First of all common knowledge says that the Mammy was an African Slave Woman from  Middle Age to Elder who was a  Nanny or Grandmother figure to the children of the Master of the house.  She was not the wet nurse as  she was usually portrayed as past the age of childbearing or de-sexed. 

Moving past the accepted and known, Mammy  is an  icon, the personification of the purely African  genotype.  She represents the  African characteristics or traits that  were handed down to us from our ancestral kin  while we lay in our mother's womb. 

The Grandmother or BIG MAMA represents  matriarchal  succession,  she is the owner of the throne of royalty in  the  African Old World. Her power  was re-directed and  annexed to the lineage of the white man or the Master of the plantation in the stereotype of the Mammy. 

Mammy , La Madama, La Negra  was the New World agent or representative of the Old Lineage, the Ancient African Female Ancestors.  Thus the Ancestral Mothers were transplanted to a foreign soil  in the genotype of their descendants. They were revived and rejected  in slavery, and eventually what occurred in the New World  in turn affected the psyche of all  in or out of Africa itself.  Unlike  the Mothers in Yoruba land  who were placated so that they would not rebel or take retribution on their own people for their demotion, African’s in America’s lost the traditional rituals .  

Mammy was no longer the image of the African Queen Mother.   The  role of  Queen Mother was  transferred to a patriarchal line of succession used by  the  royal families  of England, a system that was eventually to be adopted by England’s colonies including Yoruba land.  

The Maternal line or the mother role was not emphasized in the New World, breeding was emphasized. The  reproductive aspect of the female life cycle was the GAL.  The non-reproductive part of the cycle was the AUNTIE.   In the New World was the GAL.    She represented the cycle of fertility. The menopausal years were the time of the Auntie.

The African female could not own or raise her own children in slavery.  The  reproductive functions  themselves were put into the service of the slave-owner. He owned the African female and her ovum and mixed with them “at his pleasure”,  the black as coal complexion of the original African matriarch was transformed  over time in the diaspora into the various shades of  brown, the  rainbow of  hue – manity that arched  over the muddy waters of our  New World Niger-  the Mississippi River.