The Language of the Hand Fan

My "Great-aunt" Judy married Great-granddaddy Armstrong after his wife Susan, my mother’s grandmother, on the distaff side, died at the age of fifty-eight. When I was thirteen, my mother showed me a fan that had come down to her from her Aunt Judy. I remembered seeing that fan when I was much younger and I was excited to see it again.

Great-aunt Judy was something of a Southern Belle in the grand sense of the word. Although she didn’t come from money, she was as petite as Scarlet O’Hara wanted to be. Under five-feet tall, in her entire life, I don’t think her waist was ever more than seventeen inches around. When I was in first grade, I was nearly as big as she was.

When I was little we went to Florida to visit the old folks every Christmas; they had abandoned the snowy, cold winters of Ohio. Once I remember seeing a pair of Great-aunt Judy’s shoes sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I was so shocked that I climbed into the tub to put my bare foot along side of them; my six-year old foot was as big as her shoe.

Great-aunt Judy was from an old Southern family and she lived to be ninety-eight years old. I remember listening to her tell about watching the famous July 3rd 1870 steamboat race between the Robert E. Lee and the Belle of the Natchez. She prided herself on her southern cultivation and one of the things that she prized among all things was an ivory, silk, and lace fan that she had from her youth. When she died, the fan was passed to my grandmother and when she died to my mother. Finally, the fan that my mother showed me when I was thirteen, fell to me when I was forty five.

It is a monster by comparison to the fans available in modern gift shops. Fully opened it is a whopping twenty-eight inches wide and sixteen inches tall. The loop, to which a wrist strap may be attached, as well as the blades and guards, are carved from ivory. Mother-of-pearl capped rivets secure the pin that holds the guards and blades together.

Once a thin veil of blue or violet silk fabric called the mount covered the upper two-thirds of the blades. It had been hand-painted with small bouquets of flowers and was trimmed with handmade lace. The mount is tattered beyond repair; over time the silk has been weakened by the acids deposited long ago by Great-aunt Judy’s hands as she fluttered, flipped, and folded the fan in a series of precise and determined motions that expressed excitement, anger, fondness, impatience, and a thousand other nuances of feeling. Maybe she had that fan with her on the day when she watched the Natches race the Robert E. Lee.

When I first saw the fan, when I was five years old, Great-aunt Judy sat on the edge of her bed and went through a few of the moves she had used as a young woman in the mid-to-late 1800s. She unfolded the fan and its width was probably half her mature adult height; when she pulled up her feet and hid behind it, it seemed huge enough to cover her, although that was really an illusion she created through positioning.

She sat upright and paused as if about to begin a complicated dance step. She fluttered the fan as if to cool herself and then violently snapped it shut with her right had and slapped it into the palm of her left. She gave me a pointed look and said, “Displeasure.” I shrank in my skin. But quickly she made me smile again when she open it with a flick of her wrist, peeked out from behind it, winked at me and said, “Pleasure.”

She folded the fan and laid it across her heart and said, “I love you;” she reached across her chest and put the folded fan against the left side of her face and said, “Go away.” Then she turned slightly, spun the fan in her right hand at the level of her hip and said, “I am not married.” Finally, she gently dropped the fan flat onto the carpet and said, “I am interested in getting to know you better.”

I was sitting on the carpet and when I dived for the fan, she cautioned me away from it and lovingly picked it up. Before she put it away she let me hold it, it was so cool in my hands. I could feel the strength of the guards and the flexibility of the blades and I could catch the slightest hint of violets and lilacs when the breeze from the silk flowed past me. The next moment, it was gone from my hands and was laid away, out-of-bounds, in a deep dresser drawer.

Now I think about that fan and it brings up different things for me. Now it is still a talisman to my past but I am now sufficiently mature to see it as a representation of oppression and grief. Few African-American women my age, who are the descendants of slaves, probably have any such fond memories of an ivory fan that belonged to a Southern belle from the Antibellum South when slavery had been officially abolished, and everyone except the freed slaves and their children was benefiting from the change. Freed slaves were beaten, raped, murdered and exploited in a hundred ways in the mayhem that followed the end of the Civil War; for them the oppression did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation.

How, then, can this fan, made from the tusks of an elephant, not also represent and remind us of the violent oppression and personal pain that millions of slaves and their descendants suffered? We need to shoulder and own the knowledge that this fan is more than a reminder of a "gay old time" enjoyed in some fantasy bucolic, by-gone days. We need to include the less-than-pleasant and embarrasing associations in the larger context in which we view that beautifully-crafted fan.

On the subject of fan semiotics check out Academy for the Instruction in the Use of the Fan by Joseph Addison. It gave me a little insight into why I was so easily emotionally manipulated by that fan. Imagine the power of all that wind!!

http://www.ideco.com/fans/language.htm speaks a different dialect of the language of fans than did my Great-aunt Judy, but apparently the mother tongue is still alive and well.

Oh! Here comes my boi. Excuse me while I drop the fan hye got me at the gift shop at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco...