Stepdaughters of History by Catherine Clinton

Author:Catherine Clinton [Clinton, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780807164594
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2016-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

THREE

Mammy by Any Other Name

. . . that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet

—ROMEO AND JULIET

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive

—AUDRE LORDE, LITANY FOR SURVIVAL

Audre Lorde has suggested that “you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.”1 She is a powerful writer, a great thinker, as well as an inspiration to those who study her life and work. Schoolchildren who might read about her in my anthology, I, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African American Poetry (1998), will learn that she did not speak in school until the age of five. She later developed a voice to speak out with bravado, becoming a leading black woman intellectual at the end of the twentieth century. Another leading voice in this intellectual renaissance, bell hooks (“bell hooks” in lower case is her preferred usage), describes this impulse: “The longing to tell one’s own story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release.”2

In one of hooks’s most stimulating books, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, she examines “naming” as a political act that remains “a serious process.” And naming has been of crucial concern for many individuals within subordinated groups who struggle for self-recovery, for self-determination.3 She goes on to remember that “in our southern black folk tradition we have the belief that a person never dies as long as their name is remembered, called. When the name bell hooks is called, the spirit of my great-grandmother rises.” Thus, Gloria Watkins took on a new signature, recycled a name, but has not lost her identity; she has become bell hooks, the very model of a modern, self-invented persona. Hooks was not just about creating a name for herself or other African America women. She was struggling with the larger project of naming the nameless, dismantling without the master’s tools.

Within the history of the Old South, “Mammy” presents modern historians, particularly scholars of southern women’s history, with an un-pretty puzzle. “Mammy” is not a name but a stand-in for a name: a dystopic form of address which conjures up a body, while the person remains disembodied and anonymous.4 Mammy as brand might be most apt. This term connotes a familiar and perhaps cherished type of manufactured product, while also invoking an identifying marker on burnt skin. This doubled imagery, at the cusp of the twenty-first century, evokes Mammy’s propagandistic function above all. Most key to understanding this branding is recognizing that it’s a white name for a black figure, a racial designation perpetrated by an oppressor.

The debate about Mammy continues today and might even be found within the corridors of power reshaping American capitalism. On August 5, 2015, the secretary of the Treasury and the U.

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