I know a lot of people say that we shouldn't come here and leave our children back home, but what else can we do? Our children have to eat. You can't talk to some people about things like that because they don't know what it is like to live in one room with seven other people all sleeping in one bed and some on the floor. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't be here. But I couldn't stay home and see my children suffer. At least working here, I can send home money and clothes for them. (Myrtle, p. 87)

As a college teacher who often has occasion to work with young Caribbean people in Montreal whose mothers have preceded them to this country often by many years it has been my observation that these separations are very painful and damaging to the children as well. However, as Myrtle points out, there are very few options.

To compound their misery, often the domestic workers must look after the children of white Canadians and are required to give them a quality of care they must withhold from their own children. Evidently this is a care that many affluent white Canadians are unwilling to provide for their children themselves. Often the workers share rooms with babies and must get up to feed the during the night, tasks not significantly different from those ante bellum wet nurses in the South, except that in addition to baby-care, they are expected to put in long, back-breaking days of housework. In many cases they suffer on-going sexual harassment (in one case, repeated rape) and daily humiliations imposed by racist "teasing" by the children and their friends; sometimes they find themselves pawns moved around in the complexities of marriage difficulties. Even in the case of considerate employers, it is possible to feel unhappy, alienated and trapped:

Let's face it. They are the white elite and I is Black. So I was treated as know-your-place, you-are-here-to-do-this-and- that's-all-there-is-to-it...it's hard to tell yourself, "I am only here to do this" - domestic work when really I am living here twenty-four hours a day. I feel as if this is my home. It's not like I come to work for them and then evening I leave to go home. When you are living with them, they make you feel as if you don't belong, and where the devil do you really belong? It's a funny thing to happen to us because it make us feel we don't know if we coming or going. (Gail, p. 113)

One may ask irately, "Why do they put up with it?" One reason is that there is little work in the Caribbean, and that is poorly paid. Silvera weakens the book by not discussing this. The Caribbean countries, most of which are in the thrill of the World Bank, are among the most wretched victims of capitalist imperialism in the world. The women who come to Canada as domestic workers are doubly jeopardized. They are driven from their homes by the vagaries of capitalist colonialism, and when they arrive in Canada, they are employed per force by those people who benefit the most from the system which oppresses them. Indeed, they are often expected to give very positive affective care and companionship to the children and aged of that class. Some of the women met their first employers when the latter were vacationing in the Caribbean; I would have liked to see some attention paid to the effect of tourism as the central industry of the region and the climate of expectation which it creates in both tourist and worker.

When domestic workers come to Canada, they are 'welcomed' only on temporary work visas which can be withdrawn at the discretion of individual Immigration officers. They are permitted to work only as domestics until such time as they achieve landed immigrant status, which is difficult to get. The figure of the Immigration officer looms large in each life story. While there are regulations for the pay and working conditions of domestic workers in this category, very few employers conform to these. If the workers complain about the meager pay or outrageous working conditions, they might lose their jobs and/or get deported. If they change jobs too often (regardless of the reason), they might be perceived as "trouble-makers" and deported. Like most social victims, these women live in fear of the caprices of individual officers and in the thrill of their often exploitative and dishonest employers, not to speak of the savage nature of the immigration laws themselves.

It's been such a hard struggle with the Immigration. I only hope they don't reject my application. It would be so nice to feel free. Free to go anywhere I want to go. Free to look for any kind of job I want. (Molly, p. 81)