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Front Porch

Front Porch As Kimberly Wallace-Sanders discusses in her essay, many African American women during the Jim Crow era had to spend more time raising white children than their own. "Studio portrait of seated African American woman and young girl," Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Mss. 3778, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries. "Mammy" is one of the most vivid characters on the southern cultural landscape. Immortalized in songs, stories, and films, Mammy is the endlessly loving, eternally loyal black woman who nurses, scolds, comforts, and guides her white charges from the cradle to adulthood and beyond, dependable in every emergency from colic to a failed romance. In one famous incarnation, she is Scarlett O'Hara's indispensable emotional anchor; in another, she is William Faulkner's Dilsey, whose steadfast moral plumb line marks the Compson family's inexorable decline. Ageless, sexless, and undistracted by her own children, she pours endless love on her white babies, teaches them (and their mothers) everything important from manners to biscuit-making, and upholds family standards even when her white folks are tempted to crumple. "She's like a member of the family," they assure all comers, echoing the planters' faded evocation of "our family, black http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

Front Porch

Watson, Harry L.
Southern Cultures , Volume 20 (1) – Feb 8, 2014
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488
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Abstract

As Kimberly Wallace-Sanders discusses in her essay, many African American women during the Jim Crow era had to spend more time raising white children than their own. "Studio portrait of seated African American woman and young girl," Thomas H. and Joan W. Gandy Photograph Collection, Mss. 3778, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries. "Mammy" is one of the most vivid characters on the southern cultural landscape. Immortalized in songs, stories, and films, Mammy is the endlessly loving, eternally loyal black woman who nurses, scolds, comforts, and guides her white charges from the cradle to adulthood and beyond, dependable in every emergency from colic to a failed romance. In one famous incarnation, she is Scarlett O'Hara's indispensable emotional anchor; in another, she is William Faulkner's Dilsey, whose steadfast moral plumb line marks the Compson family's inexorable decline. Ageless, sexless, and undistracted by her own children, she pours endless love on her white babies, teaches them (and their mothers) everything important from manners to biscuit-making, and upholds family standards even when her white folks are tempted to crumple. "She's like a member of the family," they assure all comers, echoing the planters' faded evocation of "our family, black

Journal

Southern Cultures – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Feb 8, 2014

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