Creating an Oral History

African-American Oral Histories

Deborah Roberts
Clip 4: Transcript

The Pickaninny

Running Time: 9 min 45 sec

DR: It’s a pickaninny. It’s a little girl who was drawn between 1910 and 1929. And it’s different versions of her. But she’s eight years old and she’s highly excitable. She’s ignorant, in the sense of what they consider ignorant. And she’s not precocious like, what is that little, Betty Boop, or [that] little girl with little, I can’t even think of her name right now, she has blonde hair with long little pigtails. She’s not anything like that. She’s frightened. She’s barefooted, she never has any shoes on. She has a polka dot dress on that’s hiked up in the back and she has very long skinny legs. Her eyes are bucked and her mouth is open. And she’s always, I thought that was a stereotypical image of what, if that’s how you see someone that’s less than human, then, you know, then I thought, well, let me put this in my work and see what type of response I got. And when I started challenging videos because I felt that they were the catalyst. First of all, rap videos were never meant, when it first started, Run DMC and all those rappers never meant for that work to be so denigrating to Black women. Rap music was about the disadvantaged the, you know, the kids who didn’t have a voice, the voiceless. It’s for the urban youth. It was sayin’ this is how we’re livin’. We’re livin’ in poverty. You know we’re committin’ crimes because we have nothing to eat. We’re human. Why haven’t anybody noticed us? Things like that. Why have we been harassed by the police and things like that. It was all about the impassioned youth. And now, somehow from the beginnings of rap music to now, it’s this whole thing about conquest, materialistic values and degradation of Black women. And that, Black women have always been the core, the core since we have been brought over to this country and was made Americans; that the Black woman has always been the foundation. It was set up like that. It wasn’t something that we started to do. They used to bring Black men into certain types of camps and he would impregnate Black slave women and then they would move him to different ones. They would call him a buck. But the Black mother, the mammy, whatever stereotype, had always been the foundation. And if you attack the foundation of a certain group, it tends to start to erode and that is what is happening right now. When you see that African American young girls are moving into poverty—I mean puberty at an alarming, three times the rate faster than any other race, then you have to wonder what is the problem here? It’s because they, a lot of African Americans, sometimes let the TV raise their kids. They’re influenced by their culture. If they look out the window and they see women walking up and down the street with really, really short dresses on, men yellin’ at them and calling them certain names, then they feel like that’s them, and that’s not them. That is not the image that they need to see, but it’s constantly being beamed across the T.V. So, these girls are not staying young, they’re not staying little girls long anymore.

And that’s alarming because that means now that the birth rate among African American girls is age twelve and I just think that’s just—that’s horrible. You be twenty-two, I mean twenty-four, and have a twelve year old daughter. To be thirty-two and have a twenty-four year old child. Only twelve years difference. And so, once I started looking at the numbers and seeing what the outcome, the end result was with rap music and how it was being projected. And then I said, “You know, this type of polarization had to be defined more in my work.” So, I started doing these big, big paintings with all this symbolic stuff. I would put this Raggedy Ann doll in and all this stuff that people didn’t even get—the black crows with ties on with mirrors and different types of things. It was just so much involved in the painting that you needed a text next to it to explain it. And so what I decided to do was simply say, “This is a black white issue and I don’t mean skin color.” I just mean technically this is a black and white issue. Either you do it or you don’t do it. Either you see it or you don’t see it. So I started paring down everything I was doing, dropping away all the other symbolic messages and just totally focusing on this pickaninny. What I wanted to do was not paint her. I didn’t want to use that image because that’s not our image. That’s their image. So what I wanted to do was take--

CC: Who’s “their?”

DR: It was, you know, the white culture who created her. It’s their image of her. That’s not our image. I wanted to take that image and deconstruct it and reconstruct it by modern day standards. So, now if you look at it from 1910 to 1929, when African Americans were still in the midst of Jim Crow and stuff like that and so making those type of images was not seen so much as racist. That’s how people perceived Black people, so that’s why I said those were not our images. I mean we didn’t walk around with black face on. I mean that wasn’t an everyday thing you know, minstrel and things like that. So, that wasn’t our image. So, what I tried to do with my work is I wanted to reconstruct that image and say, “Well, what’s the difference between a modern day minstrel and a minstrel of 1929”? And it’s, that guy had to do it. He had less power. Blacks weren’t in a position of power. He didn’t have an audience and then you look at the minstrels of today, the rappers, that’s what I call them. Because, they have a choice. They don’t have to sit there and degrade and put that stuff in their teeth and doing that cognitive aping and prancing around. You know, those issues are very relevant and if people don’t see them and you know, know that’s it’s harmful then you know. I think that’s one of your responsibilities as an artist is to--if there are some social issues and you feel that you need to speak on them, you know, you should do it. I have friends who say, “Well, I don’t do anything like that. I don’t want to deal with anything to do with politics or social issues or issues of identity. I don’t want to touch it. I just want to paint paintings.” And that’s okay. If that’s your destiny in life, then that’s what you should do. But I always felt like from early on when we talked about being a child in my family is that my grandma always made us stand up. If there was an issue and someone needed a volunteer, we always had to volunteer. We were always people who worked in our communities. So it’s important to me when my niece said at eight years old, tell me she wishes she was white. She said, “They seem to have it easier.” And you just, you think, we’re in the year 2006 and we still have those issues where we still are not happy with our skin tone. I mean eight years old. So, that was one of the main reasons why I started doing the pickaninny, a little girl, because I wanted to see how her image was being projected under the current climate of this rap music and that who she was as a person was derogating and disappearing, that she was ever changing. So, when you look at the work it’s not even a solid figure. It’s always, you know, it’s this invisibility point of it, you know, that you can’t see who I really am because of the way we’re being projected.

Disclaimer:
“Oral Narrative as History.” Students received class credit for this work, and were under the supervision of Dr. Martha Norkunas, director of “The Project in Interpreting the Texas Past.”

Every effort has been made to transcribe the audio recordings exactly. On occasion a word, or phrase, was difficult to hear and this is indicated by a question mark in brackets.

Interviewee:
Deborah Roberts

Interviewer:
Clare Croft

Date of Interview:
February 8, April 4, 2006

Place:
Deborah Robert’s home, Austin, Texas

Recording Format:
Edirol digital recorder, Uncompressed wave file

Transcriber:
Clare Croft