XXVIIIA MONUMENT TO MAMMIES
Let us have a memorial, before the last of us who had a black mammy passes away. We who still linger would love to see a granite monument to the memory of the dear mammy who fostered our childhood. Our grandchildren, indeed our children, will never know the kind of mammies their ancestors were blessed with.
I know of two only of the old stock of nurses and housekeepers left. They were grown women when Sherman marched through Georgia, destroying their old homes, laying waste the land, and Butler sat down in New Orleans, wreaking vengeance on their hapless masters, and scattering their little bands of servants to the four winds. These two mammies I wot of remained with their own white folks. The Georgia one lived in a family I visited, a faithful old woman, doing her utmost to fill a gap (and gaps were of constant occurrence) in any branch of household duty. Mammy was a supernumerary after the children grew up, but when the new-fangled housemaidswept her trailing skirts out of the premises, mammy filled her place till another of that same half-educated sort came. When cook flared up and refused to do her duty in the way to which she was called, mammy descended into the deserted kitchen.
One day I overheard the son of that family, who was about to start to a Northern college, say: “Mammy, put on your Sunday black silk; I want you to go down the street with me; I am going to have your picture taken.” “What fur, son?” “I want it with the rest of my family to put on my bureau at college.” “Lord! son, you ought’en to hav’ my black face to show to dem Yankees; den you’ll tell ’em I’se your mammy.” However, the pleased old darky, as black as her Sunday silk, had her picture taken just like “son” wanted. I have a copy of it now. God bless her!
A family from the extreme South comes every summer to a quiet place in Connecticut and brings mammy to take care of the little ones. I doubt if they feel they could come without her. Mammy is pure black; no adulterated blood under that skin—black, flat-nosed and homely, but the children adore her, and she “makes them mind, too,” she proudly tells you. Every boarder in that big house knows mammy, but I doubt if one of them knows her name; I do not. It warms my heart to shakehands with those two remnants of a dear past civilization, the only two I ever met.
When a child I made frequent visits to my cousin, Judge Chinn’s plantation, in West Baton Rouge. I believe that hospitable house has long since vanished into the river, with its store of pleasant memories. How I always, when I arrived there, had to run find mammy first thing, and how she folded me in her warm embrace and delighted my ears with, “How dis chile do grow.” Every visitor at that grand, hospitable home knew mammy. She always stood back of the judge’s chair, and with signals directed the young girls how to wait at table. She managed after the children grew up, married and settled (some of them settled, Creole fashion, in the home nest too) that whole big and mixed household, where another generation of babies came to claim a portion of her love and care. Nobody thought to go to the judge or his wife for anything. “All applications,” to use an office phrase, “made to mammy.” She was always ready to point the way or to help one through it.
Casually meeting Mrs. Chinn and inquiring of the various members of her family that from long absence I had lost sight of, “And mammy,” I said. The dear old lady burst into tears. Mammy haddied holding the hand of the sorrowing mistress, her last words, “My work is done. I tried to do my best,” and God knows she did.
We had a mammy in my mother’s house when I was a wee little thing, and we children loved her right along all the week till Saturday night, when the ponderous woman brought the big washtub upstairs and two pails of hot water. We hated mammy then, for she had a heavy hand and a searching eye, and a rough wash rag full of soapsuds. Not a fold in the ear, nor a crease in the plump body escaped her vigilance. I really think we were glad when we outgrew need of her assistance at those dreaded Saturday night’s baths, and she went to other little lambs, in pastures new.
When I went a bride to my husband’s home, Charlotte, his old mammy, met us and proudly escorted us within doors, where were fresh flowers and a blazing fire (it was long past midnight, and dreadfully stormy too), and every comfort prepared and ready for “the coming of the bride.” I felt then and there mammy would be a comfort for me and a real help, and so she proved, in all my sunny life in the plantation home and in the dark days of the war, too. My Mammy Charlotte had complete charge of everything about the house. She had been thoroughly trained by my husband’s mother. She madethe jellies and the pickles, the ice cream, the cakes, doing a little of everything to make our home comfortable and happy. And often she remarked that no one in the house did more and had less to show for it at night than she did. That is a truth about many households, one does all the neglected things, and picks up all the loose threads. Guests were made to understand if they required anything, from a riding horse to a fresh stick on the fire, from a mint julep to a bedroom candle, they had only to call Charlotte. She was never beyond the reach of a summons, day or night. She was mammy to all the children of the house, and all the other children that floated in from other people’s houses. It was Mammy Charlotte who hurriedly secreted the spoons (!) when a Federal cavalry company came prancing down the road toward our gates. It was mammy who ran to my bedside to whisper, “Don’t you get skeered, they does look like gentlemen;” and after they had taken a drink of water and trotted off again it was mammy back to say, “It’s all right; they didn’t say nothin’ ’bout spoons.” Even at that early date and that remote spot from Butler’s headquarters the matter of spoons had been so freely and laughingly discussed that the sable crowd of witnesses that surrounded every household must have taken theidea that collecting spoons was “the chief end of man.”
I pity the little ones of to-day with no black mammy of their very own to cuddle them to her warm bosom and comfort them, and tell them funny rhymes about “The Monkey and the Baboon’s Sister,” to make them forget their griefs in a merry laugh. The high-falutin’ nurses they have now, here to-day, gone to-morrow, without any anchorage in our hearts and homes, are not and never could be made mammies like we of threescore years and ten were blessed with.
Who of us that lived within a day’s journey of Col. Hicky but remembers his Milly, the mammy of that grand, big household? The dear Colonel lived to see great-grandchildren grow up, and Milly mammied at least three generations at “Hope Estate.” She was a famous nurse. Mind you, this was decades before trained nurses arrived on the stage. How many of us remember how tenderly and untiringly Milly nursed some of our invalids to health! Her services were tendered, and oh! how gratefully accepted. With a sad heart I recall a sick baby I nursed until Milly came and put me to bed and took the ailing child in her tender arms. For two days and nights unto the end she watched the little flickering spark.
When Mr. Sidell removed his family to Washington after his election to the United States Senate, I traveled in their company several days. The children had their colored mammy to care for them. She had been raised in the Deslonde family, a trusted servant. I was struck with the system and care with which she managed her little charges from Mathilde, a girl in her teens, down to baby Johnny. She lived with them during those troublous times in Washington, she accompanied the family to Paris, and I presume died there. Always dressed in a neat calico gown, a fichu andtignon, even in Paris she did not alter her dress nor wear another headgear than her own bandana. There’s a mammy to immortalize!
Then let us raise a monument to the mammies of the days that were. Quickly, too, before the last one of us who were crowned with such a blessing shall have passed away “’mid the shadows that flee in the night.”