Diddie, Dumps, and Tot (1882). Mammy is always
ready and willing to help her white folks. She is
Mark Twain’s “nigger woman” in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884), Laura Lee Hope’s Dinah
in the Bobbsey Twins series (1904), Fannie Hurst’s
Delilah in Imitation of Life (1904), and Margaret
Mitchell’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1936).
She even appears in the contemporary romance
novels like Nora Hess’s Wildfire (1994).
While Mammy continues to be a well-known
and well used figure in literature, her most famous
exposure began in 1890, when R. T. Davis created
Aunt Jemima and put her smiling face on pancake
boxes. This image has been used to sell numerous
items, including syrup, flour, kitchen appliances,
and cleaning products.
Mammy’s career in film has remained stable.
She made her early screen appearance in America’s
first epic film, The Birth of a Nation, where a white
male actor in blackface played her role. She some-
times changed out of her head-rag and put on a
maid’s uniform, as in Mae West’s classic 1933 film
I’m No Angel. In the Shirley Temple 1935 film The
Little Colonel, she was back in her familiar slave
garb. In contemporary films, she is not as fat or
as black, but she is still Mammy in regard to her
stereotypical qualities.
No matter the genre or the name given her, this
type is identified by certain characteristics: She is
an African-American female who is usually isolated
or separated from the African-American commu-
nity. She is usually loving and yet not loved. She is
mothering but is rarely shown with children of her
own or connected to African-American children.
She has little or no past and little or no indication
of a future; she exists in the here and now. Though
she is not usually successful, she can and does help
her white family succeed. She is always able and
willing to help without any justifiable prodding.
Mammy is well entrenched in American history,
literature, and popular culture. The mere mention
of her name can evoke strong emotional responses.
Mammy’s soothing touch has been used to ease the
conscience of a nation ravaged by the guilt of slav-
ery. She has been used to placate and subjugate.
She is a ready mask that can be placed on the body
of any African-American woman. She is powerful
and powerless. She is an American icon.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New
York: Routledge, 1991.
Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of
Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1998.
Morton, Patricia. Disfigured Images. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Publishing, 1991.
Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Represen-
tations of Race and Region. New York: Routledge,
1994.
White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I A Woman? New York:
Norton, 1987.
Yvonne AtkinsonManchild in the Promised Land
Claude Brown (1968)
Like RICHARD WRIGHT’s BLACK BOY, MALCOLM X’s
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, and NATHAN Mc-
CALL’s Makes Me Wanna Holler, CLAUDE BROWN’s
Manchild in the Promised Land offers a firsthand
view of what the author, a native of New York’s
Harlem, experienced as he moved from boyhood
to young adulthood during the post–World War II
era. Cumulatively, these autobiographies by black
men suggest that growing up in America dur-
ing the 20th century was similar for many Afri-
can males, no matter their geographical location.
None of these writers was granted the luxury of
enjoying a childhood of innocence, much less a
young adulthood filled with dreams and expecta-
tions. According to them, the black male is often
forced to be simultaneously a child and a man,
given his socioeconomic and political status. Like
Richard, Malcolm, and Nathan, Sonny Boy, the
young novice of this now-classic autobiographi-
cal novel, is forced to grow up within “the veil,” to
borrow from W. E. B. DUBOIS, within the margin-
alized world he is assigned to whether in Georgia,
North or South Carolina, or “the promised land,”
Harlem. The black mecca created dream-filledManchild in the Promised Land 333