IN THE ANNALS OF surrogate mothering, British nannies and Southern nannies are the most famous, two utterly different species, now mostly extinct. In response to the recent posts on nannies near and far, a reader sends this beautiful excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about a black slavewoman, “matriarch of the weak and young:”

Fat Aunt Bess is older than Time
But her eyes still shine like a bright, new dime,
Though two generations have gone to rest
On the sleepy mountain of her breast.
Wingate children in Wingate Hall,
From the first weak cry in the bearing-bed
She has petted and punished them, one and all,
She has closed their eyes when they lay dead.
She raised Marse Billy when he was puny,
She cared for the Squire when he got loony,
Fed him and washed him and combed his head,
Nobody else would do instead.
The matriarch of the weak and the young,
The lazy crooning, comforting tongue.
She has had children of her own,
But the white-skinned ones are bone of her bone.
They may not be hers, but she is theirs,
And if the shares were unequal shares,
She does not know it, now she is old.
They will keep her out of the rain and cold.
And some were naughty, and some were good,
But she will be warm while they have wood,
Rule them and spoil them and play physician
With the vast, insensate force of tradition,
Half a nuisance and half a mother
And legally neither one nor the other,
Till at last they follow her to her grave,
The family-despot, and the slave.
–Curious blossom from bitter ground,
Master of masters who left you bound,
Who shall unravel the mingled strands
Or read the anomaly of your hands?
They have made you a shrine and a humorous fable,
But they kept you a slave while they were able,
And yet, there was something between the two
That you shared with them and they shared with you,
Brittle and dim, but a streak of gold,
A genuine kindness, unbought, unsold,
Graciousness founded on hopeless wrong
But queerly living and queerly strong. . . . 

               — Comments —

Lisa writes:

When I was younger, my grandpa told me of his conversations with ancient black women who had been born slaves. They were essentially “Fat Aunt Besses.” It is so hard for the multicultural mind to grasp even a hint of this “family love though master and slave” reality that the modernists conclude it could not have existed. When I visit my southern home state, many of the older blacks are generally without an equal rights chip on their shoulders, but are cheerful, helpful, and not at all bothered about being black or the possible descendants of slaves, for their great-grandfathers and mothers loved my great-great grandfathers and mothers, and were cared for and loved in return, which was not the case in many northern states where they were forbidden from even residing.

Lydia Sherman writes:

The accent of southern whites was created by blacks. They were taught by black mammies, and the vowel system of the black people was different. They had trouble saying things like “I” (pronounced eye) so they said “Ah.” Consequently, you hear Southern gentlemen say, “Ah believe.”  They got their language training from their black mammies in the antebellum period. They also got some of their cuisine from them. Watermelon was brought over from Africa, particularly for the slaves.

Lisa writes:

 For a rather humorous account of the true history of southern speech, see this article by Dr. Robert Beard, PhD Linguistics. Rather than theorizing that black mammies taught white children their vowels, Dr. Beard reports that the southern accent is a reflection of the most conservative of the US dialects, and that it has changed less than any other since the migrations from England.

Lindsay writes:

That Aunt Bess post was the most revolting thing I’ve read on the Thinking Housewife so far. I’m no feminist but I am black and I found the romanticizing of slavery and the miserable economic conditions that forced black women to be domestic servants disgusting.

Laura writes:

I gather Lindsay did not read the excerpt but skimmed it, saw that it was praise by a white man for a black slavewoman and immediately assumed it must be “revolting.” That’s the only charitable explanation I can find for her response.

Benet does not approve of slavery; he calls it a “hopeless wrong.”  He does recognize the transcendent bonds that sometimes existed between masters and slaves, none more profound than those between children and the black women who raised them. How could Lindsay possibly object to Benet’s description of Aunt Bess as “master of masters“? Lindsay may be black but she is not sympathetic to blacks. Should a woman such as Bess have refused to be a “master of masters”? Should she have denied the children she cared for her maternal genius, withheld love and scorned their praise? Should she have lived in a state of perpetual grievance toward the people who kept her in bondage but who also cared for her in return? Or should she have blossomed in the only role that fate assigned her?

Whether Lindsay despises them or not, real Aunt Besses existed. They made the small universe they inhabited better. They possessed spiritual gifts and mothered whites. They were living embodiments of St. Paul’s caritas, which “suffereth long and is kind.” Such is the “genuine kindness, unbought and unsold” that Benet describes. 

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