“...the small, shrewd eyes of an elephant. She was shining black, pure African, devoted to her last drop of blood…”
“...her kind black face sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey's face…”
— "Gone With the Wind," Margaret Mitchell
With the 94th Academy Awards ceremony just days away, we’ve seen the perennial uptick in posts about Hattie McDaniel and her historic Oscar win for Best Actress in a Supporting Role volleyed around in the entertainment news and invoked gratefully by hopeful black nominees. It speaks to the dearth of such roles and accolades for non-white talent since 1940, as well as the enduring hagiography surrounding her legacy. In all the celebration and homage, have we considered that cheering for the winner of “Gone With the Wind”’s Mammy not only nurtures misconceptions about her life and career? Have we assessed the origin and impact of that role, one that has cemented the most pernicious stereotype dogging women of African ancestry?
As an avid reader in my youth, I’d decided, upon urging from my step-father, to never read “Gone With the Wind.” It was the closest to a banned title in my book-loving household, along with Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” though I’d managed to sneak a copy of the collection. Margaret Mitchell’s marriage of Jazz Age feminist spunk to Lost Cause nostalgia was a firm ‘no thanks’ for me. The same applied to David O. Selznick’s Oscar-sweeping film adaptation – just no.
It wasn’t until I decided to write about the making of this campy relic of Hollywood’s Golden Age several years ago, about its pervasive place in pop culture, its cardinal position at the intersection of race and film, that I finally crumbled and read GONE WITH THE WIND. Sort of.
For the first time in a life rife with literary pretensions, I leaned on CliffsNotes. When I stumbled upon the above-referenced descriptions of The Mammy of all mammies, I suspected they’d been incorrectly cribbed. The dual symbolism of a monkey and an elephant seemed beneath the mark for a Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning title. I was wrong. The archetypal domesticated black maternal figure beloved by Americans in movies, on food labels, and tchotchke, had in fact been described as simian with lumbering girth.
Until this intensive research into “Gone With the Wind,” I’d hoped and erred on the side of positioning Mammy and all mammies as relics of a long-gone past, but the resilience of stereotypes dashed that hope. Their associations, whether applicable or organic or not, have a durably-enforced staying power. Nearly 90 years later, our collective cultural imagination is so beholden to Mammy, the rotund, high-priestess of pancakes and wet-nursing, that she’s still the most prevalent stereotype for black women. We just can’t shake it – a social media moment centering Lizzo reminded us of that.
I’m no fan of Lizzo, nor a fan of twerking or flutes, or her needy exhibitionism, nor her ratchet spin on pop divadom. Given her desperate contortions and pleas for sexual objectification, I thought at least she’d broken free of the stereotype that’s always lurking and looming in our pop culture landscape. If Lizzo’s tearful IG story about being tarred with the Mammy label was genuine, heartfelt – and not a calculated publicity stunt to generate buzz for the music video she’d released just days prior – I was her reluctant brethren. Are we, as women of African descent, forever trapped in this timeless and repressive stereotype?
Though anachronism doesn’t always serve us well despite it being all the rage, isn’t it odd that Mitchell’s above characterization of Mammy became the basis for the most iconic, oft-celebrated black actress? Isn’t it ironic that Hattie McDaniel’s performance in this role is still considered trailblazing?
For much of Tinseltown circa 1938, the casting of “Gone With the Wind” was a frequently discussed affair, accompanied by schadenfreude that David O. Selznick, a nepotism baby, had sunk his career with the debacle. Despite all his hype about the casting of Scarlett, the film’s narcissistic leading lady, an anecdote about Mammy’s casting is far more interesting and illustrative of the bizarre, phrenology-adjacent beliefs which sustained American cultural output at the tail-end of the Great Depression.
Among the creatives and suits with decision-making power on the picture, including George Cukor, the openly gay director who helmed the first phase of shooting, there was a belief that blacks couldn’t act, that they couldn’t emote dramatically on screen, presumably because they didn’t have or feel emotions, except mirth, joy, and hunger. Thus the typical footage, from that era, of black extras laughing and dancing while frying chicken and making biscuits. The recommended workaround was a white actress in blackface, a practice still embraced by the studios at the time – as evidenced by Judy Garland’s blacked-up turn in “Babes in Arms” with Mickey Rooney in 1939. David O. Selznick, the producer and progressive of the bunch, thought otherwise. Thus Hattie McDaniel’s accolade, one that would change the trajectory of black actresses forever, and endow the film industry with an optics bolstering cha-cha to distract from the awful truths of inequality.
In all the exaltation of Hattie McDaniel, there’s an underlying assumption that she was a Civil Rights warrior. Her long-running feud with the then NAACP leader Walter White shows the contrary. Her ideas on class, race, and progress were borrowed from Booker T. Washington, an accommodationist, as my step-father explained to me around the time he derided “Gone With The Wind.” Accommodationists didn’t believe in or strive for equality and integration. They instead counseled blacks to focus on blue-collar careers and proselytized bootstrapping. McDaniel did just that - her game was all hustle and grind and eventually, it paid off, to some degree.
The hypocrisy of the bestowal of McDaniel’s historic Award at the Cocoanut Theater where she wasn’t allowed entry is well-known by now. These Jim-Crow-like incidents, on and off the set, flesh out the dirty little secrets of her career and the film industry, whether she liked to admit them or not. Even years after her career heights, before her untimely death from diabetes complications, McDaniel ran damage control for Hollywood’s status quo and its commitment to trafficking in the most base stereotypes. In stark contrast to Rita Moreno, the first Latina actress to win an Oscar who has always been vocal about her disdain for being stereotyped, McDaniel never acknowledged it, nor voiced frustration with always playing the maid.
McDaniel is even lauded by many for a famously flippant quip, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.” When I first came across this quote, I struggled to clap for it. In light of her antipathy and antagonism towards calls for better roles on screen and more opportunities for black crew members – just as in the defense industry due to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime decree, an initiative shepherded by Walter White – I find it glib, if not smug.
Like Lizzo, I too have had run-ins with Hattie McDaniel’s legacy as Mammy, as the everlasting black maid. It's the type of experience one doesn’t understand in the present. Like stereotypes themselves, these unforgettable moments only accumulate meaning and illuminate the broader contexts of their origins with repetition.
The first time this shadow touched me was in grammar school. I was the academic MVP of a small, kinda lefty Catholic school in Chicago’s Boystown, pre-anointed valedictorian in 5th grade. It was the post-racial mish-mash of blacks, white Catholics, Latinos, and Asians that I’ve since taken for granted my entire life. There was an open call to cast the school play. Though I had no thespian pretensions, I figured it’s 5th grade, I’m a shoo-in for valedictorian – why not put down the Salinger and the Orwell, and live a little. I can’t remember the play – a Thornton Wilder knock-off – a middling Americana drama. I auditioned and nailed it. On the way home from school in my grandparent’s car, I boasted “I got a part in the school play.” The perfunctory old people “isn’t that nice” nod. “I’m the maid.” The huge steel tank of a car slowed, my grandmother’s neck turned in an Exorcist-like rotation to the back of the car. “What? The maid!”
My grandfather’s screeching u-turn rerouted us back to the school for reasons I didn’t understand. My grandparents were always threatening to speak to the principal – not because I was in trouble, because I’d transgressed – because the institution she steered had. I didn’t understand what she’d done but I felt very sorry for her. My grandparents – born into the brutal indignities of the Jim Crow South – carried chips on their shoulders for the sole purpose of anticipating this type of insult and disenfranchisement.
Buoyed by steely resolve and a frightening degree of willpower, my grandmother, neither an activist, nor a producer, forced a rewrite of the play in minutes, and Hattie McDaniel’s famous quote. Voila, I was a co-lead: a spinster in a shawl.
“I’d rather play a maid than be one” is the perfect pull-quote for the signature sass McDaniel honed on screen. Sure, it’s seen as proof of “black excellence” – that McDaniel bootstrapped her way from being the help to one of the first black actors to get a Hollywood agent, as well as a leadership role in the then-fledgling Screen Actors Guild. Her achievements seconded those of Stepin Fetchit, the first black actor to make it big and become a millionaire with his “laziest man in the world” shtick. Less acknowledged in the invocations of McDaniel is that she and Stepin Fetchit were often paired, thrown together by the inextricable symbiosis of their stereotypes.
Not that there were never moments of contention that challenged Hattie McDaniel’s boundaries and dignity on and off-camera. She is known to have at least lobbied for private dressing rooms on set. Hollywood, then under the influence of the Hayes Code which enforced strict guidelines not just for the representation of sex and vice, but all matters racial, wasn’t conducive to constructive criticism. McDaniel tried to give in her performances what she couldn’t ask for in a rewrite, mostly in the form of sass, her down-home version of speaking truth to power. It’s this pushback, all simmering frustration, where her comic chops shine the brightest. Stereotypes, like movie studios and censorship boards, allow little wiggle room. Hattie was punished for pushing those boundaries and, thereafter, learned to toe the line
At a screenwriting group years ago, it was a (white) South African woman’s turn to read the pitch for her script. I can charitably characterize it as the Afrikaner version of “The Help:” a saccharine coming-of-age story set during the denouement of apartheid, about childhood trauma, a nurturing relationship with her “Amy” – apparently a common name for a black nanny in South Africa – and the power of sisterhood. Whenever she uttered “Amy” she looked at and gestured to me. My fellow aspiring screenwriter had cast me, despite the visible remnants of my goth years peaking through the SoCal preference for blue jeans and feminine tops, in the supporting role my grandmother never wanted me to play.
I was gob-smacked, more than angry or vexed. Anyone who knows me intimately enough to have seen inside my purse or apartment knows that I am a performance artist of disorganization - Apple accessories, Sephora impulse buys, books, and shoes, lots of shoes mark any coordinates I inhabit. In other words, I’m no one’s maid – not even my own.
The most searing episode, the only time I was actually called Mammy was in Paris, by a familiar, of sorts. When I first met my ex-husband’s mother armed with a bouquet of pale peach Amaryllis fresh from a picture-perfect French flower market, I was met with a single comment in a sloshed French accent. “You look like Ophraaah Winfreeeee.”
I looked around for other guests in the foyer, not realizing she meant me – me at 5’3, in my early twenties, a veganized, Pilates size 4, light tan complexion, crudely highlighted lob, the best grad-school-budget-knock-off Jil Saunders I could find. I didn’t understand that comment or how to let it land. French people are notorious for their propensity to flatten others, especially non-French, into caricatures, but to that degree?
She later explained she didn’t understand my name, though it clearly follows a widely used, slightly inverted French naming convention - ‘Marie’ hyphenated to another name. Maybe that comparison was meant as a compliment? At the time Oprah wasn’t the gazillionaire she is now, but she was still Oprah, very rich and ultra-famous. I worked hard to fit this incident into a digestible package because I knew this was not a back-handed compliment, nor a compliment at all.
With a steady stream of worsening remarks, her trajectory, like my imminent nuptials with her son, and her complete hair-ripping rejection of my existence was set. When she uttered that she wouldn’t be attending our wedding to celebrate our union, I disinvited her. A large swatch of Parisian friends and family begged me to reconsider, entreated me to forgive her. It was a firm ‘non’ every time. In the ensuing years of my tumultuous, toxic, abusive marriage, I declined to visit the inlaws, relinquishing trips to Paris, Cannes, and the Alps. In the most baffling reversals, the story peaked with a report by the loose-lipped Portnoy I’d made the mistake of marrying. I learned that Mommie-Dearest-in-law no longer used my name, had jettisoned “Opraaah Winfreeee” and her other epithets, and now regularly and only referred to me as “Gone with the Wind.”
All the justifications for her failed efforts to render the syllables of my French-inspired name and other Anti-American epithets evaporated. There I was, just Mammy, though not on stage, not in a writers group, but in my home, in my own family. I couldn’t force a rewrite, I couldn’t turn the other cheek, I certainly wouldn't win a historic award for playing the part. With the stroke of a pop-culture reference, I was smeared and insulted in body, mind, and spirit, and reduced to a stereotype, to a massive lumbering mammal. I’m neither shining black, nor pure African, nor gifted with shrewd eyes, certainly not devoted to anyone, but the uncomprehending sadness wasn’t far off.
I never recall my grandmother speaking highly of Hattie McDaniel, nor invoking her name adoringly. I don’t think she cared much for someone who always played the maid. I was lucky to have grown up in a multi-racial context that nurtured what some call naivete on racial matters, under the tutelage of a woman who was wary of ethnic fealty and pride, and cared very little about “black excellence’’ and more about my opportunities and achievements. By spinning McDaniel’s quote on its head, “I’m not a maid, I’m not gonna play one, or celebrate someone for it either,” my headstrong grandmother made a sizable dent in the enduring power of the Mammy stereotype, at least in my consciousness.
If my grandmother can do it, perhaps it’s time for us to collectively ask if Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar, like Rudyard Kipling’s Nobel Prize, was more a sign of the times than a transcendent accolade. If we take stock of her life, it’s clear that her legacy is as much about success, as it is about loss. McDaniel’s one dying wish was to be buried in Hollywood Memorial Park, interred next to her brethren, Hollywood stars. Like the Cocoanut Grove, her presence wasn’t allowed. After McDaniel’s death, amidst the troubles of managing her estate, the historic Oscar was lost. Maybe the cruel irony of this loss is instructional, that it’s time to retire this whole construct and dismantle the stereotype that made it possible.