Scribbling

A year or so ago I helped clean out my father-in-law’s house, which was built nearly fifty years ago by his brother-in-law; and, as one might expect, there were all manner of accumulations and objects tucked away over time, forgotten or overlooked, until a memory suddenly sprang up and reconnected past and present. While my own history shares significant threads with the lives that shaped this house, I could not claim the kind of intimacy that my wife and her sister experienced growing to adulthood here. If there is a room that has even a single book self, I will be drawn to it; my body will automatically tilt from its normal vertical orientation and my head will follow suit as I accommodate the text and spine of each book.Over the years the time I’ve spent in this house may best be characterized as variable –not always pleasant, but certainly not always unpleasant. I am always genuinely curious about the selection of books people have on display in their homes so my inquisitiveness often led me to explore the rows of books arranged around the living room of my in-laws’ house, especially those undisclosed treasures hidden in the more hard-to-reach areas of the room. I thought I had made a fairly complete mental catalogue over the years and continued to revise it with each additional visit. Finding E.E. Cumming’s Collected Poems published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company copyrighted in 1938 with an introduction by Cummings in his own inimitable style seemed out of place, and even more so, considering the companions which pressed shoulder to shoulder to it as if vying for attention.As much as I admired some of Cummings’ poetry –his poignant anti-war poem, I Sing Of Olaf, is among the finest of that particular genre–, I was not dumbfounded by its presence in the house; however, I did not feel the same about a thin volume shoved behind a wall of annuals from NC State, then known simply as State College. As I pulled the two- toned tan and black book from its resting place, I thought it might be an monograph that was authored by a member of my wife’s family or a distant relative, especially since I had been told about the family’s genealogical link to James Watt of the steam engine Watts. When I flipped the book over and beheld the title, I didn’t know what to think. The title of the book was more of a bombshell than a steam engine’s hiss and was definitely not the literary oevre of any member of my wife’s family. I held in my hands the equivalent of a turn of the century minstrel show, as close to blackface as is possible using only script instead of makeup. My black Mammy: A True Story Of The Southland by Jefferson Penn.

Could I have uncovered a satirical prank from another era of the south, the south that had begun its death rattle by the time I had encountered it in the mid ’60’s? Was this another of those sordid little pieces spewing hatred and falsehoods like the Ku Klux Klan material I discovered in 1963 in New Jersey while I worked unloading boxcars to earn money for college? For starters, it wasn’t a monograph. The book was bound and sewn with a hard cover, printed in the USA, and copyrighted by Jefferson Penn in 1942.Puzzled by my discovery I asked my wife and sister-in-law if they recognized the book or knew anything about it. Neither had any knowledge of the book although they guessed that Jefferson Penn was probably connected with Chinqua Penn Plantation. Their mother had been a guide or a docent at Chinqua-Penn when they were young girls and very likely obtained the book during her tenure there. My first reaction upon reading the first page was to dispose of it immediately. Page one was appallingly patronizing and I had no doubt that the content of the remaining pages would change my mind; however, I wanted to determine for myself if Jeff Penn had written a polemic endorsing racism or a clever satire against it. Sadly, Penn is woefully inept and his efforts are riddled with cliché and weak attempts at rendering authentic dialect. Furthermore, it is not altogether clear if his condescending tone is intentional or illustrative of his total lack of skill. Penn’s dedication appears little more than a poorly contrived lampoon. It reads.

To my wonderful Mother –Annie Spencer Penn;and to her maid, given her when a child,my black Mammy        

So who is Jefferson Penn? Thomas Jefferson Penn (1875-1946) was a business and farmer whose father Frank Reid Penn and uncle Sam Cabell Penn started Penn Tobacco Company in Reidsville, North Carolina. Jeff Penn grew up in Rockingham County and upon graduation from the University of Virginia began his professional life as a sales representative for Penn Tobacco Company. In 1911 when Frank Penn sold Penn Tobacco to American Tobacco, Jeff purchased several hundred acres of land in Rockingham County and began preparing a dairy husbandry business. By 1922 Corn Jug Farm had grown to over 1000 acres and had been renamed Chinqua-Penn Plantation.It is difficult to fathom how a driven successful businessman like Thomas Jefferson Penn could travel the world, be exposed to a blinding array of cultural variety and be so unaware of the destructive, derogatory, and denigrating content of his homage to his mother’s black mammy. The title screams unvarnished racism in any era but in 1942 it was part of the south’s dark duality accomplished with a finely polished facade of decorum and civility secured by a grotesque hierarchy of white supremacy whose parasitic strength increased with each abhorrent transaction involving the sale of human chattel. There is no apology for the first page of My black Mammy.

Introducing Mammy-Leethy  
The Negro mammy, before and after the Civil War, was a really unique person never duplicated in any other walk of life in all the history of human beings.She was neither a slave nor a servant, neither an equal nor an inferior. And yet she was all of these.There were few families of any size, and most of them were large, that felt they could manage without a mammy for their children. And while the majority seldom fully realized the practical, presiding position that black Mammy held in the house–held in fact over the whole place or plantation–yet the love, the respect, the loyalty they gave Mammy must remain one of the sweetest memories of all the Southland.Her presence, her personality were not only a comfort and a joy, her place was never questioned.Black Mammy-Leethy, and she was blue-black and blue-true, was a mid-wife, a doctor, a teacher, a philosopher, a nurse and a servant to all the family. She was manager and dictator to all the servants and all the colored, doing anything around the place. Actually, even the Master, the Big Boss, made Mammy his confidante and consultant about many matters concerning the household, from the Mistiss on down to the sorriest darkey on the place.     

There can be no apology for the book; with it we can only hope to avoid the tragedy, which the philosopher George Santayana warns will befall us if we are not vigilant: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.