
Emily Dickinson as HP
I recently stumbled across a web article on Pixie Smith that makes me want to stop the presses of Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story and add it as an appendix. Then I was delighted to discover that the author, Thea Wirsching, is creating a new deck, The American Renaissance Tarot, with artist Celeste Pille, based on esoterically-inclined religious influences in early 19th c. American literature (bios). PCS fits into this obliquely as an American artist (living in England) whose Colman-side grandparents were publishers and prominent Swedenborgians and who created an esoteric tarot that became America’s most iconic deck. In addition to fleshing out some of Pixie’s notable ancestors and making the point of just how thoroughly she emerged out of a lineage of early American ‘royalty,’ Wirsching examines the difficult issue of Smith’s racial appropriation of Jamaican folklore and patois.
In addition to Emily Dickinson, the Major Arcana of this deck includes figures such as Thoreau, Emerson, Walt Whitman, the Fox sisters and Margaret Fuller. An entire suit is dedicated to Poe and another to Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter). Wirsching’s blog includes examples of the kind of depth of analysis you’ll find for each card. This deck belongs among other great decks that not only serve as divinatory devices but also contain teachings of cultures and cultural artifacts, that bring us insight into the human condition, such as the Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot and Celtic Wisdom Tarot or Diane Wilkes’ Tarot of Jane Austen and Ed Buryn’s The William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. These decks introduce us to and, indeed, educate us in areas to which we might not have otherwise paid that much attention.
Wirsching and Pille are planning on completing the deck and book this year and are currently looking for a publisher or alternative publishing option. At this point, you can help subsidize the artist’s expenses by buying a print.
In the blog article on Pamela Colman Smith, Wirsching, an astrologer and a professor of American literature, praises the recent biography of Smith (which I co-wrote) recounting her SQUEEE reaction. She goes on to explore “the complicated history of colonial privilege and racial appropriation,” claiming these speak to “the fundamental Americanness of Pamela Colman Smith.” This is a discussion that deals with the very issues that are confronting us (forever anew) in the world today, especially as Smith is being claimed as a woman of color on so many websites and in social media. A part of me wishes it were so, however the facts of her life make it near impossible.

Smith’s grandfather, mayor of Brooklyn and a NY state senator.
With humor and extensive knowledge of early American history, Wirsching explains how Smith’s ancestors on both sides were among the earliest and most prominent in America: “the first Smith on that side of her family arrived in the colonies in the 1630s, and another direct relative in the Smith line was purportedly felled by witchcraft – that crazy fad that spread through New England in the late 17th century,” and “Pixie Smith’s Colman ancestors . . . were actively engaged in establishing the character of American art and letters in the nation’s early period.” I learned so much about her ancestors than I hadn’t known before, in what rivals a captivating episode of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots.”
Wirsching then gets to her real concern. While “culture has always been and always will be syncretic, formed by the “mixing together” of discrete traditions,” she also claims, “we can view Smith’s West Indian performances as a type of minstrelsy . . . if someone wanted to dismiss her as a culturally appropriating black impersonator, they could.” Ah, there’s the rub! Unable to give a settled opinion on this, Wirsching manages to present us with one of the most thoughtful explorations of this conundrum that is so in our faces today. I highly recommend reading this article in its entirety.
I want to briefly explore Pixie’s cultural appropriation of Anancy (Anasi), the spider-trickster originating in Ghana who became a central figure of Jamaican folklore: He was associated with skill and wisdom in speech (wikipedia) and with the kind of selfish cunning and deception that oppressed slaves needed to outwit the white man, just as spider required trickery to outwit tiger. The Jamaica.com site includes this interview with a Jamaica youth:
“But the way I learnt Anancy, I knew Anancy as a child, and it was a joy-y-y! We loved to listen to the stories, we loved to hear about this little trickify man, and you know, and one thing we knew, that this man was magic, and we could never be like him. You know he is a magic man. He could spin a web and become a spider whenever he wanted to [laughter]. You cant do that, so you better not try the Anancy’s tricks, you know, but it was fun!”
Anancy stories were night-time tales, often recounted by elderly women to children in their care, which is how Pixie learned hers. Known as an exceptional mimic, Pixie easily assumed the role of Jamaican story-teller. She became a trickster-storyteller, the very traits for which Anancy was known, and reflecting her constant joking and willingness to make fun of herself. She playfully sketched self-portraits in ways that emphasized the racial confusion that her short, round, dark appearance and love of bright, strange clothing engendered in others, several of whom claimed she was Oriental-looking.
She may have taken lessons from Anancy when trying to deal with her own forms of cultural oppression and the hardships of a woman trying to make her own way in the world and in the male dominated professions of art, publishing, theatrical design, and also suffrage. It is notable that there is a distinctive feminist cast to her Anancy tales that doesn’t exist in the originals. Is this an excuse for appropriation of any kind? Not an excuse but, perhaps, something to consider. “Anancy is an art that woos the loser even as it acclaims the victor.“
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April 13, 2019 at 7:59 am
camillareads
Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention, Mary. Fascinating and insightful…
April 13, 2019 at 11:00 am
PCS and the American Renaissance Tarot Deck — Mary K. Greer’s Tarot Blog | ravenhawks' magazine
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April 13, 2019 at 1:12 pm
mkg
Camilla,
Yes, I love reading an intelligent and knowledgeable discussion about issues and people so close to our beloved topic of tarot.
Mary
April 14, 2019 at 5:04 pm
Rowan Fairgrove
Having had a Jamaican nanny myself as a child, I’m conflicted about how stories told to one in her earliest years, that influenced and were loved, are later seem as appropriation.
April 15, 2019 at 12:50 am
mkg
Rowan,
The question, in part, is who gets to decide if it is appropriation? Is appropriate for my granddaughter to wear a kimono for Halloween that was made for me when I lived in Japan as a child? Time, place and context may be everything. And the answer might change every generation or two.
Added: How do you think Jamaicans might feel about you earning a living by dressing up and using the patois of a Jamaican storyteller?
Mary
June 7, 2019 at 5:06 pm
Stella aka "fennario"
Appropriation was common in her time, but it is wrong under any circumstances. I understand that her motivation may have been her love of the stories and the people who told them, and wanting to share that, but that doesn’t excuse it, and it really WAS minstrelry. If your grandparents had a Black maid who told you stories, you wouldn’t go on a tour imitating her, complete with a mock accent.
A better solution would have been to work up a presentation with an actual Jamaican person (who could surely have used the money). But I don’t know if this would have been allowed in the UK then.
When Hollywood didn’t allow POC to play lead roles, these were played by white actors. There’s a spectrum here: I’d much rather see Chaney Sr.’s Yen Sing in “Shadows” than Step’n’Fetchit in ANYTHING, but even the best of these movies stand as a testament to how stupid and evil humanity can be.
Cringeworthy though this is, I haven’t relegated PCS to the trash pile. People are complex, and the more we know about someone, the more normal and expected it is to feel more than one way about them. I’m sure people will be rushing to defend her “no matter what”, but wrong is wrong – even if the person who did wrong also made a beloved deck.
June 10, 2019 at 4:14 pm
Mary K. Greer
Stella,
Times change. Is it wrong for a straight actor to play a gay person (or vice versa), or for a seeing person to play a blind person, for a Caucasian to play a Chinese? (Our local Asian-American theatre company often has to use Caucasian actors in minor roles.) If only there were simple absolutes in life! It becomes even more difficult to look back and say that someone “should have” done things differently, especially in a different time and a different culture. Women should not have been made to bind their feet. Clitoridectomies should never have been allowed in any country. Stating why these things are wrong and have always been wrong is important. Casting blame on individuals for whom the issue in their timeline probably never even came up, or hiding what happened, is not the answer. I welcome dialog.
October 10, 2022 at 2:19 pm
haintbluecreative
This conversation around cultural appropriation is just as intriguing as Pixie. Ms. Greer, I would love to know your theory around Pixie’s true ethnicity. I’m not entirely convinced that her father was her biological, and I’m searching for more information to support claims that she was a woman of color. Thank you, Ms. Greer, for your contributions to Tarot and to the incredibly impressive tome, “Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story.” — Mandy
October 18, 2022 at 3:43 pm
Mary K. Greer
Mandy,
Personally speaking, the only thing that makes sense to me is that Pixie was the daughter of her stated parents and was born in a London suburb as per her birth certificate. The family moved to Jamaica for the first time when she was 11 years old. There is no indication that they were there previously. She was most often described as looking Chinese or Japanese. She also looks like two portraits of her fathers’ father who had dark curly hair. And both sides of the family publicly accepted her and even supported her work, even with an inheritance.