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  • Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America
  • Robin Bernstein
Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. By Micki McElya. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 322 pp., 16 halftones. $27.95 cloth.

In the assiduously researched and beautifully written Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, Micki McElya shows how the figure of the mammy, a mythic faithful slave who loved and cared selflessly for white children, “served a wide range of emotional, economic, and political needs for white and black Americans” (13). White supremacists used the mammy as a locus for re-imagining antebellum slavery as a familial arrangement based on slaves’ affection for and devotion to slaveowners—a model of righteous racial hierarchy, some argued, that should extend into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, African Americans organized to resist and critique these claims and occasionally attempted to deploy the figure of the mammy positively in anti-racist contexts. With this book, McElya joins with scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler in showing how intimacy, especially intimacy within homes and families, does not necessarily counter or mitigate violence. To the contrary, the domestic family in history and representation has provided a structure and site for racial violence based in affection, tenderness, and even love.

At the center of McElya’s book is the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and their efforts, from 1904 through 1923, to memorialize the mammy. Through prodigious research in the UDC archives, McElya has reconstructed the process by which the Daughters claimed that their “memories” of faithful slaves, especially mammies, gave them “specialized racial knowledge” (64). The Daughters constructed memories of benign servitude through dialect performances, “epistolary blackface” (59) in which white women wrote in the voices of mammies, and, in a most spectacular effort, a nearly successful push to establish a national monument to the mammy to stand “in the shadow of Lincoln’s memorial” in Washington, DC (116). The contest over mammy [End Page 151] memorials illuminates the competing, high-stakes concerns that intersected in this mythic figure: the UDC wanted the mammy memorial to substantiate their memories as “official ‘truth’” (118) and thus to authorize elite white women such as themselves as the guardians of antebellum American history. Furthermore, against the backdrop of labor unrest, race riots, lynching, and the Great Migration of African Americans from rural South to urban North, the UDC wanted to posit an imagined past through which to envision a future of racial harmony based on black subservience.

African Americans understood these stakes, and they responded in well-organized protests, which McElya tracks through the black press. African American newspapers argued that white fantasies of faithful slaves, particularly mammies, “did not stand in opposition to this violence [of lynching and other attacks on African Americans] but was very much a part of it” (160). The UDC claimed that their proposed memorial commemorated affection, and African American newspaper writers countered not by claiming that enslaved caregivers and white children never felt affection for each other, but instead that such affection “was itself a form of violence and that the memorialization campaign itself was deeply vicious” (161). New Negro writers and activists confounded the UDC and other mammy fantasists by honoring enslaved mothers who struggled, often to the point of self-sacrifice, to care for their own children despite impediments that included forced labor in white households. New Negro writers and political cartoonists also explicitly showed how fantasies of asexual physical intimacy between white child and black mammy masked white anxieties about another form of interracial congress: white men’s rape of enslaved African American women. For example, a political cartoon in the African American newspaper the Chicago Defender in April 1923, critiqued the mammy memorial by proposing a parallel “white daddy” statue in which a white man assaults an African American woman. Protests such as these successfully prevented the national mammy memorial from ever being built.

McElya devotes one chapter to the stunning story of Camilla Jackson, an African American woman who adopted a white girl, Marjorie Delbridge. Jackson and Delbridge lived as mother and daughter for most of Delbridge’s childhood. When the juvenile...

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