Letters to Mammy
a substack collaboration with Bethany Nicole
Today’s post was made in collaboration with the brilliant . After realizing we both wrote about not wanting to become a Mammy, we decided to write letters to the actors who normalized the stereotype. My letter is to the actress Hattie McDaniel. She was in more than 300 movies, was the first Black woman who won an Academy award, and played Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
Bethany wrote a letter to Madea, a character Tyler Perry created to honor the women who protected him during a childhood rife with severe sexual abuse. Perry plays Madea in his 11-movie franchise. Read Bethany’s letter here.
Dear Hattie,
The curse for ambitious Black girl’s making sanctuaries in the thinning oxygen of white expectations. We build while barely breathing. Those alabaster atmosphere architects applaud themselves for the minimum they give us. I don’t see you’re suffering, they say, because I hear you breathing.
Like you, I huffed and puffed to make a name for myself. Our breath was playdough they flattened. You weren’t made to be compressed, but here we are a century later fighting on battlefields made with your body. To survive you is to hold you and love your genius.
I can be a maid for $7 or play a maid for $700 a week.1
You built a career portraying reality. Reality bit you back. Your representation of Black women became a weapon formed against us. Your power became our stereotype. I once did the same, accidentally building a career in your shadow. I put the IV in my veins and bled for every white nickel and dime. They drank my blood but didn’t leave me dry. It was a courtesy: bleeding and breathing. I suffocated just enough to catch my breath in small spurts. At least I was breathing.
I still watch your Oscar speech. You were tangled in magnolias with your back to the wall and a table too narrow for our hips. You were Venus in her glorious blackness and fatness. They should have prayed to you. Instead, carved and idol in your likeness, committing it to their fantasies.
In playing the part of Mammy, I tried to make her a living, breathing character, the way she appeared to me in the book.2
I am a 36-year-old fat Black woman who leads through serving. I suppose it’s because of my Christianity, but I don’t look like Jesus. I look like you. Round. Dark. Assumed docile with a fire in my eyes. Sagging breasts and pre-diabetes. You stand upright with the scent of magnolias in your posture. Other humans tried to play God and failed. You breathed life into nostrils made of paper and ink. You crafted humanity out of a stale imagination.
I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race3
Excellency builds a cage others are beat into. They took your personhood and contorted your body into these excellent chains. Greatness is a weapon of mass obsession.
I don’t hate you, Hattie. I entered your likeness and made a home for myself in your ribcage. I polished your awards and swept out the reductions. I made a garland of your bronchioles and put frame around your iris. I let them hang as I left. Did you see me leave, Hattie? The dignity I give is the refusal to become what they wanted you to be. Surviving you is confronting the curse I became.
With the pain of self-realization,
Camille
tell me something good…
thank you for reading this collaboration post! Don’t forget to read Bethany Nicole’s Letter to Madea for the fullness of our words. I’m a fan of Bethany’’s work and, most recently, her stereotype series where she blows up the stereotypes that bar Black women and breathes the fullness of her radical self love into its remains. It’s so good y’all.
Hattie’s response to the NAACP criticizing the roles she played and presenting the sexualized Lena Horne as the ideal Black Actress. (Vanity Fair)
Hattie explaining the inspiration behind her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind. (The Queen of Sugar Hill)
From Hattie’s 1940 acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards. (Academy Awards Speech Database)
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This piece landed for me like a heavy coat against the chill of racism. Your words are so potent, Camille!