Memories of Izzy on Mother’s Day 2022
Carol Chaya Barash, PhD
Building community through storytelling. Healing trauma, dissolving conflict, creating spaces where all people are safe, liberated, and free. Author ?? Speaker ?? Teacher ?? Coach
WARNING: This story includes a description of physical harm and references to slavery. It was originally published on Medium in May 2022.
It’s Mother’s Day 2022, and my indomitable mother has COVID. That woman has crashed through nearly every barrier life placed in her path, facing demons from her own and her family’s past again and again. But she was not an easy person to have as a mother. She told me once that she did not enjoy raising young children.
When I was in third grade, my entrepreneurial parents moved their office out of the basement of our house into a building they bought downtown. Isabelle McCoy moved into that basement office turned bedroom and became our housekeeper and nanny.
“You can call me Izzy,” she said on her first day of work, laughing quietly under her breath afterwards, in the way she did to assert her rules and smooth things over at once.
Izzy lived with us from 1967 to 1972, from the time I was eight until I was thirteen. Izzy brushed my hair and wove it into braids. She made sure my favorite dresses were washed and ironed, so I could wear them to school. She helped me clean myself up when I got my first period.
Izzy made it possible for my mother to work outside our house. She made me feel loved and cared for. When I first told a story about Izzy in 2009, I slid off my chair onto the floor, leaning my head against the chair as if it was her lap.
I hear the soothing sounds of Izzy praying, singing, laughing just under her breath, swaying gently as she wipes the kitchen counter, vacuums the living room carpet, makes my bed and my sister’s, day after day after day. She takes off her apron when she leaves the house. She has one bible by her bed, and another, smaller one she carries in her purse and takes with her wherever she goes.
Izzy died walking up the stairs to church on Holy Thursday 1972. For some reason, I did not go to her funeral, though my parents and sister did.
I’ve written about Izzy before, in the voice of the child she loved and tended without question. That voice no longer feels adequate. I’m the same age now that Izzy was when she raised me. Looking back, she seems much older, worn down by chronic illness and the sadness of living away from her own children.
Trying to experience this relationship from Izzy’s point of view, I went back into the history of Black female domestic workers in the U.S. The role begins with enslaved Black women (1). Many of them were very young, living in the slave owner’s house and caring for his children, some of whom were often their own children.
The structure of the plantation system remained in Black women’s role as domestic workers long after slavery was officially abolished. One early twentieth-century Black nanny described the role as “we are literally slaves” (2). In 1967, when Izzy came to live with us, 90% of Black women worked in domestic service jobs (3). It was one of the few types of work available to Black women at that time.
Izzy had five grown children. Her oldest daughter worked at a bank in New York; everyone else lived an hour away, several in the same house where she had raised them. Late at night, she sat with my father at the end of our kitchen table, talking about money. He helped her open a savings account and a checking account, so she could send money to her children each month.
As these relationships go, I think my parents were reasonable employers. They paid Izzy a decent salary; they bought her a car; they gave her Saturdays off to visit her family plus all day Sunday so she could go to church.
In State College, Pennsylvania, at that time it was very unusual to have a live-in Black housekeeper. Like the red Mustang convertible my mother drove over the speed limit downtown, Izzy was a marker of my parents’ – especially my mother’s – economic and social ambitions. I remember my friend Nancy saying, after Izzy died, “Carol, your parents have money. They paid Izzy to take care of you. Your parents have money.”
Though I knew other Black people — my grandmother’s housekeeper Mary, the people who worked in my grandfather’s grocery store in Philadelphia — there was something very different about Izzy. She lived with us, taking over many of the tasks that my friends’ mothers did for them, at a time when the experience of gender and race was changing in our small town.
The first year Izzy lived with us was the year Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember talking about the Civil Rights movement with Izzy, and separately with my father.
Looking back, I imagine the things I said as a child must have stung her. “Izzy, were you a slave?” I asked, trying to make sense of it all. The minute I said it, I did the math in my head and knew it was impossible. As I started to apologize, Izzy laughed from deep down in her belly. “How old do you think I am?” she asked, laughing so hard her smooth brown wig slipped to the side, revealing a tiny little gray wig underneath.
Another time that same year, when the neighbors’ son had rubbed me so hard he left red marks on my arms and legs, I asked Izzy to tell my father about the marks she had seen on my body. “Honey child,” she sat up straight and shook her head, “what he did is not right. Not at all. But I cannot speak to your father like that. He’s the pay boss.”
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That phrase “pay boss” has stuck with me all these years, a reminder of a fundamentally unequal system of domestic servitude that benefited both me and my mother in different ways, and limited our power and choices in others. Izzy’s choices were far more constrained than ours.
The race inequality Izzy and my parents talked about over dinner — and they helped her work around to some extent — all of that is rooted in systems of race, class, and gender inequity our Constitution took for granted and we have still not sorted out. Everything that holds back white women holds back Black women more. Everything that white women achieve takes Black women longer. Once you see how this system works, you see it everywhere.
In My Grandmother’s Hands and The Quaking of America, Resmaa Menakem urges white people to pause and take in the enormity of that unequal system. He invites us — as humans who live in white bodies — to physically and emotionally experience how we benefit from that system.
When I was a young girl, I took for granted that Izzy would care for me. Though in some ways I must have known, I had no way to understand or process how oppressed Izzy was, living with us, how limited her choices were, and what working for us cost her as a person, a woman, and especially as a mother.
Izzy had several chronic illnesses that working for us most likely made worse. She took medicines for blood pressure and a weak heart, and walking up the stairs from her basement apartment often left her short of breath.
Izzy did not have much privacy in our house either. Her bedroom had no real door, just the folding screen leftover from the basement office. There was a TV down in the basement, where Izzy watched As The World Turns and General Hospital, while she folded the laundry. She ironed everything, including our underwear.
All the things that were structurally unequal in 1967 remain structurally unequal today:
Black women bear the consequences of this racist system in their bodies. And when their work is domestic work — cleaning, cooking, child care — they are literally taking care of white bodies, as Izzy took care of me.
I have read dozens of articles written by white women about the Black and brown women who raised them. Very few of those Black women domestic workers have published their own stories about what that system was like for them. We need more of those stories – not just from my perspective, but from Izzy’s.
Izzy was a constant, steady presence in my life for eight pivotal years. When I walked in the back door, she listened to whatever I was wrestling with and helped me calm down. When I was angry and dramatic, she laughed and hummed under her breath, listening to me search for answers to things I could not understand or change.
When I think of Izzy cooking and singing, I feel calmed, even today. In the years she lived with us, I attended three different schools, had my first crush, and read Shakespeare for the first time.
My mother was an out in the world badass business builder with my dad. She taught me to be bold and fight to win. She found problems and solved them. She hated to lose.
Izzy was the first of many women who taught me vital life lessons I’ve tried to teach to my own children. She taught me how to cook, how to wash my own clothes, and how to listen to someone who is upset like a vulnerable child.
Izzy dying was the beginning of a hard time for all of us. The sustenance she provided, the unquestioning solace and willingness to love me no matter what painful things I was screaming at her about, was something I took completely for granted and was not ever really replaced.
If I could sit with Izzy, back at our old kitchen table, and ask one question, I would lean in and say, “Izzy, what was it like for you taking care of us, five days a week, so you could spend the occasional Saturday with your own children and Sundays with God?”
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