In New Zealand there's a chocolate-coated ice-cream on a stick called 'Topsy,' and as late as the 1980s (when I was a kid) its ads featured a cute little black girl in a red and white polka-dot dress. Reggae and the Cosby Show were both popular at the time and I think, if I considered it at all as a kid, I just assumed the mascot was part of the same sort of thing (hey, black people are cute and fun!). It wasn't until I was at university and reading Uncle Tom's Cabin that I put two and two together and had my mind blown. (What's especially mind-boggling is that a Topsy ice-cream is vanilla in a chocolate shell. Was the ice-cream company calling Topsy an Oreo?) I also finally understood why people said that something was 'growing like Topsy.' That's also still an expression here, albeit one used by the older generation. When I read the passage comparing Topsy and angelic little Eva, I got so irritated. I wanted to take Topsy to one side and tell her she had about eighteen times the spunk of Eva, plus the advantage of not being destined for a morally uplifting Little Nell death, so she should never EVER feel inferior no matter WHAT the narrator said.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-04-13 04:27 am (UTC)I also finally understood why people said that something was 'growing like Topsy.' That's also still an expression here, albeit one used by the older generation.
When I read the passage comparing Topsy and angelic little Eva, I got so irritated. I wanted to take Topsy to one side and tell her she had about eighteen times the spunk of Eva, plus the advantage of not being destined for a morally uplifting Little Nell death, so she should never EVER feel inferior no matter WHAT the narrator said.