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Chapter 1 1. My Generalities Refer to Stereotypical Patterns In Notes Chapter 1 1. My generalities refer to stereotypical patterns in represented images of black wornen. There are certainly alternative, though not as prominent, images of black wornen in popular culture as weil as in literature. I recognize problems inherent in categorizing wornen as "Iarge" or "fat." A wornan who wears a dress size 12 or 14 in one culture rnay be perceived as large or fat, whereas she rnay be perceived as skinny or at least slender in an­ other. Since I am dealing prirnarily with black and white conceptions of size in the Uni ted States, I would posit rhat a white wo man who wears a size 14 or 16 is generally considered fat whereas a black wornan rnay not be labeled as such until her dress size reaches 22 or 24. Please keep in rnind that large size as I williater use it to refer to sorne African American wornen does not rnean that the wornen are perceived as unattractive. Keep in rnind as weil generational consideration in terms of size arnong black wornen. Prirnarily as a result of education and upward rnobility, rnany African American wornen under 30 are often just as conscious about con­ taining their size through diet and exercise as are their European American counterparts. 2. Such depictions occur in autobiography and fiction. For representative ex­ arnpies, see Frederick Douglass's account of the whipping his Aunt Harriet receives in Narrative 0/ the Lift 0/ Frederick Douglass (1845) and Margaret Walker's account ofLucy and Vyry being whipped in Jubilee (1966). For a theoretical discussion of black wornen's bodies during slavery, see Hortense J. Spillers' 1987 essay, "Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Gramrnar Book," in Within the Circle: An Anthology 0/ African American Literary Crit­ icism ftom the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durharn: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 454-481. 3. Saidiya Hartman, "Seduction and the Ruses of Power." Special Issue­ Emerging Wornen Writers, Callaloo 19:2 (Spring 19%): 537-560. 4. For a discussion of these images in selected European American literary texts published by wornen writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Diane Roberts's The Myth 0/Aunt Jemima: Representations 0/ Race and Region (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 182 Saints, Sinners, Saviors 5. See M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career 0/ Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Marilyn Kern-Fox­ worth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Roberts, The Myth 0/ Aunt Jemima: Representations 0/ Race and Region; and Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). 6. Lisa M. Anderson mentions this pattern in Mammies No More: The Chang­ ing Image 0/ Black Women on Stage and Screen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefie!d, 1994), p. 6. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mam­ mies, and Bucks.· An Interpretive History 0/ Blacks in American Films (rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 11 for a still shot of the mammy from Birth 0/ a Nation. Anderson indudes the same still shot following p. 86. 7. Distributed by California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street/420, San Francisco, CA 94103. 8. One of the ironies of the contrasts in Cabin in the Sky is that sleek, beauti­ ful Lena Horne plays opposite Ethe! Waters, who by this time is the stereo­ typically large, spiritual singing, matronly black woman. Photographs of Waters from the 1920s reveal her as the sleek, beautiful, thin, black woman. This is perhaps another indication of the comforting girth into which black women grow and the perceived "rightness" of that size in particular for cast­ ing in certain visual roles. Horne, as the jezebe!, fits into another stereotype of black women. 9. Compare the transformed images in Kern-Foxworth, photo essay following chapter 4. See also the images in Phi! Patton's "Mammy: Her Life and Times," American Heritage (September 1993): 78-87. 10. For a discussion of this phenomenon, where the emphasis is obviously on European American women, see Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tjranny o/Slenderness (1981; New York: HarperPerennial, 1994). 11. Donald Bogle asserts that, although Hattie McDaniel (who played the mammy role in Gone With the Wind) "weighed dose to three hundred pounds" (p. 83), Louise Beavers (who starred in several movies, induding Imitation 0/ Lift), had to overeat substantially to maintain the required large size in the roles she played. "She was heavy and hearty," Bogle writes, "but not heavy and hearty enough. Thereafter [after she was relegated ro the role of cook instead of mammy in her debut appearance in Uncle Toms Cabinl she went on force-feed diets, compelling herself ro eat beyond her normal appetite. Generally, she weighed dose to two hundred pounds, but it was a steady batde for her to stay overweight. During filming, due to pressures, she often lost weight and then had to be padded to look more like a full­ bosomed domestic who was capable of carrying the world on her shoulders" (p. 63). 12. A1though Hansberty had a hand in the casting for this role, I would main­ tain that my argument still holds. As Ossie Davis points out, McNeil in the role ofMama Lena became everybody's "great American Mama." In her em­ phasis on the type in American culture, Hansberry was surely aware of the Notes 183 comforting implications of such casting. See Davis's "The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry," Freedomways 5:3 (1965): 399. 13. Donald Bogle heads the caption for astilI of EtheI Waters in Pinky (1949) with "Black shoulders were made to cry on," as he pictures her with the young, white Jeanne Crain leaning against her; Crain apparendy "learns" the lesson weil. Bogle mayas weIl have asserted, "Black female bosoms were made to cry on." See Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, p. 153. Another stiIl-of an older Waters comforting an even younger white person in The Member 0/ the Wedding (1952)-appears on p. 163 in Bogle. 14. See, for example, Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resis­ tance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1943). 15. Toni Morrison represents this phenomenon in Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1992), where hips become the site for desire. However, there is a generational gap here as so me African American men prefer smaller hips. I thank Lova­ lerie King of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for pointing out Eddie Murphy's condemnation of"large asses" in The Nutty Professorand the revelation during O. J. Simpson's trial of Simpson's "disdain" for his wife Nicole's "nigger butt" during her pregnancy. 16. The best visual representation I have seen of this phenomenon is in the movie Soul Food (1997), in the scene in which Vanessa L. Williams and her screen sisters engage in a love affair with the preparation of a Sunday din­ ner-in memory of the deceased strong motherlgrandmother of the family (who ironically died from diabetes probably induced by these very foods). 17. I made this discovery in 1995, when I was in rhe process oflocating a hotel for my own family reunion, which was held in July. 18. This is another point at which it is important to point out that, in the 1990s, some younger black women preferred skinny legs. Of historical note is the fact that in various black communities throughout the country night clubs held "big leg" contests for black women-well into the 1960s. 19. This pattern influences the literature in several works. There is "Big Sweer," whose adeptness with a knife protects Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men (1935-the character also appears in other Hurston works) and "Big Laura," in Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography 0/ Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Shay Youngblood entides her 1989 collection The Big Mama Stories. Two con­ temporary film presentarions of the powerful Big Mama are Soul Food (1997), in which Vanessa L. Williams plays an important part, and Nothing to Lose (1997), in which Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins encounter the wrath of Lawrence's on-screen mother, who admonishes hirn for coming in late because it sets a bad example for his children, who are more importandy her grandchildren. When he tries to talk back, she slaps hirn, then slaps the Robbins character when he butts in to offer further explanation. This is per­ haps one of the few times that a character resembling a screen mammy, here played by Irma P. Hall, could get away with slapping a white character. 184 Saints, Sinners, Saviors 20. Toni Morrison, "What the Black Woman Thinks about Women's Lib," New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971,63. 21. In tbe artide I published on tbis topie in 1995, I identi/Y several characters and works tbat fit into the paradigm outlined in the preceding few paragraphs. They indude, in earlier, less developed manifestations, Elizabeth Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Dial, 1953) and Mary Rambo in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1952). An early strict manifestation of the type is Aunt Hagar Williams in Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930; rpt. Collier Macmillan, 1969). Otber characters who fit tbe paradigm are Hansberry's Mama Lena Younger and Morrison's Sethe Suggs, who will be treated in later chapters, Mor­ rison's Eva Peace in Sula (New York: Knopf, 1974) and Mrs.
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