"The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South" Katherine Van Wormer, David Walter Jackson III, Charletta Sudduth

"I decline to accept the end of man . . . . I believe that man will not only endure, he will prevail."  William Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speak and appearing on the wall of the library at the University of Mississippi

I use the quote above not because it was specifically in the book, but because it was on the library at Ole Miss when I was there.  I had visited Faulkner's home and, of course, spent time in Oxford.  The book included someone who had worked at Roanoke and a relative of Faulkner's who had grown up with African American women caring for her.  There was an interview with a woman who had gone on a bus to Oxford to support Meredith's entrance into Ole Miss.  And the authors of the book paraphrased this Faulkner quote to make it their own.

This book was brought to my attention by an e-mail, but I am not sure what mailing list I was on that led me to get the e-mail.  I bought it for my Kindle because I wanted a counterpoint to "The Help."  Coincidentally, I was listening to William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust" at the same time.

Later:  As I am reading this book, "Intruder" and "Sex and Punishment" I realize how much of how I think and believe was determined by history.  I am a product of a prejudiced South that taught me, whether I accepted it or not, that blacks are lesser in some way.  My mother would say, "I'm not prejudiced," but then would go on to say that going to Catholic school would give me access to a better education because the courses wouldn't be "dumbed down" for the general population by which she meant blacks.  I am also the product of a Victorian attitude toward pedigree, which also translates into a belief in castes.  I admit to having difficulty shedding the trappings of my early education.

I wonder if that is why I struggle with the idea of hiring someone to clean my house for me on a regular basis.  One of the points of the introduction to "Maid Narratives" is that it is still the custom to want to hire someone to work in your house who has difficulty speaking your language and the theory behind that is that it is easier to believe that someone who cannot fully communicate with you is of lesser intelligence.  This pattern exists in countries other than our own and in countries where the principle language is other than English.  How will I feel about someone who cleans my house?  Often the people who do housework now are immigrants who are not able to use their expertise from the home country here in the U.S.  So, it turns out that many people doing day labor are well educated, sometimes with college or graduate degrees, but are doing the only work they are able to get.  A literary example is the doctor from Slovak in "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" who is working as house cleaner because she can't get another job.  In our building at Simpson College we once had a custodian who had been a math teacher in Hungary.  She would stay late at work to sit outside one of our classrooms to watch the math lecture.

This book has a mix of historical background, interviews with women who served as domestics in Mississippi, Arkansas and the Midwest, and interviews with women who lived in households that had African American domestics in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana.  The authors, three academics at various points in their careers, analyzed the interviews for themes.  The remembrances by the domestics and those whom they worked for are starkly different.  The young women and men who were partly raised by domestics expressed love for them, but this love was not always reciprocated, and what the young children interpreted as the asks of a caring mother figure was remembered by the domestics as just part of the job.

One theme was the maternalism that the domestics were treated with by the employers - often paying with goods instead of money, their employers trying to take care of them, and sending food and discarded household goods home with the domestics.  I can understand how this helped empower the employers, who were often very dependent on their help.  Many of the employers said that their help was "a part of the family" but clearly the domestics and other employees were not treated the same as the members of the family, having to eat separately, using a different set of dishware than that used by the family to avoid spreading of "Negro germs" and having to use separate toilet facilities, if toilet facilities were provided at all.

One aspect I could not (and could) empathize with was the handing down of clothes and furniture.  I'm sure I can't understand the situation completely because I was a member of the employer race, but as a poor girl growing up I cherished every piece of clothing handed down to me by anyone, because it was a piece of clothing that I did not have to make myself and was store bought, of which I had little knowledge of.  I couldn't understand how people bought clothes and never wore them, because some of the things I got still had the store tags on them, because that was a luxury I didn't experience until I was a professional later in life.  And I could never consider throwing away a piece of clothing now, and everything I can't or won't wear any longer goes to someone or some place that can use them.

Of course, the book "The Help" was mentioned several times in this nonfiction account of women of the same era, but this treatment was more complete by talking to women of different ages and including those that had moved to Iowa with the Great Migration.  It was also more well-developed by describing the range of experiences of women on both sides of the power structure and a follow up of what happened to them later in life, especially with regard to changing attitudes and the de jure, if not quite the de facto, revocation of the Jim Crow laws.  A good companion piece is the National Parks Service site on Jim Crow laws that puts a visual perspective on the times that is hard to shake.