Salted Benne Wafers

For years the only benne wafers I knew were sweet crisp square cookies that came in a green and white tin box with an old-time kerchiefed mammy on the lid. Sometime during the 1960s the black mammy changed to white, still kerchiefed, still grinning, in a revisionist denial of the African slaves who introduced sesame seeds into this country as “bennes.” Oddly enough, more Americans know the unctuous taste of sesame through Near Eastern foods like tahini or sesame pita breads than through the