Shame—shame—shame. In the July/ August “Correspondence” column you refer to Fala’s “Scotch soul.” You obviously used a license, poetic or otherwise, since you are certainly aware that “Scotch” is only a whisky, and nothing more, while the souls of Scotland are Scots, Scottish, or Scotsmen. Next you will be telling us the Forbes tartan is a nice “plaid”!
Editor’s note : It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and not the editor who committed this particular solecism.
Your July 1993 issue brought back splendid memories of the Delta Queen . In the mid-sixties I grew up in New Albany, Indiana, where the local steamboat favorite was the Belle of Louisville , the only other active steamboat on the Ohio River.
Every year during Kentucky Derby week, the Delta Queen and Belle of Louisville would race, and the civic pride of Cincinnati and Louisville were on the line. Unfortunately, the Delta Queen almost always won.
My fellow grade school students and I hid our shame by inventing excuses: the Belle got stuck in mud, the Belle had too many passengers, the Queen’s captain cheated. The painful truth was the Delta Queen was a stronger boat, and I hated her for it.
Bien dicho y bien escrito! Well said and well written!
What a refreshing change to read real history as it relates to the Spanish presence in North America. All the more refreshing after the recent orgy of Orwellian pseudo-history that the politically correct attempted to force-feed us during the Columbian quin-centennial. Sadly, it seems the Black Legend is still a potent political tool.
As an aside, it should also be mentioned that Spanish money, in part, helped finance the American Revolution. A reserve of two million pieces of eight, so-called Spanish dollars, was given to the patriot cause to back the Continental currency.
“The Spain Among Us” by Henry Wiencek in American Heritage’s April number was superbly crafted, an elegant statement on Hispanic contributions to America that corrected many widely held misconceptions about Spanish “conquest” of the Americas. The record is certainly not pure, but it also is not as soiled as many blindly believe.
As Aunt Jemima anticipates her centennial, she has shown up in what at first glance seems unlikely circumstances: as one of the heroines of the black collectibles movement, whose participants have grown over the last five years to some thirty-five thousand, according to Jeannette Carson, president of Black Ethnic Collectibles Inc., the hobby’s organization, and publisher of its magazine. In iron and wood, plastic and fabric, Mammy has become highly prized. At a recent show and sale for collectors in Washington, D.C., one could find cookie jars and pot holders in her image, advertisements and banners, even old packages of mix and meal. One vendor offered a banner for a local Kiwanis Club that had linked fundraising with Aunt Jemima. Price: $550.
“They have made you a shrine and a humorous fable, But they kept you a slave while they were able…”
At about the time every Tin Pan Alley hitsmith was celebrating Mammy’s charms, Stephen Vincent Benét included her in John Brown’s Body , his 1927 epic poem about the Civil War. In one of the sections about Wingate Hall, a great Georgia plantation brought low by the war, he limns Mammy as the most sophisticated protectors of her legend perceived her:
The recent sale of Alex Haley’s papers included the typescript of The Autobiography of Malcolm X , which commanded the highest price ever paid for a manuscript by an African-American writer. The text included a chapter titled “The Negro,” which was mysteriously omitted from the published text. Here, as reported in The New York Observer of April 19, 1993, is what Malcolm X thought of the power of the ubiquitous icon:
On Highway 61, just outside of Natchez, Mississippi, stands Mammy’s Cupboard, a 34-high concrete figure of a black woman. For years she was a famous landmark, staring with electric eyes from beneath a pillbox cap, wearing earrings made of horseshoes, and holding a tray. Under Mammy’s red brick skirts, punched with arched windows, Mrs. Henry Gaude operated a small restaurant, its dining room supported inside with cypress beams recovered from a cotton-gin house. Gaude catered to visitors drawn by the Natchez Pilgrimage of Homes—a tour of the town’s grand old houses and an effective celebration of the plantation myth. Edward Weston photographed the place, whitewashed, in 1941; later, the familiar round blue sign of the old Bell system stood at the door and out front were three Shell gas pumps, one white, one yellow, and one sky blue.