We often see such a black female figure in Tom and Jerry. She has a large waist, a tiger's back, a loud voice, often calling Tom's full name "Thomas", and often plays the role of the terminator of drama conflicts.
Many Chinese audiences jokingly called her "headless heroine", and many saw her as Tom's master.
So who the hell is she? Is she Tom's master after all? Did she ever show her face?
The fat black woman actually had a name, and her name was Mammy Two Shoes.
It is never stated in the animation whether The Lady of Two Shoes is the hostess or the maid. In the early short films, the Two Shoes women always appeared in aprons, implying that she was a maid. In some episodes, however, she has a separate bedroom on the second floor, seemingly implying that she is the owner of the house. But the title of Mammy is self-evident, she is a servant, not a master.
In Tom and Jerry, we can see that Lady Two Shoes is not only responsible for taking care of her pet Tom, but also cleaning, buying vegetables and cooking, and other chores. In the episode "Weekend Cat Night", as long as you are fast enough, you can see the face of Lady Two Shoes.
One would ask what "Mammy" before The Name of Lady Two Shoes means?
Mammy was actually a general term for black maids in the southern United States before the 1960s, and is now regarded as a racist term.
Mammy's image in literary works is usually of obese black women. To use an inappropriate analogy, the term Mammy is like the fact that we now refer to women who clean up as "aunts," which is indeed a modest term.
Mammy's history dates back to before the 19th century, and they often served as servants or wet nurses in white families. Mammy's literary image stereotype should have originated from the American writer Stowe's 1852 novel critical of slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
After Uncle Tom's Cabin, similar characters were born in many literary works. From the nineteenth century to the twentieth century to the twenty-first century, it has never been broken, for example, the protagonist's adoptive mother Queenie in "The Strange Affair of Benjamin Button" is a typical Mammy image.
For many conservative Americans, the black fat aunt represents the warmth and thoughtfulness engraved in the genes. A pie made by a black aunt, a hug from a black aunt, a black aunt's "Oh! Honey!", which makes up the warmest taste of home in the world.
To this day, we can still see Mammy-like black women in many literary and artistic works that depict the daily life of Americans. Although they are no longer called Mammy, they still represent the warmth of traditional family values.
Back to Tom and Jerry.
Ms. Two Shoes doesn't actually appear in many episodes in the anime, only nineteen times in total, and has not appeared since the episode of "Robot Cat Storm" in 1952. For this long-lived animation, Two Shoes can be said to be just a cameo actor like a dragonfly.
But because the most well-known works of "Tom and Jerry" are from the Hanna-Barbera period from 1940 to 19588, Ms. Two Shoes has become the eternal "headless heroine" in the hearts of many Chinese children.
Here are a dozen appearances of Lady Two Shoes.
Puss gets the boot, The Midnight Snack, Fraidy Cat
Dog Trouble
Puss n' Toots, The Lonesome Mouse
The Mouse Comes to Dinner
Part Time Pal
A Mouse in the House
"Old Rockin' Chair Tom"
Mouse Cleaning, Polka-Dot Puss
The Little Orphan
Saturday Evening Puss
The Framed Cat
Sleepy Time Tom, Nit-Witty Kitty
Triplet Trouble
Push-button Kitty
Here I would like to mention the episode "Weekend Cat Night".
The reason for writing this article comes from a debate on Douban. A few days ago, Amazon temporarily removed the movie "Gone with the Wind" due to racial issues, which caused dissatisfaction among many fans. Some wondered whether any famous works in history had been deleted or removed for racial reasons.
When I say that Tom and Jerry once changed the original white female to black in a replay, I was referring to the episode "Cat Night weekend." My claim has been refuted by many people.
In fact, I did misremember myself, "Weekend Cat Night" was indeed deleted due to racial issues, but it was not changed from white to black, but precisely from Mammy Two Shoes to white.
The reason for the confusion in my memory is that the pirated VCD of Tom and Jerry that I watched as a child was not chronologically arranged, leading me to mistakenly believe that white women are the products of the era of racial discrimination.
In fact, stereotypical blacks like Mammy Two Shoes are the source of racism. In the 1960s, Gene Daecher, the second-generation director of Tom and Jerry, said in an interview:
Ms. Two Shoes will not appear again, and such a stereotypical image of a black housekeeper no longer applies to this era.
In fact, long before the era of Gene Dacher, Hanna and Barbera had begun to change the racial prejudice in the animation. Since the mid-1950s, the owner figure in Tom and Jerry has been replaced by a white man.
Hanna and Barbera have also expressed their sense of no racism on various occasions since then, whether it is Mammy Two Shoes or blackface, all of which are just comedic effects in the context of the times.
Even so, how to deal with the racially discriminatory elements of tombo and Jerry's early short films became a problem that plagued future generations of television stations and production companies.
MgM bought the rights to Tom and Jerry in the 1960s and drastically changed many of the original plots when it replayed classic episodes on television, with white women replacing black maids from the 60s television replays.
MGM's move was criticized in the 1990s, with Paul Mueller, then director of the American Television broadcasting management association, criticizing MGM's approach as an over-racially sensitive act that made Two Shoes, which had no racial discrimination tendencies, a symbol of racial discrimination.
In the new Tom and Jerry series in 2008, a character named Mrs. White women at Two Shoes. The character is believed to be a spiritual sequel to Mammy Two Shoes, inheriting the character's will.
In the '90s, Warner acquired the rights to Tom and Jerry, and they chose a completely different approach from MGM. In Warner's "Tom and Jerry" selection DVD, they invited the black actress Ubi Goldberg, who starred in "Nuns Are Crazy", to give a lecture before the animation began:
The animations you're going to see are a product of their time. They may have portrayed some of the racial prejudices that were prevalent in the United States at the time. These depictions were wrong, both then and now. Although these animations do not represent Warner Bros.'s view of today's society, these animations are presented as they are, because the opposite would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.
What should we do when certain depictions in literary and artistic works are no longer in line with contemporary political correctness?
Is it to meet the contemporary aesthetic and cut enough to fit or even banned? Or is it presented as it is and acknowledges that the work is no longer in line with contemporary values?
My opinion is exactly what Ubigoldberg said. To deny or delete is to cover up, to pretend that these prejudices do not exist. Returning history to its original form is what any society with a conscience and a sense of responsibility should do.
Mammys like Two Shoes, once in large numbers, have fed generations of Americans, and it's no exaggeration to say they're the mothers of American society as a whole. Obliterating her existence seems to be respect, but in fact, it erases her credit, and it also erases the truth of an era.