“I am NOT just like one of the family …”

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“I am NOT just like one of the family …”Mary Elizabeth Pope aa University of Iowa ,Published online: 08 May 2007.

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“I am NOT just like one of the family…” THE BLACK DOMESTIC SERVANT AND WHITE FAMILY DYNAMICS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN AND SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE

Mary Elizabeth Pope University of Iowa

In the course of the nineteenth century, the social function of the great service families was displaced onto national bureaucracies, while the image of the family was projected onto these nationalisms as their shadowy, naturalized form. Because the subordination of woman to man and child to adult was deemed a natural fact, hierarchies within the nation could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The metaphoric depiction of social hierarchy as natural and familial—the “national family,” the global “family of nations,” the colony as a “family of black children ruled over by a white father”—depended in this way on the prior naturalizing of the social subordination of women and children within the domestic sphere.

– Anne McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven”: Gender, Race and Nationalism

What makes domestic service as an occupation more profoundly exploitative than other comparable occupations grows out of the precise element that makes it unique: the personal relationship between employer and employee.

– Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and their Employers

n 1956 Alice Childress published Like One of the Family, a collection of short stories about the daily life of a black domestic servant working in several white homes in New York City. The title of the book is taken from the short story of the same name in

which the narrator, Mildred, overhears her mistress telling visitors that Mildred is “just like one of the family.” Mildred’s analysis of this statement later in the chapter provides readers with a servant’s perspective on the rhetoric of family that employers have often used throughout history to describe their relationships to the servants with whom they share a household. In addition, Mildred’s analysis of her mistress’ use of the word “family”

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offers readers an opportunity to question exactly how and why the rhetoric of family is often called upon to describe a relationship that is so clearly fraught with economic and racial inequalities.

Family ideology has long been employed in describing interracial relationships of all kinds in countries where the economic relationship is one that has been determined by social institutions that have subordinated one race to another. The concept of paternalism derives from the same understanding of the concept of family as that used to describe the relationship between the black domestic servant and the white family served. With the domestic servant, however, the employment of family ideology is reinforced by the fact that the relationship develops in the domestic setting of the white household and by the almost unavoidable intimacy that develops between the domestic servant and the family served. Further, the domestic servant often functions within roles already prescribed within the family. Yet, what allows the claim “She’s just like one of the family!” to come across with such benevolence despite the obvious inequalities of the relationship is, as Anne McClintock explains above, the prior hegemonic acceptance of the “social subordination of women and children within the domestic sphere.”

My first purpose in this analysis of the popular claim that the domestic servant is a family member is to examine how it is that a relationship that is so clearly one of inequality might be construed as one of family. In doing this, I will begin by looking at how the economic relationship between servants and family members in white households is structured by essentialized notions about the existence of a racial hierarchy, and how this hierarchy leads to an economic relationship between the races that has long been classified as paternal. I will also address how this relationship comes to be seen as paternal by examining how the social subordination of women and children has become naturalized.

Having established this, I will then focus on the development of intimacy between the domestic servant and the family, for while its very existence and function in relation to the economic and racial elements of the relationship reinforces the status of the servant as a family member, it simultaneously provides the servant with a perspective that allows an exception to the servant’s status as a family member, as my analysis of five texts will prove. Finally, I will propose that it is the servant’s awareness that the relationship s/he has with the family s/he serves is first and foremost economic that allows him/her to differentiate him/herself from family members—who often believe their relationship with one another is primarily intimate—and that leads many domestic servants, like Mildred in Alice Childress’ Like One of the Family, to insist, “I am NOT just like one of the family…”

In examining this issue, I will use both historical and literary examples of domestic servants from twentieth century South African and American literature, as both countries share a history of slavery and segregation that has prompted one historian to call each a “mottled mirror” of the other (Massie xi). In addition, it is the religious justifications for slavery and segregation both countries share in conjunction with social justification for the exploitation of labor that has led to similar attitudes and beliefs with regard to race in both countries, and which make them particularly compatible in any analysis of interracial relationships like the one between domestic servants and the families they serve. As the initial relationship between the nonwhite domestic servant and the white

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family is often predetermined by race in both contexts, this shared history is a critical starting point for examining the multiple layers of this complicated relationship.

To begin, one striking similarity between the early white settlements of both North America and southern Africa is the influence of the Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517 with Martin Luther’s denunciation of the corruption within the Catholic Church in Europe and John Calvin’s location of Christian redemption in faith and predestined election. In England, the upheaval of the reformation resulted in a movement of protestant separatists, a group that fled for the new world to pursue religious freedom, landing at Plymouth and forming the first Puritan settlement there in 1620.

The doctrine of John Calvin also had a significant influence on the Dutch who began settling at Cape Town in 1652. Prior to their arrival in South Africa, Holland had recently won political and religious independence from Catholic Spain following a war that lasted for eighty years, and one that was fueled in part by the Dutch rejection of the influence of the Catholic Church. In his book The Mind of South Africa, Allister Sparks notes that it may have been the influence of Calvinism that resulted in the propensity for “master-race notions” among followers of Calvinist religions, two examples of which are the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa and the Puritan congregations of the early colonies of the United States. He notes:

This is not to say that the Dutch were unique in having attitudes of racial superiority toward people of color at that time. Such feelings were common to all European colonizers and to all those engaged in the slave trade…Yet there were differences of nuance and degree between Catholic and Protestant colonial powers that left a lasting imprint on the societies they touched. Grim though the historical record is of Portuguese and Spanish slavery, nowhere in Latin America did it leave a legacy of segregation and entrenched racism like that of the American South; no Ku Klux Klan crosses were burnt in Mexico or Brazil; nor, from Africa to the Indies did either the British or the Dutch ever consider emulating French and Portuguese colonial policies of accepting educated evolués or assimilados into their metropolitan cultures. (23)

It is also significant that in both the United States and South Africa, the idea of a racial hierarchy was one that was grounded in religious beliefs and perpetuated by social practice. One of the most common protests of whites in both countries against the abolition of slavery was, in fact, grounded in religious doctrine. In South Africa, a white woman’s memoirs explain how the abolition of slavery in 1830 prompted her Dutch family’s trek out of the British controlled Cape (where slavery had been outlawed) to the interior of South Africa:

It is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths as their being placed on an equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke; wherefore we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines. (Thompson 88)

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Even comparatively liberal white British South Africans, who opposed the Dutch settlers’ use of slave labor, still “had an interest in acquiring and controlling indigenous labor…The racism that was part of nineteenth century British culture became accentuated by their experiences in the new milieu” (Thompson 56). Thus, while there were differences between the Dutch and British justifications for racial subordination, the white populations in South Africa shared in the unstinting assertion of a racial hierarchy.

In the United States, on the eve of the Civil War, many white Southerners, similar to the Dutch settlers in South Africa, looked to religious doctrine for proof of the moral and religious imperative of race as a precursor for servitude, and for justification of the southern states’ secession:

Had not the patriarchs of the Old Testament held bondsmen? Had not Noah, upon awakening from a drunken stupor, cursed Canaan, son of Ham, from whom the Negroes were descended? Had not Saint Paul advised his servants to obey their masters and told a fugitive servant to return to his master? And had not Jesus remained silent on the subject, so far as the Gospels reported his words? (Tindall and Shi 371)

As C. Vann Woodward explains in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, even northern states that opposed slavery practiced exploitative employment policies, and while “the Northern Negro enjoyed obvious privileges over the southern slave…[he] was made painfully aware that he lived in a society dedicated to the doctrine of white supremacy and Negro inferiority” (18).

Thus, in both South Africa and the United States, the practice of securing cheap labor was contingent upon the belief in the inferiority of the black race. However, if the intersection of the racial relationship with the economic one occurs at this point, it is here also where we encounter the initial implication of the family relationship as a metaphor for the white master and the black servant, as Albert Memmi explains in The Colonizer and the Colonized:

Whenever the colonizer states, in his language, that the colonized is a weakling, he suggests, thereby, that this deficiency requires protection. From this comes the concept of a protectorate. It is in the colonized’s own interests that he be excluded from management functions, and that those heavy responsibilities be reserved for the colonizer. Whenever the colonizer adds, in order not to fall prey to anxiety, that the colonized is a wicked, backward person with evil, thievish, somewhat sadistic instincts, he thus justifies his police and his legitimate severity. (83)

To understand why the family hierarchy metaphor has served as justification for various means of colonial control, it is important to note, as Colette Guillaumin does in Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, that just as class has historically been determined by race, it has also been determined by gender. Guillaumin explains that gender roles, like racial roles, are socially reinforced by a system of marking—signs on the body, in this case sexual features—that lead to “imaginary formulations” about natural distinctions between genders and races. She argues that because women often perform unpaid domestic service

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tasks within the family, this results in the misguided assumption that such performance must come “naturally” to them. Unfortunately, once such beliefs about the existence of natural categories become legally sanctioned, the proclamation of the existence of natural groups enters the order of material facts and “inscribes the system of domination on the body of the individual, assigning to the individual his/her place as a dominated person” (149).

With regard to children in the nuclear family, children, like women, share a subordinate status to men for reasons also grounded in social roles. In her book The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone locates this subordination in the fact that “the heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles…And in turn children are defined in relation to this role” (81). Historically speaking, children and women have been legally defined as dependent subjects, who must both bear the duty of their prescribed roles in order to receive economic support from the family patriarch (Rubin 160).

It is easy to see how the servant might be considered a part of this family hierarchy, as the roles s/he assumes are subordinate roles that already exist within the nuclear family. Judith Rollins makes this important point in her book, Between Women: Domestic Servants and Their Employers, when she writes: “The popular conception of domestic slaves as the original household workers misses the important fact: slaves were originally taken to supplement or take over the responsibilities of women” (21). In addition, servants are also perceived in the role of children. As Memmi explains, a history of racial subordination rendered the stereotype of the black servant as childlike or deficient in mental capacity (82), and in need of protection. This perception is reinforced by the fact that a servant’s food, shelter, and clothing is often “provided for” in a similar way in which employers provide for their own children (Memmi 81). However, Rollins notes that while subordinate family roles are filled by the servant, the same is not true of status, as “the domestic’s ‘place’ is on the bottom” (173).

However, it is not these aspects of the family relationship that make the claim that a servant is part of the family so popular—in fact, it is because these hierarchical elements of a family relationship are masked by the existence of love and intimacy that the analogy is so convenient. In examining how this works, it is necessary to remember that marriages have historically been structured economically and formed through agreements between families in order to ensure the economic welfare of their children and the legal perpetuation of their line (Beauvoir 427). However, in today’s white households in the United States and South Africa, people tend to marry of their own free will, and thus a relationship that was once considered an economic necessity is now considered a contract based on mutual affection, and any children who result from the union are considered an extension of that mutual affection, not a biological inevitability (Firestone 172). And while the entrance into marriage by free will—presumably for reasons of “love”—does not eradicate the economic function that marriage and family serves, it does obscure the oppressive economic and hierarchical aspects that still exist within the family.

It is for these reasons that the family metaphor is so commonly invoked in describing a black servant’s relationship to a white family, as the element of love tends to obscure the inequalities in the relationship in much the same way that it does within families. And while it is perhaps difficult to imagine that real love or intimacy could exist

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in a relationship fraught with obvious racial and economic inequalities, when considering the previous discussion of the similarities between subordinate family members and the servant, one might just as well say that love cannot exist between family members because of the hierarchy in place within the family.

In supporting this claim, I first turn to the testimonies recorded in Susan Tucker’s Telling Memories Among Southern Women, in which she writes of a late twentieth century white mistress from the American South recalling the domestic servants of her youth and defending their relationship to her family: “It makes me so mad…because we did know so many of them and they did love us, too. And we loved them. We were always together” (38). In similar fashion, interviews with several white South African mistresses conducted in 1980 by Jacklyn Cock for her book, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation, revealed that when asked “How would you describe your feelings toward [your black domestic servant]?” the women responded with answers such as: “She’s like a child of ours,” and “Like one of the family.” Another claimed, “I love her and I think she loves me” (133).

Domestic servants, too, claim to care about and even love their employers and their employer’s families, though the number of servants who claim that the relationship is one of family or of love is, not surprisingly, far smaller than similar claims made by white employers. In an interview conducted by David Katzman for his book, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America, one turn-of-the-century black domestic servant professed to have a great love for her employer (161). Another, interviewed by Susan Tucker, explained her fondness for her employer, claiming, “for me it was fun being over there [at her employer’s house]…I was never treated like a servant. I was treated like a member of the family” (160). Similar feelings of emotional attachment to employers were expressed in interviews with South African domestics; one domestic servant explained that she cared about her employer and that, “I [felt] important especially when she decided rather than go to the hospital, I would look after her.” Another said of her employer, “When she was really ill I worried about her” (95).

Clearly, it is not a lack of intimacy between servants and their employer’s families that leads to the protest of servants, like Mildred, that they are “NOT just like one of the family.” According to Rollins, it is actually the existence of the intimacy that creates the problematic elements of the relationship, in that the real intimacy between the employer’s family and the servant can attempt to mask and justify the racial and economic hierarchy in place as it does within families (156). In demonstrating this, I turn to David Katzman’s Seven Days a Week: Women’s Work in Industrializing America. Katzman describes the relationship of the mistress to the domestic servant in America during the period between the Civil War and World War I as “maternalism,” explaining that many women naturally felt close to their servants, as a servant entered the domestic sphere where all relationships were intimate (154). In addition, Katzman notes that servants’ relationships with men were regulated “with much the same eye to their best interests as are those of the daughter of the family” (154).

However, safeguarding the servant girl’s relations with men is also in the best interest of the employer, for white families have often lost their best servants to marriage. Katzman discusses the change in servant relationships that were taking place at this period of history as live-in maids were becoming live-out maids, and explains that

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“Employers feared losing control over the servant’s environment because then the whole range of human problems and emotions would compete with the employer’s need for the maid’s attention” (159). Intimacy between a servant and a white family, then, was a useful tool in ensuring a continued economic relationship.

The same holds true in South African households under the system of apartheid. In the course of her interviews with South African domestics and mistresses, Jacklyn Cock discovered that one way South African employers ensure the investment of their domestic servants in their own white families is by enforcing an initial period of intense separation between servants and their communities:

The privilege of having visitors or of visiting away from the establishment is completely withheld at first, ensuring a deep initial break from past roles and an appreciation of role dispossession. Visitors to domestic servants are often rigidly controlled. And of course frequently the domestic worker is known to her employers by a different, English name, symbolizing her break with her own social roles and cultural identity. (60)

Under such circumstances, it is easy to see how intimacy in these cases is used to both reinforce and efface the economic relationship between the servant and the family.

However, while the role intimacy plays in the family may be similar to the role intimacy plays in families’ relationships with servants, the difference between servants’ relationships with the family and the family members’ relationships with one another lies in the awareness of how the economic and hierarchical aspects of the family function in relationship to intimacy. For while family members may be dimly aware of the ways in which their relationships to one another are hierarchical and economic, the idea of the family as bound together by love obscures their understanding of how all of these dynamics function in relation to one another. Firestone points to psychologist R. D. Laing’s explanation of what he calls “the game of the happy family” from The Politics of Family and Other Essays:

One thing is often clear to an outsider: there are concerted family resistances to discovering what is going on, and there are complicated stratagems to keep everyone in the dark, and in the dark that they are in the dark. The truth has to be expended to sustain a family image…Since this fantasy exists only in so far as it is “in” everyone who shares in it, anyone who gives it up shatters the “family” in everyone else. (99) (emphasis added)

Laing explains these complicated stratagems as denial and repression, and in my textual analysis I will demonstrate how they prevent family members from seeing what is going on within the family. In addition, I would like to assert that for the purposes of this paper, Laing’s “outsider” is the domestic servant, as my textual analysis will prove, and that it is the servant’s awareness of the ways that intimacy within the family, however genuine, functions in relationship to the other elements of the family that provides the basis for Mildred’s claim that she is “NOT just like one of the family.”

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In supporting this assertion that servants do understand these dynamics, I return to the interviews conducted by Jacklyn Cock in South Africa in the 1970s. Domestic servants were asked about the kindness and appreciation their employers had ever shown to them, and how they felt about such praise. One responded, “I feel good but I also feel angry because I know she just wants me to do more,” while another said, “I feel she just wants me to work hard for nothing.” A third responded, “I take it as a joke because I don’t know if she means it or not,” while a fourth explained, “Sometimes I feel like a fool. It’s like giving a sweet to a child” (Cock 97). And in keeping with the issues at stake in this paper, another domestic responded, “She pretends to like me. She keeps on saying I am part of their family” (Cock 91).

I propose that it is this awareness of the ways in which the relationship between the servant and the family for which she works is both racial and economic that results in the servant’s resistance to the application of family rhetoric to her own situation, for as Laing explains above, the family lacks this awareness for many complicated reasons. It is not, then, that the servant is not technically part of the family hierarchy, does not technically fulfill roles within the family, or lacks intimacy or love with members of the family that results in the servant’s rejection of family status—it is the servant’s awareness of how intimacy obscures inequalities within the family that precludes her family membership.

In illustrating the subtleties of these points, I turn to five texts from 20th century American and South African literature: Alice Childress’ short stories, “Like One of the Family” and “Inhibitions,” Langston Hughes’ short story, “Cora Unashamed,” Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, and Sheila Kohler’s short story, “Africans.” Each of these is particularly useful in demonstrating, first of all, the hierarchy in place within the white families themselves, how the hierarchy creates inconsistencies within the families, as well as how intimacy and love are used to efface the other dynamics within the structure of the family. They also demonstrate how these dynamics extend to the servant, as well as how family members fail to understand the responsibilities and consequences of the economic and hierarchical elements of the family (even as they participate in them) while the servant understands clearly how these elements interact with and are effaced by intimacy.

I turn first to Alice Childress’ short story, “Inhibitions,” in which the main character and narrator, Mildred, complains to Marge, a fellow domestic, that the mother of the family for which she works will not discipline her son. In the initial analysis of the mother’s failure to discipline her child, Mildred draws comparisons between herself and the child, as well as herself and the child’s father in examining the ways that the mother relates to each. At the start of controversy around which the story builds, Mildred has snapped at the child, who has tried to stick his fingers in the meat Mildred is preparing for dinner, and the mother rushes to comfort him, saying, “Mildred loves you! Mildred loves you! But she’s busy!” (132). To Mildred, she says, “Tell him, Mildred, tell him you love him and explain why he can’t play in the hamburger” (133). Later, the mother explains to Mildred that this is to prevent the child from becoming inhibited, which, she tells Mildred, is not a good thing for children to be. In turn, Mildred responds:

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“Well, don’t you think that should hold true for everybody? Why should I be inhibited? I can’t tell that child why he can’t do things and make any sense out of the tellin’ ’cause I’m in such an inhibited state myself. I got to walk around here bein’ considerate of you, and the only way I could explain to him why he shouldn’t do things would throw you smack-dab in the middle of the explanation.” (133)

In this response, Mildred points out the contradiction between the hierarchy in place in the family that locates Mildred herself at the bottom, and how inhibitions keep her in that subordinate place. With regard to the child, Mildred points out that not disciplining him or creating any inhibitions in him creates a problem for the hierarchy that the white family presumably wants to preserve, as Mildred cannot react the way the mother expects her to without disrupting that hierarchy. In addition, the mother’s constant protestations of love as she attempts to discipline her son are a (perhaps unconscious) attempt to use intimacy to mask the unpleasant responsibilities of the economic and age-based hierarchy in place in the family.

Mildred points out that the mother exploits intimacy with her husband, as well as with Mildred herself, in the same way she does with the child whenever she is faced with a hierarchical reality:

“You’ve got a whole set of inhibitions of your own. For one thing, you’re always feelin’ awful about how you’re feelin’ inside and workin’ yourself to death to make the outside look just the other way. You will spring unexpected dinner guests on me and then go ‘round here complainin’ ‘bout havin’ a headache. When you do that you’re tryin’ to make me feel sorry for you so that I won’t get mad about the extra work.” (134)

When the mother responds that she would never plan to do such an underhanded thing, Mildred makes reference to the mechanisms of denial and repression in the family that are in place that prevent the mother from understanding what is going on when she says:

“No, you wouldn’t plan it ’cause you’ve done it so much ’til it’s become second nature. I notice that every time you have a few cross words with your husband, you jump into bed and play sick ’til he buys you a ring or a watch or somethin’, and you also give me a little present every time you speak cross to me or act unreasonable…I notice that whenever he goes out of town for two or three days he sure is extra-special nice to you when he gets back here, and no matter how cranky you might act, he’s as humble as a little lamb for two or three days. I guess that’s just his way of givin’ you a piece of candy, just like you do with that child.” (135)

The fact that Mildred recognizes that the mother’s denial and repression (or, in

Mildred’s terms, inhibitions) are what prevent her from facing the economic and hierarchical aspects of the relationship she has with her child and her husband demonstrate Laing’s theory about how families function, as well as proving that, despite

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the way that Mildred is subsumed into the system, Mildred’s awareness of these dynamics exclude her from family membership.

Another of Mildred’s employers, Mrs. C., attempts to exploit the intimacy she has with Mildred in order to mask the hierarchical and economic reality of the relationship in another short story entitled “Like One of the Family.” Once again in conversation with Marge, Mildred complains that one day while Mrs. C. was hosting company in the living room, she called into the kitchen to Mildred and said loudly, “Mildred dear! Be sure to eat both of those lamb chops for your lunch!” (1). Mildred deciphers Mrs. C.’s intent, saying, “Now you know she wasn’t doing a thing but tryin’ to prove to the company how good and kind she was to the servant, because she had already told me to eat those chops” (1).

Mildred’s second complaint involves another moment when Mrs. C. attempts to efface the economic relationship between them using the rhetoric of family. On this particular day, after Mildred has served lunch to Mrs. C. and a guest, Mrs. C. tells her guest within earshot of Mildred, “We just love her! She’s like one of the family and she just adores our little Carol! We don’t know what we’d do without her! We don’t think of her as a servant!” (1) After the guest leaves, however, Mildred addresses her “status” as a family member, explaining:

“In the first place, you do not love me; you may be fond of me, but that is all…in the second place, I am not just like one of the family at all! The family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen. Your mama borrows your lace tablecloth for her company and your son entertains his friends in your parlor, your daughter takes her afternoon nap on the living room couch and the puppy sleeps on your satin spread…and whenever your husband gets tired of something you are talkin’ about he says, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, forget it…’ So you can see that I am not just like one of the family.” (2)

In delineating the individual privileges that each family member, including the family puppy, have within the household, Mildred is locating herself on the bottom of the economic hierarchy by pointing out that she is not allowed any of these privileges despite being considered “just like one of the family.” The racially determined economic element of the relationship takes precedence over what intimacy does exist, and whatever degree of love Mrs. C. and her family feel toward Mildred is not great enough to overcome their need to reinforce their racial superiority and their economic position as her employers or their beliefs about what her position should be. In identifying this, Mildred points out that Mr. C.’s affection for his wife works in a similar way, in that it is not great enough to overcome his prerogative to exercise his own superior position when he insults his wife by interrupting her with “Oh, for Pete’s sake, forget it…”

This is further elaborated upon by Mildred when she addresses Mrs. C’s claim that she herself loves “little Carol”:

“Now for another thing, I do not just adore your little Carol. I think she is a likeable child, but she is also fresh and sassy. I know you call it uninhibited and that is the way you want your child to be, but luckily my mother taught me some

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inhibitions or else I would smack little Carol once in a while when she’s talking to you like you’re a dog…” (2)

Mildred points out that Mrs. C. is exploiting the fondness Mildred feels for her employer’s daughter to cover up the inequalities in the relationship between them. Mildred understands that this fondness for little Carol does not efface her own economic position in the household, for she cannot call upon the same claim to fondness in defense if she “smacks little Carol once and a while” as a disciplinary action when the child is being fresh. Mildred highlights her awareness that the relationship is one that is based on economics when she tells Mrs. C., “When you say, ‘We don’t know what we’d do without her’ this is a polite lie…because I know that if I dropped dead or had a stroke, you would get somebody to replace me” (2).

Doris Lessing’s 1950 novel, The Grass is Singing, provides a related look at how the dynamics of the family hierarchy are masked by love and how family members find various ways of avoiding the hierarchical truth of their relationships with one another, as well as how this plays itself out in the relationship between the family and the domestic servant. The Grass is Singing tells the story of Dick and Mary Turner, a poor young couple who live on a remote farm in the interior of South Africa. Dick is a farmer who has no sense of land or money and fails agriculturally and financially as a result. His wife Mary attempts many times to persuade him to change his farming methods, but ultimately, in her subordinate role, she has no control over how Dick runs the farm. Her unhappiness over the state of the farm, as well as her lack of control, begins slowly driving her mad. Dick is aware that Mary is terribly unhappy and has been behaving strangely. In one discussion that occurs on the verge of Mary’s breakdown, she asks Dick to give the tobacco crop that he tried growing unsuccessfully that year another chance the following year, as she reasons that he cannot have two poor seasons in a row. However, to do this would mean to take out a loan, and Dick, defending his role as a provider, refuses:

But she saw the expression on his face she had seen before, when she had pleaded they might go for a holiday to restore themselves to real health. It was a look of bleak fear that chilled her. “I’m not getting into debt a penny more than I can help,” he said finally. “Not for anyone.” And he was obdurate; she could not move him. (148) (emphasis added)

Mary’s subordinate role and helplessness as a result are emphasized in this passage, but instead of returning to her life as an independent woman in a nearby city, she stays with Dick under the delusion that they are together out of love. She submits to the hierarchy, as Lessing explains: “Once she had exerted her will to influence him, she withdrew, and left him alone” (143).

Evidence of the mechanisms of denial and repression in place that prevent Mary from seeing what is going on even after Dick indicates that his role as economic superior in the family takes precedence over any concern he may have for her mental health and happiness appears several pages later, when Dick begins to notice that Mary is truly not well:

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Dick, working harder than ever on the farm, realized at last that she was looking worn, with a curious puffy look about her eyes, and patches of red on her cheeks. She looked really very unhealthy. He asked her if she were feeling ill. She replied, as if only becoming aware of it, that she was. She was suffering from bad headaches, a lassitude that might mean she was ill. She seemed pleased, he noted, to think that illness could be the cause. (150)

In this passage, Mary’s denial that what is making her ill is her frustration over her subordinate position to Dick, and her anger at him for betraying his love for her to his economic role as superior, demonstrates how it is that she does not see what is going on. Like the mother in Alice Childress’ “Inhibitions,” Mary, instead of acknowledging that Dick has betrayed their intimacy in pursuing his economic ambitions, represses her anger and it manifests itself in the form of headaches.

This is in stark contrast to how Moses, the Turners’ domestic servant, deals with Mary’s betrayal of his intimacy with her, because of his recognition of the racial and economic hierarchies in his relationship with the couple. Moses arrives at the house when Mary begins to completely break down and can no longer handle domestic tasks. He realizes quickly that she is mentally ill and the power dynamic between them begins to change; in caring for her, Moses must assert himself, demanding that she eat, drink, and sleep when she needs it. Ultimately, the intimacy that develops between them all but destroys the hierarchical aspects of their relationship because Mary is rarely well enough to challenge the ways that the intimacy between them has taken precedence over the racial and economic hierarchies, and Dick is around too little to notice.

However, Charlie Slatter, a neighbor who stops by for dinner one night, does notice, and out of his own fear that the mad Mary’s intimacy with Moses will reveal the vulnerability of the white race in general, Slatter insists that Dick get rid of Moses. In addition, out of fear that the impoverished state of Dick’s farm will reveal the ultimate equality of the races, Slatter persuades Dick to leave the farm by offering to help him financially.

As the couple prepares to leave, a young Englishman arrives to take over management of the farm. The Englishman’s arrival is the catalyst that reveals to Moses the ultimate racial and economic hierarchy between himself and Mary, who, in conversation with the young Englishman one afternoon, reprimands Moses sharply in a voice she has not used since her initial encounters with him. In falling back on her socially defined position as his superior in her need to maintain a front of control over him before the Englishman, she betrays her intimacy with Moses. However, in stark contrast to how Mary responds when Dick betrays his intimacy with her earlier in the book, Moses murders Mary in the graphically depicted final scene of the book. It is Moses’ ultimate awareness of the economic and racial reality of the relationship he has with Mary that allows him to see, despite a very intimate connection between them, the truth about what is going on in a way that Mary cannot because of her denial of the ways that the hierarchy of the relationship with Dick have eclipsed the element of intimacy between them.

In Langston Hughes’ short story, “Cora Unashamed,” it is the domestic servant Cora’s ability to see what is going on within the Studevant family that exposes both the

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hierarchy within the family, as well as how the love Cora has for one of the family members is both valued and devalued by the family with regard to her location in the hierarchy. The white family lives in a small town in Iowa, and the economics of the relationship between Cora and the family are no secret to Cora: “The Studevants thought they owned Cora, and they were perfectly right: they did. There was something about the teeth in the trap of economic circumstance that kept her in their power practically all of her life” (4). Here, the racial underpinnings of the relationship become clear: Cora’s relationship with the Studevants is presented as one that perpetuates the slavery economy. In spite of this, the intimacy between Cora and the Studevant’s youngest daughter, Jessie, is so profound that Hughes writes of Cora, “In her heart she had adopted Jessie” (9). Cora’s attachment to Jessie springs in part from the fact that she lost an illegitimate daughter who was the same age as Jessie.

For Jessie’s part, she, too, loves Cora:

In that big and careless household it was always Cora who stood like a calm and sheltering tree for Jessie to run to in her troubles. As a child, when Mrs. Art spanked her, as soon as she could, the tears still streaming, Jessie would find her way to the kitchen and Cora. At each school term’s end, when Jessie had usually failed in some of her subjects (she quite often failed, being a dull child), it was Cora who saw the report card first with the bad marks on it. Then Cora would devise some way of breaking the news gently to the old folks…Everybody found fault with her but Cora. (10)

In terms of the hierarchy within the family, Mr. Studevant is always absent, “too busy buying and selling to bother with the kids” (10). He leaves the responsibility of raising the children to his wife, who “looked down on [Jessie] as a stupid girl” (10). And in locating Cora within the hierarchy in place in the household, Hughes writes, “Like all unpleasant things in the house, Jessie was left to Cora” (11). Hughes establishes that the only real love in the family is the love between Cora and Jessie, but reveals that this love is betrayed in favor of preserving the power hierarchy in place in the family.

This betrayal occurs when Jessie, who is in her last year of high school, realizes she is pregnant by the son of a local Greek ice cream vendor. Jessie reveals the secret to Cora first, who, as always, breaks the news to Jessie’s mother (in this way, Jessie, like the other members of her family, also leaves unpleasant tasks to Cora). In the following scene, Cora attempts to assert her love for Jessie by making clear Jessie’s desire to keep the baby:

So, humble and unashamed about life, one afternoon [Cora] marched into Mrs. Art’s sun-porch and announced quite simply, “Jessie’s going to have a baby.” Cora smiled but Mrs. Art stiffened like a bolt. Her mouth went dry…she rose…sat…walked…whispered, “What?”

“Yes, m’am, a baby. She told me. A little child. Its father is Willie Matsoulous. They want to get married…” Cora would have gone on had not Mrs. Art fallen into uncontrollable hysterics. Crying and praying followed…Scandalization! Oh, my Lord! Jessie was in trouble.

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“She ain’t in trouble neither,” Cora insisted. “No trouble having a baby you want. I had one.”

“Shut up, Cora!” “Yes, m’am…but I had one.” “Hush, I tell you.” (12)

In this passage it is clear that it is not Jessie who is in trouble, nor that the mother’s concern is for Jessie at all. The mother is concerned about the scandal and shame that her daughter’s pregnancy might bring on the family. Cora tries to defend Jessie and explain that there is “No trouble having a baby you want,” but Cora’s position within the household is reinforced when Mrs. Studevant responds with “Shut up, Cora!” And it becomes clear that despite the fact that the Studevants are concerned about appearing to be a “good family”—presumably one that includes love—they do not honor Cora’s love for Jessie enough to consider her opinion in deciding the fate of Jessie’s baby, coming as it does from the bottom of the hierarchy.

Love as a concept works to efface the horror of what happens to Jessie at the hands of the family hierarchy when Mrs. Art spirits her away to Kansas City to have an abortion. Despite Jessie’s desire to keep the baby and marry the baby’s father, Mrs. Art refuses to allow the marriage because of the boy’s ethnicity. “Mrs. Art had ambitions that didn’t include the likes of Greek ice-cream maker’s sons” (13). Significantly, Mrs. Art’s ambitions reveal the connection she sees between race and class; her rejection of Willie as a suitable husband for her daughter because of his ethnicity also illuminates her belief in a racial hierarchy and in Cora’s inferiority because of her race. And so, under the guise of doing the “best thing” for Jessie, Mrs. Art takes her to Kansas City for a “spring shopping trip” and Jessie returns with a brand new wardrobe. Mrs. Art’s selfish exercise of her position in the family hierarchy to preserve her family’s name and white supremacy, as well as secure social advancement for herself through a profitable marriage for her daughter, betrays what intimacy she might share with Jessie, and, like the rings and watches the father brings the mother in Childress’ “Inhibitions,” the new clothes are meant to efface the violation of intimacy that has occurred.

However, when Jessie dies as a result of complications from the abortion, it is not just the intimacy between mother and daughter that has been sacrificed to the family hierarchy, it is also Cora’s intimacy with Jessie that has been sacrificed to the mother’s selfish desires. The mother expects that the intimacy Cora shared with Jessie will result in the same concern for the protection of Jessie’s name that the mother believes she herself was showing when she enforced the abortion, and so she invites Cora to the funeral fully anticipating that Cora will not speak out.

However, Cora is not deluded by the same mechanisms that blind mother, father, and sister to their own culpability. Cora sees how the dynamics of the hierarchy have resulted in Jessie’s death, and that had the decision been made out of love, Jessie would have been allowed to keep the baby and marry Willie Matsoulous. In keeping with the other texts in this analysis, following the death of her daughter, Mrs. Art complains of physical ailments which are presumably the manifestation of denying the unpleasant reality and consequences of the hierarchy in place within the family, and are not unlike those experienced by Mary in The Grass is Singing and the mother in “Inhibitions.”

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Significantly, for all the love she professes to have felt for Jessie, Mrs. Art does not cry over the death of her daughter.

Cora, on the other hand, like Moses in The Grass is Singing and Mildred in “Inhibitions”and “Like One of the Family,” recognizes the hierarchical dynamics within the family, and while she may be subsumed within or below them, she is aware that her relationship to the family, without Jessie, is solely economic. And like Mildred and Moses, she acts out instead of denying and internalizing the betrayal. When the funeral is under way, Cora rises and cries out to Jessie:

“Honey, I want to say something…They killed you! And for nothin’…They killed your child…They took you away in the spring of your life, and now you’se gone, gone, gone! They preaches you a pretty sermon and they don’t say nothin’. They sings you a pretty song, and they don’t say nothin’. But Cora’s here and she’s gone tell ’em why they took you to Kansas City…They killed you, honey. They killed you and your child. I told ’em you loved it, but they didn’t care. They killed it before it was…” (17)

Several things are revealed in this final speech Cora gives before she is escorted out of the room, and leaves the Studevant home for good. The first is that love and religion have been used to smooth over the evil that has been perpetrated by the family. The second is that the violation of intimacy by the dynamics of family hierarchy extends to Jessie’s unborn child, who is even more powerless than Jessie herself. The third is that in her accusation that “they” killed you, Cora implicates the father as well as the mother, for while unpleasant domestic tasks are kept from the father, the fact that they are indicates to what extent the father benefits from the hierarchy and is ultimately partly responsible for Jessie’s death. Finally, unlike the mother, who has been willing to shoulder the unpleasant responsibilities to the family hierarchy under the guise of love, Cora is not deluded by the mechanisms of denial and repression that prevent the family members from confronting the horrors of the family hierarchy.

The final text under study is Sheila Kohler’s short story, “Africans.” This is the story of John Mazaboko, a domestic servant for a white South African family in the 1940s. The story begins with a woman recalling her and her sister’s favorite family servant from their childhood: “The Zulu we loved best was John Mazaboko…He was unusually tall, and so strong…but his hands were gentle. Mother said he could not bear to hear us cry when we were babies and would beg the severe Scottish nanny to allow him to hold us in his arms” (102).

When they grow to be adults, the narrator’s sister, Katie, marries, and John Mazaboko is transferred to her new household. However, it quickly becomes clear that Katie’s husband is violent and unfaithful. He constantly betrays the intimacy between himself and Katie, and himself and their children in abusing his position as superior within the family hierarchy. He beats both their children and Katie herself, breaking their bones. She tries to fight back when he becomes violent, but ultimately submits in her continued willingness to forgive him. In addition, he is unfaithful to her, and he molests her son and his friends when they come to the house to visit. Still, Katie does not leave him. She tells her sister, “I am afraid of what he might do” (107).

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At one point, when it appears that Katie may in fact find the courage to leave him, she returns home one afternoon to find that her husband has slit his wrists and has called their children to watch him die. In this instance, the husband—like the mother and her headaches in “Inhibitions”—manipulates the intimacy between himself, his wife, and his children to garner sympathy and mask the horrifying reality of how he has abused his position of superiority within the family hierarchy. And his attempt works; Katie and the children stay, only to be abused further. Katie’s repeated submission to her subordinate position within the hierarchy indicates an awareness of its existence but a lack of awareness of how intimacy is used by her husband to control her. Further, she denies the responsibility that is inherent in her superior position with regard to her children, as she has more power to remove them from the abusive situation than they do. Her failure to do so demonstrates how powerful her husband’s manipulative use of intimacy is in controlling her.

The family hierarchy becomes even more complicated by John Mazaboko’s presence within it. The narrator tells us that John was originally chosen for his ethnic heritage as a Zulu. “Mother preferred Zulu servants. She said they had been disciplined warriors. They were obedient, conscientious, and fiercely loyal. Their society was built on loyalty…and [they] did not hesitate to perform whatever was asked of them” (101). The racial element of John’s position as a subordinate within the family is emphasized here, but Kohler’s narrator makes sure to draw parallels between the subordinate position of John and the subordinate position of Katie and herself as women, explaining, “My mother sent me and my sister to boarding school…We were taught meekness as well as obedience, diligence, and like the Zulus, loyalty. As our head mistress pointed out, most of us were destined to be mothers and wives” (104).

With regard to John’s relationship to Katie’s husband, he is in a similar position to Katie in that his “master” is not Katie, with whom he has a long-standing intimate relationship, but her husband. John’s recognition of the dynamics of the gender hierarchy within the family become clear when, during one particular fight, Katie manages to thwart her husband’s blows by pinning his arms behind his back. When he cannot free himself, he calls for John, who, under the command of Katie’s husband, pulls her off him and holds her down with “no glimmer of response in his eyes” (109) while her husband beats her. This shocking final scene demonstrates that John understands that his position within the household is primarily economic, and that he must betray his intimacy with Katie in order to preserve his job. For unlike Katie, who refuses to see how intimacy is sacrificed again and again by her husband to the family hierarchy, John understands completely that the hierarchy exists and that he must honor it to preserve his position with the family.

In all five of the texts analyzed here, the domestic servant functions within the family hierarchy, participating in roles that already exist within the family, and experiencing intimacy in its various forms as it develops and functions within the dynamics of the family served. In the relationship between the domestic servant and the family, intimacy exists and functions in similar ways with regard to the hierarchical and economic elements within the family. However, as the circumstances of Mildred, Cora, Moses, and John Mazaboko have demonstrated, the difference between the members of the family and the servant lies in the servant’s awareness of how the element of intimacy

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functions in relation to these other dynamics. Each servant chooses to deal with this recognition in his or her own way—Moses, Cora, and Mildred lash out in their respective ways, belying as they do their awareness of how their intimacy with the families they serve has been abused and betrayed in favor of maintaining power hierarchies. John Mazaboko belies his recognition of the economic and racial underpinnings of his relationship with Katie in honoring the hierarchy of the family and betraying the intimacy between himself and Katie.

However, each of the servants displays an awareness of these dynamics that is superior to the members of the white families who refuse, or are perhaps unable to face, the responsibilities and consequences of what these dynamics imply. Thus, even where domestic servants may for all intents and purposes appear to be part of the family, it is for this reason that Mildred is correct in her claim that she is “NOT just like one of the family.”

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WORKS CITED

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

Childress, Alice. Like One of the Family…Conversations from a Domestic’s Life. New York: Independence Publishers, 1956.

Cock, Jacklyn. Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation. Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1980.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970.

Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Hughes, Langston. “Cora Unashamed.” The Ways of White Folks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934.

Katzman, David. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Kholer, Sheila. “Africans.” One Girl: A Life in Stories. Kansas City: Helicon Nine Editions, 1999.

Laing, R. D. The Politics of Family and Other Essays. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.

Lessing, Doris. The Grass is Singing. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1950.

Massie, Robert Kinloch. Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer a Future in Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.’” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, & Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock et al. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Trans. Howard Greenfeld. New York: The Orion Press, 1965.

Rollins, Judith. Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.

Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations between Women and Men. Ed. Allison Jagger. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

Sparks, Allister. The Mind of South Africa. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1990.

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Tindall, George Brown and Shi, David E. America: A Narrative History. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1989.

Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

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Documents

“I am NOT just like one of the family …”