G. Brady: *folk music plays* My name is Gaynell Brady.
I’m the owner/educator at Our Mammy’s. I started Our Mammy’s which is a History & Genealogy Program
in 2013. It came out of my love of genealogy and family history and of course Louisiana.
I wanted to teach kids how to find like the heroes on their family
trees and so it started just growing from there. And one of the things I noticed very early on,
I wanted to grab attention to get the conversation going, and I felt that
if I’m going to talk about my ancestors, I want to wear some of the clothing that
they would have worn at that time to try and add a layer to the story.
I work with children and adults, my favorite thing to tell the kids, “guys, the back of
the plantation was jumping” you know, and it was like, “what do you mean,” and I was like,
“do you realize what was going on back there after all of that work?” They were trading secrets,
sharing stories, creating music, creating the culture and traditions that we love today.
It was a party back there, I know it. I feel it in my heart that at the end of the day after
every that they’ve experienced, those families came together, and they supported each other.
I have been doing adult genealogy classes that I’ve been teaching through the library system,
cemetery preservation project in New Orleans and then I do, I’ve been doing summer camps
in addition to my day job. I do all of these things, as long as it aligns with
remembering and honoring my ancestors, I’m going to do it. We have the power to change the
narrative, to shift like, the way of the world and I consider that to be like very powerful.
So, when I first started Our Mammy’s, I had this little binder in front of me and
with the thing of naming the persons who I would portray, and this was before I knew as
much information as I know now. I literally named my grandmothers without even knowing them. So, for
example, my Francois line, I wrote in this very first binder that I would portray this Francois
lady who was very strong and very powerful. On my binder I call that Adelaide Francois and I
actually have a grandma that was called Adelaide Francois and before I even knew she existed.
How can I have memories of someone that I’ve never met. And so, I started looking into it and see
that there’s this thing called ancestral memories that we carry our ancestors’ memories within our
DNA so, maybe that’s where her name came from. So, after I had Benjamin, I went through a really
bad postpartum depression. I wouldn’t come out of the room, I wouldn’t really talk to anyone,
I wasn’t really eating. My husband, he knows how much I love all of these powerful women that come
before me. So, he put me in the car, so we went to St. Francisville. I went to the historical
society there, I saw the museums and I saw like all the spaces where my ancestors walked.
I walked on the grounds and suddenly, I feel better, so I went back to work. And then a couple
years later, I ended up getting very sick and I lost hearing on the left side; a lot of people
don’t know I’m supposed to wear a hearing aide. My husband did the thing again. He put me in a car,
we drove to St. Francisville. I’m still sad, I’m pouting all the way there and so I got out of the
car you guys, I put one foot on the ground I could hear a voice in my deaf ear, that literally said,
“it’s going to be okay.” I didn’t get out the car though,
I had one foot out, I back up, I close the door, I said, “okay, I’m fine, let’s go” and I was fine.
My husband was like, “what happened?” I said I heard Grandma Lizzie and she told me I was going
to be okay. Now, the cool thing about Grandma Lizzie is Grandma Lizzie was a midwife. She lived
in St. Francisville and I knew it was her voice. Our memories is important to me and pardon me if
I get emotional, but I always find, no matter what program I’m doing,
there is always going to be a reminder in some kind of way from one of my ancestors like, almost
like a head nod, like a blessing, that yes, this is what I want you to be doing at this moment.
So, Mama Belle is actually one of my favorite ancestors. She is like my hero. The reason why
is Mama Belle started her family very early and she got married very young and she raised
multiple generations there after her. She was born in 1888, died in 1971. She was a domestic servant.
She traveled from Clemson to Des Almas, back to New Orleans, she worked to provide for her family,
even after her husband was injured. I feel like if I didn’t tell Mama Belle’s story,
then no one will remember what she accomplished, no one will remember what she contributed to
society. And then of course, there’s like tons and tons of stories on like free
people of color, this, that, and the other. I just wanted to tell like who are those people
in the background? Like what were their lives like, like the ordinary people, the regular folks,
and genealogy does that. And so, my way of dealing with
finding a creative way to tell the story to make it hands on and make it interactive and make
you appreciate all of your ancestors, no matter what they’ve accomplished or didn’t accomplish.
Our Mammy’s is the tool to do that so, that’s why I did it.
And then I’ll confess - like when I first started doing this, people were hung up on the name,
they were hung up on why any African American woman would want to portray an enslaved person
or portray anything that happened in the seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen hundreds,
like what’s the matter with you? How like when we hear certain terms,
it really just like, it’s a trigger, right? But I felt that I had to take that stereotype
and show the world who Mama Belle was because they both served in the same capacity. But
this stereotype of like, who mammy is or was, was not the women who raised me. By no means were
these women uneducated, by no means were these women the person for the character portrayed. So,
I was like, give me this word, and I will give it a new meaning and that’s how it was born.
So, I wanted to create a new meaning for a word for a powerful person in the African American
community like and I told people this. I said, “you think of it this way, you know,
for African American families when Mama dies, everything falls apart.” When my grandma dies, the
entire family falls apart. So that shows you right there how powerful or how important that person
is to the community. So, I had to do something, so kind of like her, using that term that everybody
was familiar with, that the majority of African American women is Mama Belle.
Mama Belle, born August 28, 1888. She died here in New Orleans in April 1971.
She was born in Clinton, Louisiana. That side of my family were all pretty much domestic servants
and the men in the family worked on sawmills. So, they left Clinton, Louisiana and they went to Des
Almas to work in Dewey Sawmill and that’s where our family church was established. The building
is still standing in uptown New Orleans. My dad’s side, different story. My grandfather
went away for WWII, and he came back with a different perspective on life.
And he just said, “here’s what I’m not going to do today,” and the plantation owner told him,
“if you’re not gone by the time morning rises, we’re gonna kill you.”
So, they left. In fact, they left the plantation when my grandmother was pregnant with my dad.
So, that’s not that long ago. That’s the scary part, like when
people say things, they don’t realize that I’m going to be one generation out. I heard many
stories about Mama Belle. I saw photos of her. But I didn’t quite understand her life. She’s like our
own little queen and I couldn’t understand, like God, everybody has a photo of this woman in their
house, but I didn’t know anything about her. In learning, I understood why. Just her kids,
my grandma Florence, who I am dressed like now, she’s actually my great grandma. When they came to
New Orleans, they all joined unions. They opened up a church in uptown New Orleans, that’s when our
families first started getting access to formal education when we arrived in New Orleans. So,
that’s the mood I kind of like wanting to portray today and just like how we left the plantation,
and we went on to bigger things in the city and we left them behind, but we never forgot it. We
took the traditions with us, we took the food with us, we took family practices with us.
My mom’s side of the family very close knit. They all pretty much live in the same neighborhood
where we are right now. This is like a little island, everybody knew everybody,
everybody was almost married to everybody here. Similar to plantation life.
This is home and it’s been home I think three, four hundred years in that area. When I stand
on this land, I tell people it feels very peaceful because this, in my mind, is freedom seeker lands,
when people were running away from the plantation, this is the swamps and the bayous and all these
places where they would hang out and find peace. This is like where gatherings were taking place.
Even though the history wasn’t written down, it was still passed to us verbally.
They weren’t known necessarily as grandma, it was Mama Belle, Mama Florence. The funny thing about
every single one of my costumes is named after one of my grandmothers because I want to keep them
near me and I want to, when I put that dress on, I want to do my best to be their voice and say what
they wanted to say but couldn’t. And I do this little ritual before every program, every meeting
no matter how I’m engaging with the community, I ask their permission to share their stories.
Again, because I want to be like those women. Like a lot people may say, “well yeah, but they
were uneducated” and they were this and they were that but to me, it’s like, no, it’s not education
in the way that you may think of it, but these are more healing people with food and encouraging
people and educating in their own way. And I want to have that skill set. I do my best to make sure
every day I’m telling their story one way or the other, just remembering them or just researching
their lives. So, like for example, growing up, I used to suffer really bad nosebleeds, like
horrible nosebleeds and my dad told my mom to put a brass key around my neck with a black string,
and the nosebleeds would stop, and I would have to wear it everyday in order for that to happen.
Now scientifically, I’m sure that there’s a reason why the nosebleeds stopped
but I wore that key from about kindergarten all the way to about 7th grade and I didn’t have
to wear it anymore, the nosebleeds stopped. So then also, I would like always catch these
horrible, horrible colds and that’s when the tea would come about, right? Like we drink this tea,
it’s going to all come up, rub a little bit of whiskey on the baby’s gums to stop a toothache
and little cool stuff like that, but it works right? Like using the tools that you have to
survive and that’s the piece that I’ve learned, just how to survive with limited resources.
One of the things I actually learned from a family member then I heard it again when I was
in Donaldsonville, I had really bad rheumatoid arthritis for a long time and I was in a ton of
pain, and I remember them saying, “you need to find you some pepper baby”, some pepper? “You
need hot peppers; eat hot peppers and it’s going to reduce the inflammation.” Really? I tried it,
it worked right? I don’t have to take medication for rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, of all of
the autoimmune diseases and stuff I have, I don’t take any medication. I’m not saying I’m pain free,
but I don’t have to take any medication. And then on the line of peppers,
we were always taught to plant hot peppers in the front of your yard to keep the
evil spirits away. Even with cleaning practices, my dad will tell you, you can’t clean a house from
the front to the back, you always start in the back and then clean from the back to the front.
After you get done, sprinkle the whole house with Florida water. So, little practices like that,
little things like that we were just taught by words and then also by practices.
*music begins again* I often too have dreams of things
and places and it’ll put me like way in the past as if I was there living through it. And then
sometimes when I’m researching, I realize like, “holy cow, my ancestors were there.
So, I look out at this gate and I remember several times, I’d wake my husband up and I say, “man,
I had this dream that I was talking, I was trying to get to this little lady. She was sitting on the
porch and she was talking to people. And I was waiting in line to try to talk to her, but you
know, I was rushing to try to get to the front, but I couldn’t get to her.” And when I looked
out and saw the van out there just now and I’m sitting here in this chair and it made me realize,
maybe I was the little old lady because this was like literally, my vision. And I just saw it.