My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 97

Brenda Marie
Osbey

Note to Clyde Taylor
A lump of raw sugar mixed with butter
and wrapped in plain kerchief was
the standard daily fare of enslaved
infants and children on Louisiana
sugar plantations whose mothers were
employed either as mammies to the
slaveholders’ infants, or else set to labor
in the canefields, or even inside the
city of New Orleans, and thus were
unavailable to breastfeed their own.
It was aptly called tette-a-suc’ — sugar tit.
Though sometimes offered by older
women past lactating, more often this
was the job of girls as young as four
or five. Not only were infants and
children thus consistently fed a diet of
no imaginable nutritive value; at a very
young age, girl-children were suckered,
as it were, into a false belief that
they were providing sustenance, and
simultaneously made complicit
in a form of deprivation that they
themselves had likely also experienced.

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I’ll digress a bit here to point out that
while it’s true that the current Domino
owners weren’t around to contribute
to or benefit from the slaving industry,
the company has indeed continued —
except for a brief hiatus following
the floods of 2005 — to operate as the
major employer in its original Louisiana
slave industry locale.

The original Domino Sugar Refinery
has more than a century-old history
in Chalmette, St. Bernard Parish,
Louisiana, just outside the New Orleans
city limits. But Chalmette’s a place best
known for its thoroughgoing hatred
of all things Black. This is notable only
because a significant portion of the
population of St. Bernard Parish is
descended from passant-blancs — poor
Blacks who left the majority-Black
city to pass for white. They remained
poor — there not being much
wealth-making in St. Bernard — but
“escaped” the dreaded black hide.
Or so they claimed. Chalmatians, we
call them. And, yes, it does rhyme
with Dalmatians. The simple fact is
that the town itself grew from the sugar
plantation of its namesake.
No doubt the work is impressive.
Its scale and the labor required for its
execution, stunning. And the fact that
Walker is a Black woman artist who has
researched the history of sugar slavery
and exploitation and made a critique
in subtle, ironic, sexually expressive,
self-loathing and humorous ways all
contributes to its provocativeness.
Without these, nobody would look.
It’s important to remember, however,
that the self-hatred typical of much
if not all Walker’s work is not personal.
It extends to a ll of us.

Sugar has been cultivated in Louisiana
since the 1600’s, the first successful
plantings having rooted in what is now
the Central Business District of
downtown New Orleans. In modern
nola parlance, sugar tit has come to
mean anything offered up as a facsimile
but lacking, intentionally or not, the
substance and value of the real thing.
Corrupt Louisiana politicians white,
Black and other, have been offering us
sugar tit forever, it seems. Is it any
less injurious, are we somehow getting
some of our own back, when the
servers are Black?
I’ve written elsewhere about Black
art and the Basquiat factor: nobody
Black — neither corporations nor
institutions, and certainly not
individuals — is commissioning or
buying or even mounting work by
living Black artists at this level.
Consider that despite Van Der Zee’s
long established reputation as an
artist, perhaps his best known later
work is his portrait of Basquiat.
Much like those babes in arms and
their little would-be nursemaids, we
are tertiary consumers of a product
cultivated for profit elsewhere. Again.
We are witness to an art economy
not only controlled by, but marketed
and pitched by, to and for white
consumption — works created by
Black artists and marketed and pitched
to major white buyers. The fact that
we visit gallery spaces, convene panels
on, discuss, critique and write about
such work may well give the semblance
and allure of critical insight and
creative intellectual engagement.
Somehow it smacks to me of a lot of
tette-a-suc’.