Читать книгу Uncle - Cheryl Thompson - Страница 11

In the early twentieth century, some of the first silent films – How Rastus Gets His Turkey (1910), How Rastus Got His Chicken (1911), and Rastus’ Riotous Ride (1914) – featured a comic Black character. How Rastus Gets His Turkey was a short film directed by Theodore Wharton and released by Pathé Frères, one of the first film production companies. Like all slapstick comedies starring the white silent film actor Billy Quirk in blackface as ‘Rastus,’ these films depict a ‘Black’ character in various scenarios in which his body is the butt of the joke. Rastus chases after turkeys or chickens. He gets caught in fences. He becomes confused by simple things. According to a December 3, 1910, review in Variety, ‘Rastus causes considerable laughter by the manner in which he stole a big turkey gobbler. He even carried part of a fence home with him. The theft is well pictured.’¹ These slapstick comedies continued a historical tradition in American culture that depicted Black characters as caricatures to please white audiences.

The film version of Rastus was childlike and non-threatening – a character who would have reminded audiences of Uncle Tom.

The Rastus character predates the release of those early movies. In 1893, Emery Mapes of North Dakota’s Diamond Milling Company set out to find an image to market his breakfast porridge, called Cream of Wheat.² He decided an image of a subservient and uneducated Black chef was the best fit.³ As a former printer, Mapes recalled the numerous stock images of Black chefs among his collection of old printing plates. Mapes would also have been aware of the many other products that were sold by Uncles, such as Dixon’s Carburet of Iron Stove Polish. One 1890 lithograph advertisement depicted a figure named ‘Uncle Obadiah’ – an elderly and frail Black man wearing ragged clothes and a smile.⁴

In ads, the grinning Rastus held up a chalkboard. Just as Aunt Jemima’s lack of education symbolized her authenticity as an African American, Rastus’s use of non-standard ‘Black’ English reinforced the stereotype of the semiliterate enslaved servant.

Rastus appearing in an advertisement for Cream of Wheat, c. between 1901 and 1925.

The original chef trademark was replaced in 1925 by a more realistic version that was used for decades on Cream of Wheat products. While dining in a Chicago restaurant called Kohlsaat’s, Mapes noticed the broad smile of his Black waiter and instantly wanted this image to replace the antiquated woodcut he’d developed many years earlier.⁵ Mapes persuaded the waiter to pose in a chef’s cap for a full-face snapshot and paid the man five dollars for his services. Just four years later, the Cream of Wheat company, riding high on its new branding, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. (While Cream of Wheat was once a division of Nabisco, today it is part of B&G Foods.) Rastus, like Aunt Jemima, became more than just a company trademark – he was marketed as a symbol of wholesomeness and stability, or what Ferris State University professor David Pilgrim describes as ‘the toothy, well-dressed Black chef [who] happily serves breakfast to a nation.’⁶

The new Rastus appeared in Cream of Wheat ads in National Geographic, the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s. In Canada, he often appeared alongside white children in Chatelaine Magazine, the country’s most popular women’s periodical. Chatelaine held a pivotal role in Canadian women’s culture between the two world wars, serving as an important forum for white, mostly middle-class women’s discourse. (Chatelaine was one of the only publications at the time geared toward Canadian women.) It was also a premier forum for advertising.

Like Aunt Jemima, Rastus ads stand as examples of how race, class, and gender were constructed in print media, and by extension, how white middle-class society sought to symbolically locate Black bodies in the Old South, where they could serve modern consumers as if they, too, were still on the plantation. This imagery provided comfort and stability amid a socio-cultural milieu of Black migration as tens of thousands of families fled the menial labour and servitude of the South for the cities of the North.

Cream of Wheat Advertisement in Chatelaine, February 1938.

During the Depression, Rastus made countless appearances in popular magazines. Like the comic-strip-style Aunt Jemima advertising during this period, the Rastus campaign made it clear that Cream of Wheat was not just a breakfast cereal; Rastus, the happy-to-please cook/servant, eased the burden on white women and their children. In February 1938, a full-page ad featured a young white boy seated atop a dogsled with a rifle strapped across his chest and a note that read:

Dear Mom,

I’ve gone prospectin for gold to make us rich. I ate 2 bowls of swell Cream of Wheat for breakfast and I’m full up with food energy goodbye. I may be gone a long time.

Jimmy.

P.S. Fix me another bowl of Cream of Wheat for dinner tonight. Rover says goodbye too I don’t think he likes prospectin like I do.⁷

With a box of Cream of Wheat positioned in the lower right corner featuring Rastus wearing a white chef’s hat and holding a bowl of the breakfast product, the ad also included detailed copy explaining the extensive role that Cream of Wheat – and by extension Rastus, as imagined server – could play in a young boy’s life.

The dominant ideology of motherhood – purity, the making of and caring for children within the context of the ideal nuclear and patriarchal family – circulated the Western world in the nineteenth century but, by the 1930s, it permeated all aspects of North American culture. It constructed some bodies as more appropriate for motherhood than others, while also positioning white children as rightfully deserving of both nutritious meals and leisure and fun.

This depiction may seem innocent: ads celebrating the wonderment of childhood and the importance of breakfast, a meal that was becoming more and more significant in the twentieth century as marketers capitalized on the need for quick and easily prepared dishes for an increasingly white-collar workforce. But nothing in the realm of children’s advertising can ever be wholly benign.

Generation after generation, white children were socialized to associate their happy childhood breakfasts with demeaning images of Black servitude from Uncle Tom to Rastus, even as ‘real’ Black bodies were not physically present in their homes. The power of advertising lies in its ability to suggest alternative worlds. It can bring to life the fictive and reframe our memory pathways such that as adults, when we think back to our childhoods, we may, in some instances, be remembering the advertisements of our childhoods, and the feelings they evoke, as opposed to our lived experiences.

From October 1939 to February 1942, a lifelike image of Rastus appeared in a series of comic-strip ads in Chatelaine. In them, Rastus wears his white chef’s cap and appears at the top of the frame. In each subsequent frame, either the entire nuclear family – Dad, Mom, and son – appear, or sometimes Mom and/or Dad are spokespersons for the entire family. There’s always a caption beside Rastus that reads ‘Old and young agree: That’s the food for me!’⁸ or ‘Here’s the way to start your day!’⁹

Within a few years, the Cream of Wheat promotions were being presented as real comic strips, not just ads. Rastus went on to appear as a tie-in for the cartoon Li’l Abner, a comic syndicated in newspapers across North America and Europe from 1934 to 1977. Written and drawn by Al Capp, these cartoons featured a fictional group of rowdy kids living in the poor mountain village of ‘Dogpatch, U.S.A.’ Most comic strips of that era focused on characters living in the North; what made Li’l Abner unique is that it was one of the first to be based in the South. This strip helped influence the views of a whole generation of children in the American South, including their perceptions about the role of Black people. Like Keeping Up with the Joneses, a comic strip by Pop Momand that ran from 1913 to 1938 and Tad Dorgan’s Tad cartoons (1920s), Li’l Abner depicted Black men as dim-witted, lazy, and foolish figures who worked as cooks, waiters, or bellhops and spoke non-standard ‘Black’ English, with their conversational misunderstandings and dialogue misspellings.

In the 1950s, however, the elaborate Rastus Cream of Wheat magazine ads all but disappeared. As women’s magazines turned their attention to telling stories about life in America’s emerging suburbs, advertising copy also shifted from breakfast foods and coffee ads to cosmetics, toiletries, and hair-colouring products, as well as cars, home appliances, and washing machines.

To keep Rastus in front of consumers, the company focused on strategically placing the boxed product in contexts where children would see the breakfast dish as an essential part of their lives in the suburbs. In one representative full-page ad in Chatelaine that appeared in February 1958, a young white boy outside on a cold winter’s day wears a hat, scarf, mitts, and wool coat. He is pulling his hat over his ears while other children stand in the snow behind him. The caption reads ‘Cold tomorrow?’ With a box of Cream of Wheat positioned in the lower right corner and Rastus’s face enlarged to take up nearly half of the box, the copy continues, ‘That’s “Cream of Wheat” weather. Guard your family with hot “Cream of Wheat.”’¹⁰

Aunt Jemima ads during this period similarly show white middleclass families how to protect their ‘good life’ in the suburbs. On one hand, the ads celebrated mothers in white nuclear families doing their own cooking without the corporeal presence of a Black domestic. At the same time, Aunt Jemima was still stuck in white kitchens as the symbolic assistant in food preparation. And while Rastus was no longer featured in cartoons and comic strips geared toward children, Cream of Wheat still represented a symbolic connection between Black servitude and white comfort. In other words, Rastus still served white families.

Rastus and Aunt Jemima are interconnected with, and inseparable from, Uncle Tom. During the first half of the twentieth century, figures of Black servility were stock templates for countless consumer brands. For example, in the early 1930s, Maxwell House ads in Canada featured a Black butler. In one ad that appeared in the Toronto Daily Star in 1932, a Black butler appears alongside an elegantly dressed white couple. The caption reads, ‘Ever since the Southland [Railway] sent famous House Coffee to Canada, it has been right royally welcomed.’ At around the same time, Gordon Brown Scheibell created Uncle Eben Says, a cartoon depicting an old Southern Black man often sitting on a wooden basket. He wears a straw hat and smokes a pipe or walks at the side of the road using a cane. The strip appeared in daily newspapers. In one installment, Uncle Eben says, ‘I may be a pessimist, but I is gwine ter keep right on lookin’ bofe ways hefo’ I crosses any c’dese one way streets.’¹¹

These stock depictions of African American men and women helped keep Uncle Tomism alive and well in the imaginations of twentieth-century children and adults.