Mammy Her Life And Times
BORN IN SLAVERY AND RAISED IN ITS PAINFUL AFTERMATH TO BECOME ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AMERICAN ICONS, SHE HAS BEEN MADE TO ENCOMPASS LOVE AND GUILT AND RIDICULE AND WORSHIP —AND STILL SHE LIVES ON
September 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 5
Print
EmailBut today Mammy is regarded in more complex ways too. The components of cliché have separated and grown more individual. Mammy has become mammies—real persons differentiated in literature and memoir, and problematic. A few years ago the New York Times editor Howell Raines’s magazine memoir of his own mammy, “Grady’s Gift,” struck many as sentimental, others as profound, but sketched the ambivalence that many former children encharged to former mammies have had.
Today Mammy’s Cupboard is in disrepair, looming like a mock Ozymandias over a changed landscape. Mammy’s paint is peeling, and her arms have fallen off. The restaurant is closed, its drive blocked with dozens of concrete birdbaths and garden elves, arrayed in a mocking dance. Mammy the stereotype continues to cast a shadow. But more and more it is possible to imagine Mammy as a kind of chrysalis, the fat woman from whom the proverbial inner thin woman has escaped, a shell from which the mature creature has at last emerged.
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Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?
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“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
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65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
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Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
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40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
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A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
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“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
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The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
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Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
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The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.
