1. Rastus, the Cream of Wheat chef, created circa 1890 by Emery Mapes, one of the owners of Diamond Milling Company. Mapes adapted the image of an African American chef for a wood-
cut image used as a logo for the product. In the 1920s, the woodcut image was replaced by the
face of a
Chicago waiter who was paid $5 to pose in a chef's
hat and jacket. This logo has been used with only slight modifications until the present day.
2. A stereotype of the jolly, former slave, and a character of the
coon type often featured in minstrel shows.
3. A pejorative name used by white folk for African American males in the 20th Century.
"By no means a lesser virtue of Toole's novel is his rendering of the particularities of
New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites -- and
one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy."
--
Walker Percy, Foreword to 'A Confederacy of Dunces'