There Was an Old Woman Tossed up in a Basket

Lizzie Baker, photographed by Cecil Beaton

There was an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it
For in her hand she carried a broom.

“Old woman, old woman, old woman” quoth I
“Oh wither, oh wither, oh wither so high?”
“To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.”
“May I come with you?”
“Aye, by and by.”

That’s what we are all obliged to do now: to join in sweeping the cobwebs. There is a little time and a little space, provided by the pandemic, for such a sweeping, if we don’t allow the zoom events and webinars and other business to fill it in.

First of all we must confront the many meanings of white privilege, difficult for me and for many others to do; particularly difficult, perhaps, for women, since we deal with our own many forms of discrimination, now rightly overshadowed by the life-threatening discrimination faced on a daily basis by darker-skinned people.

But all discrimination is, at the root, the same: our apparently profound human need to protect our place on the social pyramid and to disparage those we need to see as lower down, whether because of skin color, accent, education or lack of it, social grace, “goodness”—the list goes on and on.

But the old woman is sweeping those cobwebs out of our shared sky.

As this Avidly review of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park makes plain, our silence as entitled white women has a long and notorious history. How many of us, like the daughters in this novel, would never dream of questioning the source of our material privilege? There is no doubt in my mind but the source of material privilege for the majority of us lies generations ago in slavery.

Maybe not in the “sugar island”—Antiqua—of the Austen novel but in the mercantile fortunes of the early twentieth centuries that drew their capitol from the well-invested proceeds of that “peculiar institution”; from the railroads and mines, the factories and industries that if one were diligent enough would be shown to have a long root in black exploitation. And, to this day and endlessly into the future, in the milder (perhaps) exploitation of darker-skinned people as domestic workers, field hands, immigrants, laborers of every description.

I remember visiting a long-ago Bingham family house in central North Carolina and searching out the nearby town graveyard. The family headstones were long neglected; many had toppled over since there have been no relatives living nearby for several generations. That was sad, but even sadder was the big mound, without markers of any kind, but with a sign that notified the passerby that this was the mass grave of slaves.

Here we come to the crux of the matter: I am not personally responsible for these long forgotten and unnamed dark-skinned people; although they are closer than is comfortable to acknowledge. I remember my father once mentioning to me, in the conspiratorial tone that makes such confidences so attractive, that “The best of them came from Ghana.” The formal photograph of his maid, Lizzie Baker, who served the family for fifty years, shows her wearing as she always did the uniform of slavery: full-length white dress, white full-length apron, white turban. That her portrait was taken by Cecil Beaton adds a dash of irony; as far as I know, he took no photos of my white family.

To sweep the cobwebs out of my particular inch of sky means talking about my past as it is memorialized in that mass grave. Talking about it does no good but at least it acknowledges a grim reality. No amount of good works can unearth the bones in that shared mound of earth. No amount of diligence can discover their lost stories. At most, there are the first names recorded in my great-great-grandmother’s will. I would repeat them like a mantra, like a prayer: but I have lost the paper on which these names were recorded.

In My Family, Politics Cecil Beaton Lizzie Baker