49 pages • 1 hour read
George C. WolfeThe Colored Museum
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Sketch 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Sketch 2 Summary: “Cookin’ With Aunt Ethel”
The stage revolves as old-style “gutbucket” blues begins to play. A Black woman appears standing behind a large, steaming black cauldron. She wears a bandana on her head and a “reassuring grin.” She welcomes the audience to “Aunt Ethel’s Down-Home Cooking Show,” where she explores “the magic and mysteries of colored cuisine” (7). She tells the audience she will be cooking up something but won’t reveal what it will be.
She begins singing in a hard-driving blues style as she throws the following invisible ingredients into to the pot:
[…] a pinch of style, dash of flair, preoccupation with the texture of your hair, all kinds of rhythms, lots of feelings and pizzaz, rage until it turns into jazz […] a heap of survival, a touch of humility, some attitude, humor, sadness and blues until it simmers to madness, then adds a box of blues (5-6).
She then instructs the audience to beat the mixture, discard, and disown it. In a few hundred years, she instructs, one should bake it until it turns “black and has a nice sheen” or “nice and yellow or any shade in between” (8). She instructs the audience take them out and cool them because they are “no fun when they are hot” (8). She pulls a handful of black dolls out of the pot, saying she has cooked a “batch of Negroes” (8), then explains, “Don’t ask me what to do with them” (8), before throwing them back into the pot. She signs off, asking everyone to join her next week for the show, when she will be cooking chitlin quiche, grits under glass, and sweet potato pie.
Sketch 2 Analysis
In “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel,” more magical elements are introduced, this time playing into a familiar stereotype of the magical Black person or the “Magical Negro.” The “Magical Negro” is a trope used in American entertainment, usually to help the white protagonist on their way to self-improvement. Here the trope is used to help the audience member understand the creation of Black identity.
In many ways, the second sketch continues a thematic element of the first sketch: boiling down a collective experience to create a modern model of Blackness. Where in the previous sketch Miss Pat refers to the collective singing in the cotton fields giving birth to James Brown, Aunt Ethel creates a deconstruction of the nameless individual as a result of the of the collective experience. For Aunt Ethel, the collective traumatic experience goes on to create an individual who cannot be distinguished from any other in the batch—who is simply a result of a recipe. The humor in the face of adversity is both entertaining and disturbing.
