'Reintroduce Us to Good Mother-Wit'

An old-fashioned word used by Louis Armstrong, Yeats and Geoffrey Hill is worthy of attention and probably respect. In his second autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954), Armstrong writes: 

“But with my good sense and mother-wit, and knowing how to treat and respect the feelings of other people, that’s all I’ve needed through life. You taught me that, mother.”

 

Armstrong was born August 4, 1901, to Mary “Mayann” Albert and William Armstrong, when his mother was about fifteen years old. His father soon abandoned the family. At age eleven, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waifs Home, though he later returned to live with his mother. He always credited Mayann with teaching him “the real things” about life. She died in 1927, shortly after he recorded “Potato Head Blues,” and Armstrong often recalled her dying words: “Son – Carry on, you’re a good boy – treats everybody right. And everybody – White and Colored Loves you – you have a good heart. – You can’t miss.” The Dictionary of American Regional English (1985) gives this definition of “mother wit”:

 

“A popular term in black speech referring to common sense . . . not necessarily learned from books or in school. Mother wit with its connotation of collective wisdom acquired by the experience of living and from generations past is often expressed in folklore.”

 

The OED dates the first usage to the fifteenth century, defines it as “a person’s native or natural wit; common sense,” and cites Spenser and Emerson, among others. “Mother wit” shows up in Yeats’ work several times, most notably in “A Memory of Youth” (Responsibilities, 1914):

 

“The moments passed as at a play,

I had the wisdom love brings forth;

I had my share of mother wit

And yet for all that I could say,

And though I had her praise for it,

A cloud blown from the cut-throat north

Suddenly hid love’s moon away.”

 

The third place I recently tripped over “mother wit” is in poem VIII of Hill’s “Liber Illustrium Virorum” [Book of Illustrious Men] sequence collected in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (2013):

 

“Reintroduce us to good mother-wit;

We have been far too long estranged; take up

A grace of life discovered in its dirt . . .”