Until I moved to South Orange four and a half years ago, I did not know who had staff, who hired maids or who had servants. Once I arrived at the Village Apartments, I had to learn because these are senior apartments and many of the people who live there could not exist without assistance from their "help."
There has been a remarkable book published, and I hope by now most of you have read it or seen the movie. It is called The Help, and it reveals how disgracefully many of the servants in the South, black servants, are treated by white families, particularly by white women because they do the hiring and supervision.
I found there wasn't a day went by at Village Apartments that someone didn't talk about "my girl"--it could be a good thing or a bad thing. Now, many of these women have accumulated ages endowing them with great respect. They are in their fifties, sixties, or in their seventies. Sometimes, they are in their eighties, and they are still working because they need to work.
They are not girls. They are women in every sense of the world: highly intelligent, experienced and deserving of the greatest possible respect.
Do all the good you can.
Having gone to college in the South, I knew many people who were in fact raised by Black women in Old South white households. I was amazed at how these white people were able to hold two conflicting but very strongly held feelings: they loved these women but yet held them to be inferior. I suspect as the years go by this will pass, but very, very slowly.
ReplyDeleteThe comment above says Kathleen but it was actually posted by Darrell.
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