Taylor-Reed Corporation

The Taylor-Reed Corporation was an American food manufacturer and packager that operated from 1939 to approximately 1977. It was founded by two Yale classmates (class of 1933), Malcolm P. Taylor (1911-2000) and Charles M. D. Reed (1911-2008), who had worked together on the campus humor magazine "The Yale Record". Initially headquartered near Taylor's home in Mamaroneck, New York, the company soon moved operations a few miles away to Crescent Street in Glenbrook, Connecticut, a light-industrial and residential section of Stamford in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
Taylor-Reed specialized in a handful of consumer snack products, notably Cocoa Marsh which they called a "milk amplifier" or "milk booster" and E-Z Pop popcorn. It also manufactured Q-T Instant cake frosting and a variety of bulk institutional foods.
Cocoa Marsh.
During its early years, Taylor-Reed's main line of business was packaging sugar and chocolate rations for the War Department. In the postwar years, the company's best-known product was Cocoa Marsh chocolate syrup, which advertised heavily on children's programming in the New York City television market during the 1950s and 1960s. For many years the Taylor-Reed plant, with its Cocoa Marsh billboard ("Be strong as a lion!") was a familiar landmark by the Glenbrook station on the New Haven Railroad.
The company would on occasion issue jars of Cocoa Marsh with a toy surprise hidden in a double top. The regular metal jar cover had an additional white top cover approx. 3/4" tall attached with a white plastic strip. The toy surprise was located in this top cover. Other jars came with the pump cover - which could be re-used on a "refill" jar or the jar with the toy, also a re-fill jar.
After partners Taylor and Reed retired from day-to-day business (about 1970) the company gradually ceased operations as a food manufacturer and began to rent out and finally sell its premises. The factory's main driveway off Crescent Street is now officially designated Taylor Reed Place.
E-Z Pop Patent Infringement Case.
In 1963 E-Z Pop figured in a landmark patent-infringement case, with Taylor-Reed as the plaintiff and Mennen Food Products, manufacturer of Jiffy Pop, as the defendant. Taylor-Reed had acquired the patent rights to E-Z Pop popcorn in 1954. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, struck down a lower-court ruling that Jiffy Pop's packaging, in particular its expanding-foil pouch, was equivalent to E-Z Pop's. The Appellate Court found that Jiffy Pop's aluminum foil was compressed in a spiral arrangement and this was a significant improvement on E-Z Pop's "button" compression.

The carrying forth, working through and bearing witness to trauma(s) are memory preservation methods. Great Gram, Gram, Mama and Ursa each carry re-membering(s) in their bodies and in their names. The repetition of Corregidora's is how Great Gram, Gram, Mama and Ursa hold on to what Christina Sharpe calls a "long psychic and material reach" (p. 4) of the traumas of chattel slavery and sexual violence. How they respectively respond to, live, witness and work through these traumas spills out into their interactions with each other and the other Black people they encounter, live with, have sex with and socialize with throughout the text. Ursa is both a witness to generations of trauma, through the re-hearing of the stories and through living with the women who lived the recounted experiences, and positioned to work through its effects in ways that Great Gram, Gram and Mama will never be able to. Ursa also represents what will not be worked through as she cannot/will not create more generations. There is a witness and work stoppage with Ursa and the last man she is with in the novel. At first thought, Ursa's return to Mutt seemed like a choice rooted in an inability to work through the trauma she experienced in her own body and those of her foremothers. Upon deeper reflection, Ursa's return resonates as her way of continuing that work and witnessing through confronting a vehicle of trauma (Mutts verbal abuse, controlling demands and later physical violence) in ways that her foremother did not narrate directly to her, but she senses or realizes. ‘‘In a split second I knew what it was, in a split second of love and hate I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too." (p. 62) Jones leaves the reader in that moment of remembering, re-enacting and mal/attempt towards reversal. 
Sexual and domestic violence.
The initial conflict presented in the novel is how Ursa's fall causes her to lose a fetus and her uterus. While Ursa's neighbors and friends claim that it was an accident, Ursa states that Mutt knocked her down the stairs, indicating that it was an instance of domestic violence. Ursa's mother is also hit repeatedly by Ursa's father when visiting him to return an envelope he sent with money. Since Ursa's grandmothers were raped by their slaveowners, Jones writes a violent history for all of the Corregidora women. Ursa's hysterectomy and the history of violence in her family affect how she navigates her sexuality throughout the novel. 
In critical essays that discuss "Corregidora", the theme of sexual and domestic violence is connected to the themes of trauma and history. Because the violence in Ursa's intimate relationships is reflected in the rape and trauma the Corregidora women underwent in slavery, scholars draw connections between painful collective memories and the violence in the present narrative. Specifically, Joanne Lipson Freed points out the duplication of sexual exploitation in each of the lives of each Corregidora woman. Freed ties the repetition of trauma into the collective memory of the African American community. 
Particularly in Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman's "Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race", Abdur-Rahman reads incest as a motif in contemporary Black women’s literature. Moving from Baldwin to Morrison to Jones to concretize incest as motif, she encapsulates the ways in which incest as a figurative sexual arrangement is conditioned upon an unintelligibility — a “disruptive chronology”, fragmented subjectivities, and traces of the tragic, the obscene, and parodic — made manifest by the line of Corregidora women that ends and finds release with Ursa (Abdur-Rahman 127). The unintelligibility of the text rests alongside her contention that black woman/motherhood and black girlhood “exist along the same continuum of black female representation” — such as Ursa’s incapacity for to speak plainly and her reliance on the blues.
Womanhood and motherhood.
The Corregidora women Ursa recounts in the novel form a matrilineal ancestry. Particularly, Ursa describes the histories of her Great Gram, Gram, and Mama. Ursa describes how the Corregidora women were compelled to "make generations," connecting motherhood to remembering their trauma. Ursa describes a responsibility in her family to become women by bearing children. When Ursa has a hysterectomy, she also concerns herself with how being unable to have children will affect her womanhood. Ursa's loss of a child also connects motherhood and womanhood to the violence in "Corregidora".
Academic articles that evaluate Jones' "Corregidora" recurrently analyze the themes of womanhood and motherhood. Scholars consider how these two topics are connected in the experiences of the Corregidora women. Ifeona Fulani analyzes how the mother-daughter relationships in the novel frame the black female subject. Fulani takes a psychological approach to understanding this correlation, noting the influence of gender and conflict on the community. 
Critical response.
Gayl Jones' use of language in "Corregidora" has been highly regarded since its publication in 1975. Particularly, critics have placed Gayl Jones among a canon of Black women writers for her manipulation of structure and speech as literary devices. Critics have also praised Jones' emphasis on the oral history of African American language. 
Other than the overall favorable critical response Jones has received for "Corregidora", the novel has been critiqued for lacking detailed physical descriptions of its characters. In an interview by Claudia Tate, Gayl Jones describes her intention to draw on the African American tradition of oral storytelling. Tate's subsequent remark that "Corregidora" felt like a private story in her reading forms the critique that the novel is unable to reproduce an oral history.
Writers including James Baldwin and Maya Angelou have commented on "Corregidora" as honest and painful as well as a murky American tale (respectfully). 