Illustration from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” U.S. First Edition, Page 62. Eliza comes to tell Uncle Tom that he is sold, and that she is running away to save her child. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

A Different View

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe presents an abolitionist’s view of slavery and its devastating impact on African American families. In this illustration, Eliza chooses to run away to save her child from being sold. She asks Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe, a stereotypical mammy character, to help her escape.

Illustration of The Black Mammy Memorial Institute. The Black Mammy Memorial or Peace Monument, Athens, Georgia. Athens, GA: Banner Printery, ca. 1910. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

The Black Mammy Memorial

In 1911 a small group of southerners drew up a proposal to build “The Black Mammy Memorial Institute“ in Athens, Georgia. The institute’s supporters believed the school would serve multiple purposes: 1. It would honor the African American slave women who served as surrogate mothers and faithful slaves; 2. it would rectify the shortage of domestic servants caused by black migrations to the North; 3. it would reproduce the mammy’s so-called “best qualities” in the next generation of African Americans, teaching cooking, cleaning, sewing and child care.

Winold Riess, The brown Madonna, illustration, 1925. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

The New Negro and “The Brown Madonna”

W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Black Mother” announced a new representation of African American maternity as an emblem of the New Negro Movement (aka Harlem Renaissance). This is most apparent in the frontispiece of Alain Locke’s seminal work The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925). German artist Winold Reiss’s drawing of “The Brown Madonna” depicts an African American mother with her own child. Winold Reiss’s drawings of African Americans during the 1920s were considered to be among the first positive depictions of African Americans by a white artist.

Characters Scarlet O’Hara and Mammy photographed on the set of Gone With the Wind. Turner Theatrical Library.

Gone With the Wind

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell became a best-selling classic of fictionalized southern life that was later immortalized in film (1939). Mitchell affirms the mythology that mammies were a “special breed” of enslaved women in her characterization of “Mammy,” whose familial ties have been sacrificed so she may belong more fully to the family who owns her. Removing her from contact with her own race, she does not even have a name for herself other than “Mammy.”

Draft of “Help, 1968” by Natasha Trethewey. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Help, 1968 (Transfiguration, 1968) Excerpt.

A Woman Who Must Be The Maid

Natasha Trethewey begins “Help, 1968″ (previously titled “Transfiguration, 1968”) by comparing the Robert Frank photograph Charleston, South Carolina (1955) “of a white infant in the dark arms / of a woman who must be the maid,” with her own mother when she writes, “I think of my mother and the year / we spent alone—my father at sea.” Trethewey remembers that her mother, whose skin was darker than hers, was mistaken for her nanny: an assumption based on the prevalence of African American women taking care of white children.