Managing ‘Old Mammy’, Making ‘Mother Wit’: Older Enslaved Women, Efficiency, and Survival on the Plantation

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the values of older enslaved women on cotton and sugar plantations in the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley. Planters derived efficiency value from aged enslaved women’s medical knowledge, domestic skills, and care-taking skills, believing that these qualities could be used to create maximally productive workforces. This meaning that planters and overseers placed on some older women was a perversion of value these women often held within enslaved communities. Enslaved people valued medical knowledge and a specific kind of social tact known as ‘Mother Wit’ because they were crucial tools for surviving slavery and resisting its degrading effects. The article utilizes plantation business records, agricultural trade publications, interviews with formerly enslaved people, and a composite and speculative methodology akin to Marisa J. Fuentes’ approach to ‘archival fragments’. It builds on the work of historians of enslaved aging as well as scholarship in the history of plantation medicine and the history of capitalism and slavery. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that there were complex understandings of aging on the plantation to both enslavers and the enslaved.