
In 1954, at seventeen, Doris Hale started living with my family two days a week, which rapidly turned into five days a week. My mother hired her to help clean the house, do the laundry, and look after the kids. "Looking after the kids" became the dominant component of her job. There were four of us, ranging in 1954 from my youngest sister, two years old, to my older brother, turning ten and already suffering under the behavioral disorders that would plague his life and ours as a family.
Doris had come from a large Black family in Blythe, California, but had been the twelfth of fourteen children, so they hadn't had much experience in child care. Neither had she spent much time around white folks (let alone Jews) nor in middle-class environments. She was understandably nervous when my parents left Doris in charge of the household after just four weeks for a week of travel. But nobody died, as they say today, and Doris became our de facto mother during my parents' frequent travels, as well as being around quite a bit otherwise. She shared my bedroom with me. The house was not designed with a "servant's quarter," and we never thought of her that way. In fact, we never thought of her as any way. She was a person in our family life. She came to love us, and the feeling was mutual. Though she married twice, she couldn't have children of her own. We were as close as she got to motherhood.
One cringe-inducing comment that we avoided was the decorous lie that white families often apply to their longtime Black workers/servants/menials. "She's just like one of the family." This is patently untrue. Does she inherit like other members of the family? Does she sit at the dinner table during the holidays? Does she go on family vacations? Probably not and certainly Doris didn't during the years she was most involved with our family.
What role did Doris play in our family's life? "Mammy" springs immediately to mind, but I recoil at the term. It's so freighted with racism and yet the realities of racial and class inequities were the same that structured our relationship with Doris. Ours was much more than a commercial relationship – the exchange of services for money – but what was it? We never asked the question and in the relative innocence of the latter half of the 20th century, we never gave it any thought. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 had nothing to do with us. Except for its relative geographical proximity (we lived in Pasadena), the Watts Riots of 1965 had nothing to do with us. All we knew was that we loved Doris and that she was always there for us, even after we no longer needed a babysitter after she married her second husband and moved to Richmond, California. She would take care of the house when my parents traveled on some of their more extended vacations. She organized the wedding banquet in our backyard when my older sister was married. She spent weeks nursing my mother during the final four months of her life in 1985 when she died of a brain tumor.
The gifts of relationship didn't only flow in one direction. When my older sister and I lived in the East Bay, we visited Doris every few months. She and her husband had moved to Stockton to be closer to her sister. Doris had severe diabetes and couldn't drive by then. We had to come to her, but we did so gladly. When her husband died (heart failure), we felt it was more important than ever to keep up the connection. Her lack of mobility kept her housebound, but we found ways of taking her out – to a meal downtown or to a park. The San Joaquin County Fair takes place in Stockton. We knew she wanted to go but wouldn't consider it because she couldn't walk anymore. My sister and I took her out for a "surprise destination" – the county fair, which we toured in a wheelchair, much to our great delight. It is one of my cherished memories, and I've been to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. If I had to select only one of those experiences, the county fair with Doris and my sister would win hands down.
When Doris died, we contributed to the expenses of her final illness and burial arrangements to take some of the burden off her sister. And that was the end of it, right? Not quite …
In the early 90s, I had the idea that I wanted to write a family memoir. I taped an interview with Doris and eventually turned it into a chapter called "Skinny." A voiceover artist has recorded the chapter itself and it will drop as a Shoga Speaks podcast. There you can hear Doris describe her life in her own words as a not-quite-member-of-the-family. It is also the way I'd like to end this essay–in her voice. But be forewarned: Doris expressed herself in her own Black English. If encountering that within a white context will offend you, then don't listen to the podcast and stop reading here. Otherwise …
"I know people have a hard time seein one another. Some people look at you and all they see is the outside. And they see you different from what you really are cause they don't get to know you. Miz Philipson to me was my friend. She was my employer but she was my friend. I never did understand it. I was just glad. When I came to work for her I didn't have no references. Later on I asked her why she took me in when she didn't know anything about me. She says, "Oh Doris, you was so skinny. I knew you was all right."
-Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Two Maids of Ethel Waters
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