Collecting Controversy : The curios and figurines of a racist past are hot properties. For some African Americans,they inspire outrage; for others, a new sense of empowerment.
In the harsh light of present-day, they are at once angering and sobering. Artifacts of an unsettling past.
Stark whites of eyes and impossibly wide smiles glint from pools of black lacquered porcelain. Red head rags, patched together hand-me-downs. A silent parade of dancing pickaninnies and benevolent Uncle Toms.
Still others arranged for display: table services adorned with bronze-skinned figures slumbering beneath shady sombreros; postcards depicting a placid Japanese homemaker smiling, busy at her task.
Curios from a less-enlightened age? Possibly. Antiques? Not necessarily.
One can find newly refashioned retro images like these at hip Melrose boutiques transforming Mammy and her notorious peers into refrigerator magnets or greeting cards “authenticated” with bawdy messages in dialect, just about as easily as the antique versions, in endless incarnations at flea markets or antique malls.
It proves this: simply assigning these images to a sepia chapter from an unfortunate past would be erroneous. Readily available, and commanding high prices, they live on, very few even moderately transformed.
No matter how benign, these monuments to stereotypes, whether breezy off-color jabs or imbued with the hot hate of racism, are enshrined in the homes of the very people who were the target of their ridicule. And it is this curio that perplexes, oftentimes more than the antique pieces that ultimately rust, fray, fade or shatter.
*
In the gallery space of pop star Anita Baker’s plush Michigan mansion, African statues cohabit with mammy cookie jars and “Tom and Auntie” salt and pepper shakers.
Other prominent African Americans known for their prodigious collections of black memorabilia that many would still view as offensive include Whoopi Goldberg, Julian Bond and Oprah Winfrey.
And what to make of this unexpected move? Pop singer Gladys Knight breathes new life into the racially loaded image of Aunt Jemima, wrapping her sultry, Grammy-winning voice around the pancake jingle, “Now you’re cookin’.”
Some call these images “Blackabilia,” others “Derogatory Collectibles.” In her new book, “Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture” (Anchor), Patricia A. Turner dubs them “contemptible collectibles”--these images so persistent and so impervious to the prevailing mood of political correctness.
What these images mean to those who collect, sell and currently manufacture them ranges as widely as the product available.
“One of the most asked questions I get is, ‘ Why do you do this?’ ” says Regina Jackson, a Northern California-based collector who travels selling everything from authentic Jim Crow signs to reproductions of vintage product advertisements. Her card plainly states her mission: “Mammy Pleasant Black Collectibles: Let Us Embrace Mammy’s Past/Her Strength Lies Within Us All.”
The message, like the products themselves, inspire potent emotional responses, Jackson admits. But along with shock or undiluted anger, Jackson hopes the images she peddles might inspire a sense of illumination.
“The main reason I sell what I sell is that it’s really helped me come to terms with who I am,” says Jackson, who is African American. “I grew up wondering why my hair won’t grow? Why is it so nappy? Why is my butt so big? And then dealing with the racism in the race? The light-skinned sisters here, the dark-skinned sisters there--and I was in the middle. I didn’t feel real good about myself . . . my history or anything,” Jackson recalls.
“It wasn’t until I was an adult and had gone through some personal changes in my life that . . . I realized how strong I am and how much I can endure. I looked at the things in my house, my collection, and I said: ‘My God, there’s my strength. I’ve been walking on these people’s backs.’ ”
Jackson, who subsequently “fell in love with (her) blackness,” sees something else looming behind portrayals of blacks so many simply write off as tasteless, offensive, or downright hateful:
“I think the problem a lot of people have is what this woman looks like. And I just saw beyond the heavy buxom woman with the red head rag . . . and I started thinking about what this woman did for us. And I just saw her in a whole different way. And I think we need to get back to what that woman did. She was a nurturer, a provider. . . .”
But there are plenty who believe that is not a necessary journey. Others say they’ve been there--if not physically, psychically--and don’t care to ever go back.
When Jackson sets up her colorful tables at flea markets or jazz festivals, or even her collectible-cluttered living-space, she can read the subtlest of reactions. Those who give it a quick look and keep stepping; the traces of anger simmering or tears gathering in the eyes.
Jackson can empathize, remembering her own early reactions to the caricatures: “When I looked at these things, I saw them as sort of a visual prison.”
But, she admits, she’s not always up for the raw reactions. “There’s a whole lot of us who walk by, head up in the air, talking about: ‘Oh my God, why does she have that stuff out here?’ So many people say, ‘ That is not my history!’ I was willing to take the risk because I had something to say. I had something to share.”
But Jackson, who’s been cursed out and branded a sellout, understands that it isn’t just for anybody.
“I tell people this is an emotional booth, be careful coming in here. And the thing about it is, (these images) can’t hurt me anymore and I’m so proud of it. I’m so proud of the people who had to walk the streets at that time. And that’s why I do it.”
*
Like Jackson, Monrovia High School Assistant Principal Casey Johnson collects not only for the historical and educational value, but as a way of confronting some long-stowed emotional baggage.
Born in a small town in Alabama in 1950, Johnson admits that the pieces scare up poignant images of the past: the bombing of a Birmingham church, the “For Colored Only” signs at the Dairy Queen.
Johnson says he’s drawn to the items for two reasons. “In order to know who and where you are, you have to know what you came from,” he explains. “We have a tendency to see it only in the negative. (But) black people were used to advertise a plethora of items, I’m just enthralled by how entrenched we were in American country--from soap and postcards to pancakes.”
The collectibles also give Johnson a chance to share a tangible history with his niece and nephew.
“It offers a link and . . . new awareness to the past. By learning you have an opportunity to define what you are about. It gives me a sense of self-definition. I can now define who I am as a man, and as an African American male.”
Because, Johnson adds, “It helped me to be able to (see) how far I’d come, so I could appreciate my own personal growth and the progress that my race has made.”
*
This passion to carefully collect what others find offensive or contemptible, as a tool for empowerment, isn’t particular to African Americans. A New York Times Magazine feature last year, headlined “Evil for Sale,” reported on several Jewish collectors who deal in Nazi memorabilia. Said one: “With the Nazi stuff, it’s a matter of feeling victorious. . . . You may have killed my relatives, but I own you now.”
But for others the collecting is neither catharsis nor enrichment, the artifacts sources of neither strength nor inspiration. The impulse is more about not forgetting a deplorable past.
Patricia Turner, UC Davis associate professor, keeps her goods in boxes. Finding a place for them in her home is about as dicey as understanding their place in society--and their tenacious reshaping of the culture. To her reading, Knight’s revival of the Jemima image is further evidence of these symbols’ awesome staying power.
The ‘60s, Turner points out in her book “Ceramic Uncles,” saw the retreat of some of the more heinous images. But slowly they’ve reappeared or taken new form--from the enduring television mammies of “Beulah” and “Gimme a Break” to the big-screen cliche of chauffeur and fix-it man from “Lilies of the Field” to “Driving Miss Daisy.”
And with the dawning of the ‘80s, a nostalgia mode kicked in, Turner believes. “I think the whole of American society . . . was reinventing the past in a warm and fuzzy kind of way that was real appealing, and that made it a little bit more acceptable for these products to appear with these icons.”
Determining why their popularity has increased among African Americans becomes a shade more complicated.
Black people, Turner says, will give you a range of reasons. And although the “why” people collect varies wildly, as does what is personally derived from the pieces, the motivations are strikingly similar.
“I think about how excited my relatives would be when blacks first showed up on television,” Turner recalls, “and it really didn’t matter that it was ‘Amos and Andy,’ it was just confirmation that there were blacks in the world.”
Turner believes that a direct line can be drawn between the thirst to collect these objects and the limited access to “genuine” black history. “You become convinced because of movies . . . that real black women were like (the buxom mammy) in the era of slavery . . . (historically) few households had that figure in it. It’s a fiction. She didn’t exist in that way.”
Some kind of reality, Turner acknowledges, is better than nothing. “Ralph Ellison got it right with ‘The Invisible Man.’ Not to see yourself at all, that’s the bottom . . . but the ideal would be something that spoke to the three-dimensional aspects of who we’ve been.”
*
Brian Breye, whose Museum in Black’s front-space sells African masks, fetishes, jewelry and sacred pieces, has built a back-room library-cum-museum overflowing with black memorabilia--labels for such delicacies as “Negro Head Oysters” and “Uncle Remus Syrup,” ceramic figurines of sloe-eyed African porters, docile Uncle Toms with a horseshoe of snowy hair. There are ashtrays the shape of blatantly anatomically incorrect lips, cast-iron mammy doorstops, pickaninny draft catchers.
His sentiments lie a world away from Johnson’s or Jackson’s.
“I find them to be very offensive,” Breye says flatly. “But it is a sad chapter in American history.” He is always looking for something that might fill some gap--primarily “anything exceptionally offensive or exceptionally old. The high end of the degradation, this needs to be seen.”
Despite, or quite possibly because of the painful aspects, this history is a necessity for the younger people to see, Breye says. “Otherwise they may never even know that it did exist. . . . I think we fail to look back into the past, and we fail to say to ourselves, never again.”
Breye’s concern is not born out of paranoia. One look at the surfeit of modern reproductions--from blue greeting cards to mammy trivets--proves that there are still impulses and intentions left to examine.
“There is an enormous difference if people are making them now,” says New York-based collector and writer Jeff Weinstein. “In a world where a tremendous civil rights struggle has been fought, the way in which these images are understood must be different to any eye. You can only think that people are surpassingly ignorant or greedy or sometimes both. The historian will want the genuine article. To reproduce them is beyond comprehension. What possible service could that serve?”
Lowery Sims, associate curator of 20th Century Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, sees the items’ popularity, among blacks especially, as an indication of something larger, reverberations of a movement.
“Every group has to live with their stereotypes. Like Steppin Fetchit,” Sims says. “You can reject it or you can examine it. Look forward and see the subversion in his behavior. By dragging his feet he’s slowing progress. And there’s a great sense of personal power in that.”
In the same way she sees those images as coded messages of subversion, retooled activism.
“For blacks, there’s always been a post-civil rights black aesthetic. Kind of a fashion statement. We’re reclaiming cornrows, braids. You see those images in black memorabilia. Or in Patrick Kelly’s fashions. If you look at the average young brother in dreads, old people think it’s awful, that he’s wearing that ‘pickaninny hairdo.’ But these remembrances are kind of a natural kind of straightforward representation of who we are.”
History, Weinstein says, always changes objects.
“The only way that you beat these monsters is look them in the face and laugh at them. I hope that this can happen. But you shouldn’t be destroying these objects, so that the impulse that produced them will never happen again.”