It is past time to bring up the issue of “mammy”—the cultural icon created in the antebellum South by slave owners looking to soften the image of slavery and give authority to their paternalistic ideal. Mammy flourished during Reconstruction and has persisted through the present. In the late19th century, she was portrayed as a faithful beloved slave—a loving, trusted, and self-sacrificing servant who took care of both black and white children on the plantation—hardly a slave at all. In the 20th century, mammy evolved into a large, soft, dark-skinned woman, often good natured, sometimes firm. She was viewed as safe and un-sexual and was often described as one of the family. Amongst other duties of housekeeping and childcare, she was likely a valued cook.

Author Micki McElya in her book Clinging to Mammy observes that the mammy image continues to be popular because it helps whites feel less guilty about slavery—mammy as a neutral figure, a bridge between black and white. In the midst of this stereotype, many whites insist that their caretakers loved them. There were indeed some black caretakers who were warm, loving and empathic caretakers of their white families even though the relationships had to be highly charged, perplexing, confusing, complicated and full of contradictions.

Here, in Just Like Family, the mammy image often appears in the tributes, descriptions, and photographs of African American women who raised white children and specifically, in this post, through my mother’s comments in the video in the next post. In this 2006 interview, she provides a classic description of the 20th century mammy. Although her feelings of esteem seem genuine, they are at the expense of the realities of the women who were paid to nurture her.

Most of the portrayals thus far in Just Like Family are from my contemporaries, people who grew up in the 1950s and experienced these relationships through the landscape of segregation and discrimination. Some posts from white people describe their African American caretaker in terms of the mammy stereotype. Many use Just Like Family as a forum to thank the African American woman who raised them and describe how she affected them. In viewing the video oral histories, looking at the photographs and reading the narratives in the blog, it is often hard to sort out what comes out of mammy mythology and what are the real experiences of the white people who were raised by these women—some of whom do happen to have some of the characteristics of the stereotype. One wonders how the stereotype affected both blacks and whites and how often black women took on these characteristics simply because they appealed to their white employers and, thus, helped assure job security.

We know the mammy stereotypes are not universal. Photographs from my family’s archive show a number of black women, who are not “large, soft, and dark-skinned,” holding white babies. But the stereotype continues. An interesting perspective of the physicality of mammy and its continued impact on the image of blacks in this country is provided by scholar Kimberly Wallace-Sanders in her book, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory. She writes “…when we reimagine the antebellum plantation as the body…we see how the mammy’s body serves as a tendon between the races, connecting the muscle of African American slave labor with the skeletal power structure of white southern aristocracy. Her body nurtured both African American slave children and their future owners—sometimes simultaneously. Focusing on the mammy’s body… [we see her] as a transition object for a nation moving from one developmental stage to another. This emphasis pushes us to better understand why sentimental representations of black corporeality, like the mammy, continue to be both provocative and evocative.”

In Just Like Family we can read and listen to descriptions of African American caretakers by both whites and blacks. We can’t question someone’s feelings about another human being and what they meant to them, but can we look through an historical lens at mammy, and how African Americans are viewed now in the 21st century, to tease out the truth and reevaluate our understanding? So we listen for truth and accept the experience, giving each a place for their story to exist and comments to be made.

There will be additional posts about the idea of nanny in future.

These are the words my mother, Mary Simms Furman, spoke in this short segment shot for the Shared History documentary. The footage, which references the descendants of the enslaved people at Woodlands Plantation who took care of my mother as a child and helped her as an adult, was not used in the final film. It was deemed too inflammatory without the proper context. The Just Like Family blog will attempt to provide this context by looking at the stereotype and mythology of the “mammy” figure that was developed during slavery but magnified in the 20th century. Many of the profiles featured in Just Like Family were written by whites who describe their caretaker in stereotypical ways: a large, older black woman, full-bosomed, patient, sometimes sassy, asexual, faithful and unthreatening. I will address some of the theories and realities of this stereotypical image in the hopes of better understanding the relationship between the adult white children and their African American caretakers.

From the internet, “In 1956 LIFE magazine dispatched reporters and photographers to the American South to explore how the emotionally and politically charged issue of segregation manifested itself at a time when the Civil Rights movement was barely in its infancy. Here, LIFE presents rare and previously unpublished pictures by the legendary Margaret Bourke-White, who shot in Greenville, South Carolina, for one segment of a monumental five-part series, “The Background of Segregation” — a segment focusing on Greenville citizens from different walks of life who wholeheartedly supported segregation.”

An African-American maid prepares a white family’s supper in Greenville, SC, 1956.

“In photographs that, at times, convey an unsettling intimacy, Bourke-White’s work opens a window on an era that, for better and for worse, helped define 20th century America. There is courage to be found in these images, and dignity, and weakness, and a cruelty that — in the guise of a patronizing benevolence — shaped the destinies of black and white America for decades to come, and echoes in our national conversation even today.”

One of the things that strikes me about the photograph is that the white family’s kitchen is quite modest.  I remember just about everyone of any economic class in Greenville had a maid.  The salaries of the black housekeepers were sinfully low .

In my first post to “Just Like Family,” I related a story in which my mother told me that maids had to have a health certificate to work in a white person’s home.  I scoffed at this and asked her if any of the people who worked for her had shown her a health card.   She didn’t reply. 

However,  I have some new information that suggests black women may have had to get a health card to work in a white home.  In  the 1940s, Alice Childress, an African American Southern playwright,  wrote a scene in the play, “Like One of the Family,” where the white employer demands that the protagonist Mildred, the maid, supply her with a “health card.”   Mildred retorts by insisting her employer and her family also get health certificates to prove they did not have strange white diseases, since she was working closely with them–cooking, cleaning, bathing children, doing laundry–all would put her in close contact with them. 

Another reference to the health card from Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism by Nancie Caraway: “Not only has Black women’s work experience been far from rewarding but most performed the dirtiest most dangerous, most reviled tasks under the supervision of a white woman “superior.”  This history gives rise to the most painful assumptions which challenge at every turn the Black female’s “femininity.”  One such scenario involved a white female employer of a Black maid who demanded to see a health card, fearing germs her family might contract from the Black maid’s unhygienic “filthy” Harlem lifestyle.”

Another reference to health cards is made in the book Battling the Plantation Mentality:  Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle by Lauri Bush Green.  The author recounts a time in the 1940s after WWII when the local Venereal Disease Department of Memphis provided testing for returning servicemen. But local police singled out and arrested African American women and forced them to be evaluated for syphillis and get a health card to show white employers. 

The irony of this for me is that my mother told me that our grandmother’s maid, Llewellyn Hopkins (see photograph above), had a syphilitic heart, which was discovered later in her life.  She “was sent up” from the family plantation in the 1950s, three hours away, to work for my grandmother and was considered “just like family.”

Jane Dalrymple-Hollo and Dezzie McIntosh grew up in rural north Mississippi, but in different generations.  Jane was from a well-to-do white family and Dezzie was a black domestic servant in Jane’s household throughout most of her childhood.  Their relationship deepened after Jane spent a long evening in Dezzie’s living room in December, 1999, and recorded an informal oral history in which she asked Dezzie to describe her childhood, her relationship with Blues music and  her family life.

Jane and I had been friends for several years, but in March of 2010 we happened to meet at an art opening, and I told Jane that I was ready to begin working on the “Just Like Family” documentary.  Unfortunately, Dezzie had passed away the year before, but Jane and I had already agreed that the relationship between the two of them would be an interesting one to explore.  To my amazement, I received a call from Jane the very next day.  “Felicia, you won’t believe who’s here in Boulder, right now–Dezzie’s son, Pierce McIntosh.”

Pierce, a large congenial man in his fifties, was a natural in front of the camera.  He said he knew he would call Jane when he got to Colorado, but he didn’t know what to expect.  Jane told Pierce about the “Just Like Family” project and they both agreed to let me film them as they reminisced about Pierce’s mother.  After a little searching, Jane came up with the cassette tape she had recorded with Dezzie ten years earlier, and I was able to film Pierce and Jane as they listened to Dezzie’s familiar voice.  The day before, I had interviewed Pierce, and he told me that, to him, the most important thing about Jane’s relationship with his mother was that she had thanked Dezzie.

It is clear from these segments that Jane and Pierce are fond of each other and listening together to the recording of Dezzie talking about her life seemed to deepen their connection.  In these scenes, you’ll see them respond to the poignant, funny and sad incidents in the life of the woman who essentially raised them both, but in very separate circumstances. 

After Pierce returned to Mississippi, Jane looked at the video of his interview.  From it, she told me that it gave her new insights into Dezzie’s real life–with her own husband and children.  We will continue the exploration of these relationships with an interview of Jane.  We will also provide an audio file of the oral history and a letter Jane wrote about this special relationship that was read at Dezzie’s funeral.  Stay tuned.

“Just Like Family” seeks to provide a more comprehensive portrait of African American women who raised white children–to give name and place to people whose history may not be recorded, whose impact on US culture and white people might not be recognized.  Few of these relationships between whites and their African American caretakers have been documented; the relationships have not be acknowledged.  “Just Like Families” offers a space within which to tell the stories of these caretakers from both black and white perspectives in order to honor and give thanks to these unsung mother/caretakers.

I REMEMBER MAMMY

Mattie Lee Martin (“Mammy”)
By one who loved her, Sharman Burson Ramsey

Thirteen year old Mattie Lee Martin took her mentally challenged older sister by the hand and led her down the rutted, red clay country road. Neither looked back. Mattie was determined her sister would not be abused again in their grandparents’ home. She’d finally accepted that her parents would never come back to get them. The road led to the town of Dothan, Alabama, and a life, Mattie Lee hoped, that would be better than the one they’d known on that god-forsaken farm.

Mrs. Bender stood at the door of her variety store, broom in hand, and watched the two girls walk toward her down the sidewalk. Mattie, the spokesperson for the two, stepped forward and boldly asked, “I need work and a place where me and my sister can stay. Do you know of anything?” She looked up at Mrs. Bender quite seriously. Her black eyes were wide. Anxiety was written all over her round black face that now dripped in sweat in the hot summer day after her long walk. Mrs. Bender read in that expression that she’d gotten this far, but now the little girl was in a quandary as to what should she do now? She looked at the tight grip she had on her much larger, but obviously more dependent, sister.

Mrs. Bender sized them up and in her gentle voice said, “I hear they are hiring maids across the street at the Wadlington Hotel, but come in here and let me help you with something to wear to your interview. Your sister can rest here while you go and inquire. Tell them I sent you.”

Mattie stood straight and said, “I don’t take no charity. I’ll pay you back.” Mrs. Bender nodded.

That Jewish lady remained a dear friend to Mattie the rest of her life.

Mattie Lee Martin later became highly regarded for her cooking skills. She cooked at the restaurant of the Houston Hotel for awhile and then took a job as the private cook for Dr. Moody, founder of Moody Hospital in Dothan. When the Moodys moved into their big house on Main Street from the house across from the hospital, Mattie for some reason was not going with them. Dr. Moody recommended Mattie to Dr. E. G. Burson, my father. The Moodys gave her a house as a parting gift.

When Mattie Lee Martin interviewed with my mother, she told my mother, “I don’t work with children.”

Yet as the pictures reveal, Mattie Lee Martin became as dear to us as our grandmothers and so she deserved just as endearing a name. Thus she came to be called “Mammy.”

Mammy came to work every morning before seven, except Sunday, either by bus or by taxi and stayed until after five. Even after our overweight dog, Sir Bow Wow, went blind, he would meet Mammy at the bottom of the hill where she got off the bus every morning and together they would plod their way to the house. She cooked, cleaned, and loved us. I remember seeing one of her paychecks in the amount of $27.00. I also remember the days we’d take Mammy home and she’d ask Mother to stop by the grocery store several blocks away. Then she’d put some money in my hand and I’d run into the grocery store and plunk the money down saying, “Bit o Dental Snuff, please.”

Mammy ordered the groceries to cook for lunch from Murphy’s Market downtown first thing in the morning and a boy on a bicycle delivered them in time for her to cook. Dinner was served at exactly 12:00 noon. (In the South we eat breakfast, dinner and supper.) The meat went on a platter before “the doctor”. The table was set precisely with forks on the left of the plate (with the napkin) and the knife (facing inward) on the right. The glass was placed above the knife. She trained us well.

Mammy baked the best desserts ever to grace a dinner table: Fresh apple pie with crust into which she cut real cheddar cheese cut from a block; strawberry short cake with fresh strawberries sliced and sugared to make a juice that would sink into the cake she baked that morning topped with real sweet whipped cream; a bitter sweet chocolate pie with whipped egg white topping and homemade crust; pecan pie; Lane cake (her Christmas specialty); coconut cake; chocolate layer cake; peach, blackberry, apple cobbler; banana pudding; a coconut pie and lemon icebox pie to die for just to name a few. She cooked country cooking now labeled soul food because it was so good it soothed the soul, I think. Her vegetables swam with grease and we all swear the pot likker could make a sick man well. Fried chicken, country fried steak, fried pork chops…all with mashed potatoes or rice with gravy, turnips, sweet potatoes, collards, rutabagas, fried eggplant, and cornbread saturated with butter or fried to melt in your mouth! And do not forget that specialty of the South…fresh, sweet tea with lemon or mint.

On Saturdays when Mammy heard the theme music to the TV show “Fury,” she would come pounding down the hall to watch it with me in our TV room at the opposite end of the house to the kitchen. She’d run back and forth timing cooking lunch for during the commercials. Mammy alternated cooking my sister’s, brother’s and my favorite lunch on Saturdays. When we were sick, she squeezed lemons and made a sweet/sour concoction she served with chicken noodle soup that she brought up the stairs ignoring her chronic arthritis to where we lay in our bed to make us feel better. It always worked.

Mammy had worked for the aristocracy of the town, Dr. and Mrs. Earl Moody. While she often locked horns with my mother (whose own father had been killed when logs rolled off a log truck when she was 13 leaving her mother to struggle raising five children) she refused to give up on us. “Yo mama, she be mean. But I be mean too, so we get along.” Mother had been awarded campaign ribbon for service in World War II as a nurse at the Battle of the Bulge. She could curse a blue streak and did so on occasion when things did not go to suit her. Sometimes those disagreements would get so heated that Mother would fire Mammy, but we’d cry and carry on so, she’d have to go and ask her to come back. My father was a doctor and his father was a doctor and that made us worth Mammy’s time and effort. My mother might not know what was “proper” but Mammy did, and she was determined to turn us out well.

Mammy gave us advice that stayed with us. My father was a doctor in a small town and Mammy thought that meant we had more responsibility than others…to him and our community. “Yo Daddy. He’s somebody You gotta be somebody, too.” She made us tea cakes when our friends came over and we had tea parties. She observed my behavior and said, “You too bossy. You ain’t nevah gonna have no friends!” I tried very hard to tone down the bossy. That sense of responsibility she drilled into me had its consequences…I tried to straighten out the world, my siblings and classmates. I was a chubby, lonely little girl, but I had Mammy as a best friend. I was not a beautiful child, but Mammy loved to brush my thick, straight hair and if nothing else I was convinced I had beautiful hair and a pretty smile. At least that’s what Mammy said.

She carried my sister around in a wicker clothes basket and commanded that she be patient by balling up her fists and “holding her potatoes.” Sylvia was a precocious child who loved watching…”helping”… Mammy work at the bar in our kitchen. Mammy said, “Susan” (her name for Sylvia; she called me Shamoo) “she be smart. She can do stuff. You can’t do nothin’.” To prove my worth to Mammy I took the Ajax upstairs to our bathtub and started scrubbing. Mammy followed and said, “You gone rune yo hands. Give Mammy that!” As she struggled to kneel, bending her arthritic knees, beside the tub, she muttered, “You ain’t nevah gonna git a man you rune yo hands!”) I guess that was how I managed to snare a husband at 19.

He wasn’t the same boy friend I had, the nephew of a friend of the family, who had a farm in Marianna about 30 miles south of Dothan whom I was going to pick up to come and visit us during his visit home for summer break from Louisiana Tech. I was going to take my 1966 yellow GTO convertible down to Marianna and find the farm. Mammy was assigned chaperone duty. We set out and Mammy directed me to her house first. Later I found out Mammy got her gun and settled it under the brown felt hat she wore on her head. Mammy was not going to “put up with any truck” with the boyfriend or anyone else.

One of the lullabies I sang my children was the one I heard from Mammy as she cradled my brother and sister on her lap and rocked them left to right. “Bye oh bye oh bay oh bay oh by oh by oh bay” she’d chant and it carried so much love. She sang the same song to my children when they came. If there isn’t such a term as GrandMammy there should be because she loved them and they loved her just that much.

She called my brother “Little Man” and adored him. Her best friend on Cherry Street was Perlie Mae Jackson for whom she got a job with my father’s partner in his medical practice.

Mammy did have her own family…a daughter Lucy Mae Dixon who was my Mother’s age. Mammy had very little education herself and the lists she made could barely be read, so she valued a good education. Mammy skrimped and saved and sent her to college in the North. It must have been a Catholic college because Lucy Mae converted to Catholicism. Mammy was a dedicated member of the Cherry Street AME Church. Lucy earned her Masters and came home to teach. Mammy bought her items of silver “on time” as birthday gifts. The mahogany furniture in their living areas was always covered in plastic to “save” it.

Lucy adopted a daughter. She was a beautiful child, but I always thought the adopted daughter was a bit ashamed of her adopted family. Lucy made sure she knew her real parents were educated people. The adopted daughter left Dothan as soon as she could.

I guess Mammy told my brother and sister the same thing she drilled into me. “Yo daddy be somebody. You gotta be somebody.” My sister is a cardiologist in New Orleans (Dr. Sylvia Burson Rushing) and my brother (Elkanah George Burson III ) has just started a pharmaceutical company (Burel Pharmaceuticals). Me? After you’ve got a man it’s all right “to rune yo hands” with Ajax, I learned. I wash a mean bathtub and have stayed married to the same man, an attorney of whom she approved (whose family once owned the Houston Hotel where she had worked) for forty years doing a little teaching and writing. This humble generous woman whom I never saw wear a single piece of jewelry gave me a pearl and gold bracelet for graduation from high school. She who worked from can to can’t all of her life gave me a silver goblet when I got married. I wonder if she ever knew how much they mean to me and that I realize the sacrifice and love those gifts demonstrated.

I once dreamt Mammy and I were on a train traveling to some unknown destination. I felt danger in the dream but from what source, I don’t know. Mammy took the aisle seat and told me not to look at anyone or smile at anyone. I knew she feared they would hurt us, but they’d have to get through her to get to me. She glowered at everyone. We were exhausted when finally we came to a place where we made our way to a hotel. The man at the desk said I could stay, but Mammy could not. Mammy told me to go into the room and rest; she would wait on the street until morning and then we would again make our way to the train and our destination. I knew there were dangers all around and Mammy would be out in the middle of it. I remember the horror at thinking of being separated from Mammy. I think that place is what Hell would be like.

I would not stay without her. “We’ll get back on that train and go to Muddin’s (my grandmother that had already gone to Heaven). In the dream we got off the train at the tracks that ran through Brewton and Muddin came to get us. She took us to her house just blocks from the tracks where we were all safe and we all slept in the same bedroom in the two double beds in my grandmother’s little house where all her grandchildren slept with her. My glimpse of Heaven.

How could it be that there was a place that I could stay and Mammy couldn’t?

Mammy was a proud person who made the most of her situation and, selflessly, with hard work and determination earned respect and made a good life for herself and her family. She raised us, her white family, to believe we could do whatever we chose to do and that we should make our parents proud. She drilled into us values of honesty, integrity, and a sense of responsibility. Because we had been given so much; much was expected. Because we loved her, it was Mammy we wanted to make proud.

Willie Cole, artist, has been commissioned to do a series of four works of art for the Wadsworth Athenium Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Within the Wadsworth
Museum is the Amistad Center which houses a collection of African American Memorabilia.

Mammy would be so honored, I can think of no greater homage to the wonderful woman I knew as my “Mammy”.

Copyright 1996 These are my own working genealogy files that I share with you. The errors are my own. But, perhaps they will give you a starting point. All original writing is copyrighted. Webmaster

Nancy Smith’s mother died when she was 7. The blow was softened by Rosie White, an African American woman who was hired for childcare and as the maid in Nancy’s household. They lived in New Orleans. Nancy had two older siblings and her father traveled a great deal. Someone had to raise these children. Nancy was particularly affected by Rosie’s loving spirit and generosity. She talks about this formative relationship and Rosie’s “other life” as well as Rosie’s granddaughter who was the same age as Nancy.

by Dorothy Day Ciarlo 

          Though time supposedly weakens memory, the Dickensian names of my childhood are forever there, waiting for a tug on the memory chain to come tumbling out. My schoolmates’ names all denoted something—Mary Ellen Finger, Nancy Jean Sharp, Janet Love-it, Jane Ann Cook, Uldene LongStretch, Basil Butler, to list but a handful. So, too, the places: Boil Park, where we went for picnics: Right-Sell, my elementary school, and Win-Field Methodist where my sister Peggy and I went to church every Sunday morning and evening. And the streets—Chest-er Street, Gain Street, Arch Street, Ring-o, stream out of my memory closet. But the Thing that clouded my childhood and in fact my whole life, didn’t have a name. In my own mind, I began to call it It. 

          I grew up in a time in a place where It was a constant presence, everybody felt It, had some relationship to It but nobody ever spoke of it. I was born in 1933, in Little Rock in the state of Arkansas, into a family that had come to Little Rock from the west coast a few years before. In my family, my parents were quick to point out that we were “not Southerners” and that plus the fact that my father was a professor, made us seem different than the other people we lived near. In fact, my father was a scientist who taught medical students at the University of Arkansas. You might think that this meant we lived in the rich part of town, but you would be wrong. Teachers in Arkansas, even university professors, made next to nothing at that time. This didn’t matter much to me because other people in my neighborhood didn’t have much money, but they also didn’t have much education.          

          The other thing that was different was that my mother was sick: not sick with a disease that people understood, but sick with a strange illness that kept her in bed all the time until I went to school. Because Mother was in bed and my father was very busy with his research and teaching, we needed a helper. That’s where Idabelle came in. She came to work part-time for our family when I was born, and the other part-time she went to college. One of my clearest recollections is of my dad bringing back books from the library for Idabelle’s college classes, saying, “It’s ridiculous that she can’t go there.” To this day, whenever I think about Idabelle not being able to go to the public library I get mad about It. 

          All of my very early life Idabelle was my dearest person, except for maybe my father. She was tall and dark and slender and had a deep, infectious laugh that I still hear. I have just one small picture of her. She is holding me in the crook of one arm— I am about 6 months old—and close to her other side is my sister Peggy. Idabelle is looking serious, right into the camera, and right into my heart.  Memories about what Idabelle and I did are dim. Mostly, what I remember is a feeling: that Idabelle was my person, and when she left there was a hole in my heart which remains to this day.                  

          She quit working for us to get married when I was about 5.  By that time my mother was getting out of bed more and we didn’t need so much help. After that, every Christmas we went to visit her in her neighborhood and took a basket of fruit for her family.  Soon she had her own two boys and she grew stout and lost some teeth. (My father said, “The babies got the calcium.” He did research in nutrition and knew about such things.) I didn’t feel close to Idabelle in the same way anymore and it made me sad. Then she and her husband and kids moved to California and I never saw her again.

          One of my other earliest It-memories is of walking to school with Rosemary Moron. We had just moved to our new house, and she lived right across the street from me, and for a short time when I was about seven we walked to school together. I didn’t much like her, I wasn’t sure why at first. She had a mole on her finger which was disgusting and she always wanted me to hold her hand. This particular day was a beautiful spring morning, and Rosemary and I were holding hands walking down Ringo Street heading towards Right-sell. A boy a little bit older than us was riding his bike in the quiet street, slowly with no hands, doing figure eights with the front wheel, whistling, looking dreamy and at peace. All of a sudden Rosemary for no reason calls out, “NIIGGERR!!!”  The boy’s face changes, he grabs the bike handles, stands up and hunches over his bike, and rides down the street as fast as he can. I feel my stomach turn and fury wells up against Rosemary. My memory is that I pushed her into the street. Probably I didn’t. I know I quit holding her hand, and I never walked with her again. But the memory of that event is as clear as if it happened yesterday. 

          My best friend later on in grade school and early junior high was Janet Love-it. Her father ran the Summer Field Ice Cream store. She and her father were sweet, shy people. I adored Janet. But there was a problem in our friendship: Janet’s mother, who was loud, mean, and overprotective. She always wanted to drive Janet to and from school, and since Janet and I were best friends, I had to walk over to Janet’s house 3 blocks away and ride with her mother if I wanted to be with Janet. Invariably when we were driving home, we would pass through groups of kids walking in the quiet street, coming home from their school, laughing and joking loudly as they walked. Janet’s mother would yell out the window, “GET OUT OF THE STREET, YOU BLACK APES.” And the kids, without even glancing at her, would move ever so slowly over to the side of the street, still laughing and seeming to have fun. I wanted to talk to Janet about her mom, and about It, but I never did. Eventually, I couldn’t stand It anymore and Janet and I ceased to be friends. 

          When I was in junior high, I had to go to the Sunday evening youth program at Win-Field Methodist, which I hated because I was very shy and I didn’t have a good friend to go with. Also I was an eighth-grader and everyone else was a ninth-grader. I went because I thought I was a Christian and that I should go to church. Well, the kids that went to the Sunday evening program took turns leading the program. One Sunday in February it was Brotherhood Month, and I signed up to lead that Sunday’s program. Actually, I wondered why it was just Brotherhood and not Brother-and-Sisterhood.  In any case, I thought this was my chance to stand up and talk about It. We had a program book that we were supposed to follow. It looked boring to me so I asked Daddy how I might start out the discussion so that the kids would really think about Brotherhood. He suggested I ask them, “How many of you went swimming last summer?”  And then, when they would all raise their hands (the summers were unbelievably hot in Little Rock), I would tell them that if they had been Negro they wouldn’t have been able to go swimming since there wasn’t a swimming pool for Negroes and the law didn’t allow whites and Negroes to swim together. I thought it was a good idea and that it would change the kids’ way of thinking. 

           I was wrong. Right away after I had gotten past the swimming thing but before I could even get into the discussion I had planned, the boys were jeering and using awful names and the girls were giggling and It had taken hold and Brotherhood was out the window. I felt stupid and humiliated and I wanted to die. The older couple that was supposed to be the adults in charge didn’t say anything except, at the end of the ruined program, that as Christians we should all believe in Brotherhood, whatever that meant. Not long after that, I decided I wasn’t a Christian.

           Somewhere in my childhood I read a story in the Readers Digest about a woman who was Negro and was very light in skin color. It was a story of her “passing”, as it was called, for being white. This was a new and very exciting idea to me. I had often thought that I was really adopted —since my mother and my sister both had red hair and I did not — and the idea that I really was Negro captured me. It didn’t seem implausible: I knew my dad and mom were upset about It and they might have chosen a Negro baby, so it was just an accident of fate that I became light-skinned enough to “pass.” The complexities of this didn’t bother me: from earliest time I thought that in some way black people were really my people and my external appearance was a sham. It was an accident of adoption that I was considered white.

           As I grew older I felt forced to give up the idea of my Negro heritage as unrealistic; yet it stayed deep in my mind. I longed to really know a Negro. It may seem strange to think that in a place where a good proportion of the citizens were Negro, I never had opportunity to know a single one as even a distant friend except Idabelle, and that was when I was little, but that is the case. I began to scheme about how I could meet and talk to a black person on a normal basis. Finally one day in high school my opportunity came: I was downtown, close to where the Negro college was, and a young black woman (who was, in fact, a college student) was standing waiting for a bus. I took courage in hand and struck up a conversation with her. She was friendly in what seemed to me a natural way. I was extremely nervous but tried not to show it. I don’t remember what we talked about but it seemed to me like she didn’t think there was anything odd about me starting the conversation, and that was a big step forward for me. When my bus came, I said goodbye and got on it and was relieved that it wasn’t her bus. I could not have stood having her have to sit in back of me. (My usual practice was to sit just one aisle above the middle of the bus, which to my mind conveyed that I really would have liked to sit right next to a black person. I had learned through sad experience that if I sat right in the middle, that meant that the black people had to scrunch up into fewer seats behind me.) I would have liked to be her friend, but at least this was a beginning. 

          When I was in high school, I took the same bus to Little Rock Senior High School (later re-named Little Rock Central High) as the kids who went to Dunbar High School, just a little ways away. The irony wasn’t lost on me that there was a strange duplication of educational services here.  Every morning the bus stopped first at Dunbar, and every morning the boys from my high school would harass the students getting off from the back of the bus at Dunbar— changing the name of the school (which I later learned was named after a famous poet) to an insulting depreciation— and every morning I got mad. 

          But I was being affected by this, as well as lots of other stuff. Many years later, when I was in training to become a psychologist, I worked with a psychiatric resident, a handsome cultured African-American man named Lloyd E., whom I learned was from Little Rock. I grabbed every opportunity I could to talk to him, even though it was pretty clear that he had little interest in talking to me.  This became even clearer one day when I was asking him questions about where in Little Rock he had grown up, what college he had gone to, etc. Then I asked him what high school he went to, certain in my own mind that he must have gone away to some prestigious private high school in the North. He said, “Dunbar.” Without thinking I said, “You’re joking.” He looked me straight in the eye and into my It-distorted heart and said quietly, “No, I’m not.” 

          It is no accident that as soon as I was old enough to leave home and go to college (in 1951) I chose to “go North”. Actually, I went East to a Quaker school which, I was certain, given its history and its northern location would have many black students. It did, and I got to know every one of them. Not surprisingly for that era, most of them were from Africa. In fact, getting to know the African and other “foreign” students of color was a freeing experience for me. One friend I made was Roz E., from Nigeria. Rumor had it that she was from royalty, and she carried herself with grace and confidence. She had the same infectious wonderful laugh that Idabelle had. I remember one time during spring break (when most all the other students went home, but Roz and I were too far from our homes to go back) Roz and I went into the industrial town near the college to shop. We went into a dress shop, and I asked to try some item of clothing on. The saleslady said, “You can, but she can’t.” I was furious—this was supposed to be the North—and stalked out dragging Roz with me. I felt the same incredibly deep shame that I had felt in Little Rock and I mumbled apologies. She said in her lilting Nigerian-British accent, “That’s all right, Dotty, I didn’t want to try on anything anyway.”  

          In college I also became friends with Sylvester, an African-American who took residence in my internal self for the whole of my life.  He and I were good and deep friends. We rarely talked about It, and when we did, little needed to be said in words. If truth be told, I felt we recognized our mutual souls. I never needed to apologize for my Little Rock-affected self-ness. He died recently, and I have felt a deep grief at his passing. 

          In my adult life, I have done things that people whom others like to say have “white guilt” do.  I’ve taken and then worked on developing workshops for helping people understand the dynamics of “Us versus Them.”  I’ve worked with diversity committees. I’ve lived in dedicated multi-racial communities. I’ve taken a trip to South Africa and loved Nelson Mandela and heard a society having to talk about It. I have privately been irked with white friends who like to talk about “racism” and how they are free of it. 

          In my later life, I find myself turning back to my childhood self. I think about Idabelle and how that first deep relationship with a person who cared for me and whom I loved set something unnamable but profound in motion. I believe I have done some of what I could do in my life to deal with It. And I have learned to accept that everybody else thinks I belong to that group of people called “white”. But inside, I’m still not sure but what I’m “passing.”

 Fifty years have passed since Miss Elizabeth was a girl, but she still remembers Willie Rudd, the black housekeeper who helped raise her.  She remembers the feeling of sitting on Willie Rudd’s lap while the housekeeper sang to her.  And she remembers how Willie scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees.  What would Miss Elizabeth say to Willie Rudd if she were alive today?  She decides to write her a letter telling her how things would be different.  Now, Willie  Rudd would come in the front door—not the back.  She would ride in the front of the bus with Miss Elizabeth, and they could sit together at movies.  The two of them would have a wonderful time.  And in her heartfelt letter, Miss Elizabeth has the chance to tell Willie Rudd something she never told her while she was alive—that she loved her.

Although a lovely tribute to an important person in a little girl’s life, the author leaves much to the imagination, as if Willie only existed as Miss Elizabeth’s caretaker and housemaid.  She doesn’t comment on the child’s feelings about seeing the person she loves “scrubb[ing] the floor on her hands and knees.”  She doesn’t speculate on Willie’s family life, the hardships she likely endured, the trials of segregation, and her other encounters with white people.  It gives the impression to its audience, children, that blacks naturally take on the roll of serving white people.

“She remembered the feel of Willie’s big lap, covered with a flowered apron, the feel of Willie’s generous bosom against her cheek.  This kind of stereotype is reproduced innumerably among whites as if all black women had “generous bosoms.”  More comments on the mammy stereotype in later posts.

The book does confirm an increasing desire of whites raised by black women—that there is a wish to thank her and to tell her they loved her.   Perhaps because of the popularity of The Help, whites are returning to childhood memories to consider the important relationship—though one sided or not—with their caretakers.

^“…she taught me the most valuable lesson a writer can learn, which is to try to see — honestly and down to its very center — the world in which we live.”

GRADY SHOWED UP ONE DAY at our house at 1409 Fifth Avenue West in Birmingham, and by and by she changed the way I saw the world. I was 7 when she came to iron and clean and cook for $18 a week, and she stayed for seven years. During that time everyone in our family came to accept what my father called “those great long talks” that occupied Grady and me through many a sleepy Alabama afternoon. What happened between us can be expressed in many ways, but its essence was captured by Graham Greene when he wrote that in every childhood there is a moment when a door opens and lets the future in. So this is a story about one person who opened a door and another who walked through it.

It is difficult to describe — or even to keep alive in our memories — worlds that cease to exist. Usually we think of vanished worlds as having to do with far-off places or with ways of life, like that of the Western frontier, that are remote from us in time. But I grew up in a place that disappeared, and it was here in this country and not so long ago. I speak of Birmingham, where once there flourished the most complete form of racial segregation to exist on the American continent in this century.