For such a tiny building, Aunt Fanny’s Cabin casts a long, dark shadow.
The cabin is so small and non-descript, in fact, that when I went out to Atlanta Road in Smyrna to see it recently, I drove past the structure entirely, without noticing my mistake for a mile.
Perched on the side of a bustling road next to a bank parking lot, the little white clapboard house with a sinking green roof was easy to miss. But not so long ago, it was home to one of the most famous restaurants in Atlanta, welcoming almost exclusively white patrons to step back in time to the same false depiction of slavery and antebellum culture as depicted in the scenes from Gone with the Wind.
For anyone who is white and who grew up near Atlanta in Aunt Fanny’s Cabin heyday, it was known as a special destination, a big night out.
Celebrities were frequent customers. So too, famously, was President Jimmy Carter. We know this because people signed their names in guest books and wrote out autographs for pictures to be displayed on the walls.
Incredibly, going there was not seen as something to be ashamed of in those days, but rather a place to enjoy, a carefree step back in time as light as a trip to Disneyland.
Reporting about the uncertain future of Aunt Fanny’s Cabin has described the restaurant as “controversial,” and having “presented stereotypes of Black people,” and “portrayed images that were derogatory toward Black people.”
But those sanitized buzz words don’t do justice to the deep, even joyous racism embedded in the concept, nor the humiliating work conditions for the Black staff working there.
Archived photos from the 1950s and 1960′s show young Black boys wearing wooden yoked boards around their necks, reciting the menu to tables full of smiling white diners.
Other black staff, often young boys, led patrons in renditions of Black church spirituals and Confederate fight songs.
One song was framed on the wall for patrons waiting in the lobby to read: “Keep your Confederate money, boys, the South will rise again.”
I looked up the lyrics to imagine what it must have been like for Black employees, dressed as antebellum enslaved people, to sing these words as patrons ate dinners of fried chicken or Smithfield ham:
Mister Robert E. Lee and his rebel men,
Surrendered but they said this ain’t the end,
Save your confederate money my friends,
South’s gonna rise again.
That all of this continued well into the 1980s and early 90′s when Ronald Reagan and George Bush were president and the Cosby Show was the highest-rated show on television tells you all you need to know about how real and enduring the acceptance of racism in our culture was and continues to be.
A history of Aunt Fanny’s commissioned by the City of Smyrna details its start as a country store in 1941, opened by Isoline Campbell McKenna, the daughter of a wealthy Cobb County family, and named after Fanny Willis, the Black woman who worked in service to the Campbell family for decades.
An article from The Atlanta Constitution when the shop opened is startling on its own, with Williams described as a “famous colored mammy,” who, “has been in Mrs. McKenna’s family for more than 57 years.”
Eventually the store also sold lunch to workers at the nearby Bell Airplane factory and was later sold to new owners who expanded and intensified the “Old South” theme.
After closing, being repurposed, and eventually falling into disrepair, the fate of Aunt Fanny’s Cabin recently became the focus of intense debate.
Some Smyrna residents called for its demolition, while others, notably the NAACP, argued that it should stay right where it is on Atlanta Road. Keeping it visible and present , they said, would force people in today’s Smyrna to understand what happened there and why it matters today.
One reason it matters today is that Aunt Fanny’s Cabin is not a relic of the Old South, it is a relic of the recent, in-our-lifetimes South. And it’s a reminder Atlanta was still hosting and reveling in ignorance decades after it became the cradle of the Civil Rights movement.
The Smyrna City Council voted Monday night to give the dilapidated building away. It will be relocated to a farm in Carroll County.
The other debate, beyond what to do with the physical cabin, has been how to honor Williams, whose name and cooking brought fame and fortune to its owners, but certainly never accrued to her.
The coalition to keep the cabin in Smyrna had hoped the cabin would to be reimagined to honor her. Others suggested a culinary school to celebrate her contributions to Southern food culture, or a civil rights museum. That will be up to Smyrna and its residents.
But for anyone who went to Aunt Fanny’s Cabin or knows its story now, the way to honor Williams now is to understand that the racism that the restaurant celebrated and embodied did not end with the Civil War era it glorified or the Civil Rights movement or the day it finally closed its doors in the 1990s.
Without the bigotry that the restaurant celebrated, Fanny Williams might have been the owner of the restaurant, and not its namesake. She might have been a student, or a lawyer or a state representative.
Cobb County has changed radically since then. Much of its population is affluent and diverse. Many of its county leaders are Black women. That the cabin became an embarrassment after so many years as an attraction is evidence of how much things have changed in Cobb County and in Georgia.
But we’re not done yet. Aunt Fanny’s Cabin may be leaving Cobb County, but its reality and its lessons about the endurance and damage of racism should never be forgotten.
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