When Mammy Takes Off Her Skirt

Sometimes to be whole, one must break. For me it was February 1, 2023. However, upon reflection, the senseless pain of others, past, present, and future, like the lash of a whip, had always cut deep into my soul. That February date simply marked the tipping point of exhaustion from watching the oppressed wearing the face of the oppressor.

Leading up to that day my soul could not rest. I kept seeing overseers and slave drivers. I heard the howling of dogs, across centuries.  My spirit splintered. The Ancestors would not be silent. Their revelation shook me loose from the mask I'd constructed for myself. 

I walked away from a work-defined identity. I set down the weight I had carried for so long. On that day I stopped. And in that pause, that rest, I began to heal. I took the time to speak with other Black women, educators, nurses, leaders, CEOs, mothers. What I discovered was sobering, though not surprising, I was not alone. The pain was universal. That’s when I realized.

Mammy is in crisis.

Rethinking Mammy

On this  journey of thinking, dreaming, and aging in the #AgeOfChaos I’ve thought a lot about Mammy. Before you flinch at the word, let me explain. Mammy got a bad rap. She’s been caricatured, mocked, and maligned. Frozen in black-and-white films, a figment of Hollywood’s imagination. 

Mammy was not the trope. She was the Village Mother who used strategy to live her purpose. She cooked, cleaned, and cared for other people’s children in an effort to create safety for her own. If she could soften the hearts of those other people’s children, teach them to see her, her children, her people, as human. Maybe, just maybe, the violence would decrease. Maybe the system would bend, even slightly, and the arc of the moral universe would complete its journey to justice.

The Village Mother became Mammy to absorb the bruises, the insults, the blows, so her babies, so that you, so that I, might live.

For centuries, Black women raised generations not only of our children but of this entire nation. We have literally taken care of the country by setting policy, staffing hospitals, teaching children, preaching sermons, tending wounds, starting businesses, and saving elections. We have been the mirrors and the conscience of these United States of America.

Many times we were so busy being Mammy that we forgot to analyze the strategy for the modern time. And, here’s the truth, in the year 2025, Mammy is tired. 

Naming the Water

Mammy lived her life swimming in poisoned water. People like to say racism is a shark circling the raft. This is not even close to the truth. Racism is the food we eat. The water we drink. The air we breathe. It lives in every system, every policy, every judgment about who belongs and who doesn’t. 

The same script of hatred and division has been used on every continent from Africa to the Americas. Against every indigenous people around the world for the same purpose: to rationalize capitalism, colonialism, exploitation and domination. And in this country, domination has been draped in a bastardized religion where the gospel is twisted to justify genocide, slavery, and internment. Whether the plantation of history or masked men kidnapping people from the street because they “fit the description" currently, the injustice is the same. A gospel that preaches “love thy neighbor” while simultaneously legislating exclusion is a false doctrine.

Racism is why it was so easy to dismantle “equity work.” Equity is only possible to the degree to which power structures can profit and feel comfortable. But comfort is not the same as justice. When comfort is centered, too often, the conversation is watered down, sanitized, narrowed to everything except the one truth: equity cannot exist without reckoning with race.

The Weight of Care

Black women know this better than anyone. Ask the over 300,000 Black women who have been pushed out of their jobs in less than a year, as well as those who remain. We are the teachers, the nurses, the social workers, the nonprofit leaders, the founders, the public officials, the tech executives. You name it, we do it. We are, as we’ve always been, the Village Mother, masked as Mammy, holding fragile institutions together. 

We absorb the microaggressions. But, let’s be real. The aggressions aren’t micro. They are intentional. We push through the assaults on our intelligence, our skills, our very right to be, think, and live. Even as we hold the humanity of others intact, we carry the weight of being seen both less and more than human, The Strong Black Woman.

We do the work while often earning less. And then, at the end of the day, we turn on the television and watch communities suffer. Whether they are communities who look like us, or those who don't, we feel the pain, especially for the children. And, regardless of whose child it is, we know instantly that child could be ours. That knowing never leaves our bones. 

Choosing Rest

But here is where we are now: Mammy has taken off her cape. She’s untied the big skirts of sacrifice. She is resting.

She is rejecting the lie that she is lazy and replacing it with the truth of her work and worth. She recognizes that rest is the sacred space where dreams are born. It is where I learned to trust myself again, even in the face of fear. As I write I realize this journey is about allowing myself to imagine ease, not as indulgence, but as birthright. 

It is through Mammy’s exhaustion that we reclaim the Village Mother. When I step back, I trust the seeds planted by all the Village Mothers before me who had to hide to survive. I know the worth of my labor. But I also know my worth is not defined by how much I toil or give away.

So, for this season, Mammy rests. She breathes. She lays down what was never hers to hold.

And in her rest, a new future quietly stirs. I offer this not as an answer, but as a witnessing. May it speak to those who, like me, seek our collective liberation.

Mammy’s Skirts

Today I folded Mammy's skirt

The big ones we all hid ‘neath

across generations

Today I took Mammy's skirt and buried it

Singing Down by the Riverside while splashing 

in the cool stream

Today I took Mammy's skirt and spread it out for a feast

With my sisters

as we made wildflower crowns

Today I folded Mammy's skirt and made a pillow

Where she, where me, where we could lay our head

and watch the clouds pass by

Today I took Mammy's skirt and made a kite 

Reaching heights hereto unknown

When I realized it was still tethered,

I released the string and watched it soar

Today I went to get Mammy’s skirt and it was gone,

Drawer empty

I heard her whisper, “thank you”