Paul McAllister
Why did you choose to focus on exploring this kind of relationship between Blackness and white consumption through the figure of the mammy?
Blair Banks
Yeah, so I chose this particular path. I will be honest, I wanted to initially start the project by looking at Black hair. So I was looking at images of Black beauty salons. I’m thinking that’s where I’m gonna go next, because I’m going to continue with the project. So I was interested kind of going in that vein, but I wasn’t coming across the images that I wanted, and I wanted to kind of get started writing, so I decided to change projects, and I started looking for mammies. So originally, I was looking for historical images of mammies, so looking for Black women with white babies in their laps, and I was trying to, kind of, go that route, but then it dawned on me, you know, what if I just type in Aunt Jemima? Like, what if I type in, you know, other types of mammies? Like, what’s going to pop up? And that’s when I started getting pictures of like, Hattie McDaniel and I started getting pictures of like Nancy Green, and other actresses that portrayed Aunt Jemima. And then of course, with Hattie McDaniel, playing Mammy in Gone With the Wind. But it all kind of goes back to research that I started in my senior year of college. I actually wrote one of my honors theses on commodification of Blackness for consumption in the 21st century. So in that particular project, I really highly focused on lynching and lynching postcards that were sold as souvenirs. But I also did briefly touch on Aunt Jemima as part of that project as well as being a feature of Blackness for consumption. So it was kind of nice to have a return to that work, and rereading some of the texts that I had read years ago now, seven years ago now. So it was really cool to kind of return back to that. I never really made the connection between Aunt Jemima and the actresses that portrayed her and Gone With the Wind and just knowing that all of these things were happening at the same time, and what does that mean for African Americans who are fighting for freedom, fighting for equality, when you have these same images being popularized? That are essentially putting you back into a position of enslavement?
Paul McAllister
You start your piece with a brief, kind of, exploration of the George Floyd protests of the summer of 2020 too, which you call the “summer of racial reckoning”. Why was it important for you to make that connection up front and then dive into your exploration?
Blair Banks
I think it was really important because you started seeing, at least for me, started seeing all these corporations and organizations, you were seeing Black Lives Matter statements everywhere. All of a sudden, we mattered, right? And it had to be popularized or put on the front pages of websites. A lot of organizations were taking a second look at their history and trying to figure out, you know, was there enslavement involved in our story? Like how are we actually, how have we used Black bodies in the past? And so for Aunt Jemima in particular, Quaker Oats decided to also release a statement as well and officially acknowledge that their product was using the body, the likeness of a mammy figure based off of this idea of a Black woman that took care of a white family, and they made money off of it, and made money off of it for years. And I think it was really important to make that connection, because once again, if we’re looking at history, and how that informs our present, it’s important to know that these pictures, these images, they still exist, and they still are popular, in a sense, in order to sell a product, right? So, I think it was important to showcase that until this particular moment, you know, this wasn’t a problem for enough people. It wasn’t until 2020, where a lot of the screams, the protests, that a lot of, you know, Black organizations, Black people in general that had been raising, you know, been trying to get these things changed, it really didn’t hit until 2020, when it felt like the whole world became aware of what was going on. And that was partially due to the pandemic. I like to say that, because the world was at a standstill in 2020, we couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t do anything. So all we had was the internet. So now you have images and videos of anti-Black violence being shown everywhere and you can’t escape it, because you can’t go to the grocery store, or go and do these other things that would distract you from the violence. So when you’re faced with it, corporations had to attempt to make a change or pledge their support some way.
Paul McAllister
Yes. Can we talk a little bit about, I guess, the primary image that you chose for this piece? And in it that shows one of the women who was hired to portray Aunt Jemima, she’s standing in front of a couple of boxes of a pancake mix kind of holding them out, and she has this kind of, I don’t know if it’s joyous, but maybe excited expression on her face, trying to match what’s on the box. Can you talk about how, I guess Quaker Oats in particular, wanted to use this kind of revolving cast of women to portray this stereotype, how they kind of attempted to keep it alive in its relevance?
Blair Banks
Yeah, of course. I think what’s interesting about Aunt Jemima, at least when you think about her early beginnings, is that the first actress or person that portrayed her, Nancy Green, actually didn’t resemble the mammy stereotype. I actually wasn’t aware of that, really, until I was doing my research as well, because oftentimes, these women have been lost to history. Their names have been lost, right? When you see their images in newspapers and articles, they’re called Aunt Jemima, right? Their names have been erased, and they have now embodied this character, and oftentimes you don’t really know their names until you see their obituary in the newspaper, which is really unfortunate. Or their families who know that they did this work, they went to these fairs, they went to these exhibitions, and they say, Hey, no. Yes, she played Aunt Jemima, but her name was… What’s interesting about the person that is featured, her name is Anna Robinson, and she very similar to the original portrayer, Nancy Green, was a Kentuckian and that was living in Chicago. And what was interesting about her and their choice of her is because she did resemble this idea of what mammy was, right? This idea that had been fully developed in books and novels and literature of being a woman who was fuller bodied, who had that joyous smile, who was dressed in sort of that handkerchief and the blouse and the apron and everything like that. So what’s interesting about Robinson is they saw what her body looked like. And they said, we have something to build off of, let’s go ahead and dress her in the way that we believe mammies would or should be dressed. And they posed her. And because she fit that stereotype so well, that image of Aunt Jemima, that we see is actually Anna Robinson, dressed in the Aunt Jemima garb that they’ve decided to put on. But I think something else that I was reading and should be acknowledged is that this was work. Like, for these women, oftentimes, the only work that Black women could get at the time was working as domestics, right? So you have an opportunity to not necessarily work as a true domestic, right? You could travel, you could, you know, do these demonstrations. You could make the money that you need for your family. Maybe it’s not glamorous, work to say the least, but at this point in time it was you could either play the role of a mammy or be a domestic and working in white households playing a version of mammy for those that could afford her, right, in this day and times. You can only say so much. You know, we weren’t there. We weren’t alive at that time. It’s really hard to have any sort of judgments as to well, why did she do this? Well, what were the other options, right, for her at this particular time? So I think that that’s something to also consider is that she was playing this particular role, but this is a role that was very familiar to Black women, because it was a job that they had to do, as well as this is an image that many white families were familiar with, whether it be from days old, and the idea of the mammy or literally having a Black woman working in their home and taking care of their family as a modern day domestic.
Paul McAllister
Expanding upon this point of this being a job. As I was reading the piece, one of the things that I thought about was, how were these women who were hired to play this role compensated? What benefits did they get? In our modern day context, you see people who kind of represent brands or companies like the actress who represents Progressive, Flo, in Progressive commercials, or sometimes there’s an actress for Wendy’s and what have you. It seems like … this is reoccurring work, but they’re also compensated pretty well for this reoccurring work. Do you know of what benefits or what compensation was provided to the women who played this role as Aunt Jemima?
Blair Banks
Yeah, I know a little bit about it. I know that the women were compensated for their work. I’m thinking of Nancy Green, I believe it’s Nancy Green in particular, but they weren’t well compensated. Let’s say thatup front. They weren’t well-compensated, they didn’t have copyright for their likeness, like a lot of athletes are doing right now, they’re getting paid if their likeness is being used on products. That wasn’t occurring. There were some stories about how there were some actresses of Aunt Jemima that were so wealthy, they were able to buy a building and live in it with their families, but that’s not necessarily the case. There were also stories of Aunt Jemima actresses that died poor, right? They they didn’t have that wealth that you would expect from them portraying these roles, but then you also have to think about the time and when they were doing these jobs, right? It was the 30s and the 40s, and even going into the 60s, right, like they were doing these appearances and showing up and being representatives of Quaker Oats, but at the end of the day, you know, they were still Black women, so they were going to be paid less and not be paid for the work that they were doing. I know a lot of women, I believe, they were still doing domestic work if they weren’t on the road doing these sorts of exhibitions and positions and stuff. So they weren’t well-compensated. But yeah, … that was the extent of the benefits there.
Paul McAllister
Got it. So continuing with this kind of theme of popular culture portrayals of mammies I guess the most famous example aside from Aunt Jemima is that of Hattie McDaniel’s portrayal of the nurse figure in Gone With the Wind. Can you talk about the impact of that and what the reception was to that character?
Blair Banks
Hattie McDaniel’s portrayal, she was cast as Mammy in Gone With the Wind, which was released in 1939. A part of the reason why I was also interested in this piece is that I’m from metro Atlanta. So the idea of talking about a movie that premiered in Atlanta, and knowing all about Margaret Mitchell and the Margaret Mitchell house, and everything here kind of stood out to me.
Paul McAllister
What is the Margaret Mitchell house?
Blair Banks
It’s her house that she lived at, in the city of Atlanta. And of course, it’s still here for people to come in and visit. As I was saying, Hattie McDaniel was cast opposite of Vivian Lee, who played Scarlet, so who was the young woman who she was mammy to, she kind of grew throughout the story itself. But what’s interesting about McDaniel’s depiction of Mammy is that it was not typical of what was seen in the past. You could kind of see where McDaniel brought, I guess, her own flavor into it. She wasn’t demure. She wasn’t that older, gray haired Black woman who was having a white child on her knee and cradling her and rocking her. Her relationship with Scarlet was different. She chastised her. There’s a scene that I mention in the article where Mammy is at a window and Scarlet has run out of the house and Mammy is yelling at Scarlet. The idea of seeing a Black woman yelling at a white woman is just strange. Scarlet still, you know, walks away defiantly, but just kind of seeing that sort of emotion coming from her in that moment was different. You wouldn’t really expect that from a mammy sort of character.
Paul McAllister
That’s such an interesting thing because the character of the mammy is being presented as a kind of mothering figure to these white children in this white household, yet, simultaneously stripped of the authority and the standing that would typically be given to mothers. That’s, that’s very interesting.
Blair Banks
Continuing with her performance, if we go into how audiences viewed it, you have to look at it from the perspective of you have your white audience, but you also have your African American audience, right? So during the premiere, it being held in Atlanta, Hattie McDaniel, of course, could not attend, right? The theaters were segregated, she couldn’t even be there. However, she did win the first Oscar, she’s well known for that, for Best Actress, I believe, for this. So that’s kind of like the claim to fame for this particular movie itself. But while white audiences were really enthralled with McDaniel’s performance, African American audiences weren’t so enthusiastic at first. And that was largely because the movie wasn’t released to African American audiences until months later. So three or four months later is the first time that African American audiences could actually see Gone With the Wind. Before that they were basing a lot of their critique off of the novel itself. So that already showcases that there was a stylistic choice, we’ll say, that was taken in the creation or the interpretation of Mammy that maybe the directors or Hattie McDaniel kind of took with this role. Because the novel version, African American audiences were like, no, this is a disgrace. It’s putting us back years. But when…
Paul McAllister
And you see in the piece, the picture of the woman protesting and holding signs.
Blair Banks
Yes, exactly. When it became available, and you have women protesting at a viewing of Gone With the Wind, the response becomes a bit more nuanced, right? Like, you have audience members that are like, you know, she won, she won an Oscar, she just changed the world for us, this is something that’s completely new, but there’s power in it, right? Like, she wasn’t cowering in the back, she had a bit of attitude when she was talking to Scarlet in particular, but other white people in the movie, but you also have to think about the fact that she was enslaved, like this is a portrayal of an enslaved woman in the late 30s. You have a generation of people who are protesting who, you know, their grandparents possibly were of that generation that maybe had just been freed or great grandparents, like they, it’s still really close. It hits home, in a sense, that the idea of popularizing this or sensationalizing this, or really commercializing this idea of enslavement when you are still dealing with Jim Crow, you’re dealing with segregation, you’re dealing with all, you’re dealing with lynchings they haven’t stopped, right?
Paul McAllister
A question of, I guess, very brief question of commercialization, you mentioned briefly how the actual movie wasn’t available to be seen by Black audiences until months after it initially had been released. We grew up in a commercial environment where Aunt Jemima was like the brand of pancake, but during that era, was Aunt Jemima being marketed to African Americans, or did they have their own kind of separate, I don’t know, pancake mix or design, or was it being rebranded by Quaker Oats or something else and Aunt Jemima specifically being targeted towards white Americans?
Blair Banks
I’m not entirely sure about that, but I like to think that it probably wasn’t. Because I think of it myself, like growing up, it was Aunt Jemima.
Paul McAllister
Yeah.
Blair Banks
Even for us, like, and this is technically, you know, in a world that should be a bit more sensitive, right? And we’re still getting targeted with, you know, racialized characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus from Cream of Wheat, like we were still getting those images, Uncle Ben, for Uncle Ben’s rice, like, all these images were still being used since, it’s only stopped pretty recently to advertise these products. So I’m thinking for, you know, back then, I wouldn’t imagine that there was a different brand or a different branding for a Black populace to buy these products because more than likely, what else were they going to buy unless they were making the pancake mix from scratch themselves? And they were just buying, you know, the flour and baking powder, baking soda or whatever to make these pancakes. Which may have been happening, but I doubt that at this particular point in time to appease a wide consumer base, that Quaker Oats would say, we gotta think about our Black audience. We can’t have Aunt Jemima on there, I’m sure they … weren’t thinking that. They were more concerned with, we know the demographic that has the most money in this country, and it is not our Black audience, it is our white consumers, so we’re going to advertise to them and make sure that we’re using an image that is idyllic, right?
Paul McAllister
Yeah.
Blair Banks
It brings this idea of old days past, right? We’re gonna utilize that because there’s something about nostalgia, even today. There’s something about things that are nostalgic. You see all of, you know, younger generations walking around wearing things from the 90s and you’re just like, oh that’s back. That’s back again, okay, so.
Paul McAllister
Hopefully this doesn’t come back again, though.
Blair Banks
Right! No, I hope not.