My mother was a washerwoman - or a woman that cleaned houses in Texas... in Plano, Texas - who always loved poetry and always loved stories.
Tell it to the cleaning lady on Monday. Because you'll be dust on Monday. Because I'll be pulverizing you sometime over the weekend. And the cleaning lady... cleans up... dust. She dusts. And she has weekends off, so... Monday. Right?
I don't play Hollywood maids, the hee-hee kind of people who are so in love with their madam's children they have no time for their own.
I have a maid.
I do not devalue the role of a maid or nanny, or the stereotypical roles that some members of our family have actually done to feed our families in real life.
I was raised by a black maid by the name of Ida Young and I probably talked to her more than anybody, so whatever is nutty about me was nutty about her, too, I think because I saw a lot more of her than I did of my parents.
In my earliest of years, my mother was a huge force in my life. She was for all intents and purposes, a single parent. My father had abandoned us. He was an alcoholic and a physical abuser. My mother lived through that tyranny and made her living as a domestic worker. She was uneducated but she brought high principles and decent values into our existence, and she set lofty goals for herself and for her children. We were forever inspired by her strength and by her resistance to racism and to fascism.
My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.
My mother was a very hard-working maid, and their stories are worth telling.
My mother worked for a white family that lived in one of the mansions on the beach. The husband in the family was a lawyer; he worked for a firm in New Orleans.
A maid that laughs is half taken.
There's no such thing as "just a domestic".
Maid of the luminous grey-eyes, Mistress of honey and marble implacable white thighs and Goddess, chaste daughter of Zeus.
When you live closely with people, you don't see who they really are. In particular, with nannies, they only exist in your home, and when they leave, they don't really exist anymore for you.
My mother was a doctor and so I spent a lot of time with Hirabai, our maid. One day, she got home and saw Hirabai bouncing me on her lap and cooing, 'Chunky, chunky.' She liked the name and it stuck.
