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

In this fascinating new study, McElya explores the power of historical memory, demonstrating how Americans shaped the image of the black mammy figure over time to meet their evolving needs. As McElya correctly notes, the image of the black mammy—the faithful and loving female household slave—was always a fiction. Created during slavery, the mythical mammy figure was an important part of the paternalistic defense of slavery as a positive good. Unlike the brutal and sexually abusive relationship as portrayed by the abolitionists, white southern defenders of slavery argued that the relationship between enslavers and enslaved was one based upon love and respect. As the most dependable and loving slave, and the one who always ranked her white owners’ needs above her own and those of her real black family, the mythical mammy came to be seen as the epitome of this idealized view of race relations.

The main contribution of McElya’s insightful study is to show how this earlier view of the mammy figure was adapted after the abolition of slavery into one of the most popular and powerful images in modern American politics and culture. That white southerners would appeal to nostalgia after the Civil War to help them reconstruct their devastated society is certainly understandable. Yet, even more important is the role that the mammy figure has played in helping whites outside of the South to come to grips with their own racial fears and concerns. The prevalence of the mammy figure provided them with a nonthreatening view of race relations and a comforting view of black people. As McElya argues, “The myth of the faithful slave lingers 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, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism—seem not to exist at all. The mammy figure affirmed their wishes” (3).

McElya explores a wide range of instances in which twentieth-century white Americans “clung to mammy” to find their way in an increasingly diversified and industrial society. Most visible was the Aunt Jemima character, who first appeared in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and who, in a slimmer form, is still a viable advertising image today. In addition to using old-fashioned nostalgia to sell modern-made pancakes, Aunt Jemima has also reinforced ideas about white supremacy and black servility for millions of white Americans.

McElya does a far better job of exploring the importance of the mammy figure in early twentieth-century American life than she does in the latter decades of the century. Nonetheless, her interdisciplinary approach, as well as her numerous fascinating insights, makes this an important study for understanding the lasting legacies of slavery, and the nation’s failure to acknowledge fully this tragic aspect of its past.