Notes on Inequality in America: A Little Housekeeping

Like a lot of comfortably middle-class people, we have a housekeeper. She’s Hispanic, an immigrant from Ecuador. She came here, settled in, worked hard, and on her own is now helping to send her eldest son to college, someone who wants to become a history teacher. She is the epitome of why immigrants come to America. She’s worked for us for years. She is dependable, skilled at her job, and leaves our house immaculate (in fact, so clean that before she comes, my wife and I go scurrying around making sure it’s not too messy). We pay her well. During Covid, for instance, when she couldn’t come we continued to pay half of her salary. This hardly makes us heroes. We just thought it fair. She seems to be happy working for us and we are very lucky to have her. Let me also say upfront that I’m not denigrating the job of housekeepers, or for that matter, anyone who works hard with their hands for a living.

So what’s the rub?

Every time she comes I have this awkward feeling, which has nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. I know it’s partly some form of guilt. Perhaps the run-of-the-mill sort of guilt that white, liberal, middle-class people feel when hiring someone who’s a person of color or an immigrant, a situation that is only exacerbated by the monstrous ICE raids. But the feeling I have is also made up of something deeper, something closely related to guilt but which runs to the very marrow of a person: shame. Guilt is what you feel when you’ve done something bad. Shame, however, says that you are bad. One is for an act; the other is who you are and who you can’t help being.

At the center of this guilt/shame feeling of mine is the fact that my mother cleaned houses for all of my childhood. Being a first-generation Italian-American, she often referred to herself as a donna a giornata, literally Italian for “a woman for a day,” which sounds uncomfortably like something even worse. Her various employers paid her ten bucks a day for cleaning and scrubbing and polishing. And yet those few dollars she made were essential to our very survival. My mother’s parents and all her siblings came from Italy; she was the first in her family to speak English, go to school, and have attained an eighth-grade education. She would come home from her work as a donna a giornata and tell us stories of the sorts of people she worked for. Some were kind and generous to her (for example, a dentist who gave her Christmas presents and small gifts of things he no longer needed, and who worked on our teeth for a reduced cash rate).

But she also told stories of those who weren’t so nice, who treated her like the stuff she cleaned up for them—dirt. She’d tell us how rude and inconsiderate, sometimes downright mean they could be (when I heard such stories, I always thought of how Scrooge treated Bob Cratchit). When I was little—say, five or six–and she had no other childcare options, she’d sometimes ask her employer if she could bring me to her work, promising the “lady of the house” I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way and remain quiet as a mouse. It didn’t happen often but enough so I saw first-hand how parsimonious and haughty some of her employers could be with her, how a few seemed even to take a certain satisfaction in their cruel behavior towards my mother–and me. Working hard to make a living isn’t by itself something to be ashamed of; in fact, it should be just the opposite—a thing to be proud of. But when those who are in a position of power make it so, it can feel humiliating and degrading.

One time I recall she brought me along to a large brick house on the hill just up the street. The woman my mother cleaned for was—at least by our standards–wealthy, the husband owing a big construction business that, coincidentally, my father, a carpenter, occasionally worked for. I recall her house looking and feeling like a museum, everything just so, in its place, with a hush that seemed to have fallen over the halls and rooms and furniture. The beautiful sofa was covered in that sort of bubble-wrap popular in the 50’s and not meant to be sat on; the expensive Persian rugs were meant to be looked at and not stepped upon; the candy in the candy dishes was not meant to be eaten, a fact that I was completely ignorant of. In the world I came from, one of privation and unmet needs, not to mention three older brothers all competing for limited stuff, candy was never ornamental. It was meant to be gobbled up right away–which I did. I recall the old woman who employed my mother saying she wanted a word with us—a converstion I would never forget. “Your child is eating all the candy,” she proclaimed, as if I’d stolen some holy relic. “And he’s running around like a wild hooligan.” I didn’t know what hooligan meant, but I recall feeling this terrible taste in my mouth and a burning sensation on my face. I watched my mother apologize (she could hardly afford to lose her job) and saw that she, too, felt shame; both of us not so much for doing something wrong but for being something wrong, something that was innate. Something that a person, no matter how much money he made or education level he later attained, would always feel. That was shame.

My wife tells me I shouldn’t feel the way I feel now. That it’s just a business transaction. That the nice woman who works for us needs a job and that we need our house cleaned, and besides, we pay her well and treat her with kindness. Simple. Transactional. And there is, a part of me acknowledges, truth in what she says. However, that still doesn’t make me forget the shame I once felt every time I see our housekeeper.

(Note: This is one of a series of essays on the topics of inequality and injustice in America, themes central to my upcoming novel Skunktown.)