Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (review)

In Clinging to Mammy, McElya examines white America's fascination with the myth of the faithful slave, typically represented by figures like Mammy and Aunt Jemima. McElya convincingly argues that this stereotype "is deeply rooted in the American racial imagination" because "so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit," and a world in which the injustices of slavery, segregation and institutional racism "seem not to exist at all" (3). McElya examines how Nancy Green, a.k.a. Aunt Jemima, assumed the role of the faithful slave and helped transition the nation from the antebellum and Reconstruction periods into modernity. By performing as Aunt Jemima in order to advertise the R. T. Davis Milling Company's pancake mix, Green not only helped sell an innovatively modern product, but she also perpetuated a nostalgia for the Old South and "equated the African American's place in modern life with servility, obedience, and joviality" (16). Black women like Nancy Green were not the only ones who performed as Mammy. In one of the stronger chapters of the book, McElya discusses the professional and amateur performances of middle and upper-class white women who impersonated enslaved black women, and who wrote faithful slave narratives in an attempt to preserve Confederate history and defend Southern slaveholders and the slaveholding tradition. Interestingly, these performances also enabled white women to validate their class and regional identities. America's malignant fascination with Mammy has assumed a variety of forms, as we learn from the 1916 Marjorie Delbridge custody case, in which a Chicago juvenile court removed Delbridge from her adoptive mother's home because she (Delbridge) was white and her mother, Camilla Jackson, was black. White media coverage of the trial and depictions of Jackson as Delbridge's Mammy provide examples of the exceptions white Americans took to mammy-child relationships that were perceived to provide too much interracial interaction. Yet, paradoxically, white organizations, namely the United Daughters of the Confederacy, endeavored to preserve southern antebellum history and solve the "Negro problem" by proposing a Washington, D.C. monument dedicated to Mammy. According to McElya, these efforts were "an obviously political effort to legitimize [a] distorted version of the southern past" (117). Furthermore, McElya argues, somewhat less convincingly, that those who opposed the monument, notably the black press, linked white America's obsession with Mammy to the sexual exploitation of black women and the lynching of black men. Other black activists developed "maternal progress narratives" to offer positive views of black motherhood. Still, notions of the faithful slave continued to persist, however, well beyond the Civil Rights era. McElya concludes by returning to the iconic Aunt Jemima and notes how her appearance has changed to reflect modern notions of working black women. One laments the scarcity of voices of black women who actually donned Mammy's persona; still, McElya's utilization of primary sources does provide ample, insightful commentary from white women and black and white media. Overall, this is a notable study of an enduring yet problematic American icon.