Mother's Day: Black Motherhood, Nursemaids and Labor

Happy Mother's Day!

Today I want to dedicate a post about the labor Black women have historically been tasked with as caretakers of both their own children and the children of their oppressors. This topic is somewhat sensitive but I feel like it's worth discussing and examining the lives of my maternal ancestors in relation to misogynoir and socioeconomic status. I will give a content warning for discussions of antiblackness, misognyoir, and sexual abuse. 

It's well know and well documented that Black women were often domestic laborers who cared for the children of middle and upper class white families. My maternal ancestors were no exception. In fact one of the three pictures of my maternal great great grandmother Anna Beamon, is her with a child she cared for. 

The picture is one of the saddest I have of a direct ancestor. Anna, who I know was a strong willed yet fun loving person, looks disaffected. Holding a small white child on her hip, her face in a scowl possibly from the sunlight in her eyes or her discomfort with her work duties or both. Anna was known to be a temperamental person who exhibited polarizing moods of enthusiastic  hedonism and bitter coldness when felt slighted. None of the pictures that I have of her captured her smile but this is the one that perhaps is the most sobering. 

Anna Beamon holding the white child she cared for, date unknown

Anna's life wasn't by any means easy. She was born into a large family of sharecroppers in rural North Carolina. She had two daughters, one being my great grandmother Lillian, aka Patsy, who would have my grandmother at 13 and die at 20 from tuberculosis. I don't have a date for the picture so I'm unsure if this was before or after Patsy's death but I'm sure that the experiences of domestic labor complicated the sense of grief she experienced regardless. 

I imagine that labor took time away from her children. This was also something I observed on my father's side, my great great grandmother Myrtle Santos (nee Boston), was not living in South Philly with my great grandfather and his sisters on the 1930 census. In fact neither of their parents were home at the time of the enumerator's visit. The whereabouts of their father, Lawrence Santos Sr., were unknown and he never conclusively appeared on the census. Myrtle, however, was working as a nursemaid in the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Radnor. Although she eventually moved back to Philly to live with her children, I imagine there was pain in caring for other children in the outskirts of the city while your own 3, 5 and 6 year olds are at home under the supervision of other lodgers in a boarding house. 

Other grandmothers of mine, including Anna's mother Emma Rouse, worked as nursemaids for presumably white families at various points of their lives. The conditions of the nursemaid's life were harsh and the misogynoirist and colorist iconography of the "mammy" in American popular culture perpetuated the myth that Black women were innately more nurturing yet primitive. This dynamic dates back centuries when the Transatlantic Slave Trade ruptured African modes of family structure and relegated Black women to objects of utility, via sexual abuse and enslavement. Many Black women suffered from this violent subjugation for centuries. However the voices of these women and workers were not lost to time. In 1912, the national magazine The Independent published a firsthand account a Black nanny describing the deplorable work conditions of Black domestic workers entitled, " 'More Slavery at the South,' by a Negro Nurse,". It is important to note that this article was allegedly a confession from an unidentified Black woman, meaning that the credibility of said article is somewhat questionable. Either way, it provides a great resource for understanding national conversations about the crossroads of race, class, and gender identity 50 years after the end of chattel slavery. The article describes the various obstacle in daily life as a Black caretaker, such as not being able to interact with one's old children on the street while on the clock, dealing with sexual advances from white employers or only being allowed in public spaces when in the company of white children. The anecdotes, though dubiously attributed, no doubt reflects the real life experiences endured by many Black women not only in the US but in other colonies across the world. 

My great grandmother, Lillian "Patsy" Beamon, the daughter of Anna, was only little over a week shy of her 14th birthday when she gave birth to her first child, my grandmother. Both of my great grandparents were very young and due to the taboo of endogamous relationships, in turn did not raise my grandmother, who was instead raised by her aunt Fannie Lou Rouse-Williams (1901-1986). I have very limited knowledge about my great grandmother but from conversations I had with Aunt Harriett, it's implied that Patsy was mostly indifferent to motherhood, which was reasonable for someone who gave birth while very young. She would have another child when she was 20, my uncle Sherman Spencer (who I'll dedicate a future post to), before unfortunately succumbing to tuberculosis several months after having him. When I discovered Patsy's death certificate, I was struck by the fact that she herself was also a nursemaid. I wonder what the psychological impact of having to care for a white child while also having a complicated relationship to motherhood was. Especially given that she had another child not too long before her own death. 

My great grandmother, Lillian "Patsy" Beamon, ca. late 1940s

The dynamics of the redlined North in the case of Myrtle and the rural Jim Crow South in the cases of Emma, Anna and Patsy mirror each other and reflect the difficult realties Black people and especially Black women, were not confined to a singular geographical area of the United States. Settler colonialism reproduces the same violent capacities of the slave trade no matter it's locus as the Maafa was its breaking ground. 

I don't speak much about the dynamics and lives of living relatives on here for privacy reasons but, it is interesting to observe the patterns of maternal rupture and repair over the generations, even leading up to my own complex relationship to my mother. This article has been heavy in subject matter but I still would like to acknowledge that these were all people with lives no matter how short or long, that had their own dreams, desires, love, and joy. Emma is remembered for her tenderness and laughter, Anna is remembered for being the life of the party even into old age, Patsy was remembered for being defiant and Myrtle was adored and even mythologized by my great grandfather Lawrence. I unfortunately never had a chance to meet these women but their memories live on through the oral traditions and the documented echoes of their lives.