The Northern vision of the mammy came first from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s epochal Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 protest novel that inflamed and expanded the abolitionist movement and helped trigger the Civil War. Stowe’s doomed and sickly Little Eva excitedly flings herself into the arms of her black mammy and showers profuse kisses on her, inciting the surprise and revulsion of an otherwise admirable white female cousin, an abolitionist from New England. Mammy and Aunt Jemima became stock characters in the minstrel shows of the late nineteenth century, whose broad comic style can be seen in Al Jolson’s blackface performance of “My Mammy” in the first sound film, The Jazz Singer, in 1927. That song was so uniquely American that Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht parodied it in the Southern clichés of “Alabama Song” from their 1930 Marxist opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. During the 1960s, “Alabama Song,” as recorded by Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, would so impress a new Los Angeles band, the Doors, that Jim Morrison hauntingly sang it on their first album in 1967.
Our mental picture of the mammy, however, will forever remain Hattie McDaniel’s stupendous performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, which garnered her the first Academy Award ever won by an African-American actor. Unfortunately, this tribute is somewhat overshadowed by the facts that have since emerged about the exclusion of the black cast of Gone with the Wind from the movie’s gala premiere in Atlanta and about their assignment to a back table during the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, while the white stars, such as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, were seated at ringside near the podium. It has justifiably been said that both Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the movie show Mammy as so excessively devoted to and identified with her white masters that she has no friends or family of her own. But perhaps this is not the whole story, because Mammy is incontrovertibly portrayed as Scarlett’s real mother, in emotional and spiritual terms. Mammy knows, understands, and sharply counsels Scarlett far better than her own mother, who is a classic Victorian-era plantation mistress, pious, conventional, and obliviously preoccupied with her many onerous duties, including ministering to the sick in the servant and slave quarters.
For decades, there has been a flood of commentary on Mammy by women academics calling her things like “desexed,” “morbidly obese,” even “monstrous.” A 2008 book about the mammy theme by an African-American woman scholar acidly portrays Mammy’s natural “maternity” as “primitive, instinctual, base.” (“Nature” is a dirty word in post-structuralism, which sees only the oppressions of society.) I would argue in contrast that Mammy embodies the physical force, vigor, and power of personality of the country woman and that too much of the recent animus against her seems to be at least partly based on an ambivalence about and even denigration of motherhood in second-wave feminism. Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy brusquely speaks and behaves exactly like the bossy Italian-American immigrant women among whom I spent my early childhood in the factory town of Endicott in upstate New York. Indeed, one of my favorite scenes in all film is the first moment we see Mammy, leaning out from a second-story window at Tara and shouting at Scarlett, whom she boomingly scolds. It always inspires me with a nostalgic rush of déjà vu, because that is just the way those ferocious Italian women behaved, including my adored maternal grandmother. Country women, who were raised in the open air, had big voices and big attitudes. Most of those Italian immigrant women were bulky in build, with powerful shoulders and arms from doing laundry by hand on washboards. Furthermore, for thousands of years during the agrarian era, fat was a sign of abundance, health, and stamina. Skinny women meant famine, disease, and peril in pregnancy and childbirth. Women academics should not be anachronistically exporting the current cult of chic thinness backwards to other eras. The thin ideal is an urban or courtly aristocratic aesthetic that is a lesser sub-theme in history. And to condemn Mammy for her weight is to insult the great African-American music tradition of Big Mama blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, whose vocal power came from their mass, precisely like Wagnerian sopranos in opera.
Most sources concur that Aunt Jemima was a development of the antebellum mammy, now in the guise of a domestic servant, one of the few permissible roles for black women during the Jim Crow era of Reconstruction. In 1893, Nancy Green, who had been born in slavery, was introduced as the commercial spokeswoman for a new self-rising pancake mix at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Her cooking demonstration was so wildly popular that guards had to be assigned to control the crowds. Ironically, an alliance of black professional women had been strongly pressuring the Exposition’s organizing committee to give more exhibition space to African-Americans, who were virtually invisible. As black men and women rose in the professions after the Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century, grinning Aunt Jemima came to seem like a reductive caricature of menial subordination. The Quaker Oats Company, the manufacturer of Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup since 1926, has resisted calls to change the brand name, but it did substantially modify its iconic drawing of Aunt Jemima, whose skin has been lightened and whose yellow bandanna and red-checked housedress are gone. The present Aunt Jemima pictured on product packaging is a neatly coiffed career woman with pearl earrings. But surely there are disquieting elements in this transformation, such as class bias as well as an editing of skin color that could be described as reverse racism.
Just last month, a two-billion-dollar lawsuit to recover royalties was filed against Quaker Oats by the family of Anna Short Harrington, who died in 1955 and was one of the last women (among at least seven) to play the role of Aunt Jemima on advertising junkets. Harrington, born in 1897 to a share-cropping family in South Carolina, showed such early talent for cooking that she was employed as a cook by the age of 10. After her husband abandoned her and their five children, she moved with her family to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a domestic. A representative of Quaker Oats saw her cooking pancakes at the New York State Fair. Starting in 1935, she was hired as a traveling spokeswoman for Aunt Jemima and made a considerable amount of money, allowing her to buy a large house in Syracuse where she took in boarders. However, current information about Anna and the other Aunt Jemimas remains sketchy and contradictory.
One reason I want to protest the routine strafing of Aunt Jemima is that I believe it may have been Anna Short Harrington whom I saw in person when I was a preschool child in the early 1950s. My paternal grandmother, who cared for me while my parents were at work, took me to see her at the A&P grocery in my hometown of Endicott, 80 miles south of Syracuse. Anna, if it was indeed her, was not only the first African-American I or probably most of the other shoppers in that immigrant industrial town had ever seen in person, but she was also the first woman I had ever seen speak in public. She was electrifying—warm, forceful, and inclusive as she addressed the crowd from a low platform set up near the fragrant coffee-grinding machines, where she demonstrated how to make pancakes and then distributed samples to all. I thought she was a goddess! Indeed, I conflated her miraculous transformation of poured liquid into white mottled discs with the priest’s handing out white Communion wafers at our Catholic church up the hill. The now universal attacks on Aunt Jemima have obscured the real-life professional achievements of those black women who played her role as ambassadors for Southern hospitality. They courageously ventured into potentially hostile territory and evangelically endorsed a true artifact of black culture. Because pancakes are an art form, unknown in Europe and very difficult to execute perfectly.
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s black Aunt Chloe (Uncle Tom’s wife) is a proud head cook in the Big House who is “much revered in the kitchen” and who is renowned for the “sublime mystery” of her fried corn cakes, which cannot be duplicated by her many envious admirers. In his detailed reports of his tours of the South during the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York’s Central Park, could hardly find words to describe the deliciousness of the region’s butter-drenched fried hot cakes that he saw served in heaps in home after home
, both rich and poor. Surely in our own time, when there has been a food renaissance via TV cooking shows often featuring male chefs of folk cuisine like Emeril Lagasse or Bobby Flay, we can cease looking at Aunt Jemima as a prisoner of the kitchen. It is dismaying to find African-American women academics assailing Aunt Jemima with elite theoretical jargon explicitly borrowed from Michel Foucault while neglecting to do wider anthropological investigations into the African diaspora. For example, in Salvador da Bahia, the heavily Africanized region of Northeast Brazil, there is a centuries-old tradition possibly originating in Nigeria of black women in white turbans and big skirts frying and selling ground-pea and shrimp cakes called acarajé from braziers set up along the streets and roads. The acarajé women’s folk dress has in fact become symbolic of Brazil itself. They are no servants of a white population; their patrons are fellow Afro-Brazilians. And in Bahia, the religion of Candomblé, a syncretistic fusion of ancient West African Yoruba cults with Portuguese Catholicism, is ruled by old black women reverently called “Mae” (that is, mother or mama, the root of Mammy) or “Tia,” meaning “aunt,” as in Aunt Jemima. In summary, a major revision and upgrading of Aunt Jemima is drastically needed.
My third and final myth is the Southern belle, who is often identified with Scarlett O’Hara, even though Margaret Mitchell shows her as almost pre-feminist in rebelling against the confining code of the well-bred “lady.” Major books by women scholars have documented the often dreary work-filled lives of plantation mistresses, who may sometimes have played a near-managerial role in their husbands’ operations, especially during the Civil War, when three out of every four white men were away in the military. The term “belle,” meaning “a beauty,” is properly applied only to the short period when elite white girls “came out” (or were “turned out,” as Southerners put it) and were presented to society as now eligible for marriage. Families on remote plantations might send their daughters to stay for months with friends or family in large cities, even as far north as Philadelphia, in order to meet potential husbands at the constant round of parties, balls, concerts, and riding excursions that constituted privileged social life in the nineteenth century.
The self-advertisement of the Southern belle after her social debut was an exercise in performance art. Indeed, the South was always more open to theater than the moralistic North: it was in Charleston, for example, that Shakespeare was first performed in America. The Southern planter aristocracy believed it was descended from Cavaliers who had fled the Puritan victors in the English Civil Wars—a legend for which no historical substantiation has ever been found. Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances of noble knights and fair ladies were avidly read in the antebellum era. The Southern belle was enacting a fantasy of the courtly love tradition, where an alluring but untouchable dominatrix attracted men in droves but broke their hearts. “Courtliness” still lingers in Southern culture, such as in the polite rhetorical flourishes that lengthen the preambles to sentences. One of the central accomplishments in which the belle was coached was called “sociability”—a skill that I believe should be preserved and reconfigured as networking in the modern professional and business world. It is no coincidence that the first college sorority was established in the South—in 1851 at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, which fifteen years earlier had become the first college in the world to grant degrees to women. Sororities would become an important movement for African-American women too, beginning in 1908 at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
The verve of the Southern belle as a virtuoso conversationalist seems to have received little or no scholarly attention. She had to make herself “fascinating” (that was the term used) without breaking any rules of propriety or decorum. Her speech style had an inherent musicality coming from the Southern dialect itself, which was a fusion over several centuries of Anglo-Saxon English with the multiple languages of enslaved Africans, who came from many tribes and regions. The Southern belle, if we may judge from her twentieth-century descendants in classic Hollywood movies, varied a headlong staccato assault of words with graceful glissandos or slides, often taking a lilting upward turn. I conjecture that those slides may have been influenced by the West African melisma, Islamic in origin, that musicologists have identified in the vocal style and slide guitar of African-American blues. The glittering if brief social life of the Southern belle was certainly the product of ethically indefensible exploitation, systemic to chattel slavery. Yet the belle’s public activities and performance style deserve study in exactly the way we analyze the evolution of the exquisite French rococo style during the era of Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette, when riots over bread shortages were breaking out all over France and eventually led to revolution.
In conclusion, what lessons can we draw from these three myths—the implacable old mountain woman, the all-embracing mammy, and the flirtatious Southern belle? They represent different modalities of artifice and practicality, of brutal candor and strategic concealment. The postmenopausal mountain woman is a tiny dynamo of sheer will power, harsh and unsparing, standing her ground while peppering her antagonists with buckshot. The mammy, like the ancient earth mother, is tied to the eternal and magnificent rhythms of nature, whose fertility she still commands despite her advanced years. The belle is a shimmering mirage of elegant perfection, occupying a momentary space between careless girlhood and the burdens of adulthood. What ties these three female myths together is assertive speech, which costs nothing and does everything.
31
THE MODERN CAMPUS CANNOT COMPREHEND EVIL
The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.*
Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cell phones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
[Time.com, September 29, 2014]
Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.
Too many young middle-class women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.
Current educational codes, tracking liberal-left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.
The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism—toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.
Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil—but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label
“bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.
The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.
But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.
There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.
Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: it is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.
Free Women, Free Men Page 25