Abstract
Aunt Jemima is certainly one of the most prominent images of African American women in American culture, but it is not the only one. How this image of the large, strong, happy, asexual cook joined the mammy figure, the suprahuman endurer, and the Christian hard worker to dominate black female representation in a variety of genres is a fascinating strand in American history. The black female body—with passing connection to reality—was manufactured for white public consumption, whether in print or visual media, or on the stage. Even more fascinating is how such images, especially that of the strong black woman, were embraced within African American culture and eventually found their way into and dominated female portrayal in African American literature. This embracing suggests that black acceptance of these images served financial, psychological, and cultural functions. The appearance of these images in African American literature and their evolution over more than a century suggests that African American writers were just as complicitous as the white-created mythology surrounding black women in ensuring that strong, asexual representations of black female characters dominated the literature in the twentieth century and threaten to continue that domination in the twenty-first century.
It is over thirty-five years since Autherine Lucy walked a gauntlet of white students screaming ‘Kill her!’ to enter a classroom at the University of Alabama; over thirty-five years since Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to give her seat to a white man; thirty years since Fannie Lou Hamer was shot at by Mississippi nightriders for registering to vote. We in the United States have had at least three decades of powerful, passionate images of black women (and men) to complicate and challenge three hundred years of stereotypes, and yet the best-known black woman’s face in the land looks out from a box of pancake mix.
—Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima
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Notes
Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power.” Special Issue—Emerging Women Writers, Callabo 19:2 (Spring 1996): 537–560.
For a discussion of these images in selected European American literary texts published by women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Diane Roberts’s The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
See M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998);
Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region; and
Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).
Lisa M. Anderson mentions this pattern in Mammies No More: The Changing Image of Black Women on Stage and Screen (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 6. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (rev. ed. New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 11 for a still shot of the mammy from Birth of a Nation. Anderson includes the same still shot following p. 86.
Compare the transformed images in Kern-Foxworth, photo essay following chapter 4. See also the images in Phil Patton’s “Mammy: Her Life and Times,” American Heritage (September 1993): 78–87.
For a discussion of this phenomenon, where the emphasis is obviously on European American women, see Kim Chemin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981; New York: HarperPerennial, 1994).
Although Hansberry had a hand in the casting for this role, I would maintain that my argument still holds. As Ossie Davis points out, McNeil in the role of Mama Lena became everybody’s “great American Mama.” In her emphasis on the type in American culture, Hansberry was surely aware of the comforting implications of such casting. See Davis’s “The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry,” Freedomways 5:3 (1965): 399.
See, for example, Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and
Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1943).
This pattern influences the literature in several works. There is “Big Sweet,” whose adeptness with a knife protects Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men (1935—the character also appears in other Hurston works) and “Big Laura,” in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Shay Youngblood entitles her 1989 collection The Big Mama Stories. Two contemporary film presentations of the powerful Big Mama are Soul Food (1997), in which Vanessa L. Williams plays an important part, and Nothing to Lose (1997), in which Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins encounter the wrath of Lawrence’s on-screen mother, who admonishes him for coming in late because it sets a bad example for his children, who are more importantly her grandchildren. When he tries to talk back, she slaps him, then slaps the Robbins character when he butts in to offer further explanation. This is perhaps one of the few times that a character resembling a screen mammy, here played by Irma P. Hall, could get away with slapping a white character.
Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” New York Times Magazine, August 22, 1971, 63.
In the article I published on this topic in 1995, I identify several characters and works that fit into the paradigm outlined in the preceding few paragraphs. They include, in earlier, less developed manifestations, Elizabeth Grimes in James Baldwins Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Dial, 1953) and
Mary Rambo in Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1952). An early strict manifestation of the type is
Aunt Hagar Williams in Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930; rpt. Collier Macmillan, 1969). Other characters who fit the paradigm are Hansberry’s Mama Lena Younger and Morrisons Sethe Suggs, who will be treated in later chapters, Morrison’s Eva Peace in Sula (New York: Knopf, 1974) and
Mrs. MacTeer in The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), Ernest Gaines’s Octavia in “The Sky is Gray” in Bloodline (New York: Dial, 1968), and several of Gloria Naylor’s characters, including Mattie Michael in The Women of Brewster Place and the women in Bailey’s Café (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). “The Sky is Gray” is particularly insightful in showing the impact of the unemotional, uncommunicative strong black female character on an offspring. Octavia beats her eight-year-old son James into killing redbirds for a family dinner without explaining to him the necessity for such action, and she refuses to allow him to express affection for her by hugging her or saying, “I love you,” because “that’s crybaby stuff,” and he is a “man.” Morrison’s Song of Solomon is equally powerful in showing the consequences to offspring of the strong black female character. Pilate Dead may be admirable for her strength and knife-wielding abilities, but she ultimately cannot—and does not show any inclination to—pass on her survival skills to her feeble-minded daughter or her misguided granddaughter. See my “This Disease Called Strength: Some Observations on the Compensating Construction of Black Female Character,” Literature and Medicine 14 (Spring 1995): 109–126.
Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Vintage, 1980); and
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988).
Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).
J. California Cooper, Family (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
See, for example, James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (New York: Dial Press, 1968).
Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” in In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.
Nickolas Ashford and Valarie Simpson, “I’m Every Woman,” The Bodyguard Original Soundtrack Album (New York: Arista Records, Inc., 1992).
Maya Angelou, And Still I Rise (New York: Bantam, 1978).
Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping,” in The Women and the Men: Poems (New York: Morrow, 1975).
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; New York: Harper & Row, 1990), pp. 140–41.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 44.
Alice Walker, “Women,” in Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems 1965–1990 Complete (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), pp. 159–160.
Octavia Butler, Wild Seed (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980).
For a discussion of the dozens, see Roger Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (Chicago: Aldine, 1970);
John Dollard, “The Dozens: Dialectic of Insult,” in Alan Dundes, Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore (rev. ed. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), pp. 277–294; and Abrahams, “Playing the Dozens,” in Dundes, pp. 295–309.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965), in which he argued that the central problem in African American families was matriarchal, emasculating black women, created quite a stir when it appeared, especially in its implications for public policy.
Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978) was also controversial in its exploration of strong black women, particularly in their political and interracial relationships, as well as in their romantic relationships (or lack thereof) with black men. Many of the women I treat do not have the public power traditionally expected of matriarchs, and only one of them is sexually active.
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© 2001 Trudier Harris
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Harris, T. (2001). Introduction. In: Saints, Sinners, Saviors. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05179-0_1
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