What It’s Like to Be a Maid Here December 13, 2007

What It’s Like to Be a Maid Here

Reprinted from The Profile, 1994

                             I won’t complain about the work. It may not be pleasant, but I chose to do it and I don’t resent the fact that I pick up after people and clean their toilets. Lots of women do that for free at home. No paycheck, no retirement, no union. It’s nice to be around the students; either they’re friendly or they’re not. Easy to get along with either way.                

What I don’t like is the way I get treated in the offices. I take pride in my work, and I do a good job. I have a bad day once in a while when I just can’t seem to move. Just like the office ladies. Difference is, when they can’t move, they don’t have to. They can stay at their desks, call their friends, complain about whatever. Go to lunch a little early, stay a little longer.                 

I’m not jealous, but let someone catch me on a college phone—talking to my son’s teacher at the only time she can talk to me—and the whole department gets in trouble, and it’s meetings and memos. I see the office ladies making Xerox copies of jokes and recipes and church work and cute little poems. It’s nice they can do that. It’s nice to have an honor system for paying for copies, too. I like working in a place where everyone can be trusted, more or less. But let me walk to close to one of those machines and there is an office lady sniffing around. “Do you need some help with that? Can I help you with something?” What they really mean is, “What are you doing? Is that an official college copy? Did you pay for that?” And what they’re thinking is, “Did she take any money out of that box?”                

I listen to these same women keep up with each others’ babies and husbands and church friends and people who used to work here. Name any place, and someone in the room will know somebody else’s sister or child who lives there. They remember that kind of thing, but they can’t seem to remember my name even though I’ve been here longer than they have. They know each others’ children’s wives and husbands and their home towns and where they went to college, but they don’t know my name. Don’t know my name, and I’ve been seeing them every day since the disco era. I’ve got a husband too, same old tired one I’ve always had, and I’ve got children, and they have names. We all have names, but I know the excuses: there are so many of them, I can’t keep them straight; I don’t see her enough to talk to—like every day since 1979 is not long enough?                

We have more in common than you know. For example, here I am using a computer to write this at home. I own this house; I work in the yard. My children stay out too late, and thy get grounded. I drive my elderly neighbor to the store once a week. I’m on a very important committee at my church. We raise a lot of money, but they don’t want to know about by charities or my preferences except once a year when it’s for the United Way. Then the push is on. Do it for the community. They give it a few weeks, and then they lean on our supervisor because not enough people from our department have “donated.” We asked for a payroll deduction for that new parking fee, and they said it couldn’t be done because of the computers. Not a month after that, they’re trying to talk me into a United Way payroll deduction. One time somebody important even came in front of us and said she didn’t want to work with people who aren’t “generous.” She could fire us all, so what were we supposed to think?                

I think they never take a good look at me. They couldn’t pick me out of a lineup of other women my same age and weight. I changed my hair once, and someone whose name I’ve known for three years tried to introduce herself. You can see why Staff Day is such an ordeal. That’s the one day to be nice, to pretend we’re all on the same team. I don’t like being hauled out or sent away like furniture. When there is a convocation with a black speaker, they want us there. Tell us we have to go. If the Board of Trustees is in town, they want us to be invisible. They don’t want to see any blue uniforms around here when there are important people on campus. When there are important black people on campus, they want us around for show. Imagine if your teacher or boss picked out all the convocations you should go to and wouldn’t let you go to any others and would NOT let you go to the ones he had chosen.  

                I don’ think there’s anybody here who is mean or vicious, at least not where I clean. I think some people are afraid of me, afraid of people who look like me. Afraid that if they got too friendly I might want to live next door to them. But it’s more than that. Everybody is so darn nice here that they don’t want to hurt my feelings by admitting that they don’t know my name. They’re afraid that if they try to talk to me and say the wrong thing I’ll drop my bucket, point at them, and start screaming, “Racist!” Trust me, I won’t do it. I will treat you with respect. I need my job and I wouldn’t do anything that made everybody upset. None of us in the department would. That’s why we present everything’s okay, even though most of them pretend we’re invisible. Until a toilet overflows—then all of the sudden I’m your best friend.