Bruce, your point is precisely the one I thought I was making when I wrote:
After all those years of looking after Fay and after me, her services were no longer needed. She had nothing but a penny to her name, no pension, no monetary "separation package," nothing. She still lived in that one-room shack...
Of course, Sim was just the "last straw." Perhaps that would have been obvious, if I had quoted the whole poem my dad wrote, instead of just the end. I decided against quoting the beginning, because it was fictionalized a little, "for effect": Aunt Fay, for example, was not at all like the "Miss Mae" of the poem. But Sally ("Georgie") was the "perfect servant" of the poem.
Suttee
She was the perfect servant, they believed,
with no thought for herself but only them,
and their higher concerns. Georgie relieved
old Mrs. Jukes of everything, a gem.
Miss Mae was not allowed to make her bed
nor vacuum her room nor wash a dish.
Languid and bored, Mae brought the man she wed
as great a bargain as a fool might wish.
Georgie at last was given her conge'.
Broken by overwork and age, she cared
for Sim, her syphillitic man, who lay
speechless and blind, yet beat her when he dared.
First axing Sim, she set their shack afire
and slit her throat upon her widow's pyre.
Sally had "belonged" (that was the term) to my maternal grandmother ("Mrs. Jukes"), who died before I was born. How she came to work as my nanny, I don't know, but it was for a very short time. We left Birmingham for good when I was six, and I did not go back there for years. I never saw Sally again, and I do not know what happened to her daughter/granddaughter. I really regret it.
Joan
Edit:
P.S. I learned what had happened to Sally long after it did happen. My father told me. He was very upset, needless to say. As far as he was concerned, it was all those years of exploitation that had killed her -- and his own part in it, small as it was. |
