I think the difference with a retainer-type servant is that that type of self-centered relationship extends to the adults in the household as well. The self-centered love children have for their parents is supposed to evolve over time into a more sincere relationship: when I was little I loved my mommy because she took care of me. As an adult, I love and admire my mother with a lot more depth. With a “mammy” (and IME at least, they are more often hispanic than black these days), everyone’s attitude toward the “mammy” stays immature.
I think part of it is the inevitable class gap caused by the fact that no one who could afford to have a “mammy” in the household would consider being a “mammy” an acceptable life. No one loves their mammy so much that they decide not to go to college and instead find some other young family that THEY can be mammy for.
There is also an inherent weirdness about having someone that you are proud to consider a member of the family, but that no one thinks of as having an equal claim to the family’s wealth/lifestyle/patrimony. I think the way people resolve this cognitive dissonance is by treating the class difference as inherent: Mammy doesn’t want all that/Mammy would be uncomfortable with that/Mammy isn’t that sort. This is all done very sub-consciously, but it tinges that relationship.
All this combines together to make Mammy a role in the household, not a person, and it’s true for everyone, not just the kids. So while the kid’s love for their parents and their mammy may be equally self-centered, they aren’t the same: they will eventually develop a more complex relationship with their parents, but the relationship with the Mammy stays static: it’s a quality inherent to her, not to their age.
That’s what the “Mammy” stereotype is. A everlasting fount of unconditional love and devotion. But not all maids fit this bill. I’m sure some were quiet and aloof, yet competent enough not to warrant being fired. Others were probably kinder to their charges than their own parents were, but it wasn’t a persona as much as their own personality. In other words, it’s complicated.
I think of the maid from classic Southern literature. Calpurnia from “To Kill a Mockingbird”. She wasn’t a character who oozed love and affection. In fact, she showed herself to be quit stern and no-nonsense. She’s a fictional character, but I have no doubt that there were real Calpurnias, whose real and at-work personalities weren’t probably in much conflict. They were not Mammies. Mammy existed in slave times, when putting on a good act meant escaping a life burning out in the sun or worse. But I don’t think the stakes were quite as high later in history, when maids were just maids.
What does love mean when you’re a little kid? Anything that’s warm and protective and nurturing will elicit love out of a kid. Is it the same kind of love that a mature adult has for an equal? Of course not. But does that mean it’s not love? If so, what is it? What would that emotion be called?
Some people–myself included–don’t like to think of love as a feeling. It is a feeling, but loving-kindness is manifest in action and is easier to define and IMHO understand. Even if someone secretly hates me, if they are treating me with loving-kindness, then my brain will react positively to this and will return with loving emotions. To question motives would make me paranoid, so it’s easier just to focus on the actions themselves rather than the “why” behind them.
If we thought about this too hard, we could ask how it’s possible to truly love anyone, since everyone keeps a part of themselves to themselves. We’re all playing a “role” of some type for self-centered reasons. We all wear a mask.
Didn’t you ever have a teacher that you loved growing up? Sure, maybe you didn’t really love her like you would a family member, but you still felt something strong, more than just “liking”. Would it be wrong for you to feel this way? How can an emotion, especially one like love, be wrong? You can’t help how you feel.
Aww…you’re sweet. I read yours, too. You’d be heaps of fun to hang out with.
You know, maybe that is true. At least with Miss Alice. With Miss Irene, yeah, from a grownup perspective, sure. But I wasn’t a grownup, I was a little kid. We show lots of people our different faces, even in our social circles. Miss Irene retired when I was seven or so, and I really didn’t have any idea at all about business or money or whatever then. She gave me hugs and she cleaned up my skinned knees and she told me to mind my momma or I’d get it twice as bad from her if she found out about it. And she described herself as my ‘black momma’ long after she was employed by us, and she spoke to the teenage and young adult me when I visited her in the nursing home about her ‘white babies’ and what they were all doing now and what they grew up to be and how much she loved us to come see her.
I can’t argue you’re wrong. I just know that what I feel for her is love, as much as it is for my mom. You’re arguing that I loved a person who wan’t really being herself. Ok, fair cop, but I did love the person who was with me all day. I loved her as much as I did any of my other primary caregivers when I was a kid.
/nitpick - neither of them wore a uniform, I’d be horrified if they had!
Yes, of course - I can’t say that I know for sure they loved me and my family, or that they were in it for the cash. I think they did, and maybe that’s just pretty to think so. I can say for sure that I loved the person they were around me, and if that wasn’t who they really were then I’m not sure how that changes that.
Can I just say though - the idea of money being involved isn’t a bad thing. They were both desperately poor, uneducated women of their era. Both of them had lots of kids and husbands that left when the kids were little. Miss Alice told me things about her husband that would curl your hair, he was awful and abusive towards her. They didn’t really have the skills - or even the means of getting the skills - to do more than they did. If not working for us, they would have worked for big institutions, Miss Alice did just that. They’d have been in service job somewhere looking after somebody. It was what was available to desperately poor black women in that time and space. That’s horrible all by itself, don’t misunderstand, but as a gross generalization I think it’s true.
Is it really bad that they were working for us, who at least made some attempt to look after them and their families, however stupid and patronizing and misguided that might seem, than to be working as a cleaner in a hospital, a laundress in a children’s home or a nurses aid in a nursing home? Was it really worse to have kids and families who did feel some emotion toward them? Even if they had to subliminate part of their personalities for some of the time? If it was awful, why did they stay for so long? Why say things you don’t have to say to someone who isn’t paying you when you’re an old, old lady in a nursing home?
Like I said, I just don’t know. And I totally get what you’re saying, and maybe I’m an outlier in terms of the relationship I think I had but flat out, I loved both of them and I think they loved me in their own way, no matter how much money was involved or not.
I would like to bring up the charge that it’s patronizing to, for instance, give the nanny/housekeeper extra money or ‘remember her at Christmas’ with gifts, or help send her grandchildren to college. Would it be more respectful to NOT do these things? If this person sat up nights nursing your sick children, kissed away countless booboos, comforted your elderly and dying, why wouldn’t you want to help them monetarily if you had the means? Is it really some sort of triumph for her as a person if you respect her too much to pay her a dime over what her agreed-upon salary is?
I am also a Southerner from Mississippi. To the best of my knowledge, none of my relatives grew up with any sort of ‘mammy’ figure, at least not since slavery ended – and nannies at least had the power to quit and walk away, and slaves did not.
Do be careful with your generalisations, lest ye be misunderstood – I called my mother “Mammy” until I was five or six, and this was common in Scotland, Ireland, and Northern England at the time.
How can I start other than by saying I respect you? And I admire your restraint. I’ve always thougt that if I’d been born a black man, I woulda been dead a long time ago…(I’m a white female senior citizen.)
drumming my fingers on the desk…My husband & his brother were basically “raised” by a black woman who took care of them, cleaned & cooked. In the 1950s & 1960s. I can barely conceive of the notion…but I know where you’re coming from.
As a woman, I want to tell you that I’m finishing up a poem called, “BURN.”
I started it 20 years ago when my husband told me I couldn’t do something. Don’t remember what it was. Doesn’t matter—it was the same stuff I’d heard from my daddy & from society my whole life. I always thought, “But if I’m so full of myself, & like me so much, doesn’t that count for something? Aren’t I as important as any king?” (because I knew my own mind.)
It’s taken me 20 years because I raised children & helped more members of my family die than I care to count. But I worked on it, sporadically, the whole time. (Wrote a whole lot during that time, but couldn’t get a handle on what all I was trying to say in BURN.)
It’s close to completion. Right now I’m in what I call “my bliss”…searching for The One Right Word." (The fun part after the sweat.)
If you come to the Straight Dope often, look for me. (I just found it a few months ago.) I’m wary; don’t even trust Facebook.lol So I can’t post my email or know how to go thru a 3rd (secure) party, but…I want to let you know when it’s done. I think it speaks for a lot of us. And once again, I admire your restainst.
I had a black maid growing up. Not live-in, she just came over twice a week. I liked her a lot, and she sincerely liked me and my family. I spent a few weekends with her family when my parents went out of town. I used to make us some scrambled eggs and we’d watch the Price Is Right when I was out of school in summer. She was a very straight shooter, not afraid to tell you what she thought, and only worked for people she liked. She wasn’t my “mammy”, though, just a wonderful person…she probably would’ve laughed and told me not to be giving her any of that shit if I had called her that.
As humans, we’re programmed to love young mammals. People love little puppies, little kitties, and little human babies. When someone such as a mammy fulfills a mother-role – despite not being the biological mother – it seems like it would be inconceivable to not love your charge. (Most) Step-parents do it all the time, and that’s when taking the charge at older ages.
Obviously I dispute your assertion, and obviously you’d dispute mine, and so I wonder if there’s any real type of data out there that leans towards one side or the other.
(In any case, someone that “sucks it up” for up to 18 years for a crappy paying job has problems in judgment.)
I think the difference is that Mammy is supposed to project the illusion that she loves her charges like her own: her charges, on the other hand, are free to love her all they want, but there’s this bedrock understanding that they have a place in the home no matter what, but that she can be turned out.
Or absolutely no other options, which was often the case 40 or 50 years ago.
It is possible for someone in a subordinate role to still have affection for their employer that isn’t faked. No doubt these southern maids and nannies knew others in the same role, and I’m sure they were aware who were the good employers and who weren’t, and were grateful for the wages (particularly in times and places where there were few options for black women) and the extras above and beyond those wages.
What always creeped me out (northerner that I am) was the pretense that these servants were somehow “part of the family”. No, they’re not relatives, and they’re not treated as real relatives would be. That strikes me as the hypocrisy in the relationship. They may be valued employees, they may be highly valued by a family, there may in fact be warm and friendly feelings on both sides, but the servants are not family. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were instances where after one of these women left employment they still remained friendly with former employers, they still cared for the children they helped raise, but they were never truly part of the family in the sense of a real relative would be. One of the marks of this, to me, would be as someone mentioned upthread, that no one in these families employing mammies would want a child of theirs to become a mammy. What would be the reaction of someone in the mammy-employing social class wanting to marry one of these women?
I don’t think the relationship was entirely evil - a respectable form of employment is valuable. Helping to put a mammy’s child through college would be no small thing. That doesn’t change the inherent inequity in the society in which those people lived. How many of those women would have chosen a different path if one had been open to them? If they made the best of their lot in life that’s a good thing, but how much better would their lives have been if they had not been so constrained by narrow roles?
This makes me consider all the types of employment that ask (perhaps unfairly) too much of the employed. I then considered if there were similar severely unfair situations in modern society and it didn’t take long to find the ‘fresh out of college, work’em til they dry up, 80+ hours a week’ programming jobs that exist out there. The pay is good, but you sacrifice EVERYTHING ELSE for it. And it does you no good if you’re not there to spend it…or the company goes tits up before your stock options are worth anything.
The second thought was that ‘Black woman paid to raise the kids’ and ‘loving those kids’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible to do both, because life is complicated like that.
And then I think my three years in Georgia growing up don’t come close to qualifying me to talk about it with authority and I’ll shutup now.
About 10 years ago or so, PBS had a reality show called Manor House, set in England, where they recreated what life would be like living in a great house with a staff of servants in the early 1900s. They recruited a middle-class family to play the aristocratic family, and they recruited a bunch of young middle-class kids to play the servants (plus an older man whose grandfather had been a butler to be the butler).
It was both hilarious and frightening to see how these various people took to their roles. On the last show, as everyone is leaving, the people playing the aristocratic family were sobbing and saying how much they had loved their servants and would miss them, and the people playing the servants couldn’t wait to get out of there and saying how much they had hated their masters’ guts. I don’t remember if the family was told how their “servants” had felt about them or not, but I imagine they would have been shocked to learn the truth.
It was so interesting, because before the show all of these people would have been at roughly the same social level and the show only lasted a couple of months, but that was enough time to develop this profound disconnect between the servants and the served.
Reminds of a couple of the secretarial jobs I held in corporate America. Mind you, I did that sort of work for over 20 years, and I was good at it. Most of the people I worked for I genuinely did give a damn about, and there were good feeling on both sides, and I did my best for them.
A couple of those people, however, demanded utter servitude - one attempted to block my going to my grandmother’s funeral because I was so “needed” at work I couldn’t be spared for a day (in which case, why wasn’t I making more money, if I was so damn irreplaceable?) and called me disloyal when I went to grandma’s funeral anyway because, I suppose, I was supposed to be more loyal to that person than my own family? Another expected me to dote on every need and whim and had nothing but blame for me - if the hotel bellhop wasn’t responsive enough it was somehow my fault. Some of these folks expected me to run personal errands on company time against company policy - even while I was supposed to be also taking care of several other directors or VP’s. And I was supposed to do it all with a smile and never, ever, ever show the least sign of irritation, frustration, or dissatisfaction. I was never to be sick, tired, or complain when stuck at a desk for 6+ hours with no lunch break, no water, no access to a bathroom - in other words, break labor laws and cause myself extreme discomfort all because I was so “loyal” to them. It was OK for them to call me at 3 am, at home, to ask about some trivial detail but god forbid I ever asked them a question, for a clarification of a request, or even for time off for my own needs and family.
I grew to hate those people. Utterly loathe them. And a check or gew-gaw on Secretaries’ Day never, ever, made up for the crap I took from them. The didn’t treat me as a human being with needs and feelings as authentic as their own.
Does that compare to the mammy situation? I don’t feel qualified to say, really, just that it’s the closest I’ll likely ever be to that.
New owner of the restaurant, he keeps on the old staff, I’m the new staff. He introduces one person as “the matriarch” of the restaurant. She wasn’t. She was a fat old black lady who was a great cook. She showed up, she did her work, she went home. The owner created his own benevolent fantasy about her.
Come Christmas time and who to work the Christmas shifts. I suggested asking who wanted Christmas Day off - not everyone cares, lots of the staff were away from family, it would be just another day. He decides to give this woman the whole three days, ignoring the younger woman with four small kids who really wanted the time off. The schedule goes up. The younger woman looks sad, the old woman is furious. “He’s trying to rob me of the double pay shifts”
That book is exactly what I came in to recommend, but Whynot beat me to it. It is a very enjoyable read, a true book clubs’ darling. And it is exactly about these situations, seen from the view of the Mammy, or “The Help”
I used to work for a daycare and I was paid to love other people’s kids. I never felt less than the people whose kids I watched, just as I don’t feel greater than the cook who makes my meal at a restaurant, or the mechanic who works on my car. Now, I don’t feel less than the people who ask me to perform computer work for them. I genuinely loved many of the kids I watched and most of them genuinely loved me. It is similar to the love I feel for my own kids just way less intense. I now send my children to a lady who watches them and I think she loves them and they love her. Maybe it is different because we are the same race.
The real difference is that the Mammys of the past had a dependent relationship on their employers due to the total lack of other employment options. This is not the fault of the employers it was just the reality of life in that time and place. Society has changed so now most people are not dependent on one family for employment and this is for the better but it does not mean that those relationships were not built on genuine love.
As an employee they may have not let their true feelings be known, but as a parent I don’t let my kids know everytime they annoy me and I think that is just part of the role.
Yeah, I didn’t have a Mammy, but my cousins (who lived in what I guess you could call part of the South) did. If she didn’t love them she did a great job of faking it, and when I got older I saw that as a distinct possibility.
But whether she was faking it or not, their experience was of a Mammy. She would chase us out of the kitchen, she wasn’t above giving somebody who misbehaved a smack or two, and she was pretty benevolent, generally. When I say “us” I mean when I was playing with my cousins, but she really did seem to like them a whole lot better than she liked me. Not that I thought she disliked me, but it was a different relationship. And you would think that if she was just a paid liker, she would have liked me just as well as my kin.
Now I got into a lot of trouble on account of this woman.
The next Mammy-type I ran into was the vice-principal of my junior high. This was when there was still segregation, and there were only about 6 black kids out of 300 in the school, but she was the vice-principal and since she was both female and black I have to assume, at that time and place, that she was really qualified.
She was not a Mammy. She was more like a sneaky secret policeman. So there went that stereotype…
Except, to this day, when I see a portly well-dressed black woman somewhere, like heading to the same part of the handbag section I’m heading too, I quake in my boots a little.
And written by a rich white girl who had a [del]mammy[/del] black nanny.
I almost feel slighted at the fact I grew up middle class in a very rural part of the Deep South and yet I never had a wonderfully-close life-lesson-teaching bond-as-thick-as-blood eye-opening relationship with a black domestic when I was a kid. Not once did mournful spirituals erupt from the countryside as she told me an appalling story of injustice. I’ve thought of forming a support group for those like me- Adult Children of Absentee Mammies.
Actually my family never had black domestic help in the “wear a white apron and come to the back door” sort of way in my lifetime (they had in the past). In my memory we just had a girl (so called because she was about 16, not the “I’ll send my girl to the store”) who stayed with me daytimes for a few weeks while my parents were at work. She was twelve toed, lazy (spent all day talking on the phone or taking naps), and I strongly suspect mentally ill (very eccentric acting) and we pretty much stayed out of each other’s way. My parents paid her next to nothing (a junk car to her mother and maybe $5 per week*) and she gave them what they paid for. I liked her well enough and I suppose she liked me well enough for what it was but hardly any bonding.
My mother was not from a wealthy family- her father was a construction worker on the railroad and he made a living but never more than middle class- and yet her mother had two black female servants: a full time maid/cook, a part time laundress (this was the day of the ringer washer and sometimes the boiling cauldron) and an as needed seamstress. This was par for the course- everybody who could afford it had black help and they were amazingly inexpensive. My mother and aunt used to commiserate all the time when hearing about “how bad people used to have it” by talking about “every woman who wasn’t too poor to feed her kids had a maid”. What’s interesting is that white women who were too poor to have maids and had to work outside the home seem, at least anecdotally, rarely to have been maids- you never think of white women, even among the shack-in-a-field variety, working as domestic help: they worked in the fields, as waitresses, in factories, even as “stay at home hookers” (every little community had one) but I don’t think I’ve ever known of a white she-maid among the old-time folks I knew. In that ever weird striated jigsawed mass of tendons and tissues and wormholes that is southern race relations, most middle class and higher white women trusted black women much more than they did “white trash”, even if at the same time they’d in some ways regard the white trash girl more as an equal than they would a black person who made the same income as they did.
My mother had a once-a-week maid when she was in college (when she wasn’t working and my father was earning $200 a month- that tells you how much the maid was probably making) who she liked a lot. The maid was also a college student (at Alabama State, the HBCU in Montgomery) and very intelligent and quiet. My parents lived in a tiny house (this was immediately pre Bus Boycott) that didn’t have a dining room, just an eat-in-kitchen, and the maid would bring her lunch and eat on the back stoop. When my mother told her “I really don’t mind if you eat at the table with me in here where it’s cool”, and the maid (I think her name was June) said “I mind”. That’s one of those lines that an actress could say 12 different ways with a different meaning each time and I’ve no idea which would be correct.
When I was a teenager only the really well to do still had twice-a-week-or-more black maids. Today most of the southern families I know who have twice-a-week-or-more domestic help use Hispanics, usually on a “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” legal citizenship basis (or, as I call it, “Self Mexicating”). Black women, even those with no education or training, can not only make as much money flipping burgers but they can get benefits doing it; their grandmothers who worked as maids often worked until they were 85 because their employers didn’t pay Social Security and all on them and I’ve never heard of anybody providing health insurance to a maid. Consequently black women have become unaffordable and most American adults of any color aren’t willing to work for cash-only/no benefits on a more than temporary basis, so the jobs have been filled by immigrants. The black mammy is if not dead then certainly on her back gasping blood and mumbling about the cat she had when she was a little girl.
It’s a way of life that’s dead and should be, but it’s one I’m glad is well documented even if it’s romanticized to hell and back.
*If anybody’s interested in a great late 20th century Southern Gothic story, her family had a good 'un. She was from a very matrilineal family who had a reputation as witches and murderers and were even rumored to have a buried treasure.
