence, freshly painted every spring. South Siders would go out of their way to stroll by the house or drive past slowly with their windows down, waving at my father as he sprayed his “darlings” (that’s what he called his roses). Or they would crane over the fence as they spoke to my mom, trying to figure out her secret fertilizer.
Though pretty, the yard sometimes took on a sharp odor, depending on that year’s experimental fertilizer. Cayenne pepper, bone meal, eggshells, and fish oil—my mom tried all of them to perfect her gardening. Her concoctions were neighborhood lore. My playmates’ mothers were always asking me to share Mom’s secrets, and while I am now an avid gardener, at the time I could say in all honesty that I had no idea what they were talking about. I took no interest in the freakish sight of eggshells marinating in an empty mayonnaise jar next to the kitchen sink, or bags of fertilizer made from fish, blood, or bone meal stacked up in the garage. My parents called it their victory garden. Unfortunately, as carefully as they tended it, they had less success cultivating a strong relationship between themselves. By the time I got to junior high school, their marriage had collapsed, for reasons I never understood until I started writing this book.
The Grace of Silence Page 4