Living In The Shadow Of A Black Housemaid: A Different View of “The Help”

[Ivory Simone]

My maternal grandmother, great-grandmother and great-Aunt worked as domestics for white families in the South. My grandmother or “Big Mama” as she insisted we call her cleaned houses the old-fashioned way—on her hands and knees. In fact, I think about Big Mama whenever I see my knees. I now have dark patches of skin on them, age-related hyper-pigmentation. My grandmother’s knees were dark, almost blue-black in color, for a different reason. Her discolored knees were a visible reminder of the years she spent scrubbing and cleaning other people’s homes.   

 

Although I never met any of “her people”, the term Big Mama used reference for the white families she worked for, I heard stories about them over the years. One of her favorite people was a gay lawyer named “Rico”. I remember her complaining loudly about the lavish parties he threw because the house would be left in shambles.  She’d fuss and fume about having to work hard to get the house clean again but Rico always paid her well for the effort. More importantly, he treated her well. My grandmother was more than his housekeeper she was a friend and confidante.

 

Rico, like many gay men in the 60’s and 70’s, concealed his homosexuality from the public. My grandmother, a Baptist minister’s daughter and a pillar of her church, surprisingly, had no qualms about his lifestyle. She accepted Rico for who he was and they forged a life-long friendship. She worked for him until she retired.

 

My great-grandmother and my great-Aunt also worked as domestics. I smile remembering with fondness how few people could “squeeze a dollar bill” tighter than my great-grandmother and great-Aunt. Over the years they saved enough money from their earnings as housemaids to purchase a spacious, brick house in a middle-class neighborhood with green, manicured lawns proudly maintained by the hard-working black families who lived there.

 

Every summer my parents sent my sisters and I “down-south” to live with “Mommy”, my great-grandmother, and my childless, great-Aunt “Gert”. These larger-than-life women were the center of my world. They constructed a “bubble of blackness” that my sisters and I lived in. A safe, secure world Mommy, Aunt Gert and other members of our extended family strove to preserve. Looking back, I realize the colorline between black and white Americans was so intractable during the 1960’s, especially in the south, that our lives rarely intersected. As evidence of this fact I offer the following observation, I have no childhood memory of a single white person being part of my life before the age of 7 when my family moved into a predominantly white housing development.

 

The only time I remember venturing outside of the “bubble of blackness” I inhabited when I lived with them was the day I accompanied my Aunt Gert to work. My Aunt had made a doctor’s appointment at a clinic for me for some reason or another and decided it was far too impractical to come across town to pick me up after work and then travel back across town to see the doctor—so she helped me get dressed and I tagged along with her when she went to work.

 

We traveled by bus to a different part of town and got off at a stop in a neighborhood similar to the one where Mommy and Aunt Gert lived but not as nice. The houses were smaller and the yards were not as green or as well-manicured. We walked a block or two before my Aunt stopped in front of a grey house with a large front yard. She held my hand as she walked up to the front door and knocked on it.  

 

A young, white woman opened the door, greeted my Aunt with a friendly smile and ushered us into the house.

“This is my niece,” Aunt Gert said nervously, “we got to see the doctor so I brung her to work with me.”

“Hello,” the woman said, “what’s your name.”

I told her my name and squeezed my Aunt’s hand. We both stood quietly in the sparsely furnished livingroom while the woman gave recited a list of cleaning chores she wanted my Aunt to complete. Aunt Gert acknowledged she understood what the woman was saying by occasionally saying, “Yes’m”. With her instructions finished, the woman took me by the hand.

“We’ll let your Aunt work while you play,” she said.

She led me to a covered porch at back of the house where a little girl was playing by herself. I don’t remember the girl’s name but I recall we became instant friends.  We played together for over an hour. A couple of times I caught a glimpse of my Aunt walking through the house doing her cleaning chores. For a while the woman sat outside on the porch watching us play then she went into the kitchen to prepare lunch.

 

By the time lunch was ready, Aunt Gert had finished her chores so the woman paid her and we left.

 

After all these years, I still remember the events of that day because it was the first time I recall being in the presence of ordinary white people (as opposed to nurses or doctors) for an extended period of time.

 

Watching the trailer for the movie “The Help” made me think about my great-grandmother, great-Aunt and Big Mama. I don’t think the white women they worked for thought of them as friends. They viewed them as servants. Except for the day I went to work with my Aunt Gert, I never played with or became friends with the children of the families who employed them. As black Americans in the 1960’s we lived separate lives in separate worlds- one black and one white.   

I suppose the problem I have with the film is that it presents a relationship between white women and their black housemaids that’s not rooted in reality. The truth is white women helped to maintain the color line as vigilantly as white men did. They directly benefited from the social and economic system that relegated black Americans to second-class citizenship in the country of their birth. It was ordinary black women like the ones depicted in the movie, the ones who understood what Fannie Lou Hammer meant when she said, “I’m tired of being tired”—that stood up and fought against the malignant racism of America. They did it without the help of white women—guiding, supporting, leading or otherwise taking charge of their struggle for equality and justice.

 

I grew up in the shadows of black housemaids who labored and toiled for white families in the South. “The Help” is not movie about them or their lives. It’s just another example of Hollywood co-opting the black struggle for civil and human rights to sell movie tickets.