jemima & butterworth plan boycott of white people's pancakes
MONTGOMERY, AL—In a startling development which may set breakfast-condiment relations between the races back a couple of generations, the nation's two most successful and outspoken black-female maple-syrup mascots have declared a boycott of all white people's pancakes "until complete and final racial justice is achieved in America."
"No justice, no syrup!" shouted Aunt Jemima Greene before a mob gathered in front of Shuckey's Dixie Waffle Hut, which in 1982 became the South's last pancake house to allow racial integration. Aunt Jemima, 92, lives on a modest retirement pension while the makers of the syrup bearing her name are worth hundreds of millions. She has vowed—even if it means being jailed—that she will avoid being poured upon Caucasian hotcakes "until every poor black child can eat a pancake in peace and not feel like a damn fool for doing it." Mrs. Velma Butterworth, a poor Alabama sharecropper's daughter who likewise languishes in semi-poverty while the white and Jewish men who hawk her flapjack topping are living it up with fine cigars and whitewall tires, joins Jemima in the embargo. "I ain't spreadin' myself over no cracker's johnnycake until I get PAID!" howled Butterworth over a megaphone to a crowd of hooting fat black ladies.
The makers of Log Cabin Syrup, noting that "Abe Lincoln built log cabins and liked black people," have declined to join the boycott but instead are planning to unveil their own black-female syrup mascot named Mamie Giblets.
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(Based on my original presumption that Mrs. Butterworth is a Caucasian, this was going to be called "Things Get Racial Between Jemima & Butterworth," wherein the latter was described as "a white woman with a George Hamilton tan" who derided Aunt Jemima as "a slave hand trying to run a syrup company." But after asking a few acquaintances about how they perceived Mrs. Butterworth's ethnicity [most assumed she was black], and due to her bottle's brown glass, I'll conclude that Mrs. Butterworth is probably of Negroidal ancestry. There was one holdout who insisted that the grandmotherly voice which responded to Kim "Tootie" Fields's "I love you, Mrs. Butterworth" in the old TV commercial bore a white woman's inflection, but I argue that an elderly white syrup matron wouldn't be hanging around in a dangerous neighborhood with Tootie.)
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Two readers living out in Big Turkey Country scolded me via e-mail that a "gizzard" is actually an internal organ and that the reddish saggy protruberance hanging from the throats of turkeys and some other animals is called a "wattle." Who knew?
