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The Mammy Washington Almost Had
By Tony Horwitz
Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone With the Wind (MGM)
If I say the word "Mammy," you're likely to conjure up the character
from Gone With the Wind. Or, you may think of Aunt Jemima, in her
trademark kerchief, beaming from boxes of pancake mix.
What you probably won't picture is a massive slave woman, hewn from
stone, cradling a white child atop a plinth in the nation's capital.
Yet in 1923, the U.S. Senate authorized such a statue, "in memory of
the faithful slave mammies of the South."
As a Southern Congressman stated in support of the monument: "The
traveler, as he passes by, will recall that epoch of southern
civilization" when "fidelity and loyalty" prevailed. "No class of any
race of people held in bondage could be found anywhere who lived more
free from care or distress."
Today, it seems incredible that Congress sanctioned a monument to
so-called Faithful Slaves -- just blocks from the Lincoln Memorial,
which had been dedicated only months earlier. But the monument to the
Great Emancipator masked the nation's retreat from the "new birth of
freedom" Lincoln had called for at Gettysburg, three score and ten
years before. By 1923, Jim Crow laws, rampant lynching, and economic
peonage had effectively reenslaved blacks in the South. Blacks who
migrated north during and after World War One were greeted by the
worst race riots in the nation's history. In the capital,
Virginia-born President Woodrow Wilson had recently segregated federal
facilities and screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. The
overtly racist movie exalted the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked at two
million members in the 1920s and won control of mayors' office and
state legislatures across the land.
"We have this image of the 1920s as the Jazz Age, the birth of the
modern, a world of skyscrapers and flappers," says David Blight, a
Yale historian and leading scholar of race in the late 19th and early
20th century. "But white supremacy had few better moments in our
history."
The early 1900s were also the heyday of Old South nostalgia. Popular
songs and bestselling novels depicted antebellum Dixie as a genteel
land of benevolent "planters" and happy "servants." Central to this
idyll was the figure of Mammy, who in popular imagination resembled
Uncle Tom's wife, Aunt Chloe, a cheerful, plump slave in a checked
kerchief. White performers blackened their faces to tell stories and
sing spirituals in the style "of the old time 'house darkey.'" The
ready-made pancake mix of Aunt Jemima -- a "slave in a box," as one
historian puts it -- quickly became a national sensation; a
"biography" of her was subtitled "the Most Famous Colored Woman in the
World."
In reality, the pancake mix was the creation of two white men in
Missouri, and they named it after a character in a minstrel song, not
an actual slave cook. Similarly, there is more folklore than fact
underlying the stereotype of matronly slaves nursing young whites. "I
went in search of the mammy and couldn't find her," says historian
Catherine Clinton, whose books include Tara Revisited and Plantation
Mistress. "Most slaves who looked after white children were very
young." In other words, more like Prissy in Gone With the Wind than
Mammy.
Or even younger. Harriet Tubman, for instance, was seven when she
began caring for a baby and was whipped if the infant cried. Ex-slaves
interviewed by the WPA in the 1930s also told of nursing babies as
girls themselves, while the older black women of mammy lore looked
after slave children whose mothers labored in the fields. These
interviews also cast a harsh light on the supposedly privileged status
of "house" slaves. One former slave recalled a "Mammy" being lashed
"till de blood runned out"; another described a rape by the
slaveowner's sons. "I can tell you that a white man laid a nigger gal
whenever he wanted," said an ex-slave from Georgia who "went into the
house as a waiting and nurse girl" between the ages of nine and
twelve.
These and other routine cruelties didn't figure in the
moonlight-and-magnolia romance that seized white imagination in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nor was the Mammy craze of that
era confined to literature, song, and marketing. It was fostered by
groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which
sought to recast the "Lost Cause" as a noble defense of a Southern
utopia. If slaves had been loyal, well treated, and content, it
followed that emancipation and Reconstruction were calamitous -- just
as portrayed in Birth of a Nation. The ladies of the UDC honored aged
blacks as "faithful Confederates" and even ghost-wrote testimonials
such as "What Mammy Thinks of Freedom," in which an ex-slave says,
"w'en I gits ter hebben, Lord, I hope I'll find its slabery."
This reactionary crusade culminated in a UDC campaign to build
monuments to slaves who remained faithful out of "love of masters,
mistresses and their children." Initially, this effort was confined to
the South. But black migration to the North, race riots, and growing
anxiety about what whites called the "Negro problem," made the nation
more receptive to Southern images of bygone racial order.
So did the ubiquity of nurturing mammies in popular culture.
"Mammy was appealing at a particularly fraught time in national
history," says Micki McElya, a historian at University of Connecticut
and author of Clinging to Mammy: the Faithful Slave in
Twentieth-Century America. "Mammy represents paternalism and affection
between the races, a world where everyone understands their places."
This was certainly the message of Charles Stedman, a North Carolina
Congressman who in January 1923 introduced a Mammy monument bill on
behalf of the Jefferson Davis Chapter of the UDC.
"They desired no change in their condition of life," Stedman said of
the faithful slaves who would be honored. "The very few who are left
look back at those days as the happy golden hours of their lives."
Stedman added that the bill "should find a responsive echo in the
hearts of the citizens of this great Republic." It did, at least in
the Senate, which voted for a land grant in the capital, so the UDC
could erect the monument as "a gift to the people of the United
States." The next day's Washington Post printed only a two-paragraph
item, noting that the Senate had approved three monuments: to
baseball, to a "former District commissioner," and to "faithful
colored mammies."
African Americans, however, took far greater notice, led by the
growing black press and by newly formed civil rights groups. "My own
beloved mother was one of those unfortunates who had the flower of her
youth spent in a slave cabin," one NAACP official wrote the Washington
Star, describing the mammy statue as "a symbol of our servitude to
remind white and black alike that the menial callings are our place."
He added: "if the South has such deep gratitude for the virtues of
this devoted group from which it reaped vast riches, let it remove the
numberless barriers it has gone out of its way to throw up against the
progress" of blacks.
One such barrier was lynching, which claimed some 2,500 lives between
1890 and 1920. The Senate, just weeks before approving the Mammy
monument, had allowed a Southern filibuster to defeat an anti-lynching
bill. (One Southern Senator called it "a bill to encourage rape" by
blacks, while another contrasted this menace with the "unspeakable
love that every southern man feels for the old black nurse who took
care of him in childhood.") The proximity of the lynching and Mammy
debates prompted the Chicago Defender to publish a cartoon titled
"Mockery," in which a Southerner presents plans for the mammy statue
to the dangling body of a lynching victim. The Baltimore Afro-American
offered its own vision of the planned monument: a frowning Mammy
perched atop a wash tub instead of a pedestal, her empty hand extended
above the inscription: "In Grateful Memory to One We Never Paid a Cent
of Wages During a Lifetime of Service."
Blacks also bristled at the stereotype of benignly affectionate
relations between masters and hefty, aging mammies, who seemed never
to have families of their own. A truer monument, one paper suggested,
would be a statue to a "White Daddy," sexually assaulting a young
black woman as a mammy looks helplessly on.
Plans for the actual UDC monument stoked still greater outrage.
One sculptor's model showed an Aunt Jemima-like figure holding a white
child as two other children clung to her dress. These were
"pickaninnies," the artist explained, "trying to have their mother pay
attention to them instead of devoting all her time to the white
children." Another sculptor proposed a seated Mammy with an infant at
her breast, set within a columned fountain. The monument's backers
favored this design and said it would be titled "The Fountain of
Truth." According to the Washington Post, the monument was to be
erected on Massachusetts Avenue, near an equestrian statue of the
Union general, Philip Sheridan.
But the monument bill had to pass a House committee before it could be
enacted. And blacks not only fulminated against the statue; they
organized protests. Petitions and letters poured into the offices of
politicians and newspapers, including one presented by two thousand
black women to Vice President Calvin Coolidge and the Speaker of the
House. The women's auxiliary of the main Union veterans' organization,
the Grand Army of the Republic, also condemned the monument as a
"sickly sentimental proposition," and suggested the money would be
better spent on "bettering conditions of the mammy's children."
Three months after the introduction of the monument bill in the
Senate, Congress adjourned without having taken any further action.
"Because of the controversy and resistance, it's ultimately allowed to
die," says Micki McElya. And so, the Mammy statue quietly joined the
ranks of monuments in the capital that were never built, including a
towering "Mother's Memorial" and a plan for the Washington Monument
that depicted the first president in a carriage atop thirty columns.
The spot where Mammy was to have stood is now occupied by a statue of
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, a "champion of liberty" in Czechoslovakia.
But Mammy was by no means expunged from national consciousness. Four
years after the monument proposal died, the first true "talkie," The
Jazz Singer, featured a black-faced Al Jolson singing "Mammy." Twelve
years later, Hattie McDaniel immortalized Mammy with her Oscar-winning
performance in Gone With the Wind. In the 1950s and 60s, Disneyland
included a restaurant called Aunt Jemima's Kitchen. And not until 1968
did Quaker Oats begin to give its famous cook a makeover; Jemima shed
weight and her familiar bandana, gradually becoming the coiffed woman
smiling from today's supermarket shelves.
Mammy also endures in stone, though not in the dramatic fashion the
UDC once envisioned. At Confederate Park in Fort Mill, S.C., an
obelisk "dedicated to the faithful slaves," unveiled in 1900, includes
a mammy cradling a baby. In 1914, a towering monument was unveiled at
Arlington National Cemetery to the "Dead Heroes" of the Confederacy.
Standing near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the monument's frieze
includes a turbaned and heavyset mammy, holding up a white child for a
departing rebel to embrace.
Today, at the nearby Lee Mansion, visitors get a truer glimpse of what
a mammy's life was like. Behind Robert E. Lee's stately columned home
stand the simple slave quarters where up to ten people occupied a
single room. In one, furnished with a pallet and chamber pot, lived
"Nurse Judy," also known as "Mammy," who cared for Lee's children, one
of whom described her in a letter as "very weak and thin."
Another counterpoint to the Southern lore of contentedly servile black
woman can be found across the Potomac River, at 10th and U Street in
Northwest Washington. It is a monument titled "Spirit of Freedom,"
honoring the almost 210,000 blacks who served in the Union Army and
Navy during the Civil War. The sculpture includes a black woman
holding her own child, beside a black soldier. A monument to black
servicemen was first proposed in 1916 but not built in Washington
until 1998.
"I'm proud this country finally got around to honoring these guys who
fought for freedom," says a recent visitor to the monument, Joseph
Brown, a retired black finance manager from Houston. His pride,
however, dimmed a bit when he was shown a grainy picture of the very
different monument that was proposed in 1923. "You're kidding me. We
almost put up Aunt Jemima near the Mall?"
Brown's grandmother worked in a white home in Louisiana. He believes
many Southerners were sincere in their affection for "mammies" and
"maids," noting that half the people at his grandmother's funeral were
white. "That history really happened, and there was genuine
closeness," he says. "But a Mammy monument? That's repugnant, because
it's using her as a symbol of servitude."
Historian Catherine Clinton says that if the monument had been built,
it would strike tourists today as "a monstrous apparition" from our
past. It might even have been hidden from view, inside a box -- the
fate of a faithful slave memorial in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. But
rather than cringe over the Mammy monument, Clinton believes we should
celebrate the "unsung heroism" of those who opposed it. The
controversy mobilized black women whose protests were a precursor of
their activism in the civil rights movement of later decades. One such
pioneer was Mary Church Terrell, a daughter of slaves who became
founding president of the National Association of Colored People and
later took part in pickets and other protests against segregation in
the 1950s. As a leader of the protest against the Mammy monument, she
warned that if it were built, thousands of blacks "will fervently pray
that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the
heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground."
This wasn't necessary, Clinton observes, because Terrell and others
"struck it down themselves."
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/the-mammy-washington-almost-had/276431/
Copyright © 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
--
Saurav Datta
Twitter: SauravDatta29
Mobile : +91-9930966518
"To those who believe in resistance, who live between hope and
impatience and have learned the perils of being unreasonable. To those
who understand enough to be afraid and yet retain their fury."
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