What would Don Draper do if he landed the Aunt Jemima account?
If you know about my book, “The Grace of Silence” then you know why I would ponder this question. I set out to write a book about America’s hidden conversations about race and wound up writing an accidental memoir when I started to listen to the hidden conversation about race among the people I love and realized that the elders in my family kept profound secrets locked away. Among them, was the discovery that my Grandmother had spent years in the late forties and early fifties working as a traveling Aunt Jemima selling pancake mix to midwestern farm wives, dressed up in a hoop skirt and head scarf. My mother never talked about my Grandma Ione’s work because it caused shame. Once I learned about this period in her life, I dug in to learn as much as I could about her stint working as an itinerant Aunt Jemima for Quaker Oats. I also examined how the Aunt Jemima icon was created and nurtured over time by a series of ad executives who built a massive commercial campaign around a image roote
