BLACKFACE IN NEW ORLEANS

Blackface, Dark History, Black Americana -- offensive trinkets that evoke the Jim Crow era -- are prized by collectors, and easy to find at local antique shops. April 19, 2007By Robert Cooper At New Hartford’s Collinsville Antique Company, a huge facility housing numerous antique vendors, pretty much like a shopping mall for collectors, visitors can peruse the many different antiques, from fine China, to old furniture, paintings, vintage baseball cards, and some potentially offensive examples of what has been called Black Americana.
There are Mammy and Uncle Tom salt and pepper shakers, a Bull Durham smoking tobacco advertisement picture that features picaninnies eating watermelon, and an old Mammy character smoking, with an inscription at the bottom that reads, “My! It shure am sweet tastan,” a Little Black Sambo thermometer, and a birthday card with another Mammy that reads, “This ain’t no puny little birthday wish,” on the cover and opens up showing her large backside, concluding with, “Dey’s plenty behind it.”
“It’s all politically incorrect stuff, but it’s history,” said Doug Szydlo, who owns the antique company with his wife Cindy. “I wish we could change some of those things, but it happened. ”Szydlo said he hasn’t received any negative reaction to the items, and over 50 percent of those who buy the items are African-American, but there’s a diverse interest. “Collectors are an unusual breed that come from all walks of life,” says Szydlo. “People who shop in our business understand its history.”
The term Black Americana covers a variety of memorabilia, from the era of slavery through the early 20th century. The items range from documents, shackles, receipts, and wanted posters, to quilts made by slaves, other household items, dolls and advertising posters.
Out of the Jim Crow era comes many depictions of African-Americans as dehumanizing caricatures featured in pictures, post cards, or household items, such as coin banks and toys, as well as the many signs used to draw the racial lines that weren’t to be crossed. To understand why these items were so offensive and demeaning one must simply brush up on black history. Reducing enslaved Africans and African-Americans to sub-human status in the popular imagination was one of the ways used by whites to justify the cruel institution of slavery. Blacks were believed to be ignorant, lazy, violent, sex-obsessed, immoral, and inferior to whites.
During the time of slavery, sometime around the 1830s, whites began appearing in minstrel stage productions. Minstrel shows were the first distinctly American theatrical productions, and the building blocks of the American music industry. These minstrel shows featured whites singing and dancing, with their faces covered in what is known as blackface, in front of the back drop of a plantation. White performers covered their faces with burnt cork and, eventually, shoe polish, exaggerated their lips with red lipstick, and put on wigs in attempts to mock the appearance of black people.
The shows featured slapstick comedy, singing, wisecracks and dancing sprinkled over demeaning stereotypes of black people as happy-go-lucky, lazy, and ignorant buffoons. Songs such as “De Camptown Races,” “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny”, and “Old Color’d Gentleman” accompanied dances such as the Turkey Trot, Buzzard Lope, and the Juba Dance. The productions served to justify slavery as humane; the message was that blacks were happy to be slaves and needed whites to take care of them.
It is out of these minstrel shows that many of the negative stereotyped characters that would come to symbolize white superiority and black subservience were born. Popular depictions of these minstrel characters are among those sought-after Black Americana collectibles. Characters like the Mammy, the male servant, the picaninny, and the coon kept white audiences in stitches, laying the foundation for racial divisions that still exist today.
The Mammy character was depicted as the middle-aged, overweight black maid, who was always happy, singing — a motherly figure who loved her white slave masters more than her own children, who she often treated condescendingly.
The male servant or Uncle Tom (named after the title character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery book Uncle Tom’s Cabin ) had the same demeanor as the Mammy. The male servant was usually a butler, cook, or a field worker, and was always smiling. He smiled and nodded because he was happy to be a slave. He was loyal, and always eager to please his slave master. Just like Mammy, he was old, weak, and dependent on white people to survive. One such servant is Uncle Remus, who was the fictional narrator of African-American folklore stories compiled by Joel Chandler Harris in 1881.Picanninies represented black children. Frequently shown with nappy, unkempt hair, and bulging eyes, they wore disheveled clothing, and were often depicted stuffing their mouths with watermelon or fried chicken. The origin of the picaninny character is Topsy, the “ragamuffin” slave girl also from Stowe’s novel.
Rounding off the minstrel characters is the coon — perhaps the most demeaning of all the characters. The coon is a lazy, good-for-nothing, shiftless, easily frightened, ungrateful, dim-witted, slow-moving and speaking slave who was always either trying to trick his way out of work, or to escape slavery. The coon served as a justification for whipping slaves for disciplinary reasons.
After slavery was abolished with President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the 13th Amendment, Southern states entered a period of reconstruction beginning in 1865, from the damages of the Civil War. As former slaves started to assert themselves, owning land, businesses, and even holding public office, fear grew in the hearts and minds of many Southern whites. A new character was born: the black brute.
The black brute wasn’t the good-ole darky, as the Mammy or male servant had been. He was a savage, violent, dark-skinned beast with super human strength, who was obsessed with raping white woman. His character was used to play upon Southern whites’ fears that their former black slaves would revert back to the animalistic African ways that had been kept under control by slavery. Within 12 years reconstruction was over, the Ku Klux Klan was born, and Jim Crow was implemented.
Jim Crow was originally a character from minstrel shows who walked with a limp, singing and dancing along with his cohorts, Jim Dandy, and Zip Coon. The name was used then as a derogatory reference to black people. From there it came to symbolize segregation, reducing black people to second-class citizen-status. An era of brutal lynchings followed, and a return to being dehumanized and devalued. The very same characters from the minstrel shows would become caricatures that stuck in America’s consciousness. The likenesses of these characters appeared on everything from household items, such as salt and pepper shakers, cookie jars and dishes, to advertisements, books, posters, post cards, plaques, buttons, toys, die-cast metal banks, and even fishing lures.
One might think that finding these items would take a considerable amount of effort, with antique dealers or traders too ashamed to display them for fear of offending people. That assessment couldn’t be farther from the truth. Take a nice Sunday drive to a number of antique shops in just about any small town and a variety of these collectables can be found.
Not too far from the Collinsville Antique Company is another super-sized antique venue, Antiques on the Farmington. Nestled on the banks of the Farmington River at 10 Depot St. (Rte 179), more Black Americana can be found, including a relic from the segregation days, a Colored Waiting Room sign. Three die-cast metal “Jolly Nigger Banks” can be found ranging in price from $400 to $700, along with the more expensive “Darktown Battery” bank at $1,995.
In Coventry is an antique doll store called Special Joys on 41 North River St. that has several Mammy dolls and the hard-to-find and little known Golliwogs, characters from a book published in England called The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls by Florence Kate Upton.Joy Kellener, owner of Special Joys, performed in minstrel shows at an early age.
“I wore the blackface, and was an endman,” Kellener said. “I was one of three or four people sitting on chairs at the end of the stage. We would bang our tambourines to get the crowds all excited.
”Although the items are very offensive, there are a number of African-Americans who collect them, including big name celebrities.
Spike Lee, who featured Black Americana in his film Girl 6 , and more prominently in Bamboozled, has a collection. So does Bill Cosby, and the most famous African-American woman on earth Oprah Winfrey also has a collection.
Alphonso McGriff, host of the Hartford public access Television show Conscious Conversations, has amassed a collection of over a hundred items in the past six to seven years. McGriff’s collection includes Darky Town Puzzles, Nigger Head Tobacco, slave shackles, hundreds of post cards, and a German copy of the Agatha Christy book Ten Little Nigger s.
“I am interested in our history, in every way it was represented,” stated McGriff. “At first I was concerned about its authenticity, but then it didn’t matter. I just wanted to know it existed, and what existed.
”Dave Schulman, a vendor at Antiques on the Farmington, is white and collects Black Americana.
“I’ll buy Black memorabilia if I think it’s a good piece,” Schulman said. “When I put it in my house, none of my black friends have a problem with it, only my white friends do.”As time goes on, and things change, some things still remain the same. Some of the characteristics of the minstrel show characters still persist. The Black brute is on display when rappers portray thug imagery in their videos, former Public Enemy icon Flavor Flav cooned his way through two seasons of the popular VH-1 show Flavor of Love , and the dance that accompanied the popular “Chicken Noodle Soup” song by DJ Webster and Young B. was reminiscent of a minstrel show shuck and jive.Manchester Community College Professor Lucy Ann Hurston believes that a lack of knowledge by the young generation of African-Americans of the degradation suffered by black people throughout history is the root of these behaviors still existing.“I’m all for Black Americana to be acknowledged for what it is, a reminder of the great American past,” Hurston said. “If we don’t understand the past, we can’t understand how we got here, and how we can change it for a better future.”