WHAT MY GRANDMOTHER TAUGHT ME ABOUT THE DIGNITY OF WORK
"While the kind of work matters much, the nature
of the worker matters far more."
We have a video of my grandmother from 1996. She is 81. She’s in the kitchen, joy brimming in her eyes and beaming from her high-cheekboned smile. She has just gotten a job.
It’s something to watch it now — seeing her alive and energetic, hearing the country-girl bounce of southwest Georgia in her voice that stretches red into reh-y’d. Pinballing between stove, counter and pantry, she describes her responsibilities at three local nursing
homes.
Part of the work is to keep people company. Provide human connection in a world rapidly slipping away from them. She does filing, too, and has learned to use the fancy electronic typewriter — punch in the right code for the right form, and the thing comes to life with click-clacks of ink in the
right spaces.
The moment that steals the show, however, is when she says with her trademark spunk, “Down there, honey, I’m working! I am working! And I ain’t cleanin’ no bathroom, either.”
Just like that, I’m reminded of where I come from. Who I come from. Our elders have seen some things. They have lived some lives. They have been in worlds far away from this one.
My grandmother was raised in a world where the men worked the land and the women had jobs that usually required cleaning somebody else’s bathroom. They learned, out of necessity, how to bring dignity to the kind of work others considered beneath them. Yet she, like all those around her, despised the lack of options. In this place. In this land of opportunity.
A couple of weeks ago, we hired some folks to give our house an end-of-summer deep clean. (It’s a luxury, but worth it — boys live here.) I’d also asked a landscaping crew to fix some plantings I’d botched that didn’t survive the recent dry spell. Both crews showed up on the same Friday morning — Hispanic women inside cleaning and Hispanic men laboring out in the
yard.
And me, who comes from sharecroppers and dishwashers and Jim Crow’s domestics, wondering why the scene felt so uncomfortable. Wondering why this world kind of looks like my grandmother’s, with the hues different.
We bring our histories and our understandings of things to the scenes that play out in front of us. They help us see the patterns. The people you learn living from have an outsize impact on how you view the world. Some might see the little scene at my house as a sign of progress, economic mobility and such. Others might call it further proof that race, ethnicity, gender
and nation of origin overdetermine one’s chances in America. And then there are those who look at the scene and wonder about the people in it. How did we end up in a rhyme of history? And why am I on this end of it?
To be clear, my house that day was just a rhyme and not a rerun. The minority-owned cleaning company provides its employees with benefits, bonuses, and no work on weekends or nights. We tip the ladies in cash. And my wallet is a witness to the landscaping crew getting above-market price for the work, and deservedly
so.
But in our nation’s history, the people who carry out the labor labeled as lowest-skilled tend to come from the same racial or ethnic group. At various times and places, those people were Irish or East Asian. In southwest Georgia and large swaths of the nation, they were Black. In the suburbs of
our nation’s capital today, they are Hispanic. And, like clockwork, theories of inferiority soon emerge as justification. These workers are lesser. In intellect. In biology. In culture.
I know better. In the
world where I was raised, Sunday’s deacon at church was Monday’s janitor at the high school. I know there is more to a worker than the kind of work they do. But what does it mean when the descendants of those folks are now in a position to hire the people who have taken their place?
My grandmother’s celebratory three-step in the kitchen that morning was more than just pride in the kind of work she was doing, in having options. It was a lesson to me that, while the kind of work matters much, the nature of the worker matters far more. And it’s why I couldn’t help but see younger versions of my elders in the men and women at my house that Friday morning. Different in history and circumstance, certainly. But similar in the
dogged pursuit of more opportunity and better choices — if not for themselves, then for their families. In this place. In this land of opportunity.
Making it in America cannot just mean you have options and resources that weren’t
available to your elders. It must also mean you recognize the responsibility to today’s strivers, in things large and small. Once, I was unloading a few stalks of freshly cut sugar cane at my grandmother’s house — a welcome treat in those humid country summers. As I made my way from the truck to the picnic table that sat under a pecan tree, she, with her trademark spunk, said, “Ya’ll move out the way of working folk!” It was a playful take on a hard-earned truth: People bring true dignity to
work, not the other way around.
