The work is based on interviews with more than fifty African American women who worked as
domestic servants in the
segregated South and white southerners who grew up in households that employed them. The three authors had ties to the subject: Katherine van Wormer, a sociologist, grew up white in New Orleans in a household with a maid; David W. Jackson III, a historian of African American studies, descended from women who worked as domestics; and Charletta Sudduth was raised in Iowa by a mother who had been a
sharecropper and
maid in
Oxford, Mississippi. The research took place in
Waterloo, Iowa, where many interviewees had settled after leaving Mississippi during the
Great Migration. Jackson and Sudduth interviewed the black women, while van Wormer interviewed the white participants. The oral histories are preceded by three background chapters on the
southern caste system, the paternalism of domestic service, and the Great Migration. Based on John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, Judith Rollins, and Susan Tucker, the authors describe the caste system of the cotton-growing South from the 1920s through the mid-1960s, when
sharecropping and a kind of quasi-
feudalism replaced the
slave economy. To capture the essence and uniqueness of southern racial etiquette, the authors draw on insights from contemporary scholarship and
southern literature. They trace southern paternalism, in which benevolent white authority over black workers was exchanged for performed deference and a measure of economic protection. Its female counterpart, "maternalism," governed domestic service: white mistresses offered leftover food ("toting") and cast-off gifts in lieu of fair wages. A chapter on the Great Migration describes how the
Chicago Defender, the boll weevil, and northern industrial wages drew six million black southerners from the rural South between 1900 and 1970. Many of the book's subjects left Mississippi for
meatpacking or domestic work in Iowa. The writers place the American case alongside scholarship on domestic workers in
South Africa, the
Philippines,
Latin America, and
Britain, where similar patterns of paternalism and racialized deference occurred. Part II presents thirteen oral histories of African American women, arranged from oldest to youngest. Over a hundred pages of lightly edited transcript, the chapter moves from
cooking,
cleaning, and
childcare to
civil rights activism and recollections of the
Emmett Till murder. Elra Johnson, born in 1906 in Durant, Mississippi, recounted with defiant humor how, when the
Ku Klux Klan came to her house, she sat on the porch, armed, and refused to move. Pearline Sisk Jones, born 1918, worked in William Faulkner's Oxford home,
Rowan Oak, and remembered him as "a thin, straight man" who "loved fried meat and sorghum molasses." Vinella Byrd, of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalled a farmer who would not let her wash her hands in the family's wash pan. Irene Williams, of Springhill, Louisiana, said, "I wish to God I could tell you more, but it's too painful." Patterns repeat: entering through the back door, eating separately, being called by first name while using "Miss" and "Mister" for white children, receiving pay so low it would "shock" their grandchildren. Seven of the thirteen had migrated from the
Deep South to
Des Moines or
Waterloo between the 1950s and 1970s. The book's central chapter is thematic rather than chronological, organizing the testimony around the textures of domestic service (
paternalism,
child-rearing,
education, racial etiquette, the mistress-maid bond) and the violence shadowing it: the sexual vulnerability of black women, the Emmett Till murder, and the resilience these women drew on in response. Exclusion from intimate domestic space runs through all of it. Of the seventeen women, fourteen were barred from the front door, fifteen from the family table, and eleven from the family toilet. Resistance surfaces in the same register, like the woman whose sister recalled that she would "not only clean the bathroom, but I'd take a bath in the bathtub." Part III gathers fifteen narratives from white women and two men who grew up with maids in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Most were recruited through an internet forum just after the release of the movie,
The Help. Several submitted their accounts in writing, some under pseudonyms. The white contributors reveal what the authors call cognitive dissonance: affection for a particular maid coexisting with the injustice of the system she worked in. Elise Talmage, van Wormer's mother, recalled asking as a child why the maids could not use the front door; her mother answered, "It's just not done." Elise Talmage called her family's maid Viola "my second mother," then remembered Viola's housing-projects apartment, where seven children shared one bedroom. Only Mary Hart, a white woman of
Camden, Arkansas, describes a rupture in her acceptance of the social system. Reading
Black Like Me, she wrote, "totally turned her life around," and she joined
SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and protested for civil rights. The dissonance registers in what the white narratives cannot produce. Nine of the ten white respondents asked had no photograph of their maid. All described their maids as "members of the family." None of the black women interviewed used the phrase. One exception might have been Elizabeth Griffin, whose photograph is featured on the cover. Having no children of her own, she was proud of having worked and helped raise the children in the same home for two generations. Paula, the child on the left in the picture, named her daughter Elizabeth after the cook. The term cook, instead of maid, was commonly used in New Orleans in recognition of the fine Creole meals that were prepared by these women. A companion chapter analyzes the white narratives across eight themes: denial, defensiveness,
victim-blaming,
maternalism, caretaking, bonding, regret, and defiance. The same patterns appear in research on white South Africans under
apartheid, suggesting the dynamic is structural rather than regional. The difficulty of recruiting white participants, many of whom backed away after agreeing, itself registers the discomfort the chapter describes. The epilogue gives each author a closing reflection. Van Wormer notes that
segregation generated intimate bonds whose unequal terms the black women understood far better than the white families did. Jackson recognizes in the accounts the stories of his own grandmother and great-aunts. While Sudduth recalls the "countless stories of humility" and the laughter that ran through even the most painful recollections. == Critics ==