Absolutely. No question. But the mammy role is something far deeper than a subordinate/employer relationship.
I just wikie’d The Help. I don’t know if I will read the book. I have the unexplained feeling that this book would work my nerve.
I am loving all the great posts and stories in this thread.
I am not offended at all for you using my example to start a good thread. However, some of your points are not especially valid in my case but some of them are. Lola didn’t have much family of her own around besides us. She had her own apartment in a subsidized all black complex that was very poor but she stayed at our house from the early morning until the evening. She stayed over when my parents went anywhere.
It was a symbiotic relationship too. I am 38 and she only died a couple of years ago in her 90’s but she was old when I was a baby. She was really smart for person of her background and loved to read but she never learned to drive and didn’t know how to deal with things like paying bills or setting up doctor’s appointments. My mother did all of that stuff for her and took her everywhere she needed to go from shopping to going to see a doctor 50 miles away. She had kids from an early but abusive marriage but they all moved to Houston over 200 miles away. I knew them too but they weren’t around but once every couple of years. Her granddaughters sometimes stayed us when they visited because we had space for them and things to play with.
I am certain in my heart that she loved us as much as we did her and I have some evidence for that. Lola spent her last 10 years in a nursing home and had to have her legs amputated at the knees because of complications from diabetes. I moved away from home when I was 18 and very rarely went back home past my early twenties. About 6 years ago, I was on a trip and happened to notice that the nursing home she was in was very close so I just dropped in for a visit. She was thrilled to see me and we and we had a heartfelt visit with lost of hugs. Her mind was as sharp as ever.
The one thing that was obvious was all the pictures she had spread over her humble little room. She had pictures of her own black family but perfectly mixed in with those were not only pictures of me and my brothers at every stage of life starting as babies but also my wedding photos and pictures of my daughters who she never got to meet. That was the stuff she wanted to look at most because her mobility and space were so limited. Sorry, I think I have something in my eye. I have to go.
I’m the exception in that I didn’t like The Help. It had good moments (my favorite was the story of the “Sugar Ditch” whitetrash bombshell married to the rich good ol’ boy who hires the anything-but-loving Minnie) but most of it was just “Yawn, we’ve read this before” with a totally non-shocking “You mean black domestics had lives and loves of their own and weren’t always totally invested in the white folks they worked for? Who knew?”
When Whoopie Goldberg was offered the movie Corinna Corinna, originally a paint-by-the-numbers insert-sad-spirituals-here movie about a sad-white-child/wise-black-maid that wasn’t even Whoopie Goldberg’s first movie about it (it was at least her third in fact) she agreed only after they made some major changes to the script. For one thing: when she was in Montgomery shooting The Long Walk Home about the Bus Boycott she interviewed several maids from that era and was surprised at how well educated some of them were- she’d always assumed most were barely literate if that but was shocked to learn most of them read well, read for pleasure, and some were even college graduates but the job market in Montgomery for black women with college educations in the 1950s wasn’t exactly booming, so she insisted that Corinna be a college graduate. She also insisted that Corinna have a true blue bonafide interracial romance with her employer (the original was more just her helping him deal with his wife’s death and seeing him into a new romance- she wanted to deal with a white man/black woman realizing they were attracted to each other ca. 1960 [the movie being set in L.A. rather than the south though]). She also wanted to show the “what we say when the white folks aren’t around” aspects, so the f-a-b-u-l-o-u-s Jennifer Lewis played her sister who was the voice of pissed-off-black-maids at the time. Not a great movie, but a cut above most of the “white chillen and the black women who love them” genre.
There’s a great scene in the novel (wasn’t in the movie or the musical) The Color Purple between Sophia and the daughter of the family she works for (the Mayor and his crazy-ass wife). Sophia does feel sorry for her due to the dysfunctional family she lives in, plus she lives there by court order and spends more time with the mayor’s daughter than with her own kids for several years, and the girl is the only member of the family who isn’t at all responsible for her beating and imprisonment. Later, when Sophia is finally liberated from the family’s employ the mayor’s daughter, now married and with a baby of her own still comes around constantly to talk and reminisce and bring her own baby over, and Sophia gets tired of it but accedes because 1- this is the Jim Crow South and she’s a white big shot’s child and 2- the girl is one of the only people who can cook food Sophia’s daughter [who has health problems] will eat.
One day when Sophia’s not in a good mood anyway and the girl is going on and on about her baby and saying “Sophia, isn’t he just the sweetest baby ever? Don’t you just love him?” Sophia explodes and says [I’m paraphrasing] “No, I don’t love him. He’s a baby, he’s cute, but I don’t love him. I suppose in some way I love you, but you’re not my child and I hate your parents. Stop acting like we’re family.” The girl is hurt but does understand somewhat.
Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird was also more 3-D than most domestics in southern fiction. She’s intelligent, well informed/well read, and cares about the kids but is as much a separatist as the white members of the community. One of my favorite scenes in the book is when she ends up having to take Scout and Jem to her own (all black) church, and it’s not a “Ooh, we’re honored to have white children here today!” reception by everybody. (To some it was even more “You’ve brought the enemy to our sacred place.”)
Of course the most famous mammy is Mammy. If you’ve never read the book, she’s far from a docile and “I’se happy jes to be a slave” character- she’ll slap Scarlett down in a minute without a second thought- but her backstory makes you understand her a bit more. She was brought up in her owners’ mansion (speaking French) and never lived in the quarters, so it’s natural she would be snobbish and more at home with white people, and she’s been slave since birth to the women of this family. HOWEVER, she very much understands the fact that she’s free now and even let’s Scarlett know it- now she’s with her by choice, NOT because she has to be (and besides, there’s no where else to go), and she’s as smart if not smarter than any character in the book. One of my favorite scenes that’s not in the movie is when she realizes Scarlett is trying to ensnare Frank Kennedy and she’s appalled- until she thinks it over and realizes “what choice does she have? If she doesn’t he’ll marry Suellen and best case scenario we’re all poor relations eating their scraps, more likely we’re all out on the road and there’s not a lot of employments ops in a devastated economy for a past-her-prime ex mammy”, and that’s when she feels bad about it but she helps Scarlett rouge up and catch him.
Regarding GWTW’s Mammy, Sampiro…Mammy’s was never the ‘I’se happy to jes’ be a slave’ role. She was meant to have some sass and snap to her…it was necessary to rear unruly children.
The issue with GWTW’s Mammy is the same issue as the other mammies: the de-humanizing and de-womanizing of her. What if she had wanted to view herself as the sexy and beautiful one in the house…would that have been acceptable? If she wanted to present herself as a sensual vixen, she would surely find herself out on her tuff.
In other words, the points that you bring up about GWTW’s Mammy aren’t characteristics that refute the ‘mammy’ idea. They are actually points that reinforce the mammy idea.
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I think this is a good example of the inequality of the relationship: it seems important to you that she loved you and your brother like “real family”, but it doesn’t seem like you considered her “real family” to you: you didn’t visit except once, as a drop in. You didn’t take your daughters to meet her. Was she in a nursing home of a quality you’d have left your own mother in for ten years?
Understand, I don’t think you had any sort of responsibility to love or treat her like family. But it’s the nature of the mammy relationship that part of her job–part of what she was paid for–was to be a person who loved you like family, but not to presume to be family herself. I have no doubt she really, truly loved you all. But one of the inherent features of her role is that she was among the family but didn’t have the right to make demands on the family’s resources, either financial or emotional.
We’re told nothing of her sexual history- she might be a virgin or a lesbian or a mother of twelve for all Mitchell says, she was weirdly quiet on the subject. As for free to view herself etc., she wasn’t free to do anything without the leave of Gerald O’Hara. (In the non-canonical Wind Done Gone she has a child by Gerald the same age as Scarlett and wet nurses Gerald’s daughters, but while it may work as parody this would be unlikely due to the character’s age.) Slavery was degrading and dehumanizing on a good day; Mammy’s life (the fictional character or those like her) would have been about as free as you could possibly get under slavery and even then it involved waking before dawn, working non-stop until after sundown, and having no time to devote to anything else; childlessness and unattractiveness would probably be blessings.
Of course no Victorian woman, even the free and highborn, were really at liberty to express their sexuality without being counted a slut. And for every hoop skirted blushing belle there’d have been a dozen or more free white women like the Slattery women, with missing teeth and boobs to their navels and wrinkles and visible melanomas before they were even past childbearing age.
And just to be clear: I am not saying you didn’t treat her well. I am sure you did. I certainly am not saying you failed in any responsibilities to her, because it sounds like you lived up to all the responsibilities one person has toward someone they love. What I am questioning is if you treated her like a mom. which is its own sort of category. You seem really pleased that she loved you as a son, but that doesn’t seem reciprocated.
Off topic, but I have a friend who’s black, gay, and male (not particularly fat though) and once worked as a personal assistant to a wealthy lesbian attorney and her partner in Atlanta where, amongst other duties, he sometimes took care of their daughter. He referred to himself as… you guessed it… the Manny.
Fair point but I didn’t see most of my family much at all during that time and still don’t. We aren’t estranged. We just work and live too far apart to make it more than once every few years. The only member of my family other than my daughters that I get to see more often than semi-annually or less is my mother and that is just for a few hours a year total. My own grandmother died a few years earlier and I didn’t go to the funeral or even send flowers because because I didn’t like her. That wasn’t true for Lola. I did visit Lola during a trip previous when I had the chance to see my grandmother or Lola and chose Lola.
It’s not uncommon for the not-well-off to have a maid in some Caribbean countries - Commonwealth of Dominica springs to mind. It’s happened a few times where someone would be relating a story where “the maid” slips in. European friends would be agast. You guys had a maid … how well off is your family?? Not at all, a girl from the country employed on a monthly basis, live in, going home maybe once a month.
I don’t think that’s unique to mammies, though. In general I don’t think older/bigger women are seen as attractive regardless of race or status.
Point is, they aren’t allowed to view themselves that way. I thick, buxom big tittied, big bottomed black woman is viewed in her culture, by her men as sexy, and she often takes on that viewpoint for herself. A mammy better not try that… She better act as if NO ONE would find her sexy.
One of the stories from Ken Burns’ The War is about the sudden black prosperity that came from the shipbuilding industry when the government basically told employers “we don’t have time for this racial bullshit, we need ships” and factories were required (in some cases forced at risk of losing their contracts) to integrate their swollen workforce. For many black people, both men and women, this was the first time they’d ever earned a decent wage, a few even serving in authority over white people.
A story told in The War is of all the white people who were furious at losing their maids as they either went to work in the war effort or else for the first time were able to be stay-at-home moms and housewives. One of the people interviewed from Mobile remembered a nice car stopping by a sidewalk where some black women were walking to the shipyards and saying “Hey girl” (this to a grown woman), “you or someone you know need work? I’ll pay twenty five dollars a week plus bus fare for a good maid.”
The black woman said, in stride, “If you find somebody let me know. I’ll pay 'em thirty plus cab fare.”
A similar situation happened in Charleston where my grandfather lived during the war (he also went there for shipyards). He said there were restaurants who’d had waiters and cooks that had worked there 20+ years or whatever and were in the “Ol’ Charlie here wouldn’t leave us for anything” who found out that Charlie in fact would upon getting a job that paid twice as much. He mentioned an ancient Gullah woman- old enough that she claimed to remember the Civil War- who quit the family she’d spent a generation working for, in part because she wasn’t that crazy about them to begin with and in part because with their other help gone they expected her to do twice the work. (She went to work in the boarding house he lived at and he spent the next thirty five years trying to replicate her fish head gumbo.)
A more famous example is Rosa Parks, who was hired as a typist in the secretarial pool at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery. Again they simply didn’t have time or patience to accommodate Jim Crow bullshit (though they continued to segregate soldiers of course) and she worked alongside white people for the first time. She said in her memoir that at first they were aghast at how low they’d sunk to work elbow to elbow with a Negro, but that once they found out the bosses weren’t going to do anything about it (this being before photocopiers and when typists were needed for everything) and unable to find another job that paid the same they stayed and within an amazingly short time they got over it and even began socializing at the water cooler and what not. Of course when the war ended this went away almost over night, but the taste it gave her and millions of others of the middle class life was major momentum for what would come in the next decade. (Parks herself was a maid for several families; I’ve never heard of her being a nanny and she was not by nature a sweet and motherly person but I’m sure some of them probably had kids.)
It still is, in Ireland at least common for kids (of all ages!) to call their mothers “mam” or “mammy”.
This has been a very interesting thread.
N’zinga, you are correct about the desexualization of Mammy (the stereotype). A sexual female cannot live in the same house as the beautiful mistress, especially if she’s also practically running the household. And no worthy white man was supposed to find a black woman attractive anyway. The only good thing about black women was their domesticity and harmless sassy ways. Contrast with the evil temptress Jezebel stereotype. You didn’t want one of THOSE in your house.
That old 80’s show “Gimme a Break” caught some flack because Nell Carter’s role was damn-near Mammy all the way. However, where she broke ranks (and I know this because I just watched some old episodes of the show) was that she had sexual confidence and many of her jokes were about how beautiful and sexy she was (though that could have been a joke at her expense :(). But I don’t recall her ever having a man. She had her best friend Addie, but that was it. So yeah, “Gimme a Break” was a Mammy show. Even though I loved it as a kid and I still think Nell Carter was a great comic actress.
I’ll add another data point for the Mammy-character-in-disguise, from one of my favorite old films “Imitation of Life.” There are two versions of this movie, separated by 25 years, but they’re simply different spins on the same stereotype. In the earlier movie, the black woman (Delilah) is taken in by the white woman (Bea) as the housekeeper, working only for room and board for her and her daughter. Bea exploits the hell out of Delilah, basically cashing in on her pancake-making abilities and turning her into an Aunt Jemima to market the product, while Delilah goofily goes along–even turning down the wealth her labor produces. This is pure fantasy…a woman who will not only raise your child and clean your house for free, but will also make you rich! The antagonist, of course, is Peola–her daughter who tries to pass as white and is constantly thwarted by her big black mama showing up on the scene. Peola’s abandonment sends poor Delilah to her death bed. She dies in the company of her “white” family. Apparently she ain’t got none of her own. (No wonder Peola is all tragic mulatto and stuff.) But she does have the funeral of her dreams. Fancified, ostentatious…kind of what you’d expect a kid to dream up.
The later film is an improvement over the black-and-white, but only just a little bit. That’s the strange thing. The characters’ names are different, and there’s a little less tomming going on, but the black mother is still Mammy. Just a 1950s Mammy instead of a 1930s Mammy. Somehow it’s even worse than the first one. At least the first one was aiming to be the housekeeper. This time, Annie is an apparently homeless widow who’s just drifting along on the beach and naturally takes on the role of the maid after she “befriends” Lora. Now in this version, the pancake exploitation is gone (thank goodness), but Annie is still the ever-loving servant of her “friend”, and her daughter and Lora’s daughter are raised as sisters-but-not-sisters. One gets to go to boarding school while the other stays home, for instance. Sure would have been nice if Lora had sent Sarah Jane off to school too, wouldn’t it have? Since they’re like “family”? But really, the reason why the later version irks me so much is that Annie’s devotion to Lora is just so over the top that I want to scream. Lora’s traveling the world and being a big movie star, chasing after a fine-ass man, and poor Annie’s left in the big mansion worrying about Miss Lora and Miss Suzy just as much as she’s grieving over her passing-as-white daughter (who is more evil in this version and is not played by a black actress like in the earlier version, a fact I find kinda interesting.)
Anything, one improvement of the second version over the first is Lora’s recognization, during the funeral scene, that Annie actually DID have a life. She had lots of friends and she was a piller of the black American community. Annie was privy to the details of Lora’s life, but it was not reciprocated (though I do think there was a scene when Lora asks Annie about her life, and Annie brushes off the question like the answer isn’t important). Now, this isn’t played up as a major coming-to-Jesus moment, but it is an element missing from the first movie.
I have not read Fannie Hurst’s novel, and I would be curious what liberties were taken in both movies. But despite being progressive for her time, I’m sure Hurst had fallen into the trap of romanticizing the mistress-maid relationship…not really getting the lopsidedness of the “friendship”.
Sampiro, I watch “Long Walk Home” every time it comes on TV. Both Whoopie and Sissy were excellent in that film…and it really does seem to capture the gestalt of that time period (although I wasn’t alive then, so how would I know?!) I also enjoyed the factoids you gave about “Corinna, Corinna”. I didn’t really care too much for that movie (perhaps it is because Whoopie was playing that kind of role to death around that time period, and that was the weakest film out of the bunch). But it’s good to know that she had enough clout to shape the film like that.
Finished. Now what?
A Tom and Jerry cartoon just aired on telly with the Mammy character in it.
Thread hijack to say I’m interested!
I saw this article in the Guardian the other day and thought of this thread.
One of my library school classes this term is about collection development and readers’ advisory (how to best answer the “what do you recommend” questions).
We’re using The Help as one of our base texts, and getting really into issues of prejudice and stereotyping and whether/how we could use a book with those types of issues in programming or in book clubs and suchlike.
It was interesting to hear how many of these graduate student level people didn’t think that having a frank discussion of this book in a mixed-race environment might get just a teeench touchy.
FTR, my colleagues and I are all in South Carolina. Yeesh. I weep for my generation sometimes.