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Aunt Jemima Explained: the Old South, the Absent Mistress, and the Slave in a Box Maurice M

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Aunt Jemima Explained: the Old South, the Absent Mistress, and the Slave in a Box Maurice M $XQW-HPLPD([SODLQHG7KH2OG6RXWKWKH$EVHQW0LVWUHVV DQGWKH6ODYHLQD%R[ Maurice M. Manring Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995, pp. 19-44 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: 10.1353/scu.1995.0059 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/scu/summary/v002/2.1.manring.html Access provided by Florida State University Libraries (8 Aug 2014 05:58 GMT) Aunt Jemima Explained: The Old South, the Absent Mistress, and the Slave in a Box Maurice M. Manring Before ...our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence they sprang, how they lived? Into what limbo have they vanished? —James Baldwin1 Peering out from every supermarket's shelves, between the Pop-Tarts and maple syrup, is a smiling riddle. Aunt Jemima brand pancake mix has been a part of American life for more than a century now, an overwhelmingly popular choice of consumers. The woman on the box has undergone numerous makeovers, but she remains the same in important ways, a symbol of some unspoken relationship among black servant women, the kitchen, and good food. This symbol remains too strong a merchandising tool for its owners, the Quaker Oats Company, to give up. Aunt Jemima's story should interest us for a number of reasons. She might have been the first walking, talking trademark, and the product she pitches was among the first of a wave of supposedly labor-saving products at the turn of the century. But the reasons that a nineteenth-century mammy still decorates the front of a box of ready-mix batter in the 1990s seem elusive. While the product's ingredients are listed on the side of the box,2 the qualities that make up this per- son, or idea, called Aunt Jemima are less apparent. Why was she ever a national spokeswoman for pancake batter? Why did this advertising campaign work so well, and what is she still doing on that pancake box in a time that supposedly has relieved itself of so many racist and sexist stereotypes in advertising—from Nigger Head golf tees to the Gold Dust Twins? What explains the presence of a black mammy on a grocery shelf in the first place? Tb answer these questions, we must first assemble a list of "ingredients" for the idea of Aunt Jemima. To make the pancake batter work, one adds water to phosphates that make the flour quickly rise on the griddle. The components that made Aunt Jemima rise in the marketing world aren't as easily identified or explained, but they are evident when we examine the years from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, when Aunt Jemima was created and her per- 20Southern Cultures sonality indelibly established in national print advertising. The ingredients are the idealized slave known as mammy, the creation of the American mass market, the rise of supposedly labor-saving household technology, and the "servant crisis." Blended together, these ingredients made Aunt Jemima. Simply identifying them, however, doesn't explain how or why they worked. Like the product itself, the idea of Aunt Jemima was modified by its owners over the years; different custo- dians of her image added to the mix at different times. And again, like the prod- uct itself, the idea of Aunt Jemima created by advertisers requires the customer to complete the last step of the process. So the second question is, who "added water" to the story of Aunt Jemima, and why would they have wanted to do so? The answers have much more to do with the world outside the box than any- thing inside it. The people responsible for creating and recreating Aunt Jemima, in chronological order, were Chris L. Rutt and Charles G. Underwood, who put the mammy's face on a product; R. T. Davis, whose marketing expertise made Aunt Jemima a truly national item; and James Webb Young and N. C. Wyeth, the advertising tandem that added the final ingredients to the mix and created the pancake mammy's definitive image. Ingredient #1: The Mammy Strangely enough, the idea of Aunt Jemima as a salesmammy indirectly resulted from two bachelors looking for a new use for cooking flour and a chance visit to a St. Joseph, Missouri, minstrel show. St. Joseph, known mostly for its brief reign as the starting point for the Pony Express, was also an important milling center on the frontier in the late 1800s. By 1888, however, the amount of flour St. Joseph's mills produced far exceeded demand. When a mill fell into bankruptcy that year, Chris L. Rutt, an editorial writer for the Sr. Joseph Gazette, and Charles G. Underwood, a mill worker, decided to try their hands at the business. They bought the property and set up shop as the Pearl Milling Company.3 The mill's former operators had failed by marketing conventional prod- ucts, and Rutt and Underwood faced the same problem. They decided to create an entirely new product that would, in turn, create a new demand for flour. Because pancake batter was difficult to make with any consistency and because it used a relatively large amount of flour, Rutt and Underwood began experimenting with a self-rising flour that, when mixed with milk and cooked on a griddle, would produce pancakes. After numerous tests on the kerosene oven in Rutt's home during the summer of 1889, they hit upon a mixture of wheat flour, corn flour, lime phosphate, and salt. They tested the new product on the town librarian, who assured them it made good flapjacks.4 The self-rising pancake mix had no name, and Rutt and Underwood Manring: Aunt Jemima Explained21 searched for a trademark. Rutt stumbled upon the name Aunt Jemima after attending a local minstrel performance in the autumn of 1889. On the bill were a pair of blackface performers known as Baker and Farrell, who performed a New Orleans-style Cakewalk to a tune called "Old Aunt Jemima." The performers wore aprons and red bandannas, imitating the southern mammy in the kitchen. There was nothing unusual about this performance, because the character of Aunt Jemima— sometimes "Jemimy," sometimes "Mandy"—was a regular in minstrel shows of the late nineteenth century. She was headstrong, fat, and simple- minded, a companion of the country dullard Jim Crow and his foppish city cousin, Zip Coon. A superstitious character, she was especially alarmed and con- fused by any advance in technology such as the telephone (and later the auto- mobile), and her inability to cope made her the butt of the joke for white audi- ences. But in the kitchen, she was an unchallenged expert, the cook for an idealized version of the Old South, a land of good food, beautiful but fragile white women, warm weather, gentility, and leisure.5 The number was a hit, and Rutt realized he had found his trademark. The words "Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix" were stamped on the first bags of the ready mix, along with a grinning, wide- eyed caricature of a black woman wearing a bandanna.6 That would be a satisfyingly brief summary of Aunt Jemima's origins if it were not for one question: if Aunt Jemima of pancake fame came from the Aunt Jemima of the minstrel stage, what was the origin of the minstrel show's version of Aunt Jemima? This image of the female slave has its roots in both the Old and the New South. In his accidental choice of a trademark, Rutt selected a figure that already resonated with northerners and southerners, whether they knew mammy from personal experience or literature. Historians of slavery disagree widely on what mammy did— specifically, the extent to which she might have nursed white children and the amount of power she really might have exercised within a plantation home. They often cast doubts as to whether there was anyone in the home like the mammy. But it is beyond dispute that the slave woman per- formed one of the more important and difficult tasks on a southern plantation, working long hours in a hot, often detached kitchen, where a wood fire needed to be kept burning throughout the day.7 This was a job that required skill and endurance, and it is no wonder that postbellum southern whites might have looked back fondly on the mammy in the kitchen. And when they did look back, they saw in mammy a person who was important for more than her cooking. Rather than rejecting the idealized mammy, the New South kept a special place for her in its heart, on its own terms, as many postwar redeemers built their arguments for change on approv- ing looks to the mythic southern past. The Old South was a nearly perfect land, "studded with magnolias," filled with sprawling plantations, and populated by beautiful women and courtly gentlemen, whites who lived lives of leisure. The 22Southern Cultures work that had to be done was performed by black slaves, who typically were "lovable, amusing and devoted." Spokesmen for the New South in the 1880s, regardless of the particular program they advocated, rarely failed to praise the golden era that had passed.8 The protests of loyalty to the old regime went beyond politics and were evident in literature, music, and journalism, and in organizations such as the Kappa Alpha Order and various associations of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour was likewise soaked in what C. Vann Woodward has referred to as the sweet "syrup of roman- ticism."9 During the Confederate memorial movement, "the mythology of the mammy actually emerged and expanded ..
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