The Maid Narratives

Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South

Katherine Van Wormer, David W. Jackson, Charletta Sudduth

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807149706
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South.
The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system: Vinella Byrd, for instance, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalls how a farmer she worked for would not allow her to clean her hands in the family's wash pan. These narratives are complemented by the voices of white women, such as Flora Templeton Stuart, from New Orleans, who remembers her maid fondly but realizes that she knew little about her life. Like Stuart, many of the white narrators remain troubled by the racial norms of the time. Viewed as a whole, the book presents varied, rich, and detailed accounts, often tragic, and sometimes humorous. The Maid Narratives reveals, across racial lines, shared hardships, strong emotional ties, and inspiring strength.

Part I

The Background

( 1 )

Introduction

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

—LESLIE HARTLEY, The Go-Between

This book is intended to take its readers on a journey back in time to a place that, to many, will be a foreign country. We will travel there with the help of our storytellers—African American migrant women and southern whites—who have been there and who have been generous enough to share their experiences. The destination is not the Old South—a term that refers to the slave South—but the South in the era of segregation, a period roughly from the 1920s through the mid-1960s, in which sharecropping and a kind of quasi-feudalism replaced a social system based on slavery and slave labor.

Our first guides on this voyage to the past will be the African American women whose lives there revolved around domestic service, women who worked as maids, cooks, and “nurses” for white families. To what extent these guides look back in anger or with a sense of nostalgia will be explored as we go on. Their stories will also raise the question of whether the narrators are heroes who prevailed over hardship or victims of their time and circumstances. Juxtaposed with their narration is testimony from our second group of guides, women and one man who also grew up in a culture that is no more, persons who had the privilege of race and class, a privilege they must now go to great lengths to explain, or to explain away. Norms that were taken for granted at the time and institutionalized into law are hard to fathom in the light of the present day. As one white narrator said, “That’s just the way things were done; we didn’t really stop to think about it.”

In the accounts of the black women who worked in the white households, whose personal stories are largely absent from the historical literature, as well as in the narratives of their white employers, we hope to capture the essence of a period. Although hundreds of books have dealt with the living conditions and work during this period, what is missing from the archives, as the social historian Lisa Krissoff Boehm (2009) suggests, is documentation regarding the women of the Second Great Migration. “Domestic work,” she writes, “sits outside of the purview of American historical collections because it has never been championed as an important aspect of American labor” (21).

Today, the reality of the times is preserved in old photographs, in accounts by anthropologists from northern universities and southern historians, in southern literature, and in the living memories of those who experienced it. In these interviews, we hope to get at the truth—or truths—as only the personal story can. As we hear from the character Minnie in Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help: “It’s something about that word truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life. …I’ve been trying to tell white women the truth about working for them since I was fourteen years old” (129).

Unlike Minnie, who decides to risk her job to tell her story, our narrators are older and retired; they have nothing to lose. They are women of the Great Migration, who left Mississippi, most often with their menfolk, who had been recruited for work opportunities in the North, in this case, Iowa. Not all came with their menfolk: some came by themselves at the encouragement of sisters and cousins. Some came for a short visit to a relative, liked what they saw (despite the weather), and stayed on. But they did not forget the families, the communities, and the life they left behind. Like Minnie, they want to tell their stories and preserve their memories for posterity.

In recording these memories, we hope to aid in the transmission of this knowledge, first about the daily reality of working in the kitchens of southern white folks, and, second, through gathering facts about survival under the restraints of what John Dollard (1937) famously termed a caste system. These narratives detail life in the segregated South, often called the “Solid South” for its one-party politics dominated by white males. They describe a time when people of color had no rights, when black girls were virtually born into domestic servitude, and when the descendants of slaves were literally at the mercy of white people, who controlled the power structure. We want to show how these women who worked in white homes survived and overcame, and how they finally reached the decision to leave and to build new lives in a place far from their homes of origin. Only in getting these personal recollections down on paper can we hope to bring this history alive for later generations. We present these narratives with a sense of urgency that corresponds to our awareness of the advanced age of many of the storytellers.

We wondered if the white women, too, had stories to share about the black women their families employed. Although we made many requests for interviews with southern whites who lived in families that employed black maids, only a handful agreed to venture to a place referred to by one interviewee as “the dark past.” “It is time to move forward,” several individuals said, implying that it is better not to dig up the relics of the past. More often than not, individuals whom Katherine van Wormer knew well from childhood failed to acknowledge her request for an interview. Some old friends said they would think about it and were not heard from again. Others, though, did agree to accompany us to this place in the past that is now almost as foreign to them as to the black women who moved away. These respondents expressed a keen interest in the project; they, too, have truths they want to share—truths about conditions beyond their control, about their sheltered and privileged upbringing, and about their joys and regrets. Their contributions inform both in what they say and in what they do not.

The project took on a new life with the release of the film version of the best-selling novel The Help. White women who discovered in a LISTSERV announcement that we were collecting narratives and conducting interviews rushed forward to get their stories told. The response was especially strong from women who were born in the 1950s and who grew up during the civil rights era, when segregation was coming to an end, the time period of the film. The movie, filmed in Greenwood, Mississippi, probably brought to the surface long-forgotten memories, encouraging reflection on aspects of the past that strongly contrast with the reality of the present. In response to the recent willingness of white women to get involved in the project, we were able to add to part III more narratives by white women who grew up with a maid in the home and more from a younger generation of respondents.

PRESERVING STORIES FROM THE PAST

On receiving her honorary doctorate from Howard University, Oprah Winfrey (2007) spoke of opportunities for today’s students and of the dreams of her grandmother in 1950s Mississippi: “My grandmother was a maid, and she worked for white folks her whole life, and her idea of having a big dream was to have white folks that at least were kind to her and treated her with dignity and a little respect. She used to say, ‘I want you to grow up and get yourself some good white folks.’ And I regret that she didn’t live past 1963 to see that I did grow up and get some really good white folks working for me.”

The world that Oprah Winfrey’s grandmother inhabited in segregated Mississippi was a different world from the one her granddaughter enjoys today. We know about Oprah’s world and how one talented woman achieved her potential. It is her grandmother’s world, however, that is the subject of this book. The history of this period is almost as fascinating as the individual accounts themselves. Chapter 2 presents the social historical context for our stories, delineating the extent of the challenges our storytellers faced. Slavery may have been a “peculiar institution,” but the institution that followed, in many ways, was more peculiar still. The economic structure built on sharecropping was accompanied by an ethos known as paternalism, in which the white landowners were to take care of their black workers as long as they “knew their place”; physical intimacy between black and white women in the household was not matched by social intimacy. To present the historical context and the paradox of paternalism, we draw on three classic works from the period—John Dollard’s classic Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South (1939), and Kim L. Rogers’s Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change (2006).

Because some of the most powerful character portraits of household servants are found in semi-autobiographical fiction (for example, the character of Calpurnia in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) and in biographies and autobiographies (for example, Judith Sensibar, Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art; Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream; and Sallie Bingham, Passion and Prejudice: A Family Memoir), we draw on this literature throughout the text. To capture truths found in fictional accounts, we go to the novels of African American writers such as Ann Petry, Kristin Hunter, and Toni Morrison, all of whom deal with domestic workers who have migrated from the South. Additionally, quotes from the writings of Langston Hughes, bell hooks, and Maya Angelou highlight the discussion.

Chapter 3 describes the history of the migration from the Deep South to the Midwest and can be considered as a prologue to the transcriptions that follow. The interviews of part II constitute the heart of this book, in which we hear from the women of the Great Migration in their own words. Their stories contrast sharply with those of the whites interviewed, even though their lives were intertwined in so many ways. Themes from the interviews— education, the personal impact of key historical events, the norms of racial etiquette, resilience in the face of oppression, and the role of the black church in community life—are discussed in chapter 5. Not surprisingly, there is also much common ground in the reminiscences of blacks and whites. All participants in the study agreed that black people—who were then referred to politely as “colored” people—were ruthlessly held back from education and economic opportunity. In rural Mississippi, the home of the majority of our interviewees, the harsh segregation laws and racial mores unique to the South lingered long after segregation was dead elsewhere.

Chapters 6 and 7 present the voices of white women who grew up in Louisiana, Mississippi, and other southern states. A theme of cognitive dissonance emerges as the women seek to reconcile their earlier compliance with laws and norms with the modern-day perspective of this social system as downright evil.

The seventeen interviews with African American women that appear in part II (thirteen given in depth in chapter 4, and four shorter interviews in chapter 5) were selected from a total of twenty-three transcripts as the most outstanding, emotionally moving, and informative. Eleven of the women whose stories are presented here were interviewed by David W. Jackson III; Charletta Sudduth interviewed five; and one respondent chose to submit her narrative in writing. We are grateful to these women who gladly came forward to share a part of their lives and who asked of us only that we listen, not only to their recollections of the big historic events of the time, but also to their descriptions of the everyday details of how they lived, what they ate, what they wore, and how hard they had to work. They came forth, as several stated, in the hope of recording their stories for posterity.

BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY

What is it like for the oldest generation of African American women to harbor memories of a society built on social customs so strange they can scarcely be imagined today? How do children raised with little education become competent adults? How is it possible to remember a past of constant personal oppression and deprivation and not be consumed with rage and bitterness?

We three authors of this book have our own personal reasons for wishing to find answers to these questions. Katherine van Wormer grew up in uptown New Orleans in the 1950s as a privileged white person in a neighborhood in which virtually every family had a black maid. David W. Jackson III, a scholar of African American studies and oral histories, grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and has a historian’s interest in preserving the oral histories of older African Americans who migrated from the South. Charletta Sudduth grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, in an African American community, raised by a mother who had previously worked in domestic service in rural Mississippi. Her research area is early childhood education.

Drawing on Oral History

Oral history, through gathering the recollections of ordinary people who often lived through extraordinary circumstances, provides a unique reservoir of knowledge about everyday life in the past. Not just the facts contained in the stories but also the feelings that emerge in the telling reveal a lot about the deep emotions attached to race relations today, especially concerning the South. Information obtained from oral histories can help identify a collective understanding of race relations in both the past and the present (Bindas 2010). This last point holds a special significance for the present effort. Our book covers two time periods in the migrant women’s lives—the period that is frozen in the memory of childhood, and the more recent time frame, including where the storytellers are today. Isabel Wilkerson, in her recent book on people of the Great Migration to Chicago, writes of how the past is preserved in one’s mind: “They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of the geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar” (366). Like Wilkerson, we make use of two reference points—the Jim Crow South of the 1930s to 1960s and the modern-day Midwest. In the taped interviews of the African Americans, we observed what seemed to be different emotions in play depending on the time period described: the storytellers’ voices changed in pitch when they recounted the memories of childhood—memories that resonate in their lives, as in all our lives—and assumed a more matter-of-fact tone when describing their adult accomplishments and lives.

The richness of expression contained in the oral memoirs can aid readers to better understand why people acted as they did or why they often seemed to fail to confront or resist the daily cruelties of the era. Specific episodes described—for example, taking humiliating orders from white employers to scrub the floor on hand and knees or to address a white teenager as “Miss” or “Mister”—convey the personal, feeling dimension of racism. At the same time, description of instances in which the domestic servant took on great responsibility in the white household—helping to raise children, providing lavish meals, offering sage advice to family members—tells us much about the resourcefulness of the storytellers and of the pride they took in their work. The wealth of such detailed historical information and the richness of self-expression enable the interviewer (and the reader of the transcripts) to appreciate the high level of competence of the individual storyteller while seeing beyond the original story to a larger collective piece about injustice and oppression and hope for a brighter future.

Oral history, as Bindas (2010) indicates, is especially relevant to African American history. Besides allowing for a more nuanced collective memory than do facts obtained by more conventional methods, it is also, as the social historian Lisa Krissoff Boehm (2009) suggests, “the methodology of choice for capturing pieces of the American past that have not been adequately preserved in the traditional archive sources” (21).

For our research on older African American and white women, we chose to use a narrative gerontological approach to oral history. This format evolved during the twentieth century as a scientific means to explore the lives of older adults, and to learn how they overcame life challenges (Greene et al. 2009). As the storytellers reminisce about the realities of their day, they provide knowledge that is both personal and political. The narrative interview technique allows researchers to capture the multifaceted dimensions of life during critical moments across the person’s life span and to discover, with the storyteller, themes of self-reliance as well as emotional responses, such as despair and joy. In recording stories of oppression, the researcher can take note of shifts in voice tone, outbursts of laughter, expressions of grief and sorrow, silences, and can analyze the choice of words used and the meaning behind the words. Narrative gerontology combined with resilience theory helps us understand how the storytellers “muddled through” and found meaning in their experiences of pain and suffering.

Through the narrative interview technique, both the interviewer and the interviewee can simultaneously see the personal in the political and the political in the personal. The recollection of political and social events of long ago can be considered a community narrative, one that links us to collective historical events (Greene et al. 2009).

Learning from the Personal Narrative

In his introduction to the archive collection of slave...