| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. By M. M. Manring. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. xii, 210 pp. Cloth, $47.50, isbn 0-8139-1782-4. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8139-1811-1.)

M. M. Manring's history of the cultural icon known as Aunt Jemima finds its inspiration in the life and work of the writer James Baldwin, who is reported to have asked on his deathbed for Aunt Jemima brand pancakes—which he immediately vomited. This is an appropriate symbol of Aunt Jemima, an advertising invention whose historical significance is demonstrated by the fact that as late as 1989 she was written of in a Gannett news service story as a real woman. That a respectable news service could make that egregious error is the best reason for a study that probes a "strange history" that spans more than a century's worth of black history. As Baldwin wrote, "Before our joy at the demise of Aunt Jemima approaches the indecent, we had better ask whence she sprang, how she lived? Into what limbo has she vanished?" Slave in a Box, Manring's well-researched study of the history of Aunt Jemima, tries to answer Baldwin's question. . . .

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