Old Aunt Dinah's Policy Dream Book.
First Appearance in Print of African American Folk Character
"Aunt Dinah"
One of Two Known Copies
Of First American Numbers Gambling Book
Old Aunt Dinah. Old Aunt Dinah's Policy Dream Book. Comprising a brief Collection of Dreams, Which Have Been Interpreted and Played with Wonderful Success to the Dreamer. [New York: Wm. S. Murphy, ND: but ca. 1850's].
16mo; (4 5/8 x 3"); unpaged but 32 pp., plus wrappers, frontispiece, illustration on title, full-page illustration on p. 32; original printed blue glazed wrappers printed in black, with title illustration on front and Murphy's ads on back; covers rubbed, soiled, creased; internally quite clean and a very good copy.
First Edition. This book, incorporating divination from dreams with numbers, appears to be an aid in playing "Policy", an illegal (and now obsolete) numbers game. However, it is most assuredly a lure to attract participants. This numbers game was most popular in African-American communities but was also played by whites.
Ostensibly the book was written by an African American woman, as seen by this quote from the Preface, "...the Authoress feels perfect confidence in offering these interpretations as her successful experience in the Lottery." This appears to be the first use of "Aunt Dinah," an important American Folk figure, in print. "Aunt Dinah" is an African American slave woman, who is always situated in the kitchen, in control of that domain as cook. She is not exactly a "mammy" figure; rather, there is an element of power or influence about her. Harriet Beecher Stowe uses "Aunt Dinah" as a character, as well as her kitchen, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and it is accepted that Stowe made use of existing characters or character-types in her great novel.
Whether Old Aunt Dinah's Policy Dream Book pre-dates Stowe's novel or not, the folk character "Aunt Dinah" probably does. As with other American folk figures, "Aunt Dinah" appears in songs. Immortalized in "I've Been Working on the Railroad" with the addition of "Someone's In the Kitchen [with Dinah]", she has entered American consciousness. While the exact origins of this tune are unknown, some trace it back to a "Louisiana Levee" song of African Americans. The lines asking Dinah to blow her horn most probably refer to the signal for workers to stop picking and loading cotton for lunch. Scott Joplin, in his powerful American opera Treemonisha (1911) has Dinah blow her horn as a signal for the cotton pickers to come in for lunch. The aria closes Act II, and is titled, "Aunt Dinah Has Blowed de Horn". By the second half of the nineteenth century, "Aunt Dinah" appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as a mechanical bank, to sell molasses, as a temperance advocate, and as the sponsor of quilting bees (also a famous jazz song). More recently, the Philadelphia Theatre Company mounted a production of Michael Gilliam's Old Aunt Dinah's Sure Guide to Dreams and Luck Numbers (1994-5).
The American Antiquarian Society lists their copy of Old Aunt Dinah's Policy Dream Book, previous to this the only known copy, as being authored by "Aunt Dinah". The text is illustrated with two woodcuts of "Old Aunt Dinah", but these images are caricatures of the nastiest sort. The illustration on the final page shows two African-American men conversing, in a richly depicted southern landscape with a hut and shed, palm and other trees and plants. One of the men is seated on an overturned basket, with a large pitcher at his feet, the other is standing with a shovel in his hand.
Page 6 contains the twenty-six letters of the alphabet numbered 1 to 26 with a 27th number indicating two or more numbers can be combined. Below this the text reads, in part:
To dream of seeing...any particular letter of the Alphabet, it is good to play the number corresponding with the number of the Alphabet. If you dream of several letters it is good to play the numbers corresponding with the letters in a gig or saddle; or if
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