Scope and Contents

In her interview, Venella Byrd recalls that unlike white children, she and other African American children could not return to school in the fall until the cotton had been harvested. Byrd shares her experiences cooking and cleaning for two white families, and she describes the kind of food she prepared. She recalls experiencing some discriminatory treatment, including an incident in which one of the men she worked for did not want her to use the same wash pan that he did when washing her hands.

Scope and Contents

Annie Victoria Johnson speaks about going with her mother when she did domestic work, such as caretaking for both Black and white children and washing and ironing clothes for white families. She shares stories of Black and white women’s integrated social lives in Mississippi, working together to garden and can produce, trading food they grew with one another, and quilting and sharing meals in one another’s homes. She also recalls Black and white families socializing together at yard parties, noting that the only social arenas that were segregated were school and church. Johnson speaks about regional differences between the Mississippi Delta and the northern part of the state where she grew up, describing the conditions facing Black people in the Delta being like slavery. Her interview also covers the topic of white men who sexually assaulted Black women. She describes a woman she worked for in Chicago as being more hateful than anyone she met in Mississippi or Tennessee.

Scope and Contents Annie Pearl Stevenson discusses her experiences working in domestic service in Mississippi. Her interview focuses on her experiences doing housework for an Italian-American family. Stevenson recalls that her employer, who owned a restaurant, brought lunch home for her. When he did not, she was permitted to pick food up from the restaurant, but only via the back door. She wore a work uniform and was made to use the side door to the house. She recalls helping her aunt, Pearline Jones, clean William Faulkner’s home on one occasion. In addition to her work in domestic service, the interview touches on other experiences of racism in her life and in Mississippi more broadly: her inability to enroll at Ole Miss due to segregation; the impact that the lynching of Emmett Till had on her; and an incident in which both the ticket clerk and the bus driver at her usual bus station called her a racial slur. She recalls supporting James Meredith on the day he integrated the University of...

Abstract

Oral history interviews with African American women who worked in domestic service in the South before moving to Iowa.