When we think of an activist, the image that might come to mind is of an emaciated man marching to the sea in India, a Buddhist monk immolating himself in Vietnam, an athlete with an upraised fist in Mexico City. No one would envision a radical as a toothless woman who spoke in black Southern dialect. Despite her nickname and ancient appearance, she emanated a vivacity that makes “Moms” forever young.
Dorothy Parker hid heartache behind a wisecrack, and that was the stock in trade of Loretta Mary Aiken. Although she spent seven decades making people laugh, her own life had more than its share of grief. Loretta was the great-granddaughter of slaves and grew up in conditions scarcely better. Aiken, from rural North Carolina, was one of sixteen children, raised in poverty and segregation. At age eleven, she was raped by an older black man, a traumatic event repeated two years later by the town’s white sheriff. The molestations resulted in pregnancies and the removal of the babies at birth. Shortly afterward, against her wishes, she married an older man whom she despised; she eventually bore a daughter who became a drug addict. Further events also made her life the stuff of Greek tragedy: Loretta’s father, James, died in an explosion of the fire truck in which he was a passenger, and a mail truck ran over and killed her mother, Mary, as she was returning home from church on Christmas Day. At the age of fourteen, Loretta ran away and ended up in Cleveland, where she pursued a job in entertainment, hoping to find an escape from grimmer-than-is-bearable reality. She joined the Theatre Owners Booking Association—the only venue where blacks could perform during the reign of Jim Crow—colloquially known as the Chitlin Circuit. It derived its name after chitterlings, the soul food staple consisting of cooked pig intestines. Fellow performer Jack Mabley was her boyfriend for a brief period, and she adopted the name Jackie Mabley. Later, she quipped that he had taken so much from her that it was only fitting she take something from him. Mabley, in alchemist fashion, turned the base metal of tragedy into comic gold. Arsenio Hall explained this formula when he stated, “If pain makes you funny, we definitely know why Mabley was hilarious.” Moms Mabley became the Southern version of the Italian crying clown who masked his tears through laughter.
Jackie’s professional alter ego, the origin of her stage name, Moms Mabley, was based on her grandmother, the sole ray of light and love from her Dickensian childhood. In the 1920s, Mabley was the only female standup comedian in the world, three decades before Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers, and Phyllis Diller became known as trailblazers. Her shtick involved dressing in geriatric couture—ratty housecoat, floppy shoes, knit hats—and letting loose about whatever she damn well pleased. Dressing as a senior citizen proved convenient, as popular opinion holds the elderly are immune to the verbal censor. Moving her jaw back and forth to emulate a toothless crone, she resorted to self-mockery with her routine, “How you like Mom’s dress? You know you can get some real nice things with them Green Stamps.” Life had bruised the comic, but she refused to let the bruise define her.
On stage Moms was a “dirty old lady,” the original cougar, with a penchant for young men. She poked fun at older men, subtly ridiculing the way they wielded authority over women as well as the decline of their sexual prowess. Her signature lines were, “Ain’t nothin’ an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young one. Only time you see me with my arms around some old man, I’m holding him for the police.” Moms said, about her wedding to a man nearing his dotage, “He was a man so old and weak that at their wedding somebody threw one grain of rice and it knocked him out.” The comedienne’s material mined the topic of sex, and her humor—scandalous in the context of the era—revolved around the risqué double-entendre.
Off stage, the ridiculously patterned housedress disappeared, and it became apparent why she had traded the name Loretta for Jackie. Private photographs depict her as she was away from the public eye: a lesbian with slicked-back hair, dapper men’s suits, gambling with the boys. While onstage she played the “dog” longing to rub up against Cab Calloway, offstage, her hands rested on showgirls’ knees. Norma Miller, a dancer on the circuit, recalled, “She and I shared a dressing room for two weeks—she and I and her girlfriend. We never called Moms homosexual. The word never fit her. We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms.” Jackie never revealed this side to her audience and provided only veiled autobiographical tidbits in a gravelly voice, one that could make a tax return seem humorous. But under the surface lay an undercurrent of depth, apparent when she stated, “Don’t let my looks fool you. I’ve been where the wild goose went.” One can understand Moms’ reticence in keeping mum about her sexual preference. Even seventy years later, when Ellen DeGeneres came out, the court of public opinion branded her DeGeneres the Degenerate, and sponsors pulled the plug on her eponymous show. Despite performing in the cocoon of the Chitlin Circuit, touring with Pigmeat Markam, Cootie Williams, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Moms still encountered racism. It would not have behooved her to have added overt homosexuality to the mix.
Jackie provided laughter to blacks, victims of systematic racism, and in her mid-forties graduated from the Chitlin Circuit to the legendary African-American theaters in New York, the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1939, Mabley was the first female to perform in the Apollo Theater and was a mainstay at the Cotton Club, where she provided the opening act for Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Cab Calloway. A workaholic, she performed five shows a day, six days a week. Yet she did take time off to unwind. In the 1940s, after a gig at the Howard in Washington, DC, Moms organized a gay party, one the police raided for indecency.
By the 1960s, Moms had grown into her part, but even in her sixth decade, she had no intention of slowing down. She continued to have no shame—and no teeth—and thus did not need to emulate a slack jaw. In an early movie clip, she gave a member of the stage crew a Herculean task with the words, “Make me look like Lena Horne, if you possibly can, Mr. Light Man.” In her outlandish housecoats, ill-fitting hats, and oversized shoes that made for a shuffling gait, she brought a slice of black perspective into white America’s living rooms. When Mabley delivered her jokes, she did it in the most disarming manner possible: She took out her teeth and hammed it up like a sassy old lady sitting on the neighborhood stoop. What was not readily apparent was that, behind the gummy grin and the gravel voice that sounded uncannily like Louis Armstrong, lurked a savvy woman who used jokes to couch social commentary. A clip from a 1969 episode of The Merv Griffin Show profiles Moms in a psychedelic housecoat, telling a story about the special name she was called in the South.
“What’s that man got that horse in pictures…that Western man?” Mabley asked Griffin.
“Roy Rogers?” was the reply.
“Then name me Roy Rogers’ horse…”
“Trigger,” Griffin suggests.
“Yeah, everywhere I go, they’re, ‘Hello, Trigger. What you saying, Trigger?’ At least, I think that’s what they say.”
Griffin blanched when he realized he had been set up as the straight man. Other milestone small-screen appearances were on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. In the latter, she sat down with knees considerably far apart. When the audience laughed, Moms responded, “It may be old, but it’s clean.”
More acclaim followed the woman born in an overcrowded rural shack; she became the first black female to appear on the stage at Carnegie Hall and went from making fourteen dollars a week on the Chitlin Circuit to, in her heyday, earning $10,000 a week. Talented both on and off the stage, Jackie wrote a musical with Zora Neale Hurston. The career she had mined from the pain of her youth provided the means to enjoy a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, a sable coat, and a place in history as a show business pioneer. Despite her celebrity status and elevated economic means, she never put on airs. For ten consecutive years, she visited Sing Sing Correctional Facility on Christmas Eve and performed for the inmates, who she referred to as “Moms’ children.” Her jokes about the wardens made her a favorite with men who had little to laugh about.
In 1972, at age seventy-eight, Mabley made an appearance at the Kennedy Center, where she began her routine with a fictional phone conversation with President Johnson by barking, “What you want, boy?” and then sang a lullaby with a verse about “muggin’ time up North.” Although she never met L. B. J., she did meet President Kennedy when he invited her to the White House. She was also an acquaintance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Her bond with two giants of the twentieth century gave poignancy to her song, “Abraham, Martin, and John.” Her rendition hit the US Top 40, making Mabley, then seventy-five, the oldest person to have a Top 40 hit. At age eighty-one, Moms starred for the first time in a movie, aptly titled—given the trajectory of her life—Amazing Grace. Her character was a rabble-rousing community agitator. Jackie suffered a heart attack midway through the film, but as soon as she received a pacemaker, she returned to the set. After filming, she set about planning future club dates. The entertainer who performed the spectrum from a correctional facility to the White House was always ready to go anywhere, at any time, with one exception. Moms stated, “There was some horrible things done to me. I’ve played every state in the Union—except Mississippi. I won’t go there. They ain’t ready.”
Whoopi Goldberg decided to make a documentary about the Clown Princess of Comedy to rescue Mabley from being a mere footnote in entertainment history, despite the fact that she had paved the way for minority and women performers. The result was HBO’s Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley. Ms. Goldberg depicted her heroine’s story through rare live footage of some of her performances, photographs, and interviews with actors, including Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, Kathy Griffin, Arsenio Hall, Sidney Poitier, and Jerry Stiller. Eddie Murphy based the grandmotherly character in The Nutty Professor on Moms. Joan Rivers, a graduate of Mabley’s school of satire, was another to sing the late great’s praises with the tribute, “She’s been lost somewhere in comedic history.” Always one to give credit where credit was due, Moms said, “Every comedian has stolen from me but Redd Foxx. He’s a born comedian.”
The angels were in need of laughter, and in 1975, Mabley joined their celestial number when she passed away in White Plains, New York. Clarice Taylor, who played Anna Huxtable, actor Bill Cosby’s mother on The Cosby Show, said of the comedienne’s life, “Know it was not easy.”