Tell It Like It Is: Iowa Storytellers Project

The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South is a 2012 collection of oral histories by Katherine van Wormer, David W. Jackson III, and Charletta Sudduth, published by Louisiana State University Press. The authors present the recorded memories of African American women who worked as maids, cooks, and caretakers in the segregated South, alongside the recollections of white southerners who grew up in households that employed them. Interviewing more than fifty people, most of whom had ties to the Great Migration from rural Mississippi to Iowa, they document domestic service under Jim Crow: the labor, the racial etiquette, the intimate yet unequal relationships between servant and employer. The book places these accounts within the history of sharecropping, paternalism, and the civil rights movement.