Nannies and Other Mothers, An Artist Statement

In the early 60’s my mother, the third of 8 children, left her village in Antigua to find work. “There was no work in Antigua!” she would say, “I would have stayed if there was work.” Like most Antiguan’s, her older siblings included, she took the 10 day boat ride to England. Mommy lived with her sister, who got her a job sewing in the same factory she worked in. Although she says she was basically treated ok by whites in England, it was too cold, and she left before her visa was up. My mother tells a story about how she was on her way to work when she found herself lost in the fog. She promised God then and there if he would help her out of this, she would leave England as soon as possible. Once out of the fog, she sailed to America on a visitor’s visa; she found employment, sending money back home. Her philosophy was, “if you’re patient, and you can work with the family, [this job provides] a good opportunity to get your citizenship, period.”

She ‘worked out’ at a home in the city, and lived with her aunt in Brooklyn on the weekends. She’d be employed for a while at one place, give that position to a newly arrived sister, and go to ‘live in’ at another job. This pattern repeated itself a few times, until a mutual friend introduced her to my father.

Daddy may have been considered an uneducated laborer, but he managed (as did many of his contemporaries) to buy several apartment buildings in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Prospect Heights sections of Brooklyn. They cleaned houses and bought houses simultaneously. We lived in a building owned by my father, while my mother worked a few days a week cleaning for women she had been with since she arrived in the States.

I am the youngest daughter; my parents are now in their mid-seventies. I had a very strict, Christian upbringing; patriarchy was in full swing at our house! Daddy was the undisputed head, Mommy, his self-sacrificing helper, and the children, (seven girls, how unlucky), were supposed to be invisible, only appearing when something needed to be fetched or cleaned. Laziness was abhorred (“you are not going to be whatless!”) And boy did we have manners! We were instructed to dismiss my father’s verbal and physical abuse because he was treated brutally as a child. I remember a time hiding out under a coarse grey blanket after a horrible beating… Mommy saying, “His mother died when he was very little…”

Our elementary school was across the street from our house. Mommy was well-known, and liked by the teachers. One day my sister’s pregnant teacher told my mother she needed someone to watch her baby after he was born; otherwise she wouldn’t be able to go back to work. She asked my mother if she was interested. Mommy, always looking to make extra money, said yes. She said my mother even came to see her in the hospital after the baby was born. She said it was unheard of for a woman to go back to work so soon after giving birth. She remembered looking through her classroom window, across the vacant lot, at our apartment building. And she knew that her child was safe.

Over the years one child became six children. All of the mothers were our teachers; my mother says there was never a conflict between her own children and her charges because we weren’t all in the house at the same time. She would trade children each morning, theirs for hers, and they would take us to school. No conflict of interest. They would bring us home at 3; pick up their children and leave.

Except for the many times they stayed to consult my mother about one thing or the other. These conversations lasted for hours; “move away from here” was the standard reply if any of her children required attention. Mommy was the psychiatrist and marriage counselor… she says they just wanted to ask her opinion about stuff. When I remember those times I can’t help thinking about lyrics sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock, “the fathers, the children, the brothers, turn to her, and everybody white, turns to her…” Years later when I asked her opinion about this situation she says, “Those people weren’t prejudice, they didn’t know anything about black people!”

I’m not exactly sure what she meant by that, but I am sure that she acted differently with them than with her own family. After all, she couldn’t beat those kids with the red bat when they got on her nerves… I couldn’t help but feel that she cared, if not loved, them more than her own; she paid such close attention to them! (A friend suggests if my mother had only said “we’ll do it later”, or “I’m busy right now, but later“, when I needed her attention, I may not have been so hurt. If our parents weren’t always working, outside and in the home, we may have been closer. There was “no excess of love, which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings”, as Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid puts it).

In retrospect I think my mother craved the attention she received from these women and their husbands. My father was usually dismissive and condescending towards her, and constantly undermined her abilities. I think these conversations helped to fuel her self worth.

My sister and I were recently reunited with the teachers and their daughters at one of their retirement parties. During the speeches that followed, they each recognized my mother and our family as very important in their lives, and the lives of their children. Later one said to us, "your mother was a goddess to me, I was young, divorced, I didn't know anything about babies, and she told me what to do...”. At that moment it struck me that my mother was simply different with these people than with her own family.

She says we weren’t around them much, but I was there with the first child for a year before I started kindergarten. I remember his mother would bring him in his carrier, my sisters would leave with her, and my mother would say to me, “let’s get cracking”, meaning work was about to begin. The next 6 hours were filled with cleaning, cooking, and sewing, watching soap operas, and taking care of the baby. Keeping his swing in motion was my primary job. Over the years, my sisters would spend time with the teachers and their families’ upstate in summer homes… I never really felt comfortable and only went a couple of times.

Part of my apprehension for not wanting to go upstate with my sisters might have been fueled by our houseguests. Over the years, several women would occupy the extra bed, or the kitchenette in the basement. These women were usually in their twenties, from somewhere in the Caribbean - Antigua, Barbados, St Kitts. They were ‘living in’, or ‘working out’, staying with us on the weekends. They would sit around with my mother and talk about what ‘my lady’ did this week. I remember one woman raging about having been called a ‘Black bitch’ by her 5 year old charge, “Her mother must have called me that when I wasn’t around!”

I never really understood why they had to take care of some other family when they had perfectly good families of their own in the Caribbean. They would call home and cry when they spoke to their kids. It didn’t make much sense, but I knew better than to ask questions. It seemed like whatever reason they chose to do this was based on a life or death situation and that there was hardly a choice. They would come to our home, live with us two days a week, sometimes for as much as five years. But when they finally got their “papers”, that was it! They left in such a hurry most of them didn’t even say goodbye. At first I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t keep in touch, but I’ve come to realize that we were associated with their captivity, and now they were free.