40 years ago


New Orleans/French Quarter Black Mammies



Candy-shop mammies of Royal Street

grinning and obese

command the entrances

to praline-sweet chip-gip joints



Watermelon lips

and cotton boll eyes

entice the gaze



Severe black sheen

of hands and face

conjure dreams

of ante-bellum day

(for white girls on the prowl)



"Mammies are a joke,"

the neo-massas say

and slurp gumbo

in the renovated Slave Exchange.

They are a joke,

but even candy-sweet

(lawd, miss ann you sho

nuff pretty) mammies

know their human rites.



Yesterday, my parraine,

he tell me

one candy-shop mammy

she ungrin herself, yeah,

and slashed a lily-white throat --

cajun-style



It is a mystery

of pure delight

(and drums were heard in Congo Square)



The Times-Picayune

wrote this morning:

New Orleans Shocked.

    Mammies Got Hot Stuff In Them.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            1977

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