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The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima
The American South Series
University of Virginia Press
April 1998
On Sale: April 3, 1998
210 pages
ISBN: 0813918111
EAN: 9780813918112
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Non-Fiction
In Slave in a Box, M.M. Manring investigates why the
troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American
culture. The author traces the evolution of the mammy from
her roots in Old South slave reality and mythology, through
reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel
shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt
Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her
present incarnation as a "working grandmother." The reader
learns how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided
by celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into
nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of
white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed
products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing
to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up
romantic images of not only the food but also the social
hierarchy of the plantation South.
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