Making the Past: The Politics of Southern Memory

"There is no such thing as was—only is," William Faulkner famously surmised in a 1956 interview with The Paris Review. The spirit of this Faulknerian sentiment permeates both Kimberly Wallace-Sanders's Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory and Kenneth Bindas's Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South, as each text offers examinations of the past in the context of a present and continuous construction. The similarities, however, end there. In Mammy, Wallace-Sanders utilizes an integrated examination of literature, material culture, and popular icons to deconstruct representations of the mammy figure from the 1820s through the 1930s in order to reveal what this stereotype says about the needs of the dominant class. From over five hundred interviews of a generation of rural southerners, Bindas composes a portrait in Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South of a unified cultural memory expressive of the values of a singular southern consciousness. While Bindas argues that memory represents the commonalities shared despite differences, Wallace-Sanders suggests that the "collective consciousness" that marks Bindas's vision proves neither truly collective nor fully inclusive, but rather emerges from a specific point of origin: powerful whites.

Memory is a present action enacted in the service of maintaining a present, not past, reality, asserts Wallace-Sanders; as a figure created by those in power to help ensure their continued power, the "mammy" serves the agenda of powerful whites in many ways throughout history, from national reunification after the Civil War to reinforcement of subservient black ideals in the wake of the New Negro movement to the nostalgic preservation of a romanticized Old South in the face of a crumbling mythology. Therefore, the stereotype has not remained static throughout history, but has stretched and adjusted its meaning according to changing cultural demands. "We do not talk about this past that both binds us together and drives a wedge between us," writes Wallace-Sanders in the preface. "Language seems to fail us at these moments—shadows fall across faces, eyes become moist, bodies shift nervously." Thus in lyrical prose which continues throughout the text, Wallace-Sanders begins her incisive examination of an unsettling past as she struggles to reconcile reality with history, truth with memory.

Over the course of six chapters (as well as a substantive introduction and conclusion), Wallace-Sanders focuses her critical gaze upon three primary arenas: literature, material culture, and popular icons. Literary analysis resides at the center of over half the text, as in the first, fourth, and final chapters of Mammy, Wallace-Sanders deconstructs the origins, reinscriptions, and challenges to this American icon across a century of representation. In chapters one and four, she examines nineteenth-century literary representations of visually non-stereotypical mammies, ranging from the earliest depictions of young, thin mammies in works such as Isabel Drysdale's Scenes in Georgia (1827) and Joseph B. Cobb's Mississippi Scenes (1851) to later depictions of mulatto mammies in the works of Charles Chesnutt and Mark Twain, concluding that the mammy identity depends less upon appearance than upon a behavioral preference for whiteness. A "dark-skinned Madonna holding her precious Savior to her breast," this supposedly natural partiality demonstrates the mammy's ability to accept and affirm her racial inferiority and proves integral to future representations of this "satisfied" slave. After providing the foundation for the interpretation of the oppressive agenda behind the images, in her final exclusively literary examination (as well as the text's sixth and final chapter), Wallace-Sanders shifts her analysis to the ways in which Margaret Mitchell and William Faulkner respectively reinscribe or challenge the whiteness-worshipping mammy model. Turning her focus from behaviors to bodies, Wallace-Sanders argues that Mitchell reaffirms the long-standing stereotypes of the hearty and...