“Aunt Jemima on the side of a pancake box.”
Those were the words we teased each other with as children growing up in Georgia. We were all familiar with the round-faced black woman with the scarf on her head on the pancake mix bearing her name.
I’m not sure where we heard that line, which someone somewhere had changed so that it sounded like “Ain’t ya mama…” Little did we know as little black kids that Aunt Jemima was a stereotype of how society saw black women, even if none of our mothers or aunts or grandmothers looked like her.
The Aunt Jemima on the box was a sexless woman, a face with no body, no humanity, without a history or people.
Perhaps that’s what artist Kara Walker was trying to undo – make her into a human figure bigger than life, like the Egyptian Spinx – when she built a humungous Aunt Jemima figure made out of sugar.
Some friends and I were in New York over the weekend and stood in a long line outside the Domino Sugar Factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to see the statue. We had been warned that the line would be long, but fortunately it moved steadily along the street and our wait was relatively short.
The title of the exhibit was on an outside wall of the refinery, and it held all the history that was contained in the big hunk of sugar that awaited us:
A Subtlety
or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
An Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.
The exhibit is open until July 6. It is Walker’s first large-scale public project, located inside an old empty building with molasses-stained walls, and huge windows where light poured in.
Inside the structure, the face of a white Aunt Jemima – a perfect likeness to the real thing – loomed high ahead at the far end. Before I could reach her, though, I was accosted by a series of sugar statues of brown boys. They were sculpted in dark unrefined sugar and dripping in molasses, some carrying baskets of white sugar on their backs or in their arms, with riverlets of black molasses beneath them.
For me, they represented the labor of harvesting sugar cane. They were remarkable.
But the 35-foot-high Aunt Jemima figure made of four tons of white sugar was the most impressive, her with those same round cheeks and the kerchief from my childhood. Walker, though, went farther than just a face on a pancake box. She gave Aunt Jemima big breasts with nipples, and fat hands that were folded.
I walked around the right side of it, taking in its overwhelming-ness, for it was truly a sight. Then I arrived at the back and stopped in my tracks.
This was no Sphinx behind. This was Aunt Jemima’s buttocks, large and round, with her genitals exposed. It was not what I expected. But having seen Walker’s art in the past, I was not surprised. Her paintings are far from subtle, and this installation was no different.
Some might find the image a little risqué – some sophomoric Instagram photos on the web have made a mockery of it – but you’d have to know Walker’s style to know that she works from reality.
She uses black and white paper silhouettes to show some of the harsh images of slavery, dispelling the storybook version of it to make it her own. I’ve seen her works at several exhibits, and she takes on the issues of race, sexuality, gender and power. Her images are more caricatures than real, and some people have found her works disparaging.
Walker talks about the genesis of the Aunt Jemima statue and its meaning in this interview. Here’s a PBS audio interview. Here’s what she says elsewhere about her art:
“My works are erotically explicit, shameless. I would be happy if visitors would stand in front of my work and feel a bit ashamed – ashamed because they have … simply believed in the project of modernism.”
I was curious about what was holding all that packed sugar in place, so I asked a man on site who seemed to be a rep. White foam (or polystyrene, I learned later) blocks, he said. In some places you could see the outlines of the blocks, perhaps where the sugar had melted. Click here to see a video of how the statue took shape.
“I wouldn’t want to be here on a hot day,” my friend Valorie said, noting that the sugar would certainly be melting.
The Domino factory was built in the 19th century to hold raw sugar from the Caribbean, where it was produced through the labor of slaves. In the Medieval period, says Walker, who researched the history of sugar for this project, sugar subtleties were treats made for the rich, and eaten as dessert or in between meals.
The building is scheduled to be torn down, and I suspect, Aunt Jemima will be dismantled.
“I want for her to dominate this place long after the building is gone, so somehow she becomes legend in this location, as does the building and as do many other parts of the city,” Walker said in the interview. “It’s not necessarily landmark by plank but landmark by memory and by the re-telling of residents and visitors who bore witness to her arrival and departure.”
