Deconstructing Mammy-Part 1

“You look like Aunt Jemima!” – Mommy

My mother hates my headwrap. It’s a red floral design that I proudly wrap around my hair to protect it from the harsh cotton pillowcases that I sleep on. It’s something I have been doing since time began I assume. My mother wears one to bed and my sister, all of my aunties, my grandmother and my friends. Every Black woman I know wears a headwrap to bed. But by watching television and movies you would never know that would you? With the exception of Tisha Campbell on Martin and a few of the girls on A Different World, TV land is overrun with Black women who never need a relaxer and go to sleep and wake up with perfect hair without the assistance of a scarf of any kind.

So why does the media hate the wrap? Why does my Mother admonish me if I even step one foot out of the house with the wrap on? Maybe it’s too much of a reminder of our difference. We work so hard to prove to the mainstream culture that we’re the same that any semblance of ‘other’ must be wiped out. Skin color can’t be changed so we’ve worked hard to prove that we’re ‘just like them’ even though our color may be different. But our hair, our hair is something we can change. With the right chemicals and a skilled hand we can make Celie look like Farrah Fawcett. It’s the last bastion of internal racism that we’re unwilling to face.



The headwrap reminds us that even though our hair is straight as a ruler there’s a secret to be held. Our African fore-mothers and slave grandmothers whisper to us that we’re still just like them and it scares the shit out of people. It reminds them of….Mammy.

Mammy was round, jovial, sub-serviant, asexual and old. She was not beautiful or smart, attractive or progressive. She wore her headwrap because she was unconcerned with her appearance. She kept that hair tamed under that scarf.

Mammy was a happy slave, so happy that she would fight off black men and white to keep her Mistress safe. She would even give up fortune and fame to be the wind beneath her white Mistress’ wing…as evident here in this excerpt from Imitation of Life starring Louise Beaver’s.

Aunt Delilah is offered 20% of the pancake business that Miss Bea is building from Aunt Delilah’s family recipe:
"You'll have your own car. Your own house," Miss Bea tells Aunt Delilah. Mammy is frightened. "My own house? You gonna send me away, Miss Bea? I can't live with you? Oh, Honey Chile, please don't send me away." Aunt Delilah, though she had lived her entire life in poverty, does not want her own house. "How I gonna take care of you and Miss Jessie (Miss Bea's daughter) if I ain't here... I'se your cook. And I want to stay your cook." Regarding the pancake recipe, Aunt Delilah said, "I gives it to you, Honey. I makes you a present of it."7
Full Report

Who would want to be associated with that? But what we don’t consider is that Mammy is fiction. Most black women who worked in the ‘big house’ or near it were young, light-skinned, and thin (‘cause you know they’re not really feeding the slaves). Furthermore, any black woman under the heel of slavery was subject to sexual harassment and abuse. Mammy was created to alleviate the fears of Northerners that the Southern White man was abusing black women left and right. How could anyone want to sleep with Mammy. And why would anyone have a problem with the Southern economic structure if Mammy was so much a part of the family. ‘Don’t you see how familial our slave system is?’ She was a lie. A lie that we’ve internalized and must reject.



So if the Mammy/Aunt Jemima construct is a lie. Where is the truth buried? Why did slaves where headwraps anyway? What does it mean?