I have known down South in the days of slavery, coal black queens of the domestic circle.  The cows would come to the cupping as if it were a spiritual devotion.  Maiden mistresses would tell them their love stories, when they wouldn’t tell their own mothers.  I am a southern man, born and reared mid slavery, and I pay this tribute to the black “mammies” of the South before the war.  Down there in that hale, hearty colored motherhood was laid the foundation of future health and strength for many a white baby, when otherwise its mother would have had to see it die.  Frail, delicate mothers, who because of slavery had not done sufficient work to develop physical womanhood, were not able to nurse their own infants and gave them to the care of vigorous, healthy colored mothers, who took them to their bosoms and nursed them into strength.  But for that supplemental supply of vigor, but for that sympathetic partnership in motherhood, much of the most potent manhood of the South would never have been known.

You who lived in the North before the war, and you who are younger and have read about the auction block, the slave driver and the cottonfield cannot understand the attachment between one of these colored mothers and the white boy or girl she nursed.  I know whereof I speak, for I revere the memory of my old black mammy.

There are verses, written by whom I do not know, the words of which I cannot recall except a line here and there, hence I take the liberty to supply the missing lines and revise the verses to express my feelings for the slave mammy of my childhood.

  “She was only a dear old darkey,
    In a cabin far away,
  Down in the sunny Southland,
    Where sunbeams dance and play. 
  Yet oft in dreams I hear her crooning,
    Crooning soft and low: 
  ’Sleep on, baby boy,
    The sleep will make you grow.’

  “Oft when tired of fighting
    In a world so full of wrong;
  When wearied and worried
    With the tumult and the throng,
  I seek again the cabin,
    Where dwelt a heart of gold
  And in dreams she loves and pets me,
    As she did in days of old.

  “Oh, my dear old colored mammy,
    In the cabin far away,
  Since you rocked me in the cradle
    Seems forever and a day. 
  Yet in dreams I hear you crooning
    Above my cradle nest;
  ’Sleep on, baby boy,
    Mammy watches while you rest.’”

A white baby, whose mother was ill for months, was given to one of these colored mothers to nurse.  After the war the white family moved west.  As their child grew up the father and mother often told her about Aunt Hannah, how she loved her, petted her, cooked for her, and drove away her own pickaninnies to let “mammy’s baby” sleep.