A Plethora of African American Hand Fans
- A Plethora of African American Hand Fans
My collection started simply enough: in church. One hot summer Sunday while attending services, I noticed the nearest usher fanning a woman with a flimsy church program, and the growing beads of sweat on the congregant’s face matched the frustrated usher’s recognition that her efforts were futile. Why? The usher did not have a fan.
Veteran ushers and old-school church ladies used to have fans for such occasions, but in these newfangled times of central air conditioning, fans are obsolete, and since every business has a webpage and a Twitter account, advertising on fans just is not practical anymore. In that moment, I realized that we would lose this small but significant facet of black, American, and pre-comfort culture. There was something about the sight of that usher trying to cool off the woman with a sheet of paper that made me run home to troll eBay’s black Americana items for “hand fans.”
What I found was a plethora of African American fans that represented the funeral home fans that I remembered from my youth and those fans that represented the worst of race relations in America. Fans with uplifting images of African American life to advertise black funeral homes were posted alongside fans that used terms such as “coon,” “darky,” and “nigger.” I have tried to focus my collection in those areas that mean something to me rather than having perceived future value to anyone else.
What makes my fan collection special is that it represents a memory, individual and collective, of the Du Boisian double consciousness as these representations presented warring ideals about being African American in America. At the same time a black funeral home was printing an advertising fan, a Jim Crow business was advertising “Nigger Hair Tonic” or a cure-all that “won’t make black white.” When I see people looking at the fans (see color plates 1 and 2) and other black Americana in my office, I see what Toni Morrison calls their rememory at work—a reclaiming of time and space—and my collections reclaim that history and use it as fuel. [End Page 12]
My collections are rooted in black material culture. Collecting the fans has led to other collections of Jim Crow and black Hollywood memorabilia. I own “Colored Waiting Room” signs (one, particularly treasured, is made of cast iron and purported to have been manufactured in Jackson, Mississippi, at the Adams Sign Company in 1929), first editions of Richard Wright novels, and Gone with the Wind memorabilia, particularly items related to Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. Most recently, I acquired the soundtrack to Song of the South (1946), the video version of which Disney refuses to sell and is no longer available in the United States. Someone, though, had the LP, and now I own an original recording with Hattie McDaniel and James Baskett, the first (honorary) black Academy Award winner. Currently, I am seeking a Negro travel guide published during the Jim Crow era to assist black travelers and a copy of James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). [End Page 13]
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Mahalia Jackson hand fan, collection of Candice Love Jackson, Jackson, Mississippi.
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Amos Moses Barber Shop, New Orleans, hand fan, collection of Candice Love Jackson, Jackson, Mississippi.
Candice Love Jackson (cljackson@tougaloo.edu) is the assistant provost and assistant vice president for academic affairs at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. She has a large personal library of Gone with the Wind memorabilia, Richard Wright novels, African American Barbie dolls, and African American black material culture. Her primary research centers on African American literature, specifically twentieth-century popular literature, southern literature, film, and popular culture.
