The Daring Twins

The Daring Twins by L. Frank Baum (1911) from The Reilly & Britton

L. Frank Baum is best known for his series of books about Dorothy Gale and the magical land of Oz that portrayed a truly American fairy tale. He also wrote series of books, mostly under pseudonyms, for children based on growing up in America at the beginning of the 20th Century. The 1911 novel The Daring Twins is the first of two novels that he published under his own name featuring the adventures of Phoebe and Phil Daring the oldest of five children who, once wealthy, become orphaned and penniless when their father dies soon after his business fails.

Phoebe and Phil are seniors in high school when the story opens. They, their three younger siblings, and and their black mammy Aunt Hyacinth are living with their comatose grandfather, his maid Elaine Halliday, in the grandfather's house which is across the street from their own mansion that had to be sold to pay their father's debts. Their grandfather and their father had been successful well-off members of the community but both lost their wealth and the future seems bleak for the family. Reprinted in 2006 as The Secret of the Lost Fortune, the story revolves around the cleverness of the twins in unravelling the mystery of how the wealth disappeared.

The story opens with a classic representation of a mammy, a stereotype common in the U.S. South at the beginning of the 20th Century of a black woman who worked in a white family and nursed the family's children. Mammies were idealized figures of caregivers: amiable, loyal, maternal, non-threatening, obedient, and submissive, showing deference to white authority and devoted to her employers. The mammy figure is rooted in the history of slavery in the United States. Twenty two years after Baum wrote this book the United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed the erection of a mammy statue on the National Mall. The proposed statue would be dedicated to "The Black Mammy of the South".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammy_archetype_in_the_United_States

Such a woman is Aunt Hyacinth, spending her own savings to take care of the five orphans, caring for them when no one else would. She is contrasted by Grandpa Eliot's caretaker Miss Elaine Halliday, who is commanding, threatening, mean, selfish, and cruel. Yet both are working in the same household and neither is getting paid, loyal to those in their care.

This is a delightful mystery book for children, marred by the racial stereotypes of the time.