The Grace of Silence (4 page)

By the time I was in elementary school, Grandmother Ione had become a bit of a local celebrity, always receiving citations from the mayor or keys to the city for her volunteer work with senior citizens. When she died, in 1983, her obituary in the local newspaper ran under the headline “Queen Mother Ione Brown.”

She founded the U-Meet-Us Senior Citizen Center in Minneapolis, a refuge for older people of color who didn’t always feel welcome at other such centers run by churches and the government elsewhere in the city. There they not only socialized but availed themselves of senior citizens’ programs. In the mid-seventies Grandma Ione was interviewed about her work for an oral history project. “We needed a place where we can be free,” she said. Grandma explained that while the Twin Cities had easily moved toward integration, older people in nursing homes and senior citizens’ centers were still holding on to antiquated notions. “The day still has not arrived when you get integrated and really feel like you are accepted,” she noted. “Whether the seniors in my day were the products of the
Depression years or had to go to work, [they] had to live with traditions and what society was at the time. And after you reach a certain age … it is very hard to change.”

I loved listening to my grandmother’s stories about life in the north and all the characters who would come through her family’s barbershop. When I was in college I interviewed her for a women’s studies course and we spent hours talking about her life and her travels throughout the Midwest. Her stories were rich. Upon arrival she could immediately determine the relative prosperity of a town by the quality of the curtains blowing through open windows. And she would look for another sign as well, the one tucked in a window’s corner and bearing the word
TOURIST
—code for homes that provided lodging and meals to blacks. I had been led to believe that she was traveling through all those small towns with Grandpa Jinx, a railroad postal clerk.

Only recently did I learn the real reason for her travels. My mother’s brother Jimmy is a history buff who’s caught the genealogy bug. He spends most of his time researching Minnesota history and family lore. From him, I learned that Grandpa Jinx had lived in a stationary boxcar for most of his childhood, around the turn of the last century. Jimmy also revealed that Grandma Ione had worked for Quaker Oats as a traveling Aunt Jemima. For years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she dressed up in a hoop skirt and apron, with a bandanna on her head, and traveled to small midwestern towns touting Aunt Jemima pancake mix to farmwives. At first it was hard for me to comprehend what my uncle meant. Grandma Ione had always been about style and polish in her speech and dress, and in the way she would carefully braid her long silver hair, then pile it on her head, crownlike, as in Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits. Like so many women her age, she often bustled around the house wearing an occasional do-rag and an apron.
But her head wrap was satin and covered well-coiffed hair, her apron serving to protect an elegant, church-worthy, pastel dress or skirt.

I thought my mother was going to throw me out of her condo when I asked her about Grandma’s work. She hated the story as much as she hated my badgering her for details. She was horrified that I might one day share it with the world. “Write about that after I’m gone,” she would say. I was testing our bond. She’s now softened, and the shame she felt about Grandma Ione’s work lessened the more we talked about it. She now says, “If you write about this, you better get it right and make sure people know not just what that symbol means right now but what it used to mean when they first rolled out all that mammy mess.” She’s softened, yes, but still I sense the tightness in her jaw, the coldness in her eyes—the withering stare on the back of my neck—even as I write this.

I want to be clear about something. My disbelief about my grandmother’s work as a traveling Aunt Jemima had nothing to do with shame. I just couldn’t see her in the role. But I was fascinated, imagining her wandering the Midwest, earning money by convincing white women to part with theirs, white women who treated her like a celebrity when she came to town. “Oh, she was a very big deal when she showed up in those towns,” Jimmy said. “Remember, she was a small-town girl who never got to shine ’cause she was always the sole dark spot in class. If she was treated as special, it was because she was different. Not because she was smart or beautiful. I know a lot of people are ashamed of that image, but I am not. I know what that did for her. She put that costume on and she was a star.”

All the same, as I try to picture her in her costume, I’m swamped by ambivalence. Yes, she earned money and small-town fame, but it’s hard to connect the woman you love with the character denigrated over time, depicted as a devoted, dim-witted plantation slave, heavyset and happy with her lot. How
do you extract your icon from that history? I found a picture of my grandmother in her hometown paper, under the headline “Only Negro Alexandria High Graduate Portrays Version of ‘Aunt Jemima’: Hundreds of Pancakes Served Here Friday by Former Ione Hopson.”
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You can’t exactly say she’s smiling for the camera. Her expression is one I’ve seen before. Both my mother and her sister have shown it on many an occasion: the cock of the head, the tightly set eyes, and the pursed lips. The look on my mother’s face is usually accompanied by a quip: “Ain’t this some mess!” Grandma Ione seems to be throwing off more attitude in the picture than is expected from Aunt Jemima. Mammies are about self-sacrifice and earthly wisdom; they are never spiteful. Their proverbial kitchens are full of sugar, not vinegar.

Who knows what my grandmother was thinking when the newspaper’s photographer showed up. In such a small town, the photographer more than likely would have been someone she knew, or the son or daughter of a former classmate or customer at the Hopson family barbershop. In a gingham dress, one kerchief around her neck, another colorful one tied around her head, she’s holding a spatula. The lower half of her body is obscured by a giant griddle. In the background there are pancake-mix boxes emblazoned with the smiling Aunt Jemima logo. A poster on the wall says, “Wake up to a Real American Breakfast.”

Grandma’s hometown paper described her as a “charming woman of ample proportions” and reported that she was “proud and happy with her new role in life.” She’d been “discovered” by the Quaker Oats Company while singing at the Bethesda Baptist Church in South Minneapolis and hired to cover a six-state region encompassing Minnesota, the Dakotas, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The original Aunt Jemima, it was claimed, was in Chicago. “I just sort of pinch-hit for her,” Ione said.

She never told me about having worked for Quaker Oats, so reading the story was like listening to her speaking to me from the grave. She seems to be saying, Don’t be ashamed for me, because I am not. She said her aim was to give Americans a favorable opinion of her people: “I’m a public representative of my race. I get the opportunity to meet little white children, children in small towns who have never ever seen a Negro before. I try to leave them with the best impression I can.” She said she also tried to leave “a little touch of Christianity wherever I go.” “All day long as I make pancakes for the good people I meet everywhere I sing church hymns and spirituals.”

That struck home: my grandmother used to sing and hum to herself when she made pancakes for us, but it is odd to learn that she’d done the same thing for white customers who likely saw her as just one of many Aunt Jemimas who assumed the role of the happy-go-lucky, eager-to-please slave on the pancake box. My grandmother was an eloquent speaker—she won an oratorical contest in her high school but was unable to perform at the state level because Alexandria didn’t want to send a “Negro representative.” This was also something she’d kept to herself, a story I learned only when I came across an oral history by one of her high school classmates who’d talked about her hometown pancake demonstration. Grandma may have had a beautiful voice and lovely speech, but when you picked up a copy of
Ladies’ Home Journal
or
Good Housekeeping
in the 1940s and 1950s, you were confronted with advertisements for the pancake mix that made Aunt Jemima sound like a buffoon. Aunt Jemima print campaigns then were essentially unchanged from those in the 1920s: “Lawsee! Folks sure cheer for fluffy, energizing Aunt Jemima Pancakes.” Or: “Happyfyin’ Aunt Jemima Pancakes. Sho’ sets folks singin’!”

Aunt Jemima today is a silent spokeswoman, conveniently rendered moot by a corporation that finds itself in a delicate position, holding on to a valuable trademark widely recognized
but historically offensive. The invention of Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood of the Pearl Milling Company, the character first appeared on pancake boxes in the 1890s, inspired by a popular minstrel song of the era. It was a gimmick and a good one, helping usher in an era of convenience cooking while playing to underlying racial nostalgia for the days when slaves fed the family and cared for the children.

Rutt and Underwood were better marketers than businessmen, and their company was purchased by R. T. Davis, who took the gimmick one step further by hiring a black spokeswoman named Nancy Green to portray Aunt Jemima at public events. A large and gregarious woman, Green had been born into slavery and had moved to Chicago to work for a well-known judge. Her debut at the 1893 World’s Fair created an immediate sensation. It is said that she served more than a million pancakes during the fair’s six-month run, and her catchphrase “I’se in town, honey” was popularized around the country.

Even as she served up pancakes, Green told stories of her life on the plantation. Prompted by R. T. Davis, she said she was the legendary cook of Louisiana plantation owner Colonel Higbee—a total fabrication. As the story went, her pancakes were the envy of the South, but she would never give up her recipe. Quaker Oats eventually purchased Davis’s company, and the image and the myth of Aunt Jemima grew, the result of a massive ad campaign that featured novelistic text and painting by N. C. Wyeth.

J. Walter Thompson, once New York’s largest ad agency, created a series that, historian Maurice Manring says, “turned Aunt Jemima from a trademark into a real Southern Cook,” the story unfolding in full-page spreads that tried to bridge the gap between the Old South and modern notions of convenience and hospitality.
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Wyeth and J. Walter Thompson adman James Webb Young were informed by what they would later
call “the romantic school of advertising,” their titles, text, and museum-quality illustrations dripping with drama and southern sentimentality.

One ad, called “Grey Morn,” depicted downtrodden Confederate soldiers on the run, noting, “For two days the general and his orderly had been cut off from their troops: for two days, so the story goes, they had lain hidden in the bushes on the Mississippi’s bank. Northern troops were everywhere, it seemed. No venture could be made by day, even for food. Only at night they dared move.” The ad copy goes on to explain, in breathless prose, how the two soldiers found their way to the river, where they spotted a little cabin with smoke rising from the chimney. As they crept closer they heard a robust voice: “You chilluns pestah th’ life out o’ po’ ol’ mammy with yo’ everlastin’ appetite fo’ pancakes!” Another ad shows former soldiers returning to find the woman who had saved them from near capture by Union troops: “We learned afterward that the mammy was Aunt Jemimah: befoah the wah cook in the family of one Cun’l Higbee, who owned a fine plantation heah and that she, in those days, known all ovah the South fo’ huh cookin’ skill, specially fo’ huh pancakes.”
³

It is impossible to imagine an ad like that in a popular women’s magazine today. As Manring, the author of
Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima
, notes, the ads sold “the promise that the buyer could appropriate the leisure, beauty, and racial and class status of the plantation South by purchasing a box of pancake flour.” Not pancakes but a way of life was being sold.

Nancy Green, the original Aunt Jemima, died in 1923, after she was struck by a car in Chicago. Since then several women have been avatars of Aunt Jemima, among them Anna Robinson, Edith Wilson, Aylene Lewis, and Tess Gardella, a white Italian-American
actress who portrayed a blackface Aunt Jemima onstage, the radio, and film. Gardella, who weighed more than four hundred pounds, is buried under a headstone with this inscription:

Quaker Oats claims that it does not keep a record of the dozens of women who worked as regional Aunt Jemimas—women like Grandma Ione or Rosie Lee Moore of Texas or Rosa Washington Riles of Ohio. The “pinch hitters,” as my grandmother called them. According to Manring, the existence of such a record is highly unlikely, as most of these women were hired by district affiliates or local salespeople. “There is clear evidence that there were a lot of these women,” Manring says. “They would go to county fairs, high schools, women’s clubs, events like that. They apparently did what amounted to barnstorming from town to town.” My mother’s response? “Ain’t that something? She claimed them and sold their product and probably took a lot of flak we’ll never know about. And they decide they don’t want to claim her. Now who is the saint and who is the slave in that picture? They appear to be slaves to the bottom line.” The Aunt Jemima campaign has been fabulously successful. Quaker Oats dominates the market for pancake mix, as well as frozen waffles and French toast, and ranks second only to Log Cabin in syrup sales. Its bottom line is just fine.

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.