What We Can Learn of History from Older African American

Women Who Worked as Maids in the Deep South

Katherine van Wormer, MSSW, Ph.D.

Professor of Social Work

University of Northern Iowa

vanworme@uni.edu

David W. Jackson, III, Ph.D.

Charletta Sudduth, MSW

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 What We Can Learn of History from Older African American

Women Who Worked as Maids in the Deep South

Abstract. This paper examines the life stories of six African American women who

worked as maids for white families in the Deep South from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Together their narratives bring home to us facts about life during those times that are not

contained in the history books while it shows the personal side of the facts that are well-

known. The role of older Americans as preservers of history and teachers of the younger

generation is explored.

There is an awareness today, in the tradition of historian Howard Zinn, that we should

look to peoples personal stories to bring to life the daily struggles and living conditions

of certain period. Zinns focus on the common people is enlightening (see, for example, A

Peoples History [Zinn, 2003] and Voices of a Peoples History [Zinn & Arnove, 2009]).

The aim of the present study is to go back to the same period studied by historians

now and by social scientists then as preserved in the memories of the peoplethe people

who were descended from slaves of only a few generations before. Our hope is to enrich

the history of the time of sharecropping and segregation by recording stories while the

survivors are still with us, stories of survival and resilience and endurance that can be an

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inspiration for future generations. Since our interest here is life in the Deep South in the

days of segregation, we can turn to the few extant peoples social histories of the period.

The writings of Dollard (1937) and Powdermaker (1939) are prime examples as is the

literary work of William Faulkner.

John Dollard was a northern psychologist who ventured to the town of Indianola,

Mississippi (which he called Southerntown) to study the personalities and child rearing

patterns of Negroes. But when he discovered how closely black and white lives were

intertwined, his research shifted from the psychological to the sociological realm.

Dollards groundbreaking Caste and Class in a Southern Town is chosen for reference

here because it was conducted in the same general region of the cotton-growing South in

which our interviewees grew up and during the approximate period of time that of the

Great Depression. It was also conducted by an outsider to the region, a fact that provides

a perspective that could not have been obtained by most local residents to whom their

rituals and social norms would have seemed a natural part of southern life.

The social life of rural Mississippi was characterized, according to Dollard, by a

strict social etiquette in which white was separated from white on the basis of class, and

black from white on the basis of caste. In his words:

Caste has replaced slavery as a means of maintaining the essence of the old

slavery order in the South..... A union of members of both castes may not have a

legitimate child. All such children are members of the lower caste... Caste in

Southerntown is also a categorical barrier to sexual congress between upper-caste

men and lower-caste women. (p. 62).

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 Other landmark studies of rural Mississippi, such as anthropologist Hortense

Powdermakers (1939) After Freedom, describe the institution of paternalism. This term

refers to the master-servant relationship that prevailed during the days of segregation.

This relationship was at once protective and punitive. The whites depended on blacks to

do the manual labor. Such labor, according to Powdermaker, was avoided by middle and

upper-class whites who, as she suggested, saw the Negro as childlike, irresponsible, and

dependent by nature and destined to be a servant (p. 39). Significantly, one white

informant is quoted as saying: Id much rather have a Negro servant than a poor

white...the Negros disposition is so much more pleasant. (p. 39). This attitude is to be

distinguished from race hatred; it is more insidious in its own way. Physical separation of

the races was not the goal here; the drawing of personal boundaries defined by race was.

The speaker in the example above is clearly used to being in a superordinate position

with reference to others and has little understanding of the race and class privilege that

was evidenced in her words. Through the 1950s at least, such Jim Crow paternalism was

a characteristic of southern social life.

Tully (1999) describes the paternalistic form of race relations that existed in the

South as an experience of captivity that creates a relationship of coercive control where

the captor seeks to achieve not only power over the victim but also to extract affirmation,

gratitude, and even love (p.26).

Missing from this historical literature is the richness of detail and the feeling

memoriesthe sounds, smells, and emotionsthat only can be obtained in the personal

narrative. Nor is there any emphasis on the womens roleson the social roles of the

lady of the house much less of the roles played by the cleaning lady or cook who

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sometimes, as we will see, even lived in a back room in the white household. Faulkner

did emphasize womens roles, but in fictional form, and from a white male perspective.

Nevertheless, Nobel prize-winning author, William Faulkner (1929/1956)

brilliantly captured the essence of southern life; his emphasis was on the fading etiquette

in race relations during the Depression era. His groundbreaking portrait of a decadent

family, The Sound and the Fury, does not, as the title suggests in its Shakespeare

derivation, signify nothing. Instead, this story of moral decline and generational conflict

is a metaphor for a decadent civilization. One of the underlying messages of the novel is

that white people, whether they are of gentry stock or what Dilsey calls the trash white

folks (p. 362), inhabit a society that is haunted by its past. In this classic tale of sound

and fury, strength is found in the black caretaker of the family, the Negro cook, Dilsey

(p. 416). The dependence of members of the dysfunctional white familythe Compsons

on their dutiful black servant is a theme that Faulkner echoed from his cultural

background.

As in Faulkners fictional account, Dollards book depicts the abject poverty of

the region. He fills in more details, however, about how the black sharecroppers lived

their hot and crowded shacks that were former slave cabins, the higher infant mortality,

the lack of indoor bathrooms, and the lopsided economic arrangements which kept the

sharecroppers in perpetual indebtedness to their landowners.

This brief description of the social and economic living conditions of the late

1930s has been presented here to provide a historical context for the content contained in

the excerpts from the personal narratives to follow. This anthropological material is also

presented to substantiate the extent of adversity African Americans experienced in

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depression era Mississippi. Today, an interest in the period of history known as the Great

Depression is revived under conditions of a global economic collapse, threatened bank

failures, and mass unemployment. The focus of the popular literature, however, has been

on people from those days who had a lot to lose in a failing economy, not people who

already struggled at the margins, certainly not on people who slaved in the fields as

sharecroppers or worked as maids.

The Methodology Used for the Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narratives

There is no way to compare the contribution of the present small-scale effort of

interviews with the massive collection of narratives of former slaves that were conducted

over several years by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the Great Depression.

The methodology of the two efforts to obtain descriptions of everyday life under slavery

and under the near-serfdom arrangements that followed can be compared, however.

Thanks to the anthology, The Slaves Narrative, edited by Charles Davis and

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1985) which contains some of the best historical analysis of the

2,500 WPA interviews of former slaves available, we can consider how the interviews

were carried out and the strengths and limitations of the methodology used. Under The

New Deal, in order to provide jobs for writers among others, the government hired them

to record the history of slavery from the point of view of the former slaves. According to

the instructions provided, interviewers were to be careful not to influence the informants,

and to cover the general subjects of work conditions, food, clothing, religious worship,

and resistance (Escott, 1985). The contribution of this endeavor could not be

underestimated: the wealth of the information provided and the revelation of little known

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facts about daily life in bondage has advanced our appreciation for how the institution of

slavery was experienced by the slaves themselves. Although there were a number of

autobiographies written by former slaves, those writers were highly educated and not

entirely representative of the slave population; they also were those who typically had

escaped or migrated to the North. This collection of interviews, on the other hand,

provided a record from a population that was more representative of former slaves as a

whole. Those interviews that were conducted by black interviewers obtained especially

valuable information as informants talked freely about such matters as miscegenation,

hatred of whites, courtship, punishments meted out, the separation of families, and

resistance (Bassingame, 1985). And as renowned historian C. Vann Woodward concluded

in his review, the WPA narratives contain one of the deepest reservoirs of ex-slave

testimony on two of the most profound historical experiences of the race (p. 55). These

two experiences were slavery and freedom. And although all the critics included in the

Davis and Gates anthology acknowledged the historical value of the data collected, they

offered the following criticisms of the methodology:

Because the overwhelming majority of the interviewers were white, it has been

suggested that the former slaves were less than completely candid in responses to

questions (Woodward, 1985);

An inhibiting factor to getting the full story of slavery was that many of those

interviewed were sharecroppers dependent on the good will of white people,

including some of the interviewers who were from the local area (Escott, 1985);

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 Analysis of the interviews reveals that many of the interviewers asked leading

questions to elicit positive accounts of the treatment received by the slave masters

(Woodward);

The fact that a large majority of the interviewers were male limited the nature of

the content provided (Woodward);

Only a few of the interviewers used tape recorders, and most took notes which

were not direct transcriptions of the interviews (Escott);

Because so many years had passed since the abolition of slavery, many of those

interviewed were very old, and many others had only been small children under

slavery (Escott).

Methodology of the Present Study

In the belief that interviewers from the same racial/ethnic background as the

informants have the best chance to establish rapport with them and to obtain a narrative

that is uninhibited and rich in detail, we chose to have the two of us who were African

American, initiate contact and conduct the interviews. One of the interviewers, who was

female had a special advantage in that her mother had worked in domestic service in

Mississippi and she herself was well known in the Iowa community where the interviews

were conducted. The second interviewer, a male, was a recognized oral historian who

brought his expertise in conducting interviews to this task.

Because we live near a meat-packing area in Iowa to which thousands of African

Americans migrated in the 1950s from rural Mississippi, a sample of appropriate

respondents was easy to obtain. After gaining approval to conduct the research from the

university Institutional Review Board (IRB), we proceeded to contact older African

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American women from the community who were known to the research team to have

engaged in domestic service work in the Deep South. The study was guided by a series

of open-ended questions concerning experiences growing up during a certain time and

place, standards of living, early education, working conditions, initiation into domestic

service, and relationships with the woman of the house and with other members of the

family.

Six individuals readily agreed to be interviewed - - five women who had worked

as maids in the South and one man whose mother had once worked as a maid and had

lived to be over 100 years old. In this paper, we are drawing on the five of these

participants who best took us back to the heart of the segregated South. Interviews were

conducted at an ethnic senior center and at the individuals homes. The interviews ranged

from 40 to 90 minutes and were audio taped. The purpose of the interviews - - to gather

oral histories about life and work conditions for women in the South during the days of

segregation was explained at the start of the interviews. In the interests of objectivity, we

did not wish to slant the results in a certain way. Most of the questions asked, therefore,

were generated in response to details provided in the narrative and were elicited by the

need to clarify facts that emerged in the story. Similar to the slave narratives, the general

themes of work, relationships across racial lines, southern etiquette, freedom under the

laws, and living standards were asked. The narratives were transcribed for analysis of the

content.

Data analysis involved gauging the magnitude of the mistreatment and

discrimination experienced and categorizing the coping mechanisms and expressions of

fear, bitterness, and attitudes toward whites that were expressed. Content analysis of the

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transcripts was conducted to explore the influence of not only the early childhood and

work experience but the perception of ones treatment and that of ones racial group

across the life course. The various dimensions of resilience were based on the resilience

literature. Of the transcripts of the six persons interviewed, three of the tapes and

transcripts stood out above the rest, both in terms of the wealth of background historical

information provided and for the richness of self expression. We now explore the content

in these womens memoirs. From their stories, as revealed in the excerpts below, we have

deciphered four basic themesexploitative working conditions, paternalism, southern

etiquette, and dangerous world for black men.

In the Narrators Own Words

Working Conditions

Growing up during the Great Depression, as was the case for both Annie Johnson and

Vinella Byrd, presented challenges to all the residents of the rural South. But for African

Americans, who poor whites resented as rivals, and who were used by the white planters

as a source of cheap labor, conditions were especially challenging (Dollard, 1937).

African Americans had to be constantly on guard against the brutal expressions of mob

justice of lower class whites, sexual predation of their women, and the widespread

cheating under lopsided sharecropping arrangements that left the sharecroppers trapped in

poverty and chronic indebtedness (Rogers, 2006). Annie Victoria Johnson, age 84, who

grew up in Ripley, Mississippi gives us a sense of the period:

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) got started. Back then the Black men

didnt have no jobs, didnt have no land. So we sharecropped. Whatever man

you worked for, you lived in his house and worked on his property. Whatever you

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 made - - say 200 bushels of corn, they would get half of it. Women and children

would be working in the fields like the men. We didnt have no play time, no

company time. When it rained you couldnt pick cotton so you would work in

your house.

When asked when she started working for white families, Mrs. Johnson replied:

As soon as I was old enough to walk. My mother was a missionary. Wherever

she went she would take us with her. She would take care of white babies and

black babies - - bathe them and feed them. Back then people didnt have no

money. We would wash and iron for white people, and they would give us canned

food and clothes their kids outgrew, and shoes.

My grandmother was born a slave. She had to do it (work as a servant) and

mother watched her do it.

Work at home was strenuous as well:

Every time a child got big enough he had a jobfeeding the chickens, slopping

the pigs, going to get the cows to be milked. You know there wasnt no toilet then

so we had night pots. You learned to take out the night pot and keep it clean.

Mamie Johnson, age 87, who grew up in Durant, Mississippi first described living in a

three-room house on the land on which her parents grew up:

These black people were living on this land as sharecroppers. Well you see

they lived there and they worked there. And when they worked there.they

(the landowners) was supposed to be given you half and he taking half. Well you

see they never would let you have no book to see what they was giving you. See

what I mean? Now you know that was crooked dont ya? They was supposed to

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be sharecropping! When you raised that stuff and he gets ready to sell it up with

you, he was supposed to have a book! He was supposed to have this book and

pull it up and show you how much money he gone let you have and what you

owe, and how much he got for this cotton. But he never would pull out no book!

(My mother told how) she would come up all the way up there, rode the mule in

the cold to fix their (the white peoples breakfast. And then when they get that

done, he would be in the house making a fire in the fireplace, clean out the

fireplace, make a fire in the fireplace. They in bedthe white folks was in bed.

And they get that house warm so when they get up their food would be ready and

their house would be warm. See and now young people ought to be told about

this! They should know about this! Young generation of people now would

look at the older people and they would say Well why didnt they go to school?

Well why didnt they get an education? Thats the why they didnt get an

education. They couldnt! See you didnt have no, if you didnt have no money,

to buy no land, to work for yourself, you had get on away from them white folks.

You had to get on away from them, and thats the reason why.

When I first started cleaning I was about 8 years old. The family I worked for

was called the Tates. (The husband/father) farmed. He was a plantation owner

and he worked his own land. He would just hire somebody to come chop cotton

for him. But you see, my parents didnt let us go like that, chopping no cotton out

like that. We chopped our own. I would wash dishes once a day at the end of the

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 day, at noon time, on Saturdays. See Id be with nothing to do on Saturdays, and

I would go clean for her and clean her kitchen. And then Id go home.

And they just, Im gonna tell you, they didnt pay you nothing. They pay you

what they wanted to pay you. Whatever they feel like you was worth. That was

what white folks pay you in. And if one give you a little something, hed tell you,

Dont tell the others, what he pays you. Because you see they would have

meetings on black people, on what to pay them and what to not pay them.

Vinella Byrd, age 87, who grew up near Pine Bluff, Arkansas describes her early

education:

The white kids started school in September. We should have been in school, but

we didnt get to go while the cotton was picked.

Ruthie ONeal, age 68, of Taylor, Mississippi worked from early childhood in the fields.

Of the five women interviewed, she apparently had the hardest life. Her mother

abandoned her and her infant brother when she was quite small and they were raised by

their fathers mother. When she was 13 or 14, her grandmother sent her as her

replacement to be a cleaning lady for a woman who was stingy; shed growl all the

time and who was prejudiced besides. Ruthie did the cleaning and ironing and sat alone

in her room when her work was done. She was not paid anything for her labor but got

room and board.

Paternalism

From Annie Victoria Johnson, we learn that there were certain advantages that came from

having close relationships with white families:

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 My grandmother was born a slave. She had to do it so my mother watched her do

it. Back then, that was the only way they had to get anything. Some black

women got married and their husbands didnt allow them to go to the field. They

didnt allow them to work in the yard or the garden. They didnt allow them to

work for the white women. Some black men back then are just like they are now.

They wouldnt have you working for any white folks. And it seemed that they

had a harder time because back then, everyone got along and helped each other.

But because some of the black men didnt want their wives around white folks,

they caught hell because when they needed help, they wouldnt help them.

And J.B. McCullough, age 83, whose mother lived to be over 100 was interviewed about

her experiences. She had lived with her husband above their employers house which she

cleaned. When asked if the white family felt obligated to look out for his mother and her

family, he responded:

Yeah. Didnt anybody mess with you, didnt mess with any of his help. If

someone would mess with his help, hed go to bat for you. If you got into trouble

and make it back to the farm, the man wasnt going to go out there looking for

you, he was going to go up to Hugh McClellan (employer). Tell everybody, and

thats as far as it would go.

Southern Etiquette

Ruthie ONeal seemed the most bothered of the five women by her treatment as a social

inferior. She bitterly recounts cringing when she overheard Ms. Georgia, who was

talking on the phone, refer to her as Darkie. As she reflects on the deference that was

required to be paid even to white children:

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 They (the children) were grown when I got involved (in servant work). My

grandmother told me how she raised so and so. And when she turned twelve

years old, this lady told her, Now Helen, shes 12 years old, you have to say yes

maam, no maam and call her Miss. Call her Miss Nancy. My grandmother

helped raise this child. Nancy was a little bit older than we were when we grew

up. We could say yes and no, and Nancy. It was okay because we were around

the same age. But my Grandmother had to say yes maam and no maam to

Nancy. I guess it was a racial thing because you couldnt say yes and no to none

of them. You had to say yes maam and no maam. Well you could say it to a

small kid but once they were a certain age you had to change it.

From Mamie Johnson, similarly, we hear:

You had to go to the back door. It was just a rule and you knowed it! You, just

like your son here, if I was working for you, I know what they allowed because

they would pass it out like I was at your house, cleaning up your house or

whatever not. And whats his name? (referring to the interviewers son David)

David, okay, like Im working in here and they tell me, when you clean up Mr.

Davids room, do this or fix his so and so, or dont do so and so. When they said

Mister, that is for you to say it. Mister. And you know them little ol children,

teenagers, they loved it for you to say that! Yeah they loved for you to say Mr. So

and So. Yeah when they got up to be teenagers, Mister.

When asked what the unwritten rules were, another respondent, Vinella Byrd replied:

The man didnt want me to wash my hands in the wash pan. They didnt have a

sink. They had a wash pan where you washed your hands. After that, I didnt

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 wash my hands at all. I would just go in and start cooking. He didnt want me to

use the same one that he was using.

Because the white people thought black people had germs that they didnt have and

probably for other reasons, common use of the toilet was off limits. The situation as

described by Mamie Johnson was this:

You had then, back there, you had outdoors toilets. All the white folks back there

had outdoors toilets. They didnt have indoors toilets. And if they had outdoors

toilets, you didnt go to those outdoors toilets. No, you went out there, in the

bushes or somewhere. You didnt go to their toilet. Yeah and she had, this

woman, this was with the old mailman. He worked in town. We farmed his land.

Now they didnt have nothing fancy. They just had common stuff. She didnt

have in her house what you got in your house, what we got in our house. No!

You would make her look stupid. But you didnt go in that toilet and then when

you come up, thats my backdoor there. Now if you come up here in this front,

the front door is right there, but you didnt come busting up in that front door.

You would come right up to that front door and youd pass on by that front door

and go on by to that backdoor and come on in that backdoor. Now what sense

does that make? And you would go out there in town, you didnt come in no

bathrooms, you didnt go see a toilet because its the toilet and you go busting up

in there. They had white things and colored. They had them marked all, where

you know to dont go in there. That was the public bathrooms.

Dangerous World for Black Men

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(When asked to describe if white men ever bothered them, Mrs. Johnson told of a time

when a white man was following her):

And my husband happened to come up the street and he was driving his friends

car. And I ran. I hollered at him and waved! And I told him, I said, You wait!

This young man thats been following me all across that street. He said, What

man? I said that ol man yander. He said, You wait, Ill stop it. I said, No,

dont you stop it, leave him alone! He said, I will stop him! I said, No dont

you stop him. He aint done nothing to me, he just following me. He just planned

on bothering me. He said, Ill stop him. But you see in that time, if he had

said anything, which he would have if I hadnt stopped him, you see they would

have murdered him. Theyd murdered him! Theyd murder you blacks about

your own black woman. Sure did! This all happened back in the 1940s.

Annie Victoria Johnson differentiated life in her home in northern Mississippi with the

social mores that existed in the Mississippi Delta:

The Delta is way on down near Jackson, Mississippi. Things were different down

there. The difference was, down there, even in 1944, those people could not leave

off of the plantations unless the owners told them they could leave. They didnt

even go to school. Slavery really was just over down there when Martin Luther

King started the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Some of them people were

still slaves and didnt know it. Ive heard a lot of horrible stories from even the

1970s and 1980s, how some of those people were still being treated down in the

Delta. They were treated like slaves. I remember in 1957, I had a boyfriend in

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 Chicago and he had to go down there. Do you remember when the Till boy was

killed? We were down there two weeks after that happened in Greenwood,

Mississippi. And my boyfriend, his mother rode a special delivery. She wanted

him to come down there and get his brother because they were talking about

killing him because he tore up a white mans truck. We went down there and the

place where his mother was living was just like a shack on the plantation. I said,

Well if were going to your son back, why dont you come back with us? And

she said, No I just want to get my children away from here first and then I have

to slip away. We were going to leave the next morning and she said, I want

yall to wait until it gets dark so nobody sees him when you leave. And we had

to wait until 12 oclock at night to leave from down there, from the Delta. This

was in 1957!

The white men then were having their way with the black women back then in the

Delta, but not where I lived. I think it was different in the Delta because they had

always been slaves down there. Where I came from, in the hills, those white folks

didnt believe in buying slaves. They were more Christian. That part of

Mississippi is dry (no alcohol sold) now.

Conclusion

Consider as you review these excerpts from personal narratives obtained in 2009

from residents of Waterloo, Iowa, that the majority of the informants were only three

generations removed from slavery. This means too that some of the people they worked

for or on whose land they lived were only three generations from a society defined by the

cruel institution of slavery.

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 In the segregated South of the 1930s and beyond, whites depended on black

household workers to clean their houses, do their laundry, cook their food, and care for

their children, all activities involving close personal intimacy. A code of racial etiquette

protected the whites from any vulnerability they might have experienced accordingly.

Blacks were kept powerless and ignorant. The code of racial etiquette guided how people

talked to each other and where people entered the home, sat, washed up, drank, ate, and

went to the bathroom. These facts are widely known, yet rarely described from the

perspective of those who endured it first-hand.

See, and now young people ought to be told about this! They should know

about this! This is what Mamie Johnson told her interviewer. Like the others who

offered testimony, she was very anxious to have her story recorded so that it could be

shared.

There is much we can learn from these stories of women who suffered under a

system of gross exploitation, much we can learn of resilience and resourcefulness. All of

these storytellers eventually left the Deep South to work and live in the more democratic

Midwest. All but one managed later in life to obtain the education that was denied to

them in childhood. They passed on to their children and nieces and nephews their values

and their sense of responsibility. Several expressed dismay, however, that the younger

generation dont know or appreciate what their elders have gone through, what their early

lives were like.

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Davis, C.T., & Gates, H.L., Jr. (Eds.) (1985). The slaves narrative. New York: Oxford

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Dollard, J. (1937). Caste and class in a southern town. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

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