Abstract
The figure of the Black Mammy is a uniquely telling construct that reveals much about the culture that produces and celebrates her. In addition to what this performance of African American maternity has to say about essentialized subjectivities based in race and gender, however, this construct also engages deeply embedded sexual ideologies, rubrics that inform and sustain social hierarchies that go well beyond domesticity. In her exploration of staged African American motherhood in plays by contemporary African American women playwrights, Susanna Bösch points out that the figure of the Black Mammy functions as a maternally coded “intermediary” and “interpreter” between black and white culture while also maintaining a presumed innocuousness—an innocuousness that definitively enables her proximity to white employers/owners. She writes,
The Black Mammy is one of the best-known stereotypes of Black motherhood, whether [she] ha[s] children or not. She is the perfect image of the happy slave who enjoys working for white society … Since women have always been considered weaker and less threatening than men, the Black woman could work much closer to white people than her husband.1
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Notes
Susanna A. Bösch, Sturdy Black Bridges on the American Stage: The Portrayal of Black Motherhood in Selected Plays by Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 16.
See Elise Lemire’s “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Lemire’s research suggests that three major “waves” of black-white miscegenation anxiety have plagued American culture, starting in 1802 with the first published reports that Thomas Jefferson was having sex with one of his slaves (Sally Hemmings); the second occurring in the 1830s, following the first widespread organization of abolitionists; and the third occurring in response to “threats” posed by Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 72.
Judith Williams, “Uncle Tom’s Women,” in African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, ed. H. Elam, Jr., and D. Krasner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20.
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 201–202.
See Kimberly Wallace-Sanders’ Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
Lisa Anderson, Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 5–7.
Carol Henderson, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: The Bodies of Black Folk: The Flesh Manifested in Words, Pictures, and Sound,” MELUS 35, no. 4 (2010): 5–6.
Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 74–75.
Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim (New York: Knopf, 1994), 195.
Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4.
Tony Kushner, Caroline, or Change (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 21.
Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 144.
Aaron C. Thomas, “Engaging an Icon: Caroline, or Change and the Politics of Representation,” Studies in Musical Theatre 4, no. 2 (2010): 201.
Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 199.
Ibid., 200.
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 1980), 67.
Misha Berson, “Theater Preview,” Seattle Times, September 22, 2000.
Arlene McKanic, “Five Women Jar Audience to the Floor,” New York Amsterdam News, August 19, 1999.
Melinda Chateauvert, “Framing Sexual Citizenship: Reconsidering the Discourse on African American Families,” Journal of African American History 93, no. 2 (2008): 207.
K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy (London: Routledge, 1993), 21–22.
Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 17. Here Shimakawa expands earlier analysis from scholars such as James Moy, Dave Williams, and Robert Lee.
Joyce Meier, “The Refusal of Motherhood in African American Women’s Theater,” MELUS 25, nos. 3–4 (2000): 117. Among other plays, Meier’s analysis considers Angelina Grimké’s Rachel, Georgia Johnson’s Safe, Alice Childress’ Mojo, and Shirley Graham’s It’s Morning.
For more a more thorough context on Brundage’s broader argument, see Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harard University Press, 2008).
Sally McMillen, “Mothers’ Sacred Duty: Breast-feeding Patterns among Middle- and Upper-Class Women in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 51, no. 3 (1985): 333.
Robert Hoffler, “Big ‘Change’ in Tuners: West Coast Embraces Serious Shows, Gotham Goes for Fluff,” Variety, January 31, 2005, 62.
Hermine Pinson, “An Interview with Lorenzo Thomas,” Callaloo 22, no. 2 (1999): 288.
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© 2013 L. Bailey McDaniel
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McDaniel, L.B. (2013). Race and the Domestic Threat: Sexing the Mammy in Tony Kushner, Alfred Uhry, and Cheryl West. In: (Re) Constructing Maternal Performance in Twentieth-Century American Drama. What is Theatre?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299574_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137299574_4
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