I am Nicole Racquel Carr, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M San Antonio. My research interests include Black Feminisms, Black Maternalisms, African American literature, and Pop Culture. I am currently working on my first manuscript, I Am Not Your Mammy: Black Feminist Mothering in the 21st Century. My book project emerged from an unlikely source: anger. In 2010, I was the only Black girl in my English master’s program and you know they never let me forget it. As Solange once sagely crooned, I had a lot to be mad about. But I was blessed with two (yes, two!) Black women professors. Their classes were mandatory manna for my soul. When my Black woman professor showed “Imitation of Life” during a graduate seminar on passing, I felt my face burn hot watching Louise Beavers cry for Pecola. I didn’t realize it then but my anger was not simply for Beavers but for the women in my family who looked like Beavers. In my family, these women were the ones you ran to. They told the best scary stories, warned you to never get in the car with white men, and fetched quarters out pocketbooks to make sure you could buy that pickled egg from the storehouse. They knew how to smother porkchops like it was nobody’s business but they also knew how to move in a room full of vultures. I was angry that this woman, this woman who looked so much like the women who raised me, was shunned and ridiculed in the film but in real life too. In her lifetime Beavers, like Butterfly McQueen, was denounced by her skinfolk. Her crime? Playing stereotypical, mammy-like figures. While these critiques are not without merit, I could not dismiss Beavers and McQueen. Hadn’t Hollywood reduced them to playing maids and mammies? These stereotypical roles could not silence their Black brilliance, could they? My questions reminded me of the question Alice Walker posed, “What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time?” For me, these women signified white America’s plundering of Black brilliance. Hattie, Butterfly, and Louise were Sula’s sisters: artists with an art form but no platform to share their talents. Like Sula, they became pariahs. As a graduate student, I became obsessed with recuperating this perverted version of Black motherhood, this mammy white children felt so comfortable exploiting to the detriment of her own flesh and bone. I am not too proud to admit that I made a fool out of myself trying to find something salvageable about these women. But I am eternally grateful that my Black woman professor did not berate me for trying. Perhaps she understood my anger. For me, Prissy’s blithering pickaninny routine could never obliterate the mother-love of McQueen, the Black woman who welcomed a mother of five to stay at one of her properties with a smile and a hushing reprimand, “You’re welcome, and don’t worry about the rent.” It was inconceivable to me that McQueen, a woman who rented her properties out to low-income families, should be dismissed as nothing more than a dimwitted pickaninny, sellout, or as Lena Horne spat at her, “a dog.” It is inconceivable to me now. White America should never have that much power. While pregnant with my first child, I worked on my dissertation about the subversive qualities of Black women in these mammyish roles. After delivering my stillborn son at 33 weeks, I began to think about Black mothering in the face of reproductive violence. I began to think about Black women’s rage as a powerful mothering tool. I began to think about my mama and my mama’s mama being in sorrow’s kitchen and licking out all the pots while managing to make a dollar out of fifteen cents. I Am Not Your Mammy was born out of rage, loss, and memory. It is a love letter to Black mothers and women who mother themselves and their children in spite of. It is for those among us who refuse to let white supremacy corrupt our love for our children and our art. It is for Butterfly, Hattie, and Louise.

- Dr. Nicole Carr