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This is my own family’s story. My grandmother was 4 (and her older brother was 13) when they lost their mom. Their father, who had been a domestic livery driver (and later a chauffeur) for white families in St. Louis since the 1880s, struggled to keep the children safe . . . https://twitter.com/SchomburgCenter/status/1275839955894439938
. . . and cared for as he tried to work. He had been a live-in during the week (I know this because he was enumerated in the census as living with white families), while his wife cared for their house and the children, taking in sewing and dressmaking jobs.
After she died, the employer families refused to let my grandmother onto their property. If her father wanted to continue working, he had to leave the child elsewhere. And not working was not an option.
Once their mother died, my uncle took care of his sister, but it meant he had to leave school himself. This worked for a while, but eventually he had to get a job to help support the family. So, then what happened to the little girl?
Seeing no safe alternative, her father delivered her into the care of the Oblate Sisters of Providence – the oldest older of Black nuns in North America – who ran an orphanage nearby. Over the next decade, the nuns raised her while her brother (now grown) and father worked . . .
. . . to pay her boarding fees each month. Historians often describe early 20c. orphanages as a last resort for broken families; we don't conceive of children’s homes as products of families broken by Jim Crow segregation, economic exclusion, and racist thinking.
If my grandmother’s father could have kept his job without “living in”, he could have kept his family together. From the Schomburg’s blog post: “They had no choice but to work, often caring for the children of White families, but who would care for their children?”
(Also, thank god for the Oblate Sisters of Providence. If not for them, I would not be here.)
