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Thoroughly Modern Mammy 77 they moved in, there was little to say beyond, “This is really nice.” It was nice, without being anything else. I knew then, as Shirley and Ed lay down tentative new roots, that I would finally have to cast L.A. in my mind and heart as the place where I’m from. New Orleans, the place I loved and venerated but never quite got to know, is gone. My mother agrees. She had packed up New Orleans and put it away long ago, expected little of it over the last fifty years as it slipped into a future that looked more ominous than the impoverished past she’d shut up like a locket. But its misfortune made her see that had been more forgiving of the city than she realized; it had become an old person to her, frail through no fault of its own and given to stubborn illusions of grandeur that were best tolerated, even encouraged. Living in L.A. had taught her that much about dreaming beyond your means—in the end, why not? Who did it hurt? Now the dreamer she had watched over for much of her life had vanished, gone to sleep. “Poor New Orleans,” was all my mother said in the end. “Poor New Orleans.” I know what she means. Here in the splendid desert of my own native town, free from the violent storms and strictures of New Orleans of reality, of history, of memory, I am more homeless than she’ll ever know. Thoroughly Modern Mammy O f C o o n s , P i c k a n i nn i e s , a nd G o l d D u s t Tw i n s : W h y D o B l ac k C u r i o s S tay C h i c ? December 2002 The most memorable Christmas gift I ever got was from my best friend about six years ago, an old-­ fashioned pegboard listing stock grocery items one needed to be reminded to buy week to week, such as flour, sugar, and bread. The board itself wasn’t memorable, but its particular old fashion seared my consciousness and then some: at the top was a decorative ceramic of a grin- 78 State of a Nation ning, coal-­ black, red-­ kerchief-­ headed “mammy,” a reproduction of one of those Jim Crow–era advertisements that have come to be known as black memorabilia. Beneath the ceramic was written, “Fo’ da kitchen we needs.” I put the board in a closet and thought, without much conviction, that I’d find a place on the wall for it later. I strove to be heartened by the knowledge that my friend was among the most politically enlightened and erudite black people that I knew, and therefore the pegboard had a redemptive quality that would reveal itself to me in time. But quite the reverse happened: stashed out of sight among the other questionables in my front closet, the peg board bothered me like the invisible pea bothered the princess. Its presence in my apartment began to feel like an affront to many things in it that were meant, I realized, as affirmation—African wood carvings, a framed college degree, family photos, even fashion magazines. Whenever I thought of the mammy pegboard or spied it inadvertently, I shrank from it like Kryptonite. At last I dug it out and offered it to my downstairs neighbor, also a good friend and a highly conscious black person who nonetheless pronounced it “cute” and took it away. (It must be said that she is also a longtime curio collector especially fond of kitchen things—chili peppers are her favorite motif—so her apolitical assessment of the pegboard didn’t exactly surprise me.) I was still left with the same deep-­ down bad feeling bordering on heartburn that black memorabilia always leave me with, and the same nagging question: Why do we keep this stuff around? I mean we in the strictest sense. I know why whites keep it in circulation— to begin with, they put it in circulation, the black grotesquerie of the Gold Dust Twins and Old Black Joe that branded cleaning powder and tobacco and lots of other goods, as well as many more generic images of watermelon-­ gobbling pickaninnies that accented everything else from watches to wall clocks. After such stuff fell from popularity at about the middle of the last century, it...

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