“The Mammy”

Driving along Highway 61 just outside Natchez, Mississippi, you might spy a twenty-eight-foot-tall black woman standing by the side of the road. What you’re seeing is a restaurant called The Mammy’s Cupboard that is designed to look like, well, a mammy.

Remember Hattie McDaniel’s getup in Gone with the Wind? Or those salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like fat black midgets? Or Aunt Jemima before the makeover? They all wore kerchiefs knotted at the forehead, a full, floor-length skirt, and a coarse blouse buttoned at the throat. The Mammy’s Cupboard is a fair brick-and-mortar replica of those things, born from an antebellum mother figure that some white guy probably invented. She was fat, happy, and sassy. She was a sexual turnoff for roving white men. She was a dodge to anyone who suspected that slaves were mistreated down South. She was propaganda.

I had driven past Mammy’s many times since moving to Mississippi in 1997. My husband and I would zip by in the minivan, and because I’m a sucker for anything bizarre, I’d rubberneck every time. Around 1999, I finally had the opportunity to stop and take a good long look at this freaky tribute to the Old South.

I had been working at an art museum that employed two African American men as exhibition installers whom I’ll call Bill and Russell. Bill was the quiet and sensitive intellect; Russell was the clever teddy bear who flirted with all the ladies. They had worked at the museum for over twenty years, and they could design, build, and fix anything. All of the locals knew Bill and Russell and many hired them for odd jobs, like bartending or yard work. They wore official logo-embroidered polo shirts to assure lenders outside of town that even though they were black, they could be trusted not to steal.

The three of us traveled all over the state to pick up or deliver art, usually for upcoming shows. As the registrar—the person who oversees the care and handling of artwork—I scheduled these trips and tagged along with the paperwork for lenders to sign.

A new exhibition on southern art and artists led us to Natchez one day. We started out early and by lunchtime our rental van was stocked with family portraits and heirlooms that smelled of dust, mildew, and cigarette smoke.

While on the road my stomach growled and Russell said, “Hungry, L’il K?”

I loved that Bill and Russell called me “K.” We were fast friends anyway but to me the nickname meant acceptance.

“Yep. Starving.”

“Where you wanna eat?”

I thought about it for a minute before Providence raised my arm and pointed my finger like a divining rod.

“There,” I breathed, saliva collecting at the corners of my mouth.

The guys followed the invisible line my finger had drawn in the air.

“I want to eat there,” I repeated in a monotone. “I want to eat at the Mammy.”

There she was, looming weird and wonderful on the asphalt horizon, luring hungry travelers into the folds of her bulbous pink skirt.

“You want to eat there?” Bill asked.

“Yes.” I was getting desperate. “I want to eat there,” I whined.

Bill slowly turned the van into the parking lot. It was crowded with cars from Mississippi and other southern states. We piled out and while I practically sprinted to the whitewashed front door, the guys took their time smoothing the wrinkles from their chinos before strolling toward the entrance.

“Come on,” I urged.

I gingerly touched some flaking paint near the doorjamb, like an obsessive groupie, before the guys met up with me. Russell opened the door to Mammy’s skirted netherworld and we stepped inside.

The smell of good fried food greeted us immediately. Underneath the domed ceiling stood polished dark wood tables and chairs, and the overall décor was country style. The doilies, dried flower bouquets, and brick-a-brack made the place cozy and charming—exactly the way you’d expect to feel if hugging a real mammy.

The hostess seated us near the counter, where Mammy’s famous cakes and pies sat under glass covers. I looked around, noting all of the perfectly coiffed white women nibbling on lunch and sipping sweet tea. And they were all white. Not an African American in the lot. They all wore scarves tied prettily around their throats. Such was the trend back then, and I thought how funny it was that that same material might do just as well wrapped around some mammy’s nappy head.

Bill and Russell quietly perused their menus, and while I zeroed in on the chicken salad sandwich, it occurred to me that the three of us were fodder for a really bad joke: So these two black men and a Jew walk into this restaurant….

It didn’t matter so much that I was probably the only Jew in the room. No one would know that by looking at me. But this was a fluke that Bill and Russell didn’t have. Anyone could tell they were black. It was pretty obvious, especially when compared to all the honkies in the restaurant.

Prior to this pit stop, I had never considered myself a honky, a word whose origin came from hungy, hunky, or bohunk. These were derogatory names for Hungarian, Polish, and Bohemian immigrants who worked in slaughterhouses or stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century. The idea was that every white person was a honky to blacks because they all looked alike. Polish, Hungarian—what’s the difference? They probably did look the same at the end of the day, covered head to toe in dirt and animal bits. I suspect, though, the word says more about attitude than appearance. There were likely greater similarities in the ways whites treated blacks than in skin tone.

A few other theories are floating around out there, but the one I like claims the term came from white men honking their car horns to attract black whores in the 1920s. You know, it’s such an effort to park the car, get out of the car, flag down a hooker walking the strip, and negotiate a fair rate without attracting too much attention. Then you have to walk back to the car, casually, like you’re not really with a prostitute. Just near one. Clearly, it’s more efficient to honk for action than to take any.

Since I haven’t worked at either a slaughterhouse or a stockyard, it would be technically incorrect to call me a honky. I’ve also never honked for whores, nor do I plan to. Ever. So again, you’d be wrong to say I’m a honky. When I was in grade school in Louisville, Kentucky, an African American girl inexplicably called me a honky across the playground. Even at the tender age of eight I knew she was way off base. Being a Jew in the South levels the minority playing field, so I’ve always felt that I was exempt from certain labels, like honky. Now those women at the Mammy, they were honkies.

That said, I didn’t expect Bill and Russell to act a certain way around me because they were black and I was white. I don’t know if they thought of me as a white girl, or even as a honky, but I certainly didn’t want to think of them as black. To me, they were Bill and Russell. Period. If I was arranging an art pickup with a lender who didn’t know the guys, I took great pains not to say that a couple of black men would be showing up on the doorstep. Instead, I’d explain that Bill and Russell could be identified by their uniforms, an Enterprise van, and two very winning smiles. I went out of my way to avoid describing them in anything other than generic terms. If I didn’t distinguish them by skin color, I wasn’t accepting the inequality that I assumed still existed in Mississippi. More than that, I was proving that I wasn’t your typical southern white gal, which in my mind meant racist. I was a neutral color. I was Switzerland.

But then I dragged them into the Mammy, and all of those high-and-mighty ideals went right out the window. No one stared or shook her head or pulled out a noose. Nobody said the guys couldn’t eat there; that would have been impolite. And Lord knows that if nothing else, Southerners are polite. The vibe, however, screamed otherwise: That just don’t look right.

More than my own intuition, it was Bill and Russell’s body language that told me I had made a mistake. We didn’t chitchat like we usually did when we were out on an art run. There was no goofing around, teasing, or silliness, and I knew it had nothing to do with manners. I tossed around a few lame jokes to lighten the mood, but that only seemed to emphasize the awkwardness of the situation. The guys sat stiff in their chairs like two choirboys praying they wouldn’t be sent to hell. Whether they prayed that I would is another matter, but maybe they should have. Maybe, before I suckered them into the skirt, they should have yelled, “We’re not stepping foot in that Mammy, you stupid honky!” Maybe then I would have gotten the message. As much as I didn’t want to think of Bill and Russell as black, that’s what they were and that’s how the majority of folks saw them.

If only I didn’t like to push buttons.

I could have stopped at Mammy’s anytime, with anyone. I could have set a date with my husband some weekend. I could have checked the place out on my own. But that particular summer day I just couldn’t resist. Sitting beside two black guys in a van, with the Mammy casting a shadow over us, the thought flitted through my mind: What would happen if I brought my African American friends to a restaurant shaped like a Mammy? A Mammy that white people frequented because it looked like something that came straight off a plantation? (They might have sworn it was the hummingbird cake that reeled them in, but I knew better. It was nostalgia.)

What happened was I had exposed myself as the pasty little woman that I was. I wasn’t neutral at all. I wasn’t Switzerland. I was more like France. I had pretended to be colorblind, but there is no such thing. People define the world with labels and color-coded boxes. That’s just the way life works. Noticing those differences doesn’t make you a racist, but denying they exist is downright insulting, if not obtuse.

At the Mammy, I had force-fed my friends a reality that I’d been trying desperately to ignore. Yet there it was, and I was racked with guilt. It was as though I had brought the guys to the lip of an active volcano, told them to watch their step, and then shoved them into the bubbling lava below. I have to wonder how Bill and Russell saw me after that. Did they think I was insensitive? Did they chalk it up to stupidity? Or did they figure I was just a silly little honky who had finally come out of the closet?

Unpublished, 2013

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“Pregnancy Facts: Carrying a Baby is Not Always a Barrel of Monkeys”

I was thrilled when I found myself pregnant after struggling for years with endometriosis and wacky cycles. Getting pregnant was all I could think about. I was obsessed. And when it finally happened, I was too happy to see reality beyond the little plus sign on my pee stick.

I was way more interested in the fact that my body was actually working as it should. I had two, three, maybe four weeks of foggy glee before my body decided it had had enough fun. It was time to suffer, and suffer I did. I threw up in the front yard and the shower. I had leg cramps at night that would have crippled Secretariat. My heartburn blew out the toes of my shoes. Even though I had read or heard about these symptoms, I didn’t understand their import until I experienced them myself. In retrospect, I realize my pregnancy echoed the first commandment for having kids: Thou cannot know what being a parent is like until thou has a child.

With that in mind, I offer the following nuggets for newly pregnant mommies-to-be:

1. Forget your mother’s ancient recollections and your friends’ happy advice. Who cares that your mother-in-law only gained 15 pounds with each pregnancy. No one can predict your experience, so learn to embrace the unpredictable. It’s only the beginning.

2. It’s every woman for herself when pregnant. No one is going to barf for you, except maybe the cat.

3. The yummy bubbles in your tummy are telling you your fetus is alive and kicking. Don’t let that feeling fool you that all is well. There’s plenty of time left for constipation, more barfing, heartburn and chronic nasal congestion.

3. It’s OK to hate being pregnant. Just remember that the result is worth the temporary discomfort. Well, mostly.

4. If you don’t like your OB/GYN, find a new one. Don’t feel guilty about it, either. You want to be comfortable with the doctor who is going to extract your placenta.

5. The huge, cyst-like zits on your chest and back will go away eventually.

6. Always keep food handy. You only have a 30-second window between hunger and satisfaction before you barf. But don’t eat too much, otherwise you’ll barf.

7. Invest in shoes without laces.

8. Just because your boobs get big, it doesn’t mean they’re pretty.

9. Riding a jet ski in the Gulf of Mexico will not harm your baby.

10. Don’t worry that the epidural will hurt. You’ll be too busy contracting to notice the huge needle in your back.

Published on voices.yahoo.com (2008)