Clinging To Mammy Summary

Micki McElya’s comprehensive analysis of America’s “faithful black mammy” is aptly titled Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in the Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007). Clinging to Mammy details the historical background of the characteristic imagery of the black female and its implications in the black community as well as its white society’s misrepresentation. Although there is immense scholarly research on American slavery, McElya’s sets out “confront the terrible depths od desire for the black mammy and the way it still drags at struggles for real democracy and social justice”(14). In doing so, she dissects the vast amount of research into the mythology of the “mammy women”. This approach proves successful in broadening the discourse on implications of the faithful slave in the twentieth century.
Clinging to Mammy begins with a glimpse into the history

of Aunt Jemima, starting with the woman behind the “mask”, Nancy Green, at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Green’s first performance would become the face of the Aunt Jemima pancake mix, and McElya pens that this mix “would ride the leading edge of innovation in production, packaging, advertising, and distribution, while its supposedly essential characteristic… were deemed represented by the enslaved woman and the old South” (15). After exploring the rise of Aunt Jemima and the success throughout America, McElya shifts gears as she begins to analyze the roles of whites in upholding the “black mammy” persona. Chapters “Anxious Performances”, “The Line Between Mother and Mammy”, and “Monumental Power”, sheds lights on their “professional and amateur impersonations of enslaved women”(40). “Anxious Performances” details the white woman taking on the role of the “black mammy”. One example, often illustrated in the Tribune, shows Jeannette Robinson Murphy’s “plantation entertainment” at the Arche Club of Chicago. In “The Line Between Mother and Mammy”, the author allows readers into the case of Marjorie Delbridge and Camilla Jackson. The term of “mammy” was regarded in the light of “a black servant and her white charge” by the white counterparts (79). McElya transitions from this historical event to another historical moment: the United Daughters of Confederacy’s aim to establish a monument for the “faithful color mammies of the South” (116).
In the final couple of chapters of Clinging to Mammy, the author examines the burgeoning violence of blacks and the problems black women faced in advancement as a result of the “faithful slave mammy”.

Chapter five is aptly titled, “The Violence of Affection” and it depicts the growing violence in Houston and St. Louis as a result of the “equated paternalistic affection with violence”(161) McElya leaves no stone unturned as she includes the political movement of the “Anti-lynching bill” in 1922. “Confronting the Mammy Problem” is the last chapter in this narrative. It follows the troubles of employment for the colored woman. “The Mammy Problem” caused black women to be treated unfairly in the workforce. However, McElya illustrates how blacks were able to stand for their rights in the form of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This illustration would serve to help quell the “white supremacist conceptions of the black women’s servitude, maternity, and sexuality” (207). Clinging to Mammy wraps up with an epilogue dedicated to the transformation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from the 1950s to

1980s.
Clinging to Mammy is Micki McElya’s successful historical analysis and synthesis of America’s “faithful black servant” persona. McElya presents a detailed narrative of the transformation of the Aunt Jemima trademark throughout the twentieth century. She is effective in compiling historical data from newspaper articles, biographies, governmental publications and other sources. In doing so, she is able to not only capture the true essence of the “black mammy”, but depict the roles of politics, society, and cultural on America. This comprehensive, somewhat chronological, and interpretive account of America’s slavery implications is a must read for students and historians alike.