Adeline F. Ries’s short story “The scapegoat” is the sixth in the anthology Great short stories by African-American writers, which my American friend Carolyn sent me. Like the previous author, Emma E. Butler, Adeline F. Ries is barely known.

Adeline F. Ries

The biographical note at the end of the anthology, like that for Butler, comprises three sentences, starting with:

Unfortunately, Ries’s life is unknown except for her authorship of this story.

It then offers two more:

The “mammy” was an image and caricature repeatedly evoked in American fiction, and here and in Dorothy West’s tale “Mammy” we see the caricature transformed by the author’s deeper understandings of the women who had such roles. Ries’s chilling and compressed story dramatizes the suffering and restraint her heroine experienced in her long, loving life.

This was, it seems, her sole story for The Crisis. Again, I did my own searches, but wasn’t expecting to do much better than the editors of this anthology. And I didn’t … I mostly found listings for the story and some digitised versions. However, I did find a 2015 PhD thesis titled “The Women, the Indomitable, the Undefeated”: The Mammy, the Belle, and Southern Memory in William Faulkner from Lucy Buzacott at the University. Buzacott references the story a couple of times and, as the thesis title implies, she focuses on the “mammy” that my anthology’s authors do. Well, of course they do, it’s the title of the story!

As with Butler, this story by an author about whom nothing is known has been anthologised more than once, including in Asha Kanwar’s The unforgetting heart: An anthology of short stories by African American women (1859-1993), published in 1995. Better World Books says that “The writers included here, both the famous and the less well-known, together represent the remarkable diversity of African American women’s writing across class, culture and time.” Another anthology, published by OUP in 1991, was edited by E. Ammons, and titled, Short fiction by black women, 1900-1920.

“Mammy: A story”

WARNING: SPOILER

If the last story, “Polly’s hack ride”, was a very short story, “Mammy” is a very very short story, taking up just three pages in the anthology, but it packs a serious punch. And I’m going to share that punch because you can quickly read the story at the link below (where it occupies just over a page. Do it!)

So, here goes. “Mammy” opens with our being told that she had raised a “white baby” named Shiela, who had been borne away in marriage, leaving Mammy with a heavy heart. That heart was comforted, however, by the presence of her own “black baby”, Lucy. However, the day Mammy hears the joyful news that Shiela had had her own baby is the day her Lucy is “sold like common household ware!” – in an irony not lost on Mammy – to Shiela to care for her baby. About a year later, she is told that Lucy had been found dead on the nursery room floor of heart failure, and is offered the use of a carriage to go to the coast to see Lucy before her burial. Mammy takes this opportunity, and in a shocking act drowns the baby her dead daughter had been bought to care for. Mammy’s refrain as she carries out her act is, “They took her from me an’ she died”.

As I read this story, other stories of mothers who murder came to mind, including Toni Morrison’s fictional Sethe in Beloved, and the real Akon Guode in Helen Garner’s essay “Why she broke” (my review). In fact, it was the refrain “why she broke” that came to my mind as I read “Mammy”. In her essay, Garner quotes a psychiatrist during Guode’s trial saying that it need not have been something dramatic that triggered her action, that “it can just be the ebb and flow of human suffering, and the person reaching the threshold at which they can … no longer go on”. This felt like Mammy.

Of course, “Mammy” has a twist on these two examples, because she doesn’t kill her own child, bringing the idea of revenge into the frame. Like Sethe, she is a powerless slave, but the character in “Mammy” belongs to another tradition, that of the “mammy”. Wikipedia discusses the USA’s Mammy stereotype, describing it as “Black women, usually enslaved, who did domestic work, including nursing children”. Fictionalised mammy characters, it continues, are often visualised “as a dark-skinned woman with a motherly personality”. (We all know Scarlett O’Hara’s mammy in Gone with the Wind, don’t we?) Wikipedia also says that “the mammy caricature was used to create a narrative of Black women being content within the institution of slavery among domestic servitude”. They are, in other words, taken advantage of and assumed to be happy with their lot. In Ries’ story, the slave-owners are kind enough, but Mammy also knew that “serious floggings” were never far away.

Ries tells her story well. It’s tight, with the prime focus trained on Mammy and her feelings. I see it less as a story of revenge, than one of brokenness – brokenness caused by a system that controls and disempowers, completely. (For Australians, there is also an echo here of the “Stolen Generations”.)

Either which way, it subverts the myth of “the Mammy”, by giving the Mammy an agency that she takes because no-one would have expected her to. In her PhD, Buzacott quotes Kimberley Wallace-Sanders who suggests that in Ries’s story “the symbol of racial harmony [the mammy] is distorted until the fantasy and myth dissolves into a tragic nightmare”. Buzacott suggests that the murders enacted by Sethe, “Mammy”, and Nancy in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a nun, “are part of a genealogy of black maternity outraged by slavery and its aftermath”. Whether they kill their own or another’s child, the point is made – and I certainly felt it worked in this story.

Such a shame that we have no others from Adeline F. Ries.

Adeline F. Ries
“Mammy: A story” (first published in The crisis 13 (3), January 1917)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 61-63
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online (in the whole journal)