FALL 2011/WINTER 2012

Essays

Educating Frankie By Neli Moody

Who are your people? At the heart of identity is an own community, one’s we, as Carson McCullers calls it in The Member of the Wedding. In awareness of one’s recognizing who our people are, we must also recognize those whom we cannot call our people. Our community educates us about who we are and where we belong. The film version of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, is out. In that book, the Negro help is supposed to potty train her charge, while being expected to use an outhouse provided for her because she is black. She finally convinces the mother to model the behavior in the house bathroom. In The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar, Bhima, the housekeeper of many years finds her seventeen-year-old daughter has been impregnated by the husband of her now adult charge. In the end, vindication eludes Bhima and the father of the child, through various machinations, sees to it that the child is aborted. In The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, Monique Roffey narrates the tragic consequence of helping the help. The relationship between help, employer, and charges is a complex one, made more difficult by racial and socioeconomic divisions. Yet, the surrogate mother, the mammy, is responsible, in many ways, for the “education” of her charges. Mammies were simultaneously responsible for loving the children as a mother would and “educating” them to the fact that mammy was mammy and not to be confused with an actual mother. To whom does a child owe allegiance when the mother figure is the paid or enslaved help? Is part of the transition to adulthood the recognition that loyalties must be transferred from the mother figure to one’s own race/class, one’s own people?

The ultimate American surrogate mother and help was the mammy. In the past, the slave help lived in the house or on the property in small cabins. Post emancipation, the help began to live in other neighborhoods, less affluent neighborhoods, far different from the ones in which they work. All over the country, African American women rode the busses from their homes to cook, clean, do laundry, and care for children, even as other exploited populations do today. Thus, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956 as a success and launched the Civil Rights Movement. I remember seeing these women in my own neighborhood leaving their homes, or riding the busses on my way to school across town. The surrogate mothers/housekeepers had their own children and/or families, as do the characters of these books. Crossing the perilous lines between employer and employer has a price, and nowhere has that been more evident than in the uneasy relationships between the colored help and white employers in America. The relationship between a white child and a black mother figure has been the subject of much discussion because it was such an intimate relationship and one forbidden in any other form or setting. More than one Southerner has written that is it a relationship beyond explanation. Such claims imply that we Northerners would never be able to understand that relationship and as Miki McElya writes in her insightful book, Clinging to Mammy, these assertions were simply a way of justifying slavery and affirming the superiority of not only whites, but a particular class of whites, those rich enough to have had a mammy.

The myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves— of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism— seem not to exist at all. The mammy figure affirmed their wishes. (McElya 16)

Not only did the writings of the Plantation School perpetuate, in fact, glorify this myth, but the United Daughters of the Confederacy pushed, and almost succeeded, in erecting a mammy statue in Washington D.C just after the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 (McElya 116). The mammy myth played out in vaudeville shows and in the numerous performances of mammy impersonators, white women whose status as ladies of the Southern aristocracy was always emphasized in the publicity, legitimizing their claims that they possessed a unique understanding of the institution. Mammy “narratives,” written by white women were eagerly embraced by the public and caricatures like Aunt Jemima, played by Nancy Green and later, others, at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (16) and other events, persist today on the packaging of various products. Advertisers continue to use updated versions of the faithful “help” in the form of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as marketing tools. Phil Patton in “Mammy: Her Life and Times” published in American Heritage, begins his article with a description of the giant Mammy statue outside Natchez, Mississippi which used to be a restaurant. Then he muses on this figure.

Mammy's Cupboard is an informal monument to one of the most problematic and profound icons of American culture: Mammy. She is a character as powerfully imprinted as the English nanny, a psychological, social, commercial and racist stereotype who looms large in the American commedia dell' arte of legend and literature. Southern earth mother, source of nutrition, wisdom, comfort and discipline, cook, advisor, mediator, In such personifications as theater's Ma Rainey and TV's Beulah, in literature and film, she remains in myth and memory, the most positive and yet most dangerous of all racist stereotypes. Sambo is no longer acceptable, but Aunt Jemima remains on the pancake mix box, repeatedly updated, a shiny happy face.

There are those who have sought to perpetuate a myth of undying devotion by mammies to their white families, even if not to their own families. Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris enjoyed great popularity romanticizing the mammy as a woman who, even after Emancipation, would never desert her white charges (McElya 12). Frederick Douglass wrote of his concern around the romanticization of such figures as the loyal mammy. “The South has a past not to be contemplated with pleasure, but with a shudder. She has been selling agony, trading in blood and in the souls of men. If her past has any lesson, it is one of repentance and reformation” (qtd. in McElry 26).

­­ Clearly, the mammy figure is part of the American racial consciousness, (people, including African Americans, collect memorabilia) yet some Southern writers have created mammy figures who have displayed a complexity of character and a compassion that transcends purchase. Carson McCullers, in the The Member of the Wedding, writes the character of Berenice as a contemplative and pragmatic woman who, in the course of Frankie’s 12^th summer, educates her on a variety of levels. This is possible partly because the relationship between the girl- becoming- woman Frankie (Jasmine), and Berenice, is one between two women who have a relationship somewhat outside the boundaries of normal society. Though Berenice is the cook, she plays the role of mother to the motherless Frankie. In this sense, they are “others” and Frankie wants to belong, to be part of a “we”; thus, her obsession with the wedding and the desperate attempts to join her brother and his new bride’s life. Frankie struggles to leave childhood and become a woman. She identifies with the Freaks in the circus, fearing she might become one of them. Berenice “ the cook since Frankie could remember” (4-5) is her only mother figure. Writing with sensitivity to both adolescence and the struggles of a black woman, McCullers is able to frame this relationship in such a way that Berenice is sexualized, and not just sexualized, but sexed, a woman with desires. This is important because black women were once characterized by whites as being of two types: Jezebels and mammies. “Mammy was endearing in her gruff demeanor and unrefined features, but she was the antithesis of desirable white femininity, an answer to charges of rampant, violent sexuality and white men’s fathering of black women’s children that were promoted by abolitionists and the accounts of runaway slaves” (McElya 21.) The counterpoint to this was the Jezebel, an oversexed and bestial woman who corrupted otherwise decent white men. By desexualizing mammy, advocates of slavery could legitimize this intimate relationship between whites and blacks. McElya writes,

This is precisely what makes the discussions at the kitchen table between Berenice and Frankie are so fascinating. Frankie realizes she is not a little girl anymore. Her frightening experience with the sailor in the hotel room makes her aware of her flowering. She wants to share encounter with her only mother figure, Berenice, but cannot. The crossroads where Berenice and Frankie meet is an odd place, a place of a double transition, and it is most clearly expressed in McCullers’ description of the piano tuner’s repeated unfinished scale, “The seventh chord, which seems to echo all of the unfinished scale, struck and insisted again and again” (71). They both know they will be going somewhere; they are simply not sure where.

The kitchen, Berenice’s domain, is the site of the most important part of Frankie’s education and it takes place over one summer. At the kitchen table, Berenice and Frankie discuss womanhood and otherness, an otherness that Berenice understands far too well. Berenice’s job as caretaker of Frankie ends at the end of the day. John Henry and Frankie are not her children and while she is affectionate with them, she is aware of and accepts her position as the black caretaker of a white child. She scolds Frankie, teases her, chastises her, and advises her. She educates her about the love a woman has for a man and how a woman can get obsessed and marry the wrong men, three times after Ludie Freeman. “I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved. Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off pieces of Ludie when I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces. My intention was to repeat me and Ludie” (88). It’s a cautionary tale meant to save Frankie the hurt of embarrassing herself at the wedding. Berenice educates Frankie about life, how “things accumulate around your name” (McCullers 93) when Frankie decides to become F. Jasmine. Berenice educates Frankie about otherness, a temporary otherness Frankie is experiencing in her awkward puberty, but which Berenice experiences, and will continue to experience, as a black woman her entire life. “We all of us somehow caught…Everybody is caught one way or another. But they have done drawn completely extra bounds around colored people. They done squeezed us off in one corner by yourself” (98). McCullers lifts the character of Berenice from stereotypical mammy to a sometime mother/wise aunt /teacher, even as we and Berenice know, Frankie will be called to transfer her allegiance from the help to white society. In the infamous Delbridge/Jackson trial in 1916, fourteen year old Marjorie Delbridge, a white girl, was removed from the custody of the Jacksons, a black family who had raised her. It was important to society that Marjorie knew who her people were. Her education included being aware of where and with whom she belonged. Mrs. Brock, court appointed temporary white guardian of Marjorie, upon Marjorie’s discovery of her white relatives wrote “It did my heart good to read it [the news] and I am the happiest woman in Chicago today because this child has been claimed by her people and has come into her own’ (qtd. in McElya 113). The question “Who are your people?” is at the heart of the transition required of white children in the care of black caretakers. They must answer this question in order to fully assimilate into white culture. Frankie, herself, is aware of this pending transition. She is already aware of how she and Berenice are different. Berenice is described as …very black and broad-shouldered and short. She always said that she was thirty-five years old but she had been saying that at least three years. Her hair was parted, plaited, and greased close to the skull, and she had a flat and quiet face. There was only one thing wrong about Berenice—her left eye was bright blue glass. It stared out fixed and wild from her quiet colored face and why she had wanted a blue eye, nobody would her know. Her right eye was dark and sad. (5)

Like many mammies, Berenice is described by the degrees to which she embodies the features that are perceived as “blackness,” characteristics that do not conform to white ideals of beauty. Compare this with McElya’s description earlier noted in this essay. Berenice has one blue eye, a choice Frankie admits she finds mystifying. Berenice’s face is not gruff or sassy. She is not a caricature.

Berenice’s private life is revealed at the kitchen table that summer. One evening, Berenice talks as they wait for her current male friend, T. T. Williams, a large dark-skinned man in a suit and her foster brother, Honey, who is light skinned and can “talk like white school teachers” (32) but who sometimes has difficulty speaking at all. “His lips could move as light as butterflies and he could talk as well as any human she had ever heard—but other times he would answer with a colored jumble that even his own family could not follow” (106). They are going out to a tea room and Berenice is dressed up in a pink dress and a hat with a plume. Frankie asks about Berenice’s marriages, though she has heard the story many times. It was the fourth husband, a violent man, who had been responsible for the loss of Berenice’s eye. When the trio leaves, Frankie’s dad is not yet home and Berenice tells her to go over to her cousin, John Henry’s, house if her father isn’t home by dark. Frankie looks with longing after Berenice leaves. Frankie thinks about how she doesn’t have a we. “All others had a we to claim, all others except her. When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge or her church (350. This not only places Berenice’s life outside the white home, but establishes her connection with her own community. As McElya writes,

The idealized mammy figure set the contours of the faithful slave narrative. The scene of black loyalty was almost always the white home, whether in terms of domestic work or, particularly in the case of male slaves, the protection of the home in the wartime absence of male patriarchs. These black figures and their relationships to white people were usually expressed by the assertion that they were “like one of the family.” (22)

The facts proved otherwise. Mammies gave way to housekeepers, cooks, and washerwomen.

By 1920, domestic work in the United States was performed primarily by black women, who had available to them few other options for employment. The census for that year shows that 46 percent of all employed black women were in “domestic and personal service,” which largely included work as household servants or launderers. (McElya 224)

Reconnecting black women to their own homes, regardless of the misguided championing of homemaker as the only suitable role for a woman--could black women ever get a break?—at least removed black women from the dubious honor of cleaning someone else’s house. Frankie does venture into Berenice’s neighborhood, and it is clear she has done it enough times to feel comfortable there. Frankie visits Berenice’s home to get a “reading” from the fortune telling Big Mama in Sugarville, the black community. Frankie enjoys the house most when T.T. is there. “He brought with him the stir of company that she had always loved and envied about this two-room house (107). However, T.T. does not make Berenice “shiver” and so cannot commit to him. This is one of Berenice’s lessons on love to Frankie. For love to be real, a man has to have a physiological effect on a woman.

Frankie feels Berenice is a fool for not believing her when she says she will join her brother Jarvis and his bride Janice after the wedding. She listens to Berenice talking at the table that long summer when it seems they have said the same things over and over. She thinks about her own curious life while Berenice goes on the way she often did “on a long and serious subject” (69). McCullers writes “In the gray light of the kitchen on summer afternoons, the tone of her voice was golden and quiet, and you could listen to the color and the singing of her voice and not follow the words”(69). But Frankie also thinks this about Berenice in the same scene.

Berenice always spoke of herself as though she was somebody very beautiful. Almost on this one subject, Berenice was not really in her right mind. F. Jasmine listened to the voice and stared at Berenice across the table: the dark face with the wild blue eye, the eleven greased plaits that fitted her head like a skull-cap, the wide flat nose that quivered as she spoke. And whatever else Berenice might be, she was not beautiful. (69)

Frankie’s perception of beauty does not include the features Berenice exhibits. Berenice considers herself beautiful and freely expresses her opinions on life and on Frankie’s choices. She disapproves of Frankie’ poor choice of a dress, an orange satin evening dress, for the wedding. Yet, she alters the dress as well as pleating a pink organdie dress F. Jasmine requests. Just before the wedding she gives it as a present to F. Jasmine, who wishes she could stare at Berenice with one eye “in a accusing way, while simultaneously thanking her with the other eye” (91). She calls Frankie a devil for throwing a knife at her. She tells Frankie that she needs to get “a nice little white boy beau” (68). It is another instance of Berenice educating Frankie by distinguishing for Frankie who Frankie’s people are. Berenice teases Frankie for falling in love with a wedding. She tells Frankie she is mean. When Frankie exaggerates the compliments given her, Berenice corrects her. “This is a serious fault with you, Frankie. Somebody just makes a loose remark and then you cozen it in your mind until nobody would recognize it…You keep building on to any little compliment you hear about yourself. Or if it is a bad thing you do the same (28). At first, Frankie objects, but she concedes, “I admit it a little” and then she asks Berenice for validation, “Do you think I make a good impression?” (28). It is in Berenice’s lap that Frankie, who is not a member of the club of girls her age, finds solace when she doesn’t know what to do with herself one long evening and is running around the table fantasizing aloud about the wonderful life she will have with Jarvis and Janice. “We will have thousands of friends, thousands and thousands and thousands of friends. We will belong to so many clubs that we can’t even keep track of them all. We will be members of the whole world” (97).

As they eat “the second round of that last dinner,” Berenice expounds on her own perfect world.

But the world of the Holy Lord God Berenice Sadie Brown was a different world, and it was round and just and reasonable. First, there would be no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair. There would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives. (x)

It is a peaceful world and the love of her life, Ludie Freeman is still alive. Here, each person in the kitchen, including Berenice, is a god of a world. They have often shared this way around the table, each fantasizing about their own perfect world. However, on this particular supper, the day before the wedding, F. Jasmine begins “a strange conversation” (80) and it is the strangeness of it that creates another level of intimacy between Berenice and F. Jasmine. On her journey earlier in the day, F. Jasmine has had an odd experience.

It was a mysterious trick of sight and the imagination. She was walking home when all at once there was a shock in her as though a thrown knife struck and shivered in her chest. F. Jasmine stopped dead in her tracks, one foot still raised, and at first she could not take it in just what had happened. There was something sideways and behind her that had flashed across the very corner edge of her left eye; she had half-seen something, a dark double shape, in the alley she had just that moment passed. (61)

F. Jasmine shares this experience with Berenice and she watches to see if Berenice understands what she is saying.

"I know what you mean," said Berenice. "Right here in this very corner of the eye" She pointed to the red-webbed outside corner of the dark eye. "You suddenly catch something there. And this cold shiver runs all the way down you. And you whirl around. And then you stand facing Jesus knows what. But not Ludie and not who you want. And for a minute you feel like you been dropped down a well." "Yes," F. Jasmine said. "That is it." "Well, this is mighty remarkable," said Berenice. "This is a thing been happening to me all my life. Yet just now is the first time I ever heard it put into words." F. Jasmine covered her nose and her mouth with her hand, so that it would not be noticed that she was pleased about being so remarkable, and her eyes were closed in a modest way. "Yes, that is the way when you are in love," said Berenice. "Invariably. A thing known and not spoken. (82)

F. Jasmine does not tell Berenice about the sailor, though the incident is on her mind. F. Jasmine has both a fear and an interest in her own sexuality, and though she wants to share it, to get Berenice’s opinion, she is too uncomfortable with the topic to bring it up. The conversation takes another path, a more familiar one, after this exchange. Yet F. Jasmine is aware of a shift and she recognizes what is strange about this particular afternoon. “It was the first time they had ever talked about love, with F. Jasmine included in the conversation as a person who understood and had worthwhile opinions” (83). Then Berenice begins her story about Ludie. McCullers writes,

As she told the story, it seemed to F. Jasmine that Berenice resembled a strange queen, if a queen can be colored and sitting at a kitchen table. She unwound the story of her and Ludie like a colored queen unwinding a bolt of cloth of gold — and at the end, when the story was over, her expression was always the same: the dark eye staring straight ahead, her flat nose widened and trembling, her mouth finished and sad and quiet. (83-84)

While F. Jasmine feels this feminine bond with Berenice over love, she is still aware of Berenice’s color and the limited options available to Berenice. The story of Ludie is used as a warning to F. Jasmine. It is about what happens when a person becomes obsessed in love. Berenice calls F. Jasmine’s belief that she will be part of Jarvis and Janice’s we “the saddest piece of foolishness I ever knew” (88).

F. Jasmine does make a fool of herself at the wedding in Winter Hill. Berenice offers her a party, but F. Jasmine finds the promises unsatisfactory. In shame, she decides to run away and after she is returned to her home, she never speaks of the wedding again. F. Jasmine becomes Frances. The kitchen is remodeled in preparation for its sale. Berenice gives notice and resigns herself to marrying T.T. John Henry dies of meningitis. Berenice stays with the trained nurse tending the dying John Henry. She spends time trying to get her foster brother, Honey, out of jail, but he gets eight years. McCullers writes, “It was not the same kitchen of the summer that now seemed so long ago” (127). Frances has a new friend, Mary Littlejohn, whom Frances claims Berenice doesn’t like. As Frances realizes who her people are, she sees Berenice in a new light. “Berenice could not appreciate Michelangelo or poetry, let alone Mary Littlejohn 130). For the second time in their relationship she says to Berenice,

“There’s no use discussing a certain party. You could not possibly understand her. It’s just not in you.” She had said that once before to Berenice, and from the sudden faded stillness in her eye, she knew that the words had hurt. And now she repeated them, angered because of the tinged way Berenice had said the name, but once the words were spoken, she was sorry. (130)

Berenice is no longer needed. The cook’s last words are in response to a letter Frances shares with her from Jarvis who is stationed in Luxembourg. She says, “Well, Baby—it brings to mind soapy water. But it’s a kind of pretty name” (132). So ends the story. Frances makes the transition to young womanhood and discovers her people. Berenice’s education of Frankie is complete. This must have always been the dilemma of the mammy. While the extravagant claims of mammy love were often the fantasies of a race needing to justify slavery, it is probably true that some kind of love existed between a mammy/housekeeper and her charges. As white children grew up, it was necessary that they learn to distinguish mammy from mother. It is possible, too, that Frances’ adolescent anger and dismissal of Berenice is part of the individuation process through which all children go. Still, in The Member of the Wedding, McCullers creates a black woman who is more than a mammy, who has a family and a love life. She is a woman who is thoughtful and complex and who has pondered her roles as cook, sister, lover, and caregiver. She sees herself as beautiful. At the kitchen table, she educates Frankie about love, life and those circumstances that divide people. How will the adult Frances remember Berenice? McCullers gives us no hints about that future. The most we can say is that the 12^th summer of Frankie Addams’ life, she learned a great deal, and that her education was primarily delivered through Berenice, the cook.

The relationship between the help and employers is a complex one, and it reflects a society both uncomfortable with privilege and yet, envious of it. In America, race and socio-economic status complicate the mix. Two hundred years of slavery and the violent reaction its impending abolition incited cannot be overlooked. The education we receive at the hands of our people, whether they are the temporary help or the community to whom we give our allegiance, is a critical factor in shaping our identity. Who are your people?

Works Cited

McElya, Micki. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Patton, Phil. “Mammy: Her Life and Times.” American Heritage, Vol. 44 Issue 5 http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/links/mammy/