“My Ol’ Black Mammy”

Abstract

The photograph of a black wet nurse and her white foster son, dated 1870, was selected by Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, one of the organizers of Historia da vida privada no Brasil [History of Private Life in Brazil], to grace the cover of the second volume of the series. The image gives special emphasis to the ambivalent relationship between the nursemaid and her “white son,” one of love and power (property) denoted by the touch of the child’s two little hands on the nurse’s right arm and shoulder.1 Although not entirely denying that the bodily contact in this old photo could have simply been the result of the photographer’s commands or the child’s exhaustion, Alencastro instead prefers to interpret it as the consequence of the parents’ intent to legitimize the “union” between the black wet nurse and the white boy through a family portrait, a “paradoxical albeit permitted union… founded on actual love and prior violence” (“Epilogo” 440).2 However, as revealed in several late nineteenth-century archived photographs of old aristocratic family and family-like members, wet nurses slowly disappeared from family albums, or were merely relegated to “the photographs as remnants: a hand, a wrist, until they were entirely banned from the images” (Deiab, “Memoria” 40). Such piecemeal exclusion of the institutionalized wet nurse from symbolic loci of affection reveals that she became a source of apprehension and fear, especially taking into account demeaning representations of black nurses as agents of moral and physical contamination by hygienist campaigns in favor of “natural” breastfeeding, as well as by eugenic theories and politics following the abolition of slavery.