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If we are to reckon honestly with the history and continued legacies of slavery in the United States, we must confront the terrible depths of desire for the black mammy and the way it still drags at struggles for real democracy and social justice. (14)
Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy
One of the most controversial roles black women were forced to play was that of mammy. But it was far different from the highly sentimentalized character of Scarlett 's Mammy in Gone With the Wind. The mammy character demands special attention in neo-slave narratives which intensified the struggle for identity for these often erased black women in their role as mammies. The neo-slave narratives strove to reclaim the real identity of "mammy." Central to this movement was having them claim their identity and to tell their own history. This essay, primarily through reading Shirley Anne Williams's novel Dessa Rose (1986), will explore the lives of African American women in their role as mammy found and deconstructed in a neo-slave narrative. Among the questions this essay hopes to answer are: Was mammy indeed somebody's name? Was she simply a construct of white culture and the figment of white cultural imagination? Recent popular novels like Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees (2002) and Kathryn Stockett's The Help (2009) have also challenged dominant views of African American women as domestics. But Williams's title character, Dessa, even more clearly helps us to see as well as see through the character of mammy during years of slavery and beyond.
The enslaved Southern "mammy" did not appear as a stereotype until the 1830s, thirty years before the Civil War. According to Deborah Gray White a "mammy" was
a woman completely dedicated to the white family, especially to the children ofthat family. She was the house servant who was given complete charge of domestic management. She served also as a friend and advisor. She was, in short, surrogate mistress and mother. (49)
As White also points out, mammy countered the other black female stereotype, the Jezebel. While the Jezebel was licentious, mammy was maternal, virtuous, devoted. Moreover, the role of mammy legitimized slavery, since it allowed African American women to come as close as they possibly could to the pristine...