My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 103

Barbara Lewis

The Pornographic Plantation:
Mammy Minstrel Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Molasses drips on the walls. Close to
the entrance, leading to the altar and
centerpiece of whiteness, brown sugar
boys hold baskets as their faces and
bodies melt in the heat. A few of them
have collapsed on the floor, disintegrating
into dark viscous puddles. And the
onlookers who have come to the slavery
fair to gawk and take pictures against
a background of stark plantation
pornography step over the fallen, with
hardly a notice. But the sight of the fall
and the reek of the demise linger.

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Burnished baubles, they garnish and
decorate the path to the huge, cool
mammy presence at center-stage.
White and glistening, big-lipped and
bandanna-tied, she is exposed fore and
aft, for the delight of any who care to
visually fondle, pose, snap, and smile,
and step up close into the intimacy of
vicarious exploitation. She is the icon
of American subservience, created out
of and through dominance, its abject,
undying figure. Sitting on her haunches,
in perpetuity, she utters nary a mumble
in protest. She does not see, but
she is reverently and irreverently seen.

Mammy delicious is to be consumed,
taken in with the eyes in a site of decay.
As tall as the rafters, she perches in
the Domino Factory, built by the water
in Brooklyn in 1856, when slavery was
profit central for an undivided nation,
thrilled by blackface comics making
darkie fun. The Domino game of
domination erected an infrastructure
of privilege, sucking up the goods and
essence of the losers. The end of the
Civil War did not stop slavery’s returns,
which kept the mills churning, swelling
the upper and middle classes and
sweetening the world table. Even in its
last days, the Domino factory belches
out privilege and the diminishment
and displacement of many for the
delight and pleasure of some.
By now, you have figured it out. I am
writing about the mammoth sugar and
styrofoam mammy that Kara Walker is
exhibiting in Brooklyn, under the title
A Subtlety. This was the last weekend of
its showing, and I, along with hundreds
others, old and young, black, white,
Asian, Latino, foreign, native, stood on
an unending line for more than an hour
to be in the company of this image of
perverted motherhood that is readily
available digitally.