Chapter 11
Years before the advertising icon Aunt Jemima entered public consciousness as a purveyor of pancakes at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, she was a vague stock figure rooted in southern sensibility. In the 1852 abolitionist classic, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Harriet Beecher Stowe described her Mammy figure Aunt Chloe as a “whole plump countenance beam[ing] with satisfaction and contentment from under a well-starched checkered turban.” With a BMI of a blimp, Mammy, the desexualized uber-Jemina, was a kindly—and by implication kindly treated—figure who nourished her white charges, literally and figuratively. More an idea than a fact, and therefore as adaptable to merchandising as well as myth, Mammy figures began appearing around 1875 on Aunt Sally baking powder, Luzianne coffee, Fun to Wash detergent, and Aunt Dinah molasses. Her portly aspect was even used to hawk planters and ashtrays.
And pancake mix. In 1889, four years before the 1893 Chicago fair, Charles Rutt and Charles G. Underwood bought the Pearl Milling Co. to develop a self-rising pancake mix that required you to contribute nothing but water. Originally marketed under the name “Self-Rising Pancake Flour,” the brand, the entrepreneurs realized, lacked a certain oomph. That same year, Rutt witnessed minstrels Baker and Farrell performing a popular minstrel song called “Old Aunt Jemima.”
Watching the duo warble the tune while outfitted in aprons and red bandannas evoking their platonic ideal of the Mammy, Rutt had his eureka moment. He adapted the likeness of a Mammy for his product and renamed it “Aunt Jemima.” But, lacking the funds to fully develop and market the product with the now-inspired name, the pair sold the mix to the local R.T. Davis Milling Co.
Much as Marlboro found its cowboy, owner R.T. Davis discovered his Mammy, in the form of Nancy Green, and developed a compelling backstory for a living logo who had in real life been born a slave in 1834 in Montgomery County, Kentucky.
Once upon a time in the land of cotton . . . employed as a cook by a Colonel Higbee on his Louisiana plantation, Aunt Jemima and her uncanny mastery of the pancake became known throughout the South. Ads portrayed aged and refined Caucasian gentlemen trying to coax the “secret recipe” out of Jemima, who would only surrender it, for reasons unknown, to the R.T. Davis Milling Co. The company, in turn, spread this culinary joy throughout the country like kudzu. (The invasive plant was introduced by the Japanese at the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition). It was as fictitious as “Gone with the Wind” and just as dependent upon a region equally hungry for pancakes and delusions.
But the product still didn’t become as hot as the griddles it was cooked on. With profits lagging, the company decided its best chance to break out was at the 1893 expo, where an expected audience of millions might literally make Aunt Jemima a household name.
The company built an exhibit as immodest as its ambitions, including the world’s largest flour barrel, a 24-by-12-foot keg next to which stood the company’s flesh-and-blood trademark. Outfitted in her domestic garb as Aunt Jemima, Nancy Green sang songs, spun tales of a Br’er Rabbit genus, and whipped up pancakes, the gravity of her ebullient personality drawing crowds of such magnitude that a special police contingent was assigned to keep order. Expo officials awarded her a medal and a certificate for her showmanship. The R.T. Davis Milling Co. reaped more than 50,000 orders for its mix, proclaimed Green the “Pancake Queen,” and signed her to a lifetime contract.
The expo and the collateral promotional tours all over the country propelled the mix so far and high into the public mind that, by the turn of the century, Aunt Jemima was ranked one of the two commercial symbols American housewives trusted most. (The other was the Armour meat chef.) By 1910, approximately 20 years after the expo, nearly 120 million Aunt Jemima breakfasts were being served every year. Seeing the batter on the wall, the R. T. Davis Milling Co. renamed itself Aunt Jemima Mills in 1913.
With no black friends or kin, the white families she cooked for were Aunt Jemima’s raison d’être. Desexualized as a spayed pet, Jemima was no leonine Lena Horne type who threatened to usurp the white housewife. Her English acumen existed in inverse proportion to her stovetop skills. Commercial depictions of her by the artist N.C. Wyeth breathed life into an ever-more-elaborate biography spun in the ads about Jemima’s idyllic life cooking for an appreciative white family in a “stately white-pillared mansion.”
After years of promotional appearances as Aunt Jemima, Green died in a car crash in 1923. That same year, the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to erect a monument in honor of the “faithful slave mammies of the South.” With the U.S. Senate sanctioning the effort, an early model depicted an Aunt Jemima–like figure embracing a white child while her own ignored offspring clutched at her dress. The artist clarified that the dusky children were “pickaninnies,” attempting to divert their mother’s ministrations to them “instead of devoting all her time to the white children.” Vehement protests forced Congress to abort the monument, which would have been visible from the Lincoln Memorial.
Granger, NYC
After the Quaker Oats Co. purchased the brand in 1926, it hired Anna Robinson to fill Green’s apron. With Robinson darker than Green and heavier at 350 pounds, the brand’s commercial image likewise became heftier and duskier. Promoting the mix at the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933 in Chicago, Quaker Oats brought in Robinson to echo Green’s pivotal appearance 40 years before.
For two more decades, Quaker Oats perpetuated the Mammy image with Jemima spouting mangled phrases in its advertising like “Happifyin’ Aunt Jemima Pancakes Sho’ Sets Folks Singin!” and “Lawsee! Folks Sho’ Cheer for Fluffy Energizin’ Aunt Jemima Pancakes.” The absurdly cheerful and childish patois reinforced what Caucasians happily believed African-Americans spoke and thought like.
Robinson’s tenure was followed by a blues singer, an actress, and even a Quaker employee playing the role. The last live performer was Aylene Lewis, who also played the titular role at Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House in Disneyland when it opened in 1957.
Brands like Aunt Sally baking powder, Luzianne coffee, Gold Dust washing powder, and Uncle Remus syrup that had blithely used imagery that made “Little Black Sambo” look like “Invisible Man” faded away in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Aunt Jemima’s nostalgic branding distorted an ugly history the way a used car salesman’s slick patter obscures a vehicle’s defects. She merrily served white people an image as full of comfort and as lacking in bitterness over slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow as her pancakes.
Quaker Oats evolved the brand often and profitably, introducing buttermilk pancake and waffle mix in 1957, pancake syrup in 1966, frozen waffles in 1968, frozen French toast in 1970, and a light syrup in 1985, to name a very few of its annexes. Beginning in the 1960s, the company began to morph Jemima’s image as well, lightening her skin, shedding the kerchief, and replacing it with a headband. It added pearl earrings and a lace collar in 1996 to complete the transformation from antebellum servant to postmodern working grandmother.
The almost indestructible Aunt Jemima born at the 1893 expo made its owners fat with profit but forever bound to a brand whose echoes of Jim Crow and Uncle Tom can never be silenced. Without Jemima’s universally known name and visage, the company might be hard-pressed to distinguish its products from any competitor’s.
The rift between brand image and reality may best be illustrated by the post-mortem fate of Nancy Green. After the first Aunt Jemima was killed when she was hit by a car while walking in Chicago, she was buried in an unmarked grave in the Windy City’s then-segregated Oak Woods Cemetery. For nearly a century she lay as forgotten as her alter ego was unforgettable, until 2015, when a researcher finally located her whereabouts.