Last week I wrote about a fond memory I have of my nana. But this week I am going to share something about her that is problematic.

When I was a boy in the late ’60s, early ’70s, she had an item in her kitchen whose symbolism I was unaware of because I was so young. It was a mammy toaster cover. The figure’s long, wide skirt would flow over the appliance.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there also was a two-foot statue of a sitting African native man perched on a wall stand on her front porch.

In retrospect, this is all so odd because (to my knowledge) my nana was not a racist. I never heard her or her children ever utter anything remotely racist. Also, this was in liberal Tucson, Arizona, not in the Deep South.

I wish my dad were still alive so I could ask him how these items made their way to his childhood home.