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It takes Black women until August 3,
or 19 months, to earn what a white man earns in a year. Most years,
Pay Equity Day happens in March (this year on March 24), when ALL
women must work to make as much as white men. Ain’t I a woman,
though? It takes me five months to catch up with white women. Too
often, this fact is ignored, but this year, the National Council of
Negro Women and others are reminding the nation that Black Women’s
Pay Equity Day is as important as any other recognition of pay
inequities.
There
is a level at which this is acutely personal to me. My mom, Proteone
Marie Alexandria Malveaux, made her transition on June 17 and was
funeralized on July 24. She was a phenomenal woman, and she was,
always, a worker. Although she had studied music and had an
undergraduate and graduate degree in social work, she was also a
teacher, professor, entrepreneur, and legal assistant. I’ve
talked about all these things when I talk about my mother, but I
rarely talk about the several years she spent as a postal clerk and
what I learned from that.
My
parents had one of those “rocky road” divorces that
involved intense disputes about money. We couldn’t live on what
Mom earned as a teacher (remember, in the early 1960s, teachers,
mostly women, had earnings considered “supplemental income,”
especially if they were married). So she got a better paying job at
the post office (as filmmaker Robert Townsend said, “there is
always work at the post office”). Working at the post office
stretched her (and me, as her eldest) in all kinds of ways. Her shift
required her to leave the house before day in the morning, 4 or 5. I
woke up to lock the door was “in charge” until all five
of us got out of the door. I didn’t mind. I had quiet time in
the house to myself, occasionally I snooped through mom’s
papers, and I might fry myself up some potatoes before the others got
up for their cereal.
Still,
I can’t forget how hard mom struggled to pass the postal exam.
Back before computers and scanners, postal clerks had to connect an
address with a zip code. Many people didn’t put their zip code
on their mail, but the clerks had to know it and pass a test to show
it. We spent some evenings drilling Mom on addresses and zip codes,
over and over again, until she passed with a score high enough to
earn a raise.
When
I was in my 20s and studying women and work, Proteone told me that
she could say a few things about work. She shared about working as a
maid with a family with a rather handsy patriarch and how she had to
duck and dodge his advances, going so far as to fake passing out when
he got too close. And she told me about working as a postal worker.
Do you remember, she said? And I did. I remembered the early mornings
of awakening, of the smell of her coffee tickling my nose. I
remembered being told to “behave” as I locked the door.
Years later, I asked her how she did it.
“It
was hard,” she said. “It would have been harder to see my
children go without. “ We never missed a meal or an educational
opportunity. We might have missed some toys, but you can’t miss
what you can’t measure. We had an exceptional childhood because
my mom did her best to support us, running us all over the city on
the bus because she didn’t drive, enrolling us in cultural
activities, and (sometimes) supporting our political involvement.
Dr.
Dorothy Irene Height often said that “Black women don’t
do what we want to do; we do what we have to do.” I think of my
Mama, a Mississippi-raised middle-class hat and glove-wearing diva
working in the post office so that my siblings and I could eat, and I
think of the many ways that Black Women’s Pay Equity Day is so
meaningful. Too many Black women have earned too little for working
too hard and so much. Too many Black women have experienced not only
unequal pay but also unequal and unreasonable working conditions. And
we have been forced to work to facilitate other women’s ability
to work. For example, 40 percent of the certified nurse’s
assistants (CNAs) during covid were Black and Brown. Their work made
life easier for others, but it was rarely recognized. Instead, it was
insistently expected.
We,
Black women, do what we have to do to support our families and the
nation. Maybe we can get some recognition for it, especially this
August 3.
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