Читать книгу Uncle - Cheryl Thompson - Страница 12

Just south of Natchez, Mississippi, on Highway 61, sits Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant that pays homage to the Mammies of the South. Opened in 1940 and still in operation today, the restaurant has as its facade an enormous Black woman whose skirt serves as the entryway to the dining room and gift shop. The restaurant was created by Henry Gaude, an entrepreneur who wanted a roadhouse that would capitalize on the success and popularity of the 1939 film Gone with the Wind and Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win for the role of Mammy. While the shade of the exterior wall of Mammy’s Cupboard has progressively lightened over the years with each subsequent repainting, the restaurant’s website still depicts the original and very popular Black Mammy – dark-skinned with white hair, holding out a tray.¹

As it happens, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had the first popular literary representation of a loyal Southern Mammy, a character named Aunt Chloe. Harriet Beecher Stowe described Aunt Chloe as a nurturing Black woman with a round body who is protective of her white family, but less than caring toward her own children. This depiction helped to construct the prototypical Mammy later perpetuated in the Aunt Jemima advertising trademark: self-sacrificing, white-identified, rotund, asexual, good-humoured, and loyal.

In the early twentieth century, the figure was made popular through hit songs like ‘Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose’ (1916) and ‘My Mammy’ (sung by Al Jolson in blackface in The Jazz Singer, 1927). In Imitation of Life, the 1934 film adaptation of the Fanny Hurst novel, Aunt Delilah, a Black maid played by Louise Beavers, inherits a pancake recipe. With the assistance of her white boss, Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert), she turns the recipe into a thriving business, although her success comes at the expense of her own family. Aunt Delilah was not only a prototypical Mammy, but also an Aunt Jemima caricature.

Mass-media products like pancake mix kept Mammy alive as a dream in which white America could live in a world where Black folks, content to remain as faithful servants, shrugged off any anger about past (and present) injustices at the hands of whites. Instead, they are depicted as grateful for the ‘good white folks’ who give them employment – and their sense of self.

The mythologization of the Mammy figure reached its zenith in the early twentieth century when members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) lobbied the U.S. government for a monument ‘in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.’ Founded in 1894, the UDC’s main goal was to raise funds for memorials to Confederate soldiers. In 1923, however, the UDC, along with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, sought not only to pay tribute to the fallen Confederate soldiers but also promote the idea that slaves were loyal to the system of slavery, and that Blacks, too, longed for a pre–Civil War past.² The faithful-slave myth became a vehicle for white Southerners to justify the institution of slavery and its successor, segregation. These heritage groups sought to commemorate loyal slaves and servants – the Uncle Toms and Aunt Chloes – who did not rebel against their masters during the Civil War. The UDC’s bronze monuments would forever identify the South’s uncles and aunts as martyrs for the ‘Lost Cause,’ a belief among Southerners that their fight in the Civil War was noble rather than racist.

After the Civil War, both Northerners and Southerners built monuments to commemorate those who died. While Northerners celebrated their victory and paid tribute to their heroes, Southerners used monument building to remember the cause and mourn their losses. As of 2019, there were 718 Confederate monuments and statues across the U.S. in commemoration of the South’s ‘Lost Cause.’ In 2020, however, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and the tragic death of George Floyd, dozens of monuments were removed or slated for removal.

For the most part, these monuments were not erected during the Reconstruction era (1863–77); rather, the vast majority went up between the 1890s and 1930s. The statue of Confederate Army commander Robert E. Lee, for example, was commissioned in 1917 by Paul Goodloe McIntire, a white Virginia businessman, and dedicated in 1924 in Market Street Park in Charlottesville. These symbols of slavery made manifest a collective denial of the extreme racial violence that African Americans suffered during enslavement, through Reconstruction and into the period of Jim Crow segregation at the turn of the century. They represent a way of life where race served to create a rigid social hierarchy that white Southerners both welcomed and regarded as necessary. Such monuments and statues make tangible a nostalgia for a past – and a pastoralism of Southern slavery – that did not exist. And, because of groups like the UDC, this white desire to revive the feeling of the antebellum period found expression in the halls of the U.S. Congress.

The UDC emerged from networks of women’s hospital associations, sewing societies, and knitting circles across the South. Membership was open to descendants of Confederate soldiers or those ‘who gave material aid to the cause.’ By World War I, the UDC had a membership of about twenty-five thousand women in seven hundred chapters across thirty-two states.

One of the ways in which the UDC asserted its belief in the contentedness of Black servants was through the curation of pro–Ku Klux Klan propaganda. In 1914, for example, the in-house historian of the UDC Mississippi chapter, Laura Martin Rose, published The Ku Klux Klan, or Invisible Empire. In a chapter titled ‘Carpet-Baggers, Scalawags, and Negroes’ she writes:

[T]he negroes, many of them proved most faithful. Some followed their masters to the war, others remained with ‘ole Mistis and de Chillun,’ looking after their wants and protecting them in every means in their power. Even after the war, many Negroes declined to accept their freedom, seeming to regard it as something thrust upon them which they neither appreciated nor desired, and preferred to remain with ‘their white folks.’³

When the UDC lobbied Congress to erect a monument to Mammy, one Southern Congressman said, ‘The traveller, as he passes by, will recall that epoch of southern civilization [when] fidelity and loyalty’ prevailed. ‘No class of any race of people held in bondage could be found anywhere who lived more free from care or distress.’⁴ The bill passed in the Senate, but was defeated in the House of Representatives.

Almost a century later, in 2017, following riots over the proposed removal of Robert E. Lee’s monument in Charlottesville, the UDC issued a rare public statement. In an open letter to the membership, president general Patricia M. Bryson, wrote, ‘We are grieved that certain hate groups have taken the Confederate flag and other symbols as their own.’ The letter went on to condemn anyone who promotes racial divisiveness or white supremacy.’ ‘Join us,’ she urged, ‘in denouncing hate groups and affirming that Confederate memorial statues and monuments are part of our shared American history and should remain in place.’⁵ In effect, her statement denied that the intention of such monuments was to keep African Americans mired in a past of enslavement, servitude, and ‘loyalty’ to whites.

A story in the May 29, 1910 issue of the Chicago Tribune is headlined ‘To Build a Monument to “Ol’ Black Mammy.”’

While the UDC ’s Faithful Slave Memorial Committee failed to erect a monument to Mammy, it succeeded in memorializing Uncle Tom. In 1931, the UDC dedicated the Heyward Shepherd Monument in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Heyward Shepherd, a free Black man, was shot and killed during an 1859 attempt by abolitionist John Brown to initiate a slave revolt in the South by taking over a U.S. military arsenal.

As historian Paul Shackel explains, many of the post–Civil War advancements made by African Americans in the South had vanished due to Jim Crow laws and the terrorism orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan. By the turn of the century, he continues, many Southerners believed that African Americans could play only a subservient role in the segregated South because they had proven themselves to be ‘inept in handling their newfound freedom.’⁶

Early twentieth-century popular culture, such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), reinforced this belief. The film told the ‘story’ of the Old South, the Civil War, the Reconstruction period, and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. In the film, Griffith created Black archetypes: ‘faithful souls’ such as Mammies and Uncle Toms, as well as Black ‘bucks’ – brutal and oversexed men who grew violent and frenzied as they sought out white women. As one of the first feature films in U.S. history, its perceived realism left an indelible mark on audiences. Many were too young to have experienced the events depicted in the film and regarded Griffith’s version as factual. Even Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson, after a White House screening of the film, reportedly remarked, ‘It’s like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all terribly true.’⁷

Scene from The Birth of a Nation. Director: D. W. Griffith, 1915.

By 1923, Jim Crow laws, rampant lynching, and economic peonage had effectively reenslaved African Americans in the South; meanwhile, Blacks who migrated north during and after World War I were greeted by the worst race riots in the nation’s history. In the capital, in addition to screening Birth of a Nation, Wilson also moved to segregate federal facilities. Encouraged by an overtly racist movie that exalted the Ku Klux Klan, Klan members throughout the 1920s won control of mayors’ offices and state legislatures across the nation.⁸ Even though African Americans were not pleased with the erection of the Heyward Shepherd Monument, the sentiment across America was one of white supremacy, from the old plantations of the South to the White House and mansions of the North. America was in the grip of anti-Black racism, even as popular culture continued to exalt a deeply nostalgic view of Black servants and cooks.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin had to be reimagined to fit within this milieu. When the novel first appeared in 1852, tensions over slavery had reached a fever pitch. Under the Compromise of 1850, slavery would not be allowed in new western states like California, New Mexico, and Utah.⁹ In the decades following the end of the Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel, waned in popularity even while audiences flocked to the minstrel-inspired Tom shows.

Public interest in commemorating the Civil War grew toward the end of the nineteenth century. The Reconstruction era had left many questions unanswered about the future of race relations in the U.S. and sparked a renewed curiosity about life before the war. Against this backdrop, the figure of Uncle Tom was revived not as a symbol of the clash between slavery and abolitionism, but rather as an expression of a renewed desire by many Americans to situate Blacks as loyal, subservient, and the embodiment of a better past.

The evolution of popular images of Black men mirrored the shift in the depiction of Uncle Tom. Following the end of the Civil War, some paintings and sculptures depicted enslaved and semi-nude Black men exulting their emancipation by holding up broken manacles and kneeling in gratitude before godlike, formally clad whites.¹⁰ The 1876 Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., for instance, depicts an elegant President Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling and shirtless Archer Alexander, a formerly enslaved African American, who looks up wearily. Born into slavery around 1810 in Richmond, Virginia, Alexander, like Josiah Henson, was often hired out to do handyman chores such as bricklaying because he was seen as a ‘good worker.’ He worked as an overseer of other slaves on plantations in Missouri, and never ran away.

The abolition of slavery only intensified the problem of how to represent Black men in visual culture. Once abolished, slavery retreated to the domain of memory. There, those collective memories had to be reckoned with in one way or another: suppressed, integrated, or romanticized. Emancipation, in effect, moved four million formerly enslaved African Americans, with their history of enslavement, into the national memory.

It is not a coincidence that the Emancipation Memorial mirrors a headpiece illustration by Hammatt Billings, the American illustrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appearing on the title page for chapter thirty-eight of the second edition (which had 117 new pictures in addition to the six engravings that appeared in the original edition), it is almost identical to the statue, except that Jesus stands in the place of Lincoln, Uncle Tom in the place of Alexander. There are later photographic images that can be found in archives such as the Library of Congress that evoke the Emancipation statue in style, appearance, and sentiment. Yet in these, a white man in blackface wearing pinstripes replaces Alexander while the Lincoln-like figure wears a suit with the words ‘civil rights’ printed on his sleeve. Such images conjure up the trope of Blacks ‘piggybacking’ on the shoulders of whites – a highly popular narrative in the post–Civil War era.

By the end of the nineteenth century, two comforting antebellum figures – Black uncles and aunts – began to reappear in music and theatre. ‘Dixie’ in turn came to symbolize nostalgia for the character of the eleven Southern states that tried to secede from the Union prior to the Civil War. This was the region where Southerners had fought to maintain a way of life and an economic system built on cotton, tobacco, and free labour.

During Reconstruction, it was very common for a freed man, ragged, miserable, and pining for Dixie, to sing songs like ‘The Dear Old Home We Loved so Well.’ Other published works of sheet music depict a feeble old Black man groping his way home and singing, ‘I’se Gwine Back to Dixie.’ This profusion of aging Uncles in popular culture created the impression that they were returning to the South to find happiness and eventually die in peace.

Against this backdrop, Uncle Tom by the 1890s had been transformed into an ‘old folk.’ New editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, mostly published in the North, often pointed out that questions of Black freedom were no longer popular. As Uncle Tom’s Cabin literary historian Barbara Hochman writes, ‘these editions … often acknowledge that “the great emancipation question of a few decades ago” did not sustain “all the old interest” for contemporary readers … [T]he feeling [was] that Uncle Tom had “outlived his usefulness, his day and generation.”’¹¹ The novel’s once popular sentimentalist themes of freedom and escape, evangelicalism and religiosity, now seemed anachronistic and irrelevant to a new generation of readers, audiences, and playwrights.

Nevertheless, by continually restaging the story of Uncle Tom, white actors, producers, and artists found a way to keep slavery viable as an ideology of race and class. By the end of the nineteenth century, an estimated four to five hundred Uncle Tom troupes were actively performing onstage, providing a major source of employment for Black actors.¹² Uncle Tom’s further encroachment into the popular imagination via advertising must be understood in terms of how consumer products, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become powerful agents for image making.

First, goods that relied on the Uncle Tom trope were never ‘just products.’ They were deeply imbued with widely held beliefs about race and the supposed inferiority of Black people. Scholars like Anne McClintock have written extensively about advertising and ‘commodity racism’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ‘In advertising,’ she explains, ‘the axis of possession is shifted to the axis of spectacle. Advertising’s chief contribution to the culture of modernity was the discovery that by manipulating the semiotic space around the commodity, the unconscious as a public space could also be manipulated.’¹³ Advertising, then, has always been invested in Black bodies while simultaneously disavowing that investment through ridicule or ambivalence.

Second, nineteenth-century concepts such as ‘aura,’ or the devaluation of images through mass reproduction, did not fit the narrative of Uncle Tom. The more Uncle Tom was reproduced and reimagined in new visual forms – first lithography, then advertising, and eventually film and television – the more his aura expanded.

Further, the standardization and mass production of Uncle Tom (and derivatives like Rastus) comforted white people because he had become a trusted friend and a loyal companion. We cannot talk about the use of Black bodies in advertising without acknowledging the ways racial difference became part of the process of selling goods geared primarily toward white people. In this sense, capitalism and commodification have bred the conditions of nostalgia, in which evoking memory became a method of socially positioning consumers to view products as inseparable from their lived experiences.

African American literature and history professor Saidiya Hartman writes that Blackness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was delineated by ‘darky’ antics – lying, loafing, stealing, and breakdown dancing – and therefore even saintly Tom’s performance was embellished with minstrelsy. The convergence of abolitionism’s sentimental structure and pro-slavery discourse was apparent in the stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hartman argues.¹⁴ The Old South pastoralism in Uncle Tom imagery, productions, and products narrated a distinctive kind of social experience and relationship with the past. From the Reconstruction era onward, advertising engendered feelings that were both social and material.

For over two centuries, nostalgia has been used to soothe distress about moral and ethical upheaval by speaking to, and about, memories of the past. Aunt Jemima took consumers back to a time of the Southern Mammy and homespun wisdom in the form of a cook/nursemaid. Rastus recalled a time of happy-to-please Black cooks whose joy was derived not only from whites enjoying their cooking, but also from the very job itself.

This kind of memory-making reframes the past as a better, simpler time, as opposed to the present that is dominated by conflict, division, and turmoil. The use of human characters in advertising and on packages marked an important shift in people’s understanding of consumer products. It was an indication that manufacturers understood that packaged goods had to establish a relationship with the consumer – a relationship that replaced, or at least supplemented, any relationship the buyer might have had with individual storekeepers.¹⁵

It is within this context that we can begin to understand how a constantly evolving Uncle Tom migrated from the pages of Stowe’s novel and the minstrel stage onto the boxes, packages, and advertising pages of newspapers in the early twentieth century. This context also explains the birth of Uncle Tom’s most direct spinoffs: Sambo and Uncle Remus.