" Aunt Jemima's Debut "
I’se in town, honey

1889 was the year that the hideous smile of a cartoonish mammy first appeared on a sack of pancake flour. Aunt Jemima was not born from a womb but in the mind of a post-bellum ideologist longing for a nostalgia whose very existence is in debate.

Aunt Jemima was used to sell a way of life. The war was over and the reconstruction of the South had begun. A stereotypical happy slave totally devoted to the service of her white family was sold with the promise that the buyer could appropriate the leisure, beauty, and racial/class status of the plantation south just by purchasing a box of pancake flour. Aunt Jemima served as a guide to that lost paradise where white men were gallant, white women were unburdened by the kitchen, and their children played happily around cheerful black servants who would never leave.

Aunt Jemima was based on the partially fictional attributes of the black southern mammy. The goal of the advertisement was to remove every trace of white female labor by employing blacks to represent the product. Aunt Jemima was the queen of the kitchen and her place in the kitchen is the key to understanding her place in white southern ideology. Black women in the kitchen kept white women out of it, defining not only the proper place of black women but white women as well. She reminded America of the proper order of race relations. The use of the pejorative quality of blackness was really an act of creating whiteness, reminding whites that regardless of whatever trials they faced at work or at home, they were uplifted by their race.

Quaker Oats can move her off the plantation, take off her bandana, and dilute her form but Aunt Jemima remains in the 21st century what she was in the 19th century, a black woman bought and sold.

This piece was created using vintage and antique trade-name Aunt Jemima brand dolls, mammy dolls, and dish towels; some of which by themselves are serious Black Americana collectors items. The oldest doll dates back to 1894. They are fashioned together into units that are reminiscent of the familiar kitchen “potholders”. This piece has both machine and hand-pieced elements and is composed of woven silk and vintage cotton feed-sack. The backing is woven silk. (63in x 63.5in)