The Colored Museum

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).