Free Living by the Word by Alice Walker

and their times, that illuminates them clearly. A light that helps us really begin to see them, and to comprehend the violence their images and beings have sustained. As in, for example, Al Jolson’s famous anti-mammy, anti-black mother, song.
    Here is Jolson, a white man. He is on stage before thousands of people, and, since television, before millions. He has blackened his face with burnt cork; he wears a black wig of coarse corkscrew curls. Out of his thin, made up to look fat, white-lipped mouth, as he bends theatrically on one knee, comes…
    But you remember.
    When he sings, there is a kind of jazzy chorus and the backup singers strut and yell. We understand that Jolson is not serious, that his “Mammy” is a joke, and a trivial one. It is as if he’s murdered our true grandmothers (Fannie Moore’s mammy) before our very eyes.
    And yet, because we love the people’s voices, and understand why they spoke the way they did, we can see and hear a different mammy, no matter what Al Jolson presents. We can see and hear Fannie Moore’s mammy (I imagine her thin, brown, rarely smiling, her eyes red from lack of sleep and sewing all night in poor light). We can see and hear Frederick Douglass’s mammy. We can see and hear the longing when she is sold down the river, or Fannie is or Frederick is. We can see and hear the loneliness and the daydreams.
    Africa must have seemed a million miles away to the black children who were kidnapped and brought here, as distant as the moon. But even so, many of them tried to walk back, right into the sea. And in America they regularly risked their lives to walk back to, or to find, the woman who brought them into the world and loved them, to whom their return was the essence of “holding up the light for her to see by,” through the long dark nights of slavery. Just as to them, the light was her smile. And because the light was held up for the “mammy,” light also covered the child. For when we hold up a light in order to see anything outside ourselves more clearly, we illuminate ourselves.
    Change Al Jolson into Fannie Moore, or any black enslaved person, and see what happens to his song.
    But as of now “mammy” is a used, abused, disposed-of word; and the person to whom it applies has met the same fate. This was emphasized for me when a colleague was telling me about the horrors of the recent Republican convention, one of which was the presence of black entertainers who sang.
    Who were these entertainers, I asked. “The Mammies and the Pappies,” she replied. She then elaborated on the personalities Reagan’s staff had chosen to represent black people at the convention. Her harshest words were reserved for the mammy figure, whom she imagined consoling Ronald Reagan with johnnycake and clabbered milk in the “classic” mammy tradition. “Now don’t you worry none, honey,” this modem mammy would say, her sequined gown now replacing her apron of old, “them bombs you settin’ up in Europe ain’t botherin’ nobody. And them shiftless shines you cuttin’ off of welfare ought to find them some good white folks to work for like I done.”
    And yet, we can learn from what has happened to “mammy,” too. That it is not by suppressing our own language that we counter other people’s racist stereotypes of us, but by having the conviction that if we present the words in the context that is or was natural to them, we do not perpetuate those stereotypes, but, rather, expose them. And, more important, we help the ancestors in ourselves and others continue to exist. If we kill off the sound of our ancestors, the major portion of us, all that is past, that is history, that is human being is lost, and we become historically and spiritually thin, a mere shadow of who we were, on the earth.
    How fortunate, then, that many of us love memories. That we understand we are who we are largely because of who we have been. And who we have been has come down to us as the vibration of souls