Session 3 (Units 4-5): The Sounds of Wise Women: The Kitchen Salon as a Multi-sensory Lab(2)

Unit 4: On Soundness, Despite Seasoning: Tortured Lullabies as Work Songs

Smart-Grosvenor redefined the Black mammy as an American institution, an answered prayer as the backbone of the movement for white women’s feminist rights. In this chapter, we use the nurse archetype to comprehend the indiscernible ramifications of self-sacrifice, self-definitions, self-possession, taste nurturance, and certified soundness. We begin by considering the legacy of wet nursing as a consumed class, a human locus for intersectional gastromusicology in which enslaved Black women’s bodies are the technology of multi-sensory soothing and tastemaking for suckling enslaver children. Citing Joaquin Nabuco’s quote of an adage uttered by slave-holding planters in Brazil, Smart-Grosvenor wrote, “The most productive feature of slave property is the generative belly.”[1]Black women’s sacrifice of forced breeding, carrying, breastfeeding, breast milk, and lullabic work being the height of molestation and theft of nutrients and bio information was instilled into enslaver children while in…