Voices From the Shadows
THE FOLLOWING text and illustrations provide a visual and narrative CONTEXT for the compelling nanny portraits in this exhibit. They offer evidence of the fierce and fascinating debate about how the relationship between African American women and white children should be represented.
The examples range from 19th century southern plantation fiction to 21st century poetry by prize-winning poet Natasha Tretheway. The Works offer perspectives from both African Americans and white authors, giving voices to the silent figures in the portraits. Some of the examples are well known, and some are more obscure. This journey raises more questions than answers.
A Different View
In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe presents an abolitionist's view of slavery and its devastating impact on African American families. Eliza chooses to run away to save her child from being sold. In this illustration, she asks Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe to help her escape.
Southern Literature & The Mammy Character
In the 19th century, both abolitionist and pro-slavery authors constructed fictional versions of slave life in which the surrogate mothering of white children is the primary motherhood experience for enslaves women.
Before Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), pro-slavery authors used images of enslaved women with a white child as a symbol of racial harmony. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Aunt Chloe is characterized as preferring young Master George to her own children, but Eliza’s desperate determination to free herself and her son from bondage countered that depiction.
By 1853 more than 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold. By 1856, more than thirty “Anti-Tom” novels had been written and published in response. Aunt Phillis’ Cabin by Mary Eastman (1852) is one example.
Frederick Douglass
There is a rich history of African American responses to the mammy stereotype. One example is Frederick Douglass’s revised portrait of his mother from his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1`845). In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1854), Douglass transforms his mother from someone he barely remembered into a heroic slave mother. Douglass’ revision is a historic rebuttal to the mammy characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin who are not represented with their own children.
The Crisis
The formula of the mammy stereotype is subverted by The Crisis editor, author, and Harvard-educated professor W. E. B. Du Bois. In his essay, “The Black Mother,” Du Bois criticizes slavery apologists directly:
"Let us hope that the black mammy, of whom so many sentimental tears have been shed, has disappeared from American life. She existed under a false social system that deprived her of husband and child."
"Mammy" by Adeline Reiss
In 1917, The Crisis published "Mammy, A Story" by Adeline F. Ries. In this story, mammy is not a symbol of racial harmony, but a symbol of African American maternal tragedy.
Summary: Mammy raises both a white baby Shela [sic] and her own child Lucy. When Shiela gives birth, Lucy is taken away from her mother to care for the new baby. A year later, the stress of childcare causes Lucy's premature death. Mammy travels to Lucy's funeral where she says that she is too upset to attend her own daughter's funeral. Mammy stays behind to look after Shiela's baby boy; she then takes the child to the ocean and drowns him.
The Black Mammy Memorial
In 1911 a small group of southerners drew up a proposal to build “The Black Mammy Memorial Institute” in Athens, Georgia. The institute’s supporters believe the school would serve multiple purposes:
- It would honor the African American slave women who served as surrogate mothers and faithful slaves;
- it would rectify the shortage of domestic servants caused by black migrations to the North;
- it would reproduce the mammy’s so-called “best qualities” in the next generation of African Americans, teaching cooking, cleaning, sewing and child care.
Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South
African American educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown published Mammy: An Apperal to the Heart of the South (1919) in an effort to raise money for her school for African Americans, the Palmer Memorial Institute, North Carolina. Mammy is Brown’s semi-allegorical tale about the failure of white southerners to properly support aging African American servants even as they extol the loyalty of their family mammy.
The New Negro and “The Brown Madonna”
W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Black Mother” announced a new representation of African American maternity as an emblem of the New Negro Movement (aka Harlem Renaissance). This is most apparent in the frontispiece of Alaine Locke’s seminal work The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925). German artist Winold Reiss’ drawing of “The Brown Madonna” depicts an African American mother with her own child.
The Gift of Black Folk
In the last chapter of his book The Gift of Black Folk (1924), W. E. B. Du Bois criticized white southerners for their violence against African Americans while simultaneously singing the praises of their loyal and devoted mammies.
“Above all looms the figure of the Black Mammy, one of the most pitiful of the world’s Christs. Whether drab and dirty drudge or dark and gentle lady she played her part in the uplift of the South. She was an embodied Sorrow, an anomaly crucified on the cross of her own neglected children for the sake of the children of masters who bought and sold her as they bought and sold cattle. Whatever she had of slovenliness or neatness, of degradation or of education she surrendered it to those who lived to lynch her sons and ravish her daughters. From her great full breast walked forth governors and judges, ladies of wealth and fashions, merchants and scoundrels who lead the South. And the rest gave her memory the reverence of silence. But a few snobs have lately sought to advertise her sacrifice and degradation and enhance their own cheap success by building on the blood of her riven heart a load of stone miscalled a monument.”
Gone With The Wind
Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936) became a best-selling classic of fictionalized southern life that was later immortalized in film (1939). Mitchell affirms the mythology that mammies were a “special breed” of enslaved women in her characterization of “Mammy,” whose familial ties have been sacrificed so she may belong more fully to the family who owns her. Removing her from contact with her own race, she does not even have a name for herself other than “Mammy.”
Dessa Rose
The novel Dessa Rose by Sherley Anne Williams (1986) is based on two historical incidents. In 1829 a pregnant slave woman (Dessa Rose) led a revolt against slave traders, and in 1830 a white women (Rufel) sheltered runaway slaves. The book combines the two stories, with the two women meeting. In one scene Rufel and Dessa Rose have a conversation about Rufel’s love for her mammy, with Dessa Rose insisting that she didn’t even know her real name, saying: “‘Mammy’ ain’t nobody name, not they real one.”
South to a Very Old Place
South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray (1971) is a travelogue of his trip through the South in the late 1960s. He critiques many well-known southern authors and historians: Joel Chandler Harris, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward, asking:
“[If your mammy] was so magnificent as you no claim, how come you let other white folks disrespect and segregate her like that?” and “How can fellows like you be so enthusiastic about her and so ambivalent about her brothers and sisters?”
Like One of the Family
Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life by Alice Childress (1956) offers a different version of African American domestic work from the one represented in the novel and the film The Help by Kathryn Stockett (2009).
Mildred’s employer says: “We just love her [Mildred]. She’s like one of the family and she just adores our little Carol. . . . We don’t think of her as a servant.”
Mildred addresses this by responding: “In the first place, you do not love me; you may be fond of me, but that is all. In the second place, I am not just like one of the family at all! The family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen . . . I am not just like one of the family . . . I do not just adore your little Carol. I think she is a likeable child, but she is also fresh and sassy.
“Help, 1968”
Natasha Trethewey begins “Help, 1968 (previously titled “Transfiguration, 1968”) by comparing this Robert Frank photograph “of a white infant in the dark arms / of a woman who must be the maid,” with her own mother when she writes, “I think of my mother and the year / we spent alone—my father at sea.” Trethewey remembers that her mother, whose skin was darker than hers, was mistaken for her nanny: an assumption based on the prevalence of African American women taking care of white childre
