What does it mean to control another person?
I’m exploring this issue now because a novel I’m writing involves slave owners during the War of the Northern Aggression, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about for years, ever since learning I come from a long line (200 years worth) of slave owners.
As mentioned in my last post, I don’t get it–on several different levels.
I suspect one reason has to do with my American social-economic state rather than anything else. I don’t know what it means to have servants.
Perhaps one of the reasons we’ve all fawned so over Downton Abbey, and before that Upstairs, Downstairs, is because servanthood is such an alien concept to many of us in the United States.
But that’s not true in other parts of the world.
Our foreign exchange student from Brazil couldn’t get over our appliances: the dishwasher in particular was a marvel to her. She also, however, couldn’t understand all the house work we personally did. Why didn’t we have any servants? Her family had had at last one live-in servant her entire life. In fact, our student grew up sharing a bedroom with the maid.
I distinctly remember reading Barbara Pym novels and asking my husband why I didn’t have a char woman like all middle-class British women.
He, of course, didn’t know what I was talking about.
Years ago I played bridge with a group of Navy wives in Monterey, California. We always introduced ourselves in terms of our husbands: their rank, their branch of the service, their particular specialty and where they had dragged us to live. One beautifully groomed woman was married to an airdale–a Navy flyer–and they recently had returned from the Philippines.
I was intrigued. What was life like in that country?
The four-member family lived in a plantation-type house with wide verandas and an elegant yard. They had seven servants.
“Seven servants?” I sputtered. “What did they do?”
She had a yard boy, a nanny, a cook, a house cleaner, a laundress, someone who only ironed, a shopper and a driver.
I couldn’t imagine. I held all those positions and more–every day of my life!
“What did you do?”
She was a genuinely kind, lovely woman. “We had terrific Bible studies, played lots of bridge, read and worked on our tennis. We had elegant parties and traveled.”
That was her life as the wife of a Navy flyer. This submarine wife dug her own garden beds, tended her own children, hauled them to the commissary, taught a Bible study, hung clothes on the line, never ironed and drove her own car. I hadn’t played tennis or bridge in years before moving to Monterey. I had, however, read quite a bit.
I wouldn’t know what to do with a servant, much less feel comfortable “playing” while they worked.
My great-great-grandmother was helpless when her slaves were freed. She had never had to physically care for her family before. She didn’t know how to cook and took to her bed. My great-great-great-grandmother, somehow, had acquired enough skills to tend to the newborn and the family muddled through until they could hire someone to help.
The Bible speaks of our being servants one to another, about submitting our lives to one another. As an American, I don’t see myself as having more value than another person–so it’s hard to let the young woman who cleans my house just clean my house. I have to pick up first, even if it does hurt my aching hands (the reason I hired her to begin with!)
What does it mean to control someone, without losing your soul? What is the difference between hiring a servant and owning a slave?
I’m still trying to puzzle it out.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to remain grateful for my dishwasher, washer and clothes dryer–mechanized servants I have no problem ordering around.
But forget the iron.
Thoughts? Reactions? Lurker?