More on servants

Last updated on: February 17, 2014 at 8:31 am by Jane the Actuary

More on servants 2014-02-17T08:31:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So I’ve been reading about “The Great Black Migration” (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America by Nicholas Lemann), about which I’ll write more in a later post, but only a few pages in I realized that I had to retract my prior statements that “We’re not accustomed to servants in 21st century America. In fact, it’s been a long time since anyone but the wealthy has had servants.”

Well, strictly speaking, maybe what I said was literally accurate — 21st century America is not 20th century, and “long time” is a vague enough statement. But nonetheless, Lemann describes black life in the Jim Crow South and says, “the pay [for domestic work] was so low that every respectable white family in the Delta — even schoolteachers’ and mail carriers’ families — had at least one full-time servant.”

Lemann similarly discusses the fact that the Jim Crow system was structured, in large part, to prevent blacks in the South from “getting ahead” and to keep them trapped in sharecropper farming and domestic work. In that sense, they were the “guest workers” of the day, with the system designed so that, if a white landlord wanted to cheat them (and he says that only a quarter of landlords dealt fairly with the sharecropper tenants), the sharecropper had no recourse except to try again at another farm.

And as far as domestic servants are concerned, there’s a whole genre of literature/film about the relationships between the white households and their black servants. The longtime columnist of the Chicago Tribune had a column in the Sunday paper about “Rose” — the family servant (she “cooked, cleaned, and changed diapers”) of her childhood, with whom the family maintained contact after they moved northward and loved like a member of the family. And there’s The Help, which I admit I never saw, so have no idea how much black life is sugar-coated, and “Driving Miss Daisy” which I remember only vaguely. But there are similarly-many stories coming out of the disproportionate number of Slate and Atlantic writers living in nanny-heavy New York City, of beloved Dominican nannies — yet, “beloved” does not mean “equal.”

Bottom line — do those pro-immigration-expansion advocates who speak of needing more low-wage workers, more nannies and farmworkers, really want to recreate Jim Crow South, in which people were consigned (except for rare cases of skill, hard work, and good fortune) to farm work and domestic work?

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February 17, 2014 From the library: The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann

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