The current controversy over “The Help” might seem like this week’s news. But it is just the latest episode in a long-running national debate. Did African-American women domestic workers, as the film and novel imply, truly love their young white charges? Or were they putting on skilled performances for the sake of economic survival? At the end of the day, who “owns” these complex stories of intimacy and betrayal, of affection and exploitation across the color line? And what do these narratives tell us about our nation’s shortcomings and our nation’s promise?
These questions have been posed for generations, sometimes out loud, sometimes only in a whisper, sometimes in the most unexpected of places.
Take, for instance, the cemetery right here in Oxford, the town where Emory University was founded in 1836. In 2000, as my students and I worked with local residents to restore the cemetery’s historic African-American grounds, we uncovered an old headstone hidden in weeds. Its west face read: “Louisa. Faithful servant of G.W.W. Stone, Professor of Mathematics. Emory College.” In slavery and in freedom, we learned, Louisa had served as “mammy” to several generations of the white Stone family. Professor Stone’s son, the town’s mayor, recalled in his memoirs, “she became our head nurse, washwoman and mammy. [Louisa] couldn’t have loved her own children any more than she did us.” For Stone, like so many whites in the community, Louisa, and other women of color in Oxford existed solely as a caretakers for their white charges.
The next day, we uncovered the east face of the headstone, in which was chiseled in a different hand the words, “Louisa Means,” referring to her full, married name. Elderly African-American residents recalled their own elders telling them that some time after her death, her own kin had quietly gone to the graveyard to honor her full status, as a matriarch and a “church lady.” The diverse facets of her identity — slave and free, unmarried and married, domestic servant and head of family — remain juxtaposed on stone. In the quiet of the cemetery, a profound argument endures, between those who understood Mrs. Means only as “the Help” and those who knew her in many other dimensions of her life.
Sometimes the arguments are more searing. Nearby, on the “white” side of the cemetery, another argument over “the Help” endures. In 1939, white segregationist leaders erected a large, stone tablet honoring the loyalty of an enslaved woman sometimes called “Mammy Kitty,” owned by Methodist Bishop James Osgood Andrew, Emory’s first board president. In 1844, Bishop Andrew’s ownership of Miss Kitty and other enslaved people became a matter of national controversy: Could a slaveowner legitimately serve as bishop? Bishop Andrew’s defenders asserted he had tried to free Kitty, but that she had chosen to remain in slavery out of loyalty to him; as a reward he had built her a small house in which she could live in virtual freedom. Northern Methodists were unpersuaded.
For generations, Oxford African-Americans have insisted on another version of the story. Many assert Miss Kitty was the coerced mistress of the bishop, and that she was never given a real chance at freedom. Much more than a loyal “Mammy,” she was a deeply literate and courageous woman, who sought to safeguard her family under dangerous circumstances. Her children, they note, were taken away by the bishop as slaves after her death in 1851, forever separated from their kinfolk.
This October, African-American and white residents of Oxford will gather to dedicate a new headstone to Miss Kitty, marked by her recently rediscovered name, “Catherine Boyd.” They will be joined by her descendants, traveling “back home” from Philadelphia. Emory University, in celebrating its 175th anniversary this fall, will honor Catherine Boyd as one of its 175 “pioneers.”
Such moments, as remarkable as they are, do not fully answer the conundrums posed by “The Help.” Yet they do suggest that our nation is at long last taking serious steps, however halting, toward honoring the full humanity and dignity of those who have served, in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, on our most intimate “home front,” the domestic terrain itself.
Mark Auslander, a former faculty member at Emory University, teaches anthropology at Central Washington University.
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