Transforming Mammy
It’s easy to imagine the mammy figure most people are familiar with today – the large, angry, black woman who while sweet and caring to white kids is volatile and violent to children of her own race – as being a static archetype for black female domestic laborers in the South, but as Kimberly Wallace-Sanders outlines in Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory, this is not necessarily true.[1] While the archetype has always been a harmful depiction of black femininity, its transformations over time point to a societal need to idealize black women as domestic servants and to maintain the expectation for black subordination, especially beyond slavery. Throughout her historical permutations, mammy as cultural figure and object has always functioned to depict black female domestic laborers as racial inferior, and characteristic changes in her history follow changes in the status and agency of black women in America.
According to Wallace-Sanders, mammy as cultural figure begins to proliferate between the 1820’s and 1935, even though this surrogate relationship has existed as long as slavery has been a reified institution in the United States, forcing Black women and men in close proximity to slave owners and their families on plantation homes. Thinking back to some of the historical realities around slavery in the 1820’s, it makes sense that this is the starting point for mythology around the black mammy. The 1820-30’s mark a rise in abolitionist and anti-slavery sentiments, from The Missouri Compromise banning slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri in 1820 and Denmark Vesey plotting one of the most extensive slave revolts of his time in 1822, to Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831 and William Lloyd Garrison beginning publication of the Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper published in the same year.[2] These event exemplify some of the civil unrest and dialogue around slavery during this time period; people were beginning to be divided on the issue of slavery with some people seeing it as a moral flaw (or an increasingly marginalized market) while others depended on slavery as a pillar of their agrarian economy. Further, people who lived among slaves were increasingly terrified by the idea of them becoming inspired by the violent rebellions breaking out all over. Noting this history is important to understanding the function of the earliest mammy figures that begin to appear in Southern fiction.
Wallace-Sanders cites a number of these early mammy depictions, including Granny Mott from The Valley of Shenandoah, Aunt Chloe in Scenes in Georgia, Aunt Judy in Linda, or, the Young Pilot of the Belle Creole, and Nanny from Mississippi Scenes.[3] Common to these depictions, both in abolitionist and pro-slavery works from 1820-1852, is the notion of mammy as docile, extremely loyal, and trusted to white families, but mean and volatile to other slaves. These characteristics are preserved in the later mammy archetypes, but a key characteristic that was different in early fiction was the heterogeneity of the physical features, body types, and racial composition. For example, early works, like The Valley of Shenandoah, feature mixed-raced mammies, such as Granny Mott, as well as racially pure black mammies.[4] None of these early mammies were described as overweight, and mixed race ones could even be described as beautiful, as is also the case with Granny Mott.
Greater standardization around mammy depictions happens following the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852. From 1852 into the turn of the century, what was once a disjointed depiction of individual mammies becomes a singular archetype, reifying mammy as a cultural figure separate from her existence as a historical group of women. Along with earlier characteristics, mammy’s appearance becomes homogenized: “Mammy’s body is grotesquely marked by excess: she is usually extremely overweight, very tall, broad-shouldered; her skin is nearly black.” These coinciding timelines point to the material influence mammy has on southern comfort and national discourse on black women and their evolving status. With the stability of slavery as a nation institution coming under question and, consequently, the potential status and freedom of Black women, the relationship between mammy and white families becomes a site of discourse epitomized by the construction of the mammy archetype, which serves either to naturalize or problematize the interracial dynamics of slavery while always dehumanizing and subordinating Black women.
The construction of the mammy archetype continued after reconstruction, culminating in the commodification of the mammy figure, and reinforcing an expectation of domestic subordination for black women. From the late 19th century into the mid-20th century, the black mammy was transformed from cultural figure to cultural object, beginning with the unveiling of Aunt Jemima at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Aunt Jemima is a fictional character modeled in the tradition of the mammy archetype. Though she does not care for white children, she is a happy go-lucky black woman who is fulfilled in her service to white families. Instead of celebrating her freedom post-emancipation, Aunt Jemima is the image of a former slave so enamored with her role in slavery, that she continues to pretend to be enslaved; she represents a regression in race relations and an idealization of racial relations in southern plantation life. Her characteristics help introduce a resurgence in “happy slave mythology”[5] which in turn act as a justification and explanation for her subjection outside of slavery in the Jim Crow South.
Further, as a commodified image, Aunt Jemima’s narrative become one associated with nostalgic consumption and an “old-time flavor”[6]. Even as she is dehumanized in her characteristics, in her commodification, she is reflected on fondly by southern whites, and is even seen as a positive figure in South memory. Narratives coming out of the Aunt Jemima franchise even portray her as a Civil War heroine, her food and hospitality serving as sustenance and protection for confederate soldiers. We see mammy as commodity circulated from this point on, outside of Aunt Jemima as well. She was used to advertise a variety of household products and was represented by black mammy nipple dolls, mammy postcards, the Beloved Belindy franchise (the mammy to the Raggedy Anne doll), porcelain figurines, and movies about the Antebellum south, such as Gone with the Wind, the pinnacle of old south romanticism.
While creating an expectation for black subjection outside of slavery, the mammy archetype also serves to naturalize this subjection through old south romanticism and happy slave mythology. All of this works together to construct black women as belonging in positions of servitude, this being the appropriate labor for them. As defined in a study by Melissa E. Wooten and Enobong H. Branch, appropriate labor pertains to the idealization of certain bodies in certain positions of labor, indicating “who has been socially defined as suited for a particular type of work.”[7] They explain further: “More than just the association of a group with a particular kind of work, a justification for why they are ‘appropriate’ to that work and therefore represented in one occupation versus another is advanced and becomes pervasive enough over time to be taken for granted.”[8] We can clearly see this phenomenon reflected in the development of the mammy archetype. In Antebellum narratives, the mammy figure reifies the association with black women and servitude that had thus far been compelled. Post-emancipation, this reification intensifies to not only maintain the association, but to also justify societal conditions that designate black women to domestic servitude. These conditions work to take away from the freedom promised by emancipation, and because this position of unfreedom is naturalized and justified by the mammy archetype, it is nothing to be critically examined by the greater society. The unfreedom of black domestic workers was a fact of life, and as Wallace-Sanders writes, “Aunt Jemima’s ‘freedom’ was negated, or revoked, in this role because of the character’s persona as a plantation slave, not a free black woman employed as a domestic.”[9]
Up to this point I’ve discussed the mammy archetype and her theoretical implications on black women in society; now I want to examine the people behind the archetype, the lived experiences of the women pushed into this surrogate role, and how this archetype serves as a reaction against their efforts for agency within slavery and into industrial society. In the Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenges of Womanist God-Talk, black womanist liberation theologian Delores Williams explains the specific conditions of surrogacy experienced by black women in the Antebellum south, as well as post-emancipation. She makes the distinction between “coerced surrogacy and voluntary surrogacy.”[10] As laborers in the domestic sphere, black women, by virtue of the location in which they work, have served as a surrogate within the household for a variety of labor roles; especially in slavery, the role of the black enslaved woman was one of extreme versatility. They were field laborers, cooks, and maids. They labored sexually in forced concubinage, and reproductively, birthing (literally creating) ‘capital’ for slave masters to trade in the domestic slave trade following the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. They raised, wet nursed, and cared for, not only their own children, but also the children of their slave owners, and other children birthed into slavery - they were the ultimate matriarch in plantation life. These are all examples of the coerced surrogacy black women endured in slavery. For all the labor in the home and in agrarian life, black women’s bodies were used as surrogate laborers- performing labor to sustain a home that was not hers as both breadwinner and homemaker. In slavery, the women we call mammy were the appropriate laborers for practically all physical labor in plantation life.
Williams explains that as coerced surrogate, mammy was, of course, highly exploited, but this made her highly skilled and highly valuable on the plantation. She cites narratives of ex-slaves, that talk about how mammy was valued in the social dynamics of the plantation: “An ex-slave woman in Louisiana recalled the unusual respect given to some mammies. She said that “all the niggers have to stoop to Aunt Rachael just like they curtsy to Missy.”[11] It was the value of mammy’s labor that lead to the creation of the Black Mammy Memorial Institute in 1960, so many decades after the abolition of slavery, that sought to institutionalize and create a pedagogy around the craft of being a mammy: “…the institute was to be a memorial where men and women learn… how to work and to love their work.”[12] In this quotation, mammy is even expected to ‘love’, to use her energy to imbue a household with love and affection in addition to laboring, and that was seen as a skill valuable enough to institutionalize. Already in this narrative, the archetype begins to conflict with the real women called mammy. Mammy the archetype, though very good at what she does, is depicted as dim, as being a jolly fool in her enslavement, and already this seems to be a false representation of how people viewed her in slavery. In the face of this historical reality, I ponder the purpose of this clear falsification in the perceived intelligence of the women called mammy.
Thinking about the valuable labor performed by mammy, it is important to note the ways in which black women have been barred from reaping the rewards of their labor. In fact, this is part of the value of black women in slavery. To be a universal surrogate is to be exploited in ways beyond fathomability – there is an unlimited potential to be placed in any traditional role, as anybody, and as object – and this makes black women a valuable site of experimentation as well. On the plantation, enslaved people in general are test subjects in an experiment of maximizing efficiency; they’re worked around the clock in a grand experiment on how hard the human body can be worked out of brute force and cruelty with bare sustenance. In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, historian Sidney Mintz makes the argument that this brutal model of work and the structures created to sustain it were exported from plantation life into the British work day in the form of manufacturing techniques that were emerging during the First Industrial Revolution.[13] We can also observe this in the conditions endured by Americans in various industries, conditions that eventually prompted the protests and calls for labor reforms in the Progressive Era.[14] Experimentation also occurred in medicine, where black enslaved women were used – without anesthesia - as live models of the human body, in shockingly cruel experiments by the man touted as “the father of gynecology”, James Marion Sims.[15] Post-emancipation, when black women are able to wield their labors, they lose their connection to white society as a site of unlimited experimentation, and perhaps this is why we begin to see discourse emerge calling her an unintelligent fool. Even the homogenized depictions of her physical appearance, of being excessively overweight and pitch black, work to immobilize black women. Depicting Mammy as always overweight and conventionally unattractive also takes away from the idea that she is a physically hard-working woman who deserves common respect as potential colleague, co-worker, and neighbor in society. It plays on fatphobic notions of health and beauty, that inform racist understandings of human worth. These insults are a bitterness and a recognition of the value she generated in plantation life and in American society at large. Even more so saliently, it is a reaction against the potential power of skilled black female laborers receiving the monetary value they brought to plantation homes for centuries.
Another historical inaccuracy depicted in the mammy archetype is the idea of her being loving and loyal towards white families, but hateful of every one of her own race. We can understand this to be an inaccuracy when we think about it in relation to Harriet Jacob’s memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and her experiences as an enslaved mother; as analyzed by Wallace-Sanders in Mammy, her loyalty and obedience came out of love and protection for herself and her children.[16] In Sisters in the Wilderness, Williams recounts a similar narrative: “…historian Eugene Genovese makes the point that while mammies were devout in their care of white children and families, they were also just as dedicated to their own families and the well-being of black people. They often interceded to prevent slaves from receiving floggings and abuse, and they performed other services beneficial to the slave community.”[17] Though these examples of black solidarity can be found in accounts of slavery, this image of the black hating mammy proliferated and persisted nonetheless. When we understand this incapacity for black love as an affirmation of inferiority, or self-hate, we can also see this depiction as another devaluation of mammy’s labor. For if her happiness depends on the service of white families, is white society not doing her a favor in allowing her into their homes to serve them? Why should she receive considerable compensation if her entire sense of self seems to depend on her service – is her fulfillment not her compensation?
Depicting mammy as foolish, as excessively overweight, and as self-hating, opens the door for her dehumanization, in ways that allude to so many systemic prejudices prevalent in American society – ableism, fatphobia, and racism most particularly. All of this demonstrates an objective to deteriorate the value attached to mammy in slavery, to orient her labors as less than the value she accrued in slavery, and to detach her labor from value in the social imaginary, and resultantly, any material valuation (in the form of fair compensation for the sheer amount of physical and emotional labor involved in domestic labor) that might have allowed these women we call mammy to completely focus their skills on their own lives in their own homes. The proliferation of the Mammy archetype both enabled (in its able to affect a societal devaluation of mammy) and justified (in its incapacitation of black women of having skilled labor) the market devaluation of domestic labor.
The results of this market devaluation of domestic labor continues to be visible in society today; its leaves black and brown women in a state of perpetual “voluntary surrogacy”: “… black women, after emancipation, could exercise the choice of refusing the surrogate role, but… poverty pressured [them] into certain surrogacy roles…”[18] We see this in the ways that black and immigrant men and women continue to be exploited by wealthy, white society. In Some Women’s Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and the Limits of Legal Reforms, Terri Nilliasca explains, that the reason that domestic workers are subjected is “the social construct of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sphere”[19] that originates out of the transition from agrarian society into the US Industrial Revolution. “In this new economy, only labor outside of the home became compensated by a wage, rendering housework as unpaid labor.”[20] I would argue that the creation of the Mammy archetype was a key intervention in the social discourse that yielded this separation. She further points out that most domestic workers today are immigrant women of color, and argues that the history of US imperialism and colonization are an important part of the conversation around domestic workers of color.[21] This is yet another example of mammy as a site of experimentation; Nilliasca explains that the model of displacement and subordination being implemented in developing countries today comes out of the institution of slavery and the realities of social surrogacy for black enslaved women.
Repeatedly we can see the mammy archetype and the women called mammy used as a site of discourse. As Kimberly Wallace-Sanders explains: “… the representations of the mammy’s body is the site where fiction, history, autobiography, memoir, and popular culture meet in battle over the dominant representations of African American womanhood, and African American motherhood… Focusing on the mammy’s body… means seeing the body in a metonymic relationship to personhood… as transitional object for a nation moving from one developing stage to another.”[22] From slavery to emancipation into the Industrial Revolution and modernity, mammy has been a tool, a standard, and a catalysis for understanding and imploring societal change in a society that has always exploited the labors of the women given this title.
[1] Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory, (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008): 7. [2] Deneb Pulsipher, “African American History Timeline”, BlackPast, Accessed December 9, 2019, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history-timeline/. [3] Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory, 16. [4] Wallace Sanders, 17. [5] Wallace-Sanders, 61. [6] Wallace-Sanders, 69. [7] Melissa E. Wooten, and Enobong H. Branch, "Defining Appropriate Labor: Race, Gender, and Idealization of Black Women in Domestic Service", Race, Gender & Class 19, no. 3/4 (2012): 292-308. [8] Wooten and Branch, Ibid. [9] Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory, 61. [10]Delores Williams, “Social-Role Surrogate: Naming Black Women’s Oppression”, in Sisters in the wilderness: the challenge of womanist God-talk, (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1993), 60. [11] Williams, “Social-Role Surrogate: Naming Black Women’s Oppression”, 62. [12] Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 74. [13] Sidney W. Mintz,Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. (New York, N.Y: Viking, 1985.) 19-73. [14] “The Progressive Era”, Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt Glossary, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, Accessed December 13, 2019, https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/progressive-era.cfm. [15] Brynn Holland, “The ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ Performs Shocking Experiments on Slaves”, History.com, A&E Television Networks, LLC, December 4, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves. [16] Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory, 51. [17] Williams, “Social-Role Surrogate: Naming Black Women’s Oppression”, 63. [18] Williams, 61. [19] Terri Nilliasca, “Some Women's Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and the Limits of Legal Reform”, Michigan Journal of Race & Law 16 no.2 (2011): 377-410. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol16/iss2/1/, 382. [20] Nilliasca, 389. [21] Nilliasca, 385. [22] Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory, 3.
Works Cited
Holland, Brynn, “The Father of ‘Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking Experiments on
Slaves”. History.com. A&E Television Networks, LLC. December 4, 2018. https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. (New York, N.Y:
Viking, 1985.)
Nilliasca, Terri. “Some Women's Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and
the Limits of Legal Reform.” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 16 no.2 (2011): 377-410. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol16/iss2/1/
Pulsipher, Deneb. “African American History Timeline.” BlackPast. Accessed December 9,
2019. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history-timeline/.
“The Progressive Era (1890 – 1920)”. Teaching Eleanor Roosevelt Glossary. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project. Accessed December 13, 2019. https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/glossary/progressive-era.cfm.
Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: a century of race, gender, and Southern memory. (Ann
Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. 2008.)
Williams, Delores S. “Social-Role Surrogate: Naming Black Women’s Oppression.” in Sisters
in the wilderness: the challenge of womanist God-talk. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. 1993.)
Wooten, Melissa E., and Enobong H. Branch. "Defining Appropriate Labor: Race, Gender,
and Idealization of Black Women in Domestic Service." Race, Gender & Class 19, no. 3/4 (2012): 292-308.