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Originally published in the Oct/ Nov 1999 issue of African American Family.

Worn Hands And Humble Spirits:

Three Domestic Workers Tell Their Stories

 by Mary Chapman

By now it was routine, but it would just about kill her every time. He was only seven, and come morning she'd greet him, pull him to her, run a comb 'cross his little tow head. They'd chat a bit. Come on now, she'd softly coax, time to eat your cereal. It was nice and all. Problem was, Mary McClendon had a son. But this wasn't him. Her son was by himself, in Detroit, planets away from Grosse Pointe. She hadn't had breakfast with him in months. 

 "When he was real young and I was a domestic I had to get up at dawn in order to get out there from where I lived. I didn't have enough to feed him and me too so I'd fix what I could for him and leave it on the stove. I had some doorkeys on a string I'd just put around his neck, and then I'd  leave," McClendon, 75, recalled.

 "He was there by hisself, my husband was dead, and here I was out here fixin' the little white kids' hair and having breakfast with them. Just about broke my heart. Sometimes I'd have to come home and say 'son, I'm doin' the best I can.'"

 And she did just that for as long as she could. McClendon had become a maid at age nine -- she started out in native Andalusia, Ala. -- so she knew the turf by the time she founded Household Workers Organization in l970 and eventually talked up unionization of the nation's 1.5 million maids. Household technicians, McClendon called them. To others they were nannies and domestics, housekeepers and cooks. Day workers, as others were called, had different employers throughout each week. Though titles may vary, many of these workers shared similar experiences, particularly during the '40s through the early '70s, when it was most commonplace to see streams of urban commuters headed for work in tony suburban, nearly all-white enclaves. Such were the statistics of this workforce in 1968: two-thirds black, 98 percent women, average age 46. Only 20 percent were high school graduates.

 And such were many of their complaints: no guarantee of minimum wages, let alone raises -- the average full-time household worker earned $1,523 in 1968, federal data show; no accident or unemployment insurance; and no paid sick leaves or paid vacations. And unless they worked for a large, reputable household-help agency, many workers never received social security credits, although there were some employers who did, at their own discretion, provide some kinds of benefits.

 But there were other complaints, too. Less quantifiable, perhaps, but no less serious, or insidious.

 "They'd fire you on a whim, increase your workload -- make you do things they wouldn't dream of doing -- but wouldn't increase your pay. One of them even had the nerve to turn the clock back on me, trying to make me work longer," McClendon said, chuckling. "Didn't think I knew it.

 "And I had to call them mister and missus while they'd call me honey, or sugar, or God knows what. Way back when, I'd even hear some of them on the phone, using the N-word. They didn't care if I heard. 'I've got me a good one over here,' they'd say."

 Some live-in housekeepers -- 11 percent of all domestics in 1973 -- had the same problems as day workers, and then some. Because they're given free room and board, employers sometimes felt they could pay live-ins less salary, McClendon said, adding that while most working people were putting in eight-hour days, the live-in housekeeper commonly stayed on call from early morning until very late in the evening.

 Brunice Lewis, 71, knows a little about live-ins. The Alabama native had come to Detroit at 17 in search of a factory job, but because of her age she was unsuccessful. She soon landed a job as cook in Grosse Pointe Shores, and remained with the same family there for 45 years.

 She said her experience was positive.

 "They were good people and we got along just fine," said Lewis, who once or twice a week visits her ailing former boss in an area nursing home. "When I first got there they had a little 8-year-old girl, and three years later they adopted a little boy. He calls me to this day.

 "So we were like family, kind of grew up together. We'd travel and everything. But, you know, we had our ups and downs. One time they wanted to get a dog and I said if you do, I'm not cleaning up after it. Well, they got it anyway and, sure enough, he had an accident, and she wanted me to clean it up. I told her no. I walked out on her. She ended up writing me a letter, sending me a two-week paycheck, taking me to dinner and giving me a raise," Lewis laughed. "I went back."

Other domestics, like 92-year-old Rosa Smith, took a practical, philosophical approach to their workaday world. Although she'd attended Clinton College in South Carolina, and for a while taught school nearby, Smith said she basically fell into housework in Detroit because she "knew how to talk to folks. 

 "Someone recommended me to some people and there I was. And everyone I worked for, they all treated me like I was somebody, because I was somebody."

 Smith had a couple rules of her own: she insisted on wearing a dignified, employer-bought uniform, and she'd ask that her boss have her wages waiting for her on the table. She thought it was disrespectful to her to have to look for her money or even to have to ask for it. 

"There were times when she could barely feed her kids," recalls Bernard White, Smith's grandson and owner of White Construction Co. "They'd give her food she didn't want, like stale bread. But she always took it even if she later threw it out. She's just a tremendous lady who has had a wonderful influence on my life." 

 Smith over the years worked for about six Detroit-area families, including one headed by Motown founder Berry Gordy. The mother of four boys and four girls -- her husband died many years ago -- Smith said her children never suffered from her long working hours, mostly because she was able to finagle employee flex time.

 "I'd do what I'd have to do, even if that meant me working four hours early in the morning, coming home for a spell, and then being allowed to go back to the job," Smith explained.

 "And my kids didn't feel bad that I worked in those big houses while they had what they had. Honey, the home I had was always neat and clean. We were comfortable. Sometimes (my employers) would give me real fine clothes, and I'd come home and be dressed to kill, right there in my own modest house," she said with a laugh.

 Children of domestic workers have disparate, lingering memories of what it was like to have a mother who worked in large homes under questionable conditions and helped care for white children. Some of them, like McClindon's now-grown son, is said to have resented having to wear hand-me-downs sent home by McClindon's employer. 

 "He will not wear anything cheap to this day," McClindon said. "And absolutely nothing second hand. I'd dress the little white children in their crisp new clothes at the same time socking away every dime I could get to buy my son a little something. When I'd save up enough I'd have him meet me downtown under Kern's big clock, and we'd go down in Hudson's bargain basement and buy a few things."

 Lewis' only child, AT&T retiree Andrina Smith, said on days when she accompanied her mother to work she remembers having to run to catch the bus, and then watching as it pulled up near what always looked to her just like a palace.

 "They'd collected dolls from all over the world, and so this place was a dream for me," Smith said. "I could play with them when the kids weren't there, just as long as I minded mom and put everything back the way I found it. When I got tired of that I'd run to their bar, which was always, always filled with bottles and bottles of Coke. I couldn't believe it."

 But Smith said the older she got the more she realized that the youngsters at this home were beginning to get into trouble and to have all sorts of problems. "My mother just about took care of those kids," she said. "The boy got into drugs and started staying in his room a lot. His mother wouldn't go in there. Mom was like, 'you really need to go in your son's room.' My mother knew. You see, money doesn't make you have better kids, or more common sense."

 Overall, the number of domestic workers in the United States dropped from nearly 2 million 30 years ago to 549,000 last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Leon Wilson, an associate professor of sociology at Wayne State University who has researched domestic housekeeping, attributes much of the decline to pressure from domestics' families to pursue other work, and to the expansion of other service-related work.

 "There were very, very few alternatives for African-American women back then," Wilson said. "So now we find a lot of women, for example, in the hotel industry, doing domestic work. But they're not regarded as domestic workers, and they don't have that stigma. 

 He said there also has been a relatively recent increase in numbers of English-speaking, foreign-born women who now work in affluent homes, although specific immigration numbers are difficult to pin down 

 "My sense is that the people who employ domestic workers today seem to be acutely aware that there is a certain amount of respect that must be accorded these individuals," he said. "They are sensitive enough in general to recognize that these individuals are very, very valued. So I believe the children of these employers will certainly grow up to give African Americans their due.

 "Having said that, there is always the context of covert racism. So there may be no overt sentiments against the individuals as humans, but there may be some lingering sense that all people are equal but some people are more equal than others," Wilson explained.

 McClendon understood that sense all too well. Ultimately fed up with what she considered to be an infinite variety of daily indignities, McClendon formed the group which became an affiliate of the National Committee for Household Employment, a nonprofit organization originally set up by the Department of Labor to address household worker concerns. 

 "Other than the bus stop, there was no meeting place, no local clearing house for complaints," McClendon said. "My friends didn't wanna deal with it, church folk didn't wanna deal with it. They said you gon' get a mess on your hands messin' with those white folk."

 Indeed, McClendon and other group members were threatened, blacklisted and forced to quit their housekeeping jobs. She even drew ire from some blacks for disturbing the status quo. But she persisted, by then full time, and her and others' efforts finally paid off. Workers were unionized and in 1973 most of them became eligible for coverage by federal minimum wage laws. McClendon enrolled in college at the age of 51 and remains active locally 

 "You gotta treat people right in this life," she said. "You just gotta do right by others. If you don't, well, honey, God don't like ugly. And you ain't had much of a life at all."

Mary Chapman is a Detroit based freelance writer.

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