Mammy Jane, like other mammy figures, "belongs" to her white family.  She is a faithful worker who sees herself as a member of the family and less attached to the black population.  Mrs. Carteret assures Jane by insisting, "You shall never want so long as we have anything.  We would share our last crust with you" (Chesnutt, 44).  She felt she was politically and culturally safe during the Wellington riot because her family would surely protect her.  Sandy, another black servant, also seemed devoted to his dear old Mr. Delamere, but other African American characters in the novel portray a contrasting view of the white population.  Though this vision of African American female servants is common, only a handful of real African Americans may have felt the same way toward their white families during the antebellum period.  One historian claims, "The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period" (Clinton, 201).  She claims that plantation mistresses often had these female slaves serving them in the household, but the numbers of servants that had an intimate relationship with their white families were few and far between during the post-American Revolution period.

Charles Chesnutt, author of The Marrow of Tradition, use the concept of taboo marriages to portray the thoughts of Americans on a legal wedding of a black person to a white person.  Mr. Merkell married his slave Julia Brown, and it is kept secret to save his reputation and social standing.  Olivia, Merkell's daughter, later burns the documents that substantiate the marriage and declare her black sister the heir to part of her father's property. Postslavery literatures explain:

The novel demonstrates the weakness of the written law, manifest in the marriage and inheritance papers, to overthrow white prejudice and social power.  Major Carteret, Olivia's husband, is the surrogate father who has stepped in by marriage to take control of the family's resources and genealogy and who subjagates the power of the law with his 'gold pen' as editor of the town's newspaper.  Chesnutt suggests that such power is forged by maintaining the appearance of legality while erasing black legitimacy. (Delgado, 95)

Because the white population did not want to risk their reputation and social status, the mammy was coined to create a negative and unattractive representation of black women.  She is said to have been a development from the white race for the reason of redeeming the white/black intimate relationships.  White males, in particular, could use an ugly representation of black women as a "cover up" for their intimate relationships with African American female servants.  An old, very dark-skinned, superstitious, masculine, plump woman contained all the qualities to be suggestively unattractive.  The white men would not choose such a societal taboo over his wife, and the white family was "safe."  Chesnutt used both the true representation of black/white relationships and the fictional mammy caricature to allow analysis of both what is false and what is true about African American character during the turn of the century.

The old mammy type is fading, but it still survives in novels written by Southern white authors and old mammy songs.  The white population used the presence of the mammy to argue her existence in history, but Chesnutt claims the unlikeliness of that statement.  He states:

One would gather from reading Southern stories and novels of the old school and from Southern oratory of the present day, that every white child born in the South had a colored 'mammy,' though statistics prove that not one white Southerner in ten was a slaveholder, and therefore there couldn't have been mammies enough to go around. (Negro, 521) 

Even if the mammies were present at the turn of the century, it was unlikely they were as common as it is actually portrayed in modern literature.

Chesnutt uses many clues throughout the novel to portray his views about which characters were false and which were true to the common people at the turn of the century.  It is curious that Mammy Jane is discovered dying by the prominent Dr. Miller.  This could begin to explain Chesnutt's reasoning behind Auntie Jane's character.  This is further explained in the conclusion of Mammy Jane: Superstitions.  The new African American lives and moves on, and the traditional African American is left without more than a few seconds of sympathy.