In which I accidentally buy a statue of General Lee.

I'll be damned if yesterday I didn't go and buy a copy of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee--much like the very one I'd fumed about melting down into playground equipment, a few months back here.

I didn't see it, is the thing, because standing there in the St V deP thrift store, I was marveling at the glory of a pin-up girl next to an Andrew Jackson-wearing-lipstick on a souvenir ashtray--
part of the glory being that it's an ASHTRAY, which you hardly see anymore round here. 

It made me feel nostalgic, like the Pyrex coffee pot my mother percolated Folger's coffee in.
My mother also smoked––Marlboro's––often while she drank Coke out of glass bottles, and ate sleeves of Saltines.
(And we brushed our teeth with Crest, shampooed with Breck, lathered up with Dial, lotioned up with Jergen's, washed our clothes in Tide and our dishes with Joy.)

She had clear glass ashtrays around, the ones that were so heavy you could bludgeon someone with one--seems I've seen a movie where someone is being strangled and reaches for one in self-defense? Or am I imaging that?

Anyway, I got home, unwrapped the newspaper from my finds, and ...by gum, there's my boy, top center:

 Damn. It was only three dollars, but what am I going to DO with it?

I won't sell it, which had been my intention. 
I'd had to make a decision about what I'll sell really quickly after I started on eBay, because a whole lot of "passive racist" things show up at thrift stores.

I say passive because they aren't blatantly hateful. If you didn't know the context in which they exist, you might not even spot them.

This "Our Pals" needle book, for instance:

I bought it quite a while ago because it came with two Rocket needle books I love.
It made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't quite say why. 

After public artworks celebrating the Confederacy came up [violently] for review last year, 
I looked into it more.

Looking at images from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 
I saw that the image on the needle book quite clearly fits in with many other images of good-natured, 
happy-to-be-poor and subservient African Americans--

such as the black man who cooks Cream of Wheat (for white people's children). 

What's his name?

Whoops--looked it up, he's Rastus.

Aunt Jemima, who is soooo happy to cook pancakes (for white people's children), and Uncle Ben, not Spiderman's uncle, who made rice. The New York Times reported in 2007 that a re-make of this "racially charged character" comes with a "very high cringe factor":

 "Uncle Ben [stood] prominently in stark contrast to the way other human characters like Orville Redenbacher and Colonel Sanders personify their products. That reticence can be traced to the contentious history of Uncle Ben as the black face of a white company, wearing a bow tie evocative of servants and Pullman porters and bearing a title reflecting how white Southerners once used “uncle” and “aunt” as honorifics for older blacks because they refused to say “Mr.” and “Mrs.”"

White men rarely appear on needle books, and when they do, they are leaders of industry with a family on the side:

And this is the norm for white women on needle books (I've seen no black people yet, and I've been looking). Pearl necklaces!

In contrast, "Our Pals" (they're not us, I guess, just pals, like my stuffed animals) are a pair of anthropomorphic black animals with pink hands, feet, and lips--exaggerated on the female cat, who also has simple-minded "Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' bout birthin' babies" googly eyes.

They appear shiftless, with just enough industry to sew patches on their tattered clothes, though they have to work a little at threading that needle...  

And it's significant that the male dog has nothing better to do than help at woman's work---which would have been emasculating in that era (and in our ours too--men who do needlework are slightly suspect). (Related: some African Americans object to how often black men are dressed as women in mass media, for comic effect.)

Well, so what? some might say. 
But once you look at the less "benign" images of Jim Crow--some are literally nauseating--you can see---I could see---that this seemingly friendly image is one puzzle piece in a picture of humiliation, degradation, and even outright terror, torture, and murder. 
E.g., postcards of a real lynching in Duluth, MN, in 1920, that Bob Dylan sings about his song, "Desolation Row":
"They’re selling postcards of the hanging".

So I don't buy or sell any things that set my Spidey senses tingling.
But I have accumulated a few, one way and another.
For instance, a very cool, mid-century alfalfa feed sack, printed with the pretty Indian maiden who has long been the logo of Land O' Lakes. 
Recently I sold a couple sugar sacks printed in 1936 with doll patterns, and the buyer said she is always on the look out to buy more feed sacks. I thought of this one, but got that "oh-oh" shiver.

I talked to my friend Julia, a sewer who, as a POC, has thought a lot about these things, and she said,
"Why don't you cut it up and sew it into something else?"

A good idea.
I am taking a Beginning Quilting class this afternoon, (I don't want to learn to quilt, I just want to learn some of the associated sewing tricks.) 
I am taking the feed sack to cut up. 
Maybe I'll break the ashtray and make a mosaic.