Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Winter, 1999 by Frank Diller

Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, by M. M. Manring. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. 210 pp. $14.95 paper.

THE ERA OF THE MINSTREL SHOW MIGHT BE GONE but blackface continues to pop its burnt-cork head into the popular consciousness. From 1998's New York City Labor Day parade featuring a float of blackface firefighters to the numerous supermarket incarnations of Aunt Jemima, elements of minstrelsy still appear in American popular culture and can serve as a barometer of race relations. Depictions of African Americans in popular culture demonstrate how far the nation has come and how far it still needs to go. But, as academic interest in minstrelsy has increased, it has become clear that an accurate reading of the barometer is rarely seen in the oversimplified terms of black and white. Two recent books on two different features of minstrelsy, antebellum American theater and the creation and dissemination of Aunt Jemima, demonstrate the importance of locating minstrelsy in larger social and historical spheres.

One of the biggest problems facing contemporary blackface scholars is the limited number of resources available on the subject. Many aspects of minstrelsy are yet to be addressed in a comprehensive manner and when these have been approached it is often with an apologetic tone and little original thought. Until recently, scholars fed off of each other with numerous cross-references to equally benign accounts concerning blackface and minimized the number of original sources they addressed themselves. William J. Mahar escapes this trap with a refreshing and far more rewarding approach in Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, a detailed look early blackface minstrelsy and antebellum American culture.

Without the benefit of first-hand accounts or visual media, Mahar offers close readings of the surviving sheet music and playbills from minstrelsy to make the claim, "It is virtually impossible to determine what individual blackface entertainers actually intended by their mimicry ... but it is clear that racial disparagement, however prominently it figured as a humorous device and as a means of social control, was not the only function of the minstrel show" (p. 40). Questions of class and gender take center stage as Mahar presents an exhaustive account of the burlesque pieces adapted from English and Italian operas. Composers for the minstrel show manipulated the European pieces by simplifying the complex musical arrangements, minimizing character relationships, and introducing American texts and topical references that their audience would easily recognize. Although the material was thematically similar to its European counterparts, Mahar argues that these burlesques played on the insecurity of Americans about their own cultural production and class structure.

The author later identifies the minstrel show's Ethiopian sketches (i.e., blackface interpretations) of American life in which controversial material was eschewed for the much safer reinforcement of class structures. Burlesques, featuring stereotyped figures in humorous sketches that satirized contemporary values and concerns, borrowed from newspaper parodies and played on the sensibilities of the lower- and middle-class audiences towards class and gender relations.

In the most interesting section of his book, Mahar examines the often misogynistic portrayal of women in the minstrel show. Instead of addressing the blurred racial and gender lines of male performers dressed as women, Mahar focuses on the free-spirited, sexually independent "gals" appearing in many of the minstrel songs:

   Marital fidelity might have been the preferred ideal relationship between
   men and women.... Nonetheless, many married and unmarried men believed that
   marital happiness could be achieved only after sexual dalliance.... It
   would be highly unlikely that sporting men, dandies, artisans, working
   males, and curious youth, the major audience for early minstrelsy, would
   have missed the references to "gals" in blackface songs.... Males,
   regardless of color or ethnic background, attributed to themselves the
   freedom to behave as they saw fit while relegating women to a subservient
   role in marriage, sexual relationships, and public life. (p. 309)

Mahar's recognition that gender distinctions in minstrelsy reflected the dominant political and social order of the time complicates racial assumptions surrounding blackface minstrelsy and serves as a fitting conclusion to an insightful book. Although Behind the Burnt Cork Mask emphasizes the history of American music and theater, the author's detailed work also poses a number of intriguing questions that would serve future scholars of blackface minstrelsy well.

Mahar's attention to original sources and thought would have been wise for M. M. Manring to heed while writing Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima, which does its subject an injustice as it struggles to address all of the factors leading to its creation. With its origins grounded in the minstrel show and its representation of the rise of the middle-class and the advertising industry, the Aunt Jemima figure has the potential to be a touchstone for the depiction of African Americans in American popular culture, but Manring never fully realizes such possibilities with this uninspired approach.